Elections, elections. Municipally, provincially, federally, we are gearing up for elections and I, as always am following every step, even though I know I ain’t voting for anybody I’m ever gonna hear about in the news.
I am intrigued, though, more this time than I have been for a long while. OK, skip the provincial end of things, which looks exactly like it has for a couple of decades, with a super hard right wing and a bull-shit “social democratic” alternative that is continuing its tried-and-failed strategy of playing to that right. But on the other levels, something interesting is happening.
Municipally, we’ve got a centrist bunch running the show. They broke with the electoral left (COPE) a while back to chart a more “voter-friendly” and business-friendly course that included support for the Olympics, privatization under guise of “public-private parnerships” (meaning privatization that the public still pays for, basically), and expanded venues for gambling. Fuckers. However, as I look now it is interesting to see that this municipal government has got pretty solid support in the city and is looking to coast through the election barring some unforeseen scandal. And the reasons given for that support, in poll after poll, are not linked to its tack to the right, but to the new things it’s been doing around sustainability. Bike lanes, community gardens, increased grants to neighbourhood groups. This is the shit that people are talking about and listing as reasons to keep the current bunch in.
Believe me, I hate the lot of them, and think they’re some of the slimiest opportunists I’ve ever come across. But beyond that, the fact that Vancouver seems to have built a pretty solid consensus around some old-school liberals and more focus on communities and ecology is an interesting development after such a lengthy period of pervasive neoliberalism.
Jump now to the federal level, where the Liberal Party, which has for decades been dancing farther and farther to the right, occupying the old conservative spot while former Tories jump full-on into fascism…these folks are actually running a traditional liberal campaign. Social programs. Spending. Rolling back tax breaks for corporations. Government investment in infrastructure, environmental protection and so on. Again, this ain’t the left. Hell, it ain’t even the most mild social democracy. But it is a difference from what we’ve seen over the past many elections, in which the whole tenor of the debate was formed around the tax-cut/ deficit/ free market discourse of the far right.
And, like in Vancouver, it’s resonating, at least so far. These guys are up in the polls, getting lots of press, and good press, and increasingly there is some actual discussion about a substantial shift – not from the right to the left, but from the far right to the old-school centre, to something that at least resembles the liberalism of old. And that is exciting.
Pathetic to say that, I know – to see liberalism and feel a rush of hope. But after a hugely successful run for the neo-fascists over the past twenty years, liberalism is a pretty welcome change. And the fact that it is working for them, and for our municipal government, provides me at least a small bit of hope that the era of wholesale self-interest, hyper-individualism and straight up mean-spiritedness might be facing a backlash, finally.
Anyway, I’m watching it all, and I’m interested, and I’m crossing my fingers without actually letting myself get too hopeful about a return to more liberal times.
Voting for any of it? Nope. No can do. They’re all bombing the shit out of Libya. They’re all privileging profits over equality. But I’m not so blind as to fail to recognize the difference between fascism and liberal democracy, not so blind as to equate traditional liberal capitalism with the market of the neo-con wet dream. And I am one to believe that cultural shifts matter, small and slow as they come.
