MEET ME IN THE MIDDLE?
Hillary tried, but failed. Can bipartisanship make a comeback in 2018?
The Pantone Color Institute in the United States has decreed that 2018 will be a purple year — well, ultraviolet, precisely.
Ultraviolet, according to Pantone, is the colour of mystery and the night sky, as well as “experimentation and non-conformity, spurring individuals to imagine their unique mark on the world, and push boundaries through creative outlets.”
The colour-of-the-year thing is not generally the subject of controversy or politics. (Star columnist Heather Mallick’s recent thoughts notwithstanding.)
In fact, though, there may be plenty of ways to go politically purple in 2018, if you see the colour as Hillary Clinton did the day after the last presidential election, when she had to face the public and concede defeat to Donald Trump.
“Bill and I both wore purple,” Hillary Clinton wrote in What Happened, her book about the unsuccessful run for the presidency, which was released earlier this year. “It was a nod to bipartisanship.” Clinton had hoped to wear it to Washington on her first day as president-elect, to symbolize a coming-together of the fiercely polarized American democracy.
While Clinton’s presidential aspirations may be long over, her hopes for bipartisanship seem more relevant now than ever.
In the United States, red is Republican and blue is for Democrats — slightly opposite of how political colours work in Canada, where red is the colour of the more left-wing Liberals and blue belongs to the Conservatives on the right.
Though we in Canada have more colours in our politics (New Democrats’ orange, as well as the Greens), it could be that federal politics here could use some purple too in 2018 — in the broader sense, of left and right working together. We did get to see some splashes of purple in 2017. Faced with Trump’s escalating war against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for instance, Liberals and Conservatives were trying to speak with one voice on matters of Canada-U.S. trade.
Former prime minister Brian Mulroney, a Conservative, briefed the Liberal cabinet last winter. Former Conservative cabinet ministers James Moore and Rona Ambrose were asked to join a NAFTA advisory panel.
The media is looking for purple moments where it can find them, too. The Star’s special Age of Unreason section last summer explored ways to reclaim the middle ground in politics, for instance, and how Canada can avoid being drawn into polarized, American-style political extremes.
A new TVO show, Political Blind Date, has been putting politicians of opposite views together to talk through some big issues of the day and reviews — from participants and viewers — have been great.
The idea came from the Guardian newspaper, which was running a blinddate column, along similar lines, to see how well politicians could put aside differences to talk to each other.
The Australian version of the Guardian, also in keeping with this theme, launched a podcast called Common Ground in late November, deliberately organized around the idea of fostering conversation between radically different political views.
“We hoped to break down so-called ‘filter bubbles,’ where we are largely exposed to like-minded views … to give our readers and listeners a chance to hear conversations between people they might not agree with, and who might not always agree with one another,” the Guardian says, explaining how the podcast came about.
Personally, I think that journalism’s future — or at least political journalism’s future — may rest in large part on its ability to create a space for polarized opposites to talk to each other. The more that people are yelling at each other on Twitter or the cable news shows, it seems, the greater the appetite for a sane, middle space in politics. Call it fulfilling a market need — doing what the debates in the Commons can’t seem to accomplish.
Not all of the institutions in Ottawa are hopelessly partisan, it should be said. It was heartening to see the outgoing chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, being toasted by former Conservative and Liberal prime ministers at her retirement gala this month — a testament to how the court itself has remained insulated from partisan polarization.
This year as well, the Senate underwent a radical transformation, when the number of independent senators surpassed the number of senators with Liberal or Conservative affiliation. Soon, we may have to assign it a different colour — the red chamber may soon be better described as a purple one.
For what it’s worth, the Pantone people had declared 2017 to be the colour of “greenery,” and I’m not sure anyone would say there was anything particularly green in politics over the past year.
But the colours are just suggestions, not predictions. And as an aspiration, purple isn’t a bad theme for 2018. Here’s to an ultraviolet, multi-partisan new year. sdelacourt@bell.net
The more that people are yelling at each other on Twitter or the cable news shows, it seems, the greater the appetite for a sane, middle space in politics