TRUDEAU’S HEARTONOMICS
What a plan to build the economy from the ‘heart outwards’ says about the Liberal leader.
‘We’re proposing a strong and real plan,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said in Regina on Wednesday, “one that invests in the middle class, so we can grow the economy, not from the top down the way Mr. Harper wants to, but from the heart outwards. That’s what Canada has always done well.”
“From the heart outwards” became a thing real fast, the way political bon mots sometimes do in (what it already feels backward to describe as) the age of social media. Illustrators at the Toronto Sun could not race to their computers fast enough to Photoshop Trudeau’s face onto the body of a Care Bear. Specifically Tenderheart Bear, if my Field Guide to Gen-X Nostalgia is correct about the markings and the spoor.
This sort of journalistic gotcha — treating an offhand phrase made 67 days before an election as a worthy object of interest — is sometimes thought to be odious and cheap. Yet when we reminisce about past elections, the gotcha-type stuff is all we talk about. Hard blows landed in TV debates, weird messaging choices, flubs and errors and awkward photos. Bob Stanfield fumbling a football; Gilles Duceppe in a hairnet; Dalton McGuinty, reptilian kitteneater.
Sometimes a moment of this nature cuts both ways: when Pierre Trudeau pirouetted mischievously behind the Queen’s back, he was conveying a bundle of meaningful, even contradictory deep truths about himself. It is the public that ultimately decides whether a gaffe or a goof has some larger metaphorical meaning — whether it reveals something, perhaps something not easily verbalized or specifiable, about a candidate.
So will this innovative idea of Heartonomics have legs? You tell me. But it certainly wasn’t just Conservative partisans who thought it was an odd and remarkable thing to say. The Vancouver Province’s web editors put “from the heart outwards” in a headline and tacked on, “—whatever that means.” Higher-education expert Alex Usher turned the phrase over curiously on Twitter as if it were a busted clock radio, concluding that it was “goofy” but that the candidate had just meant to say that the middle class is the “heart” of the economy. (He added that, in his view, this is “still … pretty stupid” — that middleclass prosperity is only a “side effect” of economic growth.)
I’ll tell you what I think. “Economic growth from the heart outwards” gets our attention partly because it was meant to. Contrived phrasemaking (“my number is nine”) is a feature of Justin Trudeau’s campaign in a way that it will never be of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s or NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s. Young Trudeau’s inner circle is small. He and his alter ego, Gerry Butts, have three literature degrees between them. They have little choice but to try making a virtue of Trudeau’s meandering career, which contains little that is traditional for politicians and less in the way of mathematical or logical rigour.
To put it the way that Harper would, if he were feeling particularly rowdy: the guy’s a drama teacher and professional raconteur. Of course he says stuff like that. “From the heart outwards.” Of course he would like to turn the election into a contest of emotional expression.
If that is to be the basis of Canada’s decision, Harper is in enormous trouble. Unfortunately for Trudeau, what history teaches is that Canadians usually opt — over the past 50 years, anyway — for the bigger jerk. We have a demonstrable propensity for nightmare-boss types and volcano-tempered father-in-laws.
I don’t know if we were meant to take “heart” just to mean “middle.” I do know that Trudeau’s people would never have him say “middle” when he could say “heart” instead. Voters disposed to regard elections as tests of sympathetic capacity will regard “heart outwards” versus “top down” as an attractive, compact little sally. There is a large audience for the belief that the problems with Harper’s government are specific to Harper’s soul, assuming he has one.
Trudeau will look for ways to tap into the great aquifer of irrational (or subconsciously perceptive!) Harper hatred. Without, mind you, appearing to indulge in the sin of “negative campaigning.” Implying that you mean well toward Canada, and your opponent — a prisoner of demented, savage economic theories — does not. What’s so negative about that?
This sort of talk is what is often called “cynical.” Perhaps that is a fair word for promising to do politics in a new and positive way while using old psychological and semantic tricks that were familiar to Nebuchadnezzar. But the Darwinian criterion applies here: cynicism is justified by success. And perhaps only by success. Verbal barbs, tiny literary caltrops, are fair play in politics — always assuming the enemy cannot use them against you.