Ford’s populism and pragmatism
Is emblematic of the dark place where Canada’s conservative politics are headed, including at the federal level
If there is one thing on which Rob Ford and his worst critics on the left agree, it is that the unrelenting opposition he has aroused, while nominally directed at the phenomenal string of missteps and misdeeds he has committed in office, is really about his conservatism.
The mayor of Toronto is fond of dismissing opponents as downtown snobs, wellheeled beneficiaries of the “gravy train” driven mainly by a desire to stop him from saving the taxpayers’ money. And his critics — some of them — reply with something of the same argument.
Of course they will not say that his policies, by themselves, are the reason he should be removed from office. His manifest personal unfitness, especially after the revelations of his heavy alcohol and drug use, his connections to violent drug gangs, his treatment of staff and his endless lies about all of it, would be sufficient.
But, they will say, this is what comes of all that antigovernment rhetoric. This is the kind of leadership you can expect from a political movement built on cynicism about politicians and hostility to the state. This is the culture that results when you cut spending or refuse to raise the taxes needed to finance it; when “citizens” are replaced as the locus of political action by “taxpayers” or “consumers.”
Indeed, for many of these critics, there is a direct connection between Ford and the federal Conservatives, each drawing upon, and filling, the same pool of right-wing opinion. Surveying the landscape of recent policy changes — “tough on crime” legislation, dismantling the gun registry, withdrawing from Kyoto — one critic summed it up: Ford, he said, is “what we’ve become: crude, swaggering, bungling, irrational and mendacious. … Rob Ford is the New Canada.” To which Ford’s supporters reply: See what we mean?
This broad stereotyping has a tendency to be selffulfilling. There seems little doubt that some of Ford’s support on the right — from the likes of Conrad Black, for instance — is predicated precisely on the status he enjoys as the bête noire of the left. It is perhaps too strong to say that if the Toronto Star were for him, they would be against him, but that the Star and its kind are so adamantly opposed is enough for many to recommend him.
But it’s not actually true — any of it. It’s not true, for starters, that Ford is a particularly conservative politician, except in his willingness to embody the worst left-wing caricature of the type. I’m not sure when contempt for the law, attacks on those who enforce it and a noticeable absence of personal responsibility of any kind became conservative values. But even in terms of his record: Toronto is not noticeably less over-governed, three years into his term, than it was at the start. He has not cut spending anything like as much as he claims, and if he had he would not have made more than a small dent in the total. Nor has he cut taxes, overall: The best one can say is that they have perhaps risen less than they might have.
Moreover, while many conservatives might look favourably on his record, they do not accept his aberrant personal conduct as its price. It is quite possible to believe both that Toronto could be governed a little more frugally and that it should not have a delinquent for a mayor. The idea that opposition to Ford comes only from the left is belied by the calls for his resignation coming from such unimpeachable standard-bearers of the right as the Toronto Sun and Jason Kenney.
So no, Ford is neither a product of conservatism, as such, nor a particularly sterling example of it; nor should Conservatives be tainted by association, except insofar as they associate themselves with him. This last is the point: It is clear that Ford, and Fordism, are very much an outgrowth of the same political culture as the federal Conservatives, a culture each has done much to create and nurture. It just doesn’t have a lot to do with conservatism.
Rather, the modern Conservative movement is built on two things: populism and pragmatism (sometimes indistinguishable from opportunism). Both have contributed to the Ford phenomenon: populism, with its heavy emphasis on the social divide separating Us (suburban, less educated) from Them (urban, more educated), its infantilizing insistence on the need for a strong leader to protect the former from the latter; pragmatism, in detaching the party from any principled foundation, a contempt for “purism” that too easily bleeds into an expedient disregard for principles of any kind.
Put t hem together, and you get a number of subsidiary traits: hostility to intellectuals (fancy pants who think they’re better than us; academics who don’t understand how politics is actually played); imperviousness to facts (manufactured by a biased media elite; expendable in the pursuit of power); and so on. What is observable in the Harper Conservatives reaches its ultimate nihilistic expression in Ford, where absolutely no amount of evidence is sufficient to discredit him.
Indeed, among the hardest core of his supporters, the worse his sins, the more loyalty he engenders: If They — the media, the academics, even the police — are that upset with him, he must be doing something right. Something of the same can be seen in the reaction of some Conservative supporters to the Senate scandal, a determined unwillingness to grasp the real issues at stake, as opposed to the comforting mythology of a “media witch hunt.”
I really don’t think, in short, that this is about cutting taxes and “watching every dime,” however much it suits both the right and the left to pretend it is. It’s about class. It’s about identity. And it is taking our politics to a very dark place.