Democracy is becoming a joke
A race car driver, a newspaper columnist and a Scottish professor walk into a bar and begin to talk about democracy.
First, the race car driver. “We vote for people — and if you’re not happy, then you vote for other people the next time around. And if you’re not happy, you complain, they listen, and that’s it.”
That’s Quebec-born, Monaco-raised former Formula One champion Jacques Villeneuve talking about representative democracy last Thursday as he criticized Quebec’s student protesters for trying to disrupt a cocktail party kicking off Canadian Grand Prix festivities in Montreal.
“It’s time for people to wake up and stop loafing about,” Villeneuve added.
Next, the newspaper columnist. “Nobody gets killed for his beliefs in our democracy; nobody is jailed or beaten for speaking his mind. Nevertheless, there are moments when the curtain is pulled back, and we see the interplay of power and subordination in its rawest form — the humiliations, the lies, and most humiliating of all, the obligatory lie, the forced confession, in which some poor schmuck is dragged in front of the cameras and required to state that day is night, even when, especially when, the whole world knows that day is not night, and knows that he knows day is not night, but has been forced to say it anyway just to rub his nose in it, or rather, to rub our noses in it, to assert the primacy of power, not just over poor schmucks, but over truth itself. . . .”
That’s Postmedia News’s Andrew Coyne, who on May 30 commented on the absurdity of the Harper government’s omnibus budget bill, “that 425-page ransom note demanding MPs approve amendments to more than 60 bills at once, or bring about the government’s defeat.”
Coyne pointed out that Tory MP David Wilks had rightfully expressed doubts about the bill to his constituents, telling them that a “barrage” of his fellow MPs were concerned about the bill and that, “I will stand up and say the Harper government should get rid of Bill C-38.”
A few hours later (presumably after a couple of calls from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s inner circle), he was busy claiming that day was night — another example of our representative democracy at work.
“I support this bill, and the jobs and growth measures that it will bring for Canadians in KootenayColumbia and right across the country,” Wilks said on his website.
Finally, the aging Scottish professor.
“Edmund Burke’s parliamentary representation has turned into a periodic vomit — politics where one or other of the only two ‘possible’ parties is ejected in disgrace — so that a newer ‘redemption formula’ is given its chance. Westminster simple-majority voting is now needed to keep this parodic system in existence.”
That’s veteran Scottish professor Tom Nairn. Concerned that the United Kingdom was turning into what he called “a populist semi-autocracy,” he wrote in 2001 that in the U.K., “governments can now only be ‘swept away’ by febrile waves of mutiny, when popular sentiment veers from acquiescence into resentment at sleaze and ineptitude.”
The same sort of electoral sweeps have also marked our Canadian political landscape (also a Westminsterstyle democracy with firstpast-the-post voting and an unelected upper house). Likewise, the dynamics of “populist semi-autocracy” are clearly visible here as well, from Quebec’s ugly anti-protest law, to successions of Canadian prime ministers from both major parties who have used ugly legislation like the latest omnibus bill to centralize power, neuter parliaments and treat democracy and due process with about as much nuance as a miffed race car driver wanting to enjoy a summer cocktail.
So, where does that leave us? If there’s a joke in there somewhere, it might be lost on an audience that still believes that the present system is as good as democracy ever gets. Or maybe it’s the term vomit politics. That’s kind of funny in a morbid way.