National Post (National Edition)
Alberta and the fine art of bozology
It is time to declare the existence of a new field of study which can only be called bozology. Bozology is an outgrowth of an enterprise which has an established name — what modern politicians call “opposition research”: finding a record of distasteful statements and opinions attributable to an adversary.
Opposition research, perfected by Richard Nixon’s crew, has existed by that name for 50 years. The thing itself goes back to antiquity. And it leads naturally to its antithesis — the vetting, and if necessary culling, by a political movement of its own vulnerable candidates.
None of that is novel, but in a world where social media are accreting influence around the dimming nucleus of newspapers and other traditional organs, the scale and the stakes of the oppo/counteroppo game have become altogether unrecognizable.
Every potential political candidate now has five or 10 or 15 years of social media tracks behind him, even if he is a newcomer to public controversy. (Opposition research used to be easiest of all when practised on ambitious newspapermen, but now everyone is an opinion columnist, and most of you stink at it.)
Plus, the campaign environment has become more volatile, and a person’s past thoughts and words, whether fairly represented or not, can “go viral” — did we anticipate how apt this metaphor would end up being when the ad men cooked it up? — in a moment.
Hence bozology: the art, procedures, and principles of preventing “bozo eruptions” from derailing political campaigns.
Jason Kenney, founder of Alberta’s new United Conservative Party, is putting a hard-earned bozology PH.D. into practice as his party prepares for a 2019 election that is theirs for the losing.
This week the UCP encountered an interesting problem in applied bozology, in the form of a candidate for the Brooks-medicine Hat party nomination, Todd Beasley.
Beasley’s an engineer from Brooks who has been very visible in organizing for Kenney’s conservative merger and against the Alberta carbon tax. He would probably be a serious contender for the nomination, and whoever gets it will probably win the seat.
But he has a Facebook account. To make a long story short, Beasley kinda went off on the Muslims in 2017, in a thread about the terrorist attack at Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester. Beasley referred to Muslims as “Those who think a rational God would anoint a Dark Age Pedophile warlord as his prophet … fools who are really worshipping Satan. Islam is not a religion of peace. It’s cruel, revolting, racist, oppressive and has no legitimate basis …”.
This isn’t really a hard problem in bozology. The party asked Beasley to step down last week, and Beasley carped a little bit about it, since the nomination meeting is being held on the evening of July 17 — the date of the newspaper you’re looking at. Beasley complained, before withdrawing from the ballot, that he had complied with Kenney’s tough vetting process and been honest in answering endless questions.
But, in the view of the party brass, he had failed to specifically highlight his harsh language about Muslims, which was discovered by applied techno-bozologists just in time.
Kenney has been tough about applying and implementing the principle that his candidates will have to be able to represent and work with members of all religious minorities.
You can’t call Muslims “fools” and expect to be able to run credibly for office in Alberta in 2018. It would probably have not been such a bright idea even in 1988. Moreover, Beasley says he stands by the comments in the Facebook thread — which made the party’s decision easier.
But this brief fracas raises more interesting bozological hypotheticals.
What if Beasley had had an editor, or been able to edit himself half-intelligently? What if he had just made comments opposed to features of Islam in a nicer, more reasonable, less personally offensive way? Or what if the subject of his spluttering had been a more marginal faith group — say the Scientologists? And could an apology have saved his candidacy? If so, what sort? (You may notice that it is a little hard to tell, even from what he wrote, whether he is an evangelical Christian or some kind of hardcore New Atheist: only the reference to Satan gives a hint.)
Beasley spoke in an unkind and stupid way about Islam. But … the premise of liberal democracy is that someone who does think Islam is false and harmful will be able to sit in an assembly with a Muslim who thinks Christianity has altogether the wrong end of the stick.
This requires mutual respect, not total agreement on metaphysics or history — and so there will be harder bozological tests in the future, and not just for the UCP.
There is a subtle and evolving implied doctrine here that will itself become a topic of political debate: bozological tests like the one Beasley failed will be scrutinized for hints of prejudice and chicanery, and bozology itself — O brave new world — will become a public issue.