GET OFF TREADMILL OF INSTANT OPINION
Survival of deliberative democracies calls for taking more public debate off-line
Did you hear the one about Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer refusing to commit to keeping Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s freshly legalized pot in perpetuity? Scheer’s token resistance to Trudeau’s most significant policy achievement in government was certainly the joint being passed around my Twitter feed over the past few days. And, believe me, no Liberal supporter was bogarting their scorn. What kind of moron, the chatter went, wouldn’t commit to keeping such a visionary and momentous — if half-formed — policy, one riddled with possible sticking points vis-a-vis distribution, organized crime, knock-on health impacts and border crossings to the United States? Leave aside the practicalities. Doesn’t Scheer know that recriminalizing pot would also be a giant buzzkill at the ballot box? To say nothing of the upset it would cause among the cannabis industrial complex that has sprouted up in the wake of Trudeau’s 2015 election win? Indeed. All the more reason to scrutinize, then. Because you’d have to be high to give any of the fog around the implementation of legal weed a free pass. Yet here we are, having a bit of a laugh at Scheer for doing his job and wearing some big boy pants. Because that’s just what we do these days. The power of the internet compels us. A New York minute is now the time between when a politician opens his or her mouth and we all have an opinion about what it is they’ve just said. And while everyone has always had their two cents, we’ve never had a way to read them all. Doing so doesn’t lend itself to sanity. This speeding up of our communications is why most of our politics today is about tactics, and not strategy or, indeed, good government. Any tit thrown at a policy needs to be met by tat at top speed, which is why most caucus members are now carnival barkers instead of key cogs in a deliberative machine. Their value is in amplification, not adjudication. Which is sad, because the time and space needed to form a reasoned criticism is what our politics needs now, more than ever. Most of our politics tastes like garbage straight out of the bottle; it needs to breathe. The air used to come, in part, from the press, which was placed between our politicians and the public and trusted to mediate the debate. And to filter out some of the garbage, for that matter. Now, most everything goes, and some journalists are only too eager to insert themselves into the rolling sideshow via social media, along with the army of non-experts out there. And it’s everywhere. On every issue. To pick one, suddenly everyone I follow is now an expert on slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s credentials and/or terrorist affiliations. And on Saudi dissident kidnapping protocols, for that matter. Every twist and turn in the sordid tale is given the Zapruder treatment online in real time. It’s enough to make you wish that someone could just unearth all of the facts and present them for you in one meal. Or at least in discrete chunks instead of the unreasoned firehose of the internet, where fact is instantly supplanted by opinion, whether legitimate or manufactured through malignant bots. These manipulators of algorithms know our weaknesses. They know how humans crave a tidy explanation or, barring that, conspiracy. But enabling our more savage heuristics and biases can’t be the answer. Especially at pace. Especially when we’re not wired to handle it. We need to step back. Because arguments about a state-sponsored assassination of a critical journalist or dismissive banter about a possible repeal of a potentially complicated pot bill is one thing, but imagine how bad the sewer smell would be online around a truly momentous occurrence, such as a dirty nuclear bomb detonating in a Western capital or a technologically stolen election in an advanced Western democracy? As bad as the post-9/11 conspiracies about building collapses and the Jews who didn’t turn up to work were, imagine how god awful they would have been now, in the age of Twitter, Facebook and manufactured dissent? Two camps would have been declared seconds after impact and no reconciliation would have been permitted, ever. If our deliberative democracies are going to survive, we’re going to have to find ways to take huge chunks of our public debate offline. And soon. Because holding debates in full 24/7 view, in front of an army of non-experts and partisans, only encourages politicians to perform for their tribes, not try to understand the other side. Some blinders are in order. And given it won’t be the rest of us who tune out anytime soon, it is up to our politicians to unhook themselves from the drip feed of constant public attention, so they can tune out the dialogue of the deaf and deliver good government.
Andrew MacDougall is a Londonbased communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.