Why Rob Ford is dangerous
‘In this world there are more poor people than there are rich people and I side with the poor people.” Thus did Toronto’s embattled and defiant mayor Rob Ford declare his loyalties Monday, right after his adversaries on Toronto city council stripped him of most of his privileges. Ford then likened himself to George H.W. Bush at the brink of the Gulf War, with this warning: “You guys just attacked Kuwait.”
Ford would have been far closer to the mark had he compared himself to the populist demagogue Huey P. Long, governor of Louisiana and later U.S. senator, assassinated in 1935 at the cusp of his frightening third-party challenge to the established order in the United States.
Here’s Long: “I’m for the poor man — all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance.”
Like Ford, Long was a man of vulgar manners and lowbrow tastes (he used to show up to work in his pyjamas).
Then there’s the humiliating power-stripping ritual to which Ford was subjected Monday, which was coterminous with the World Wrestling Federation freak show to which he and his goonish councillor brother Doug subjected everybody else. It resembled perhaps nothing so much as the “Bloody Monday” impeachment fiasco to which Long was subjected in the Louisiana statehouse at Baton Rouge on March 25, 1929.
Among the “high crimes and misdemeanours” Long’s adversaries (including disgruntled former staffers) alleged he had committed: Bribing legislators, abusing staff, strong-arming judges, uttering “blasphemous and sacrilegious” expressions, fondling a New Orleans stripper, threatening to kill a man and consorting with greasy characters of various description. Long denied most of this.
Among the crimes and transgressions against public decency that disgruntled former staffers (among others) have alleged Ford has committed: Smoking crack, abusing staff, guzzling vodka in his office, “doing lines” at Toronto’s Bier Markt bar, hiring cronies, calling a cab driver a “Paki,” threatening to kill a man and consorting with prostitutes, gangsters and other greasy characters of various description. Ford has disputed some of this.
Among the wounded in the Bloody Monday brawl in Baton Rouge was legislator Clinton Sayes. It was never clear whether his head gash was from somebody’s brass knuckles or a cane. During Monday’s bedlam in Toronto, while it was not clear what was happening at the time, it turned out that Ford accidentally tackled Coun. Pam McConnell and left her with a fat lip.
Ford called Monday’s city council manoeuvre a coup d’etat. Long called the Bloody Monday impeachment attempt a coup d’etat.
It goes on like this, but there is one important distinction between Fordism and Longism.
While Ford’s politics consist mainly of a crude populism that appeals most directly to what was once known as the lumpen proletariat, his record in the actual business of serving Toronto as its mayor shows nothing especially extraordinary. The Ford brothers’ claim of having saved Toronto taxpayers $1 billion depends on the most liberal sort of lily-gilding. As Toronto mayors go, it’s very much an honest question whether Ford is really that much more outrageous a character than Mel Lastman, who served as Toronto’s mayor from 1997 to 2003.
In contrast, while Huey P. Long was a dangerously corrupt demagogue, his populism was radical to the marrow. During his term as Louisiana’s governor he was a scourge to the rich and a friend of the poor, white and black alike. Long confronted every institution of the establishment — the Ku Klux Klan, the banks, the oil companies and the “moneyed interests.” Eventually, he turned on his own ruling Democratic Party. He fought president Franklin Delano Roosevelt “from the Left” and mobilized tens of thousands of activists across the United States around an elaborate plan for a massive redistribution of the national wealth.
The main thing Ford shares with Long is his ability to tap into the deepest resentments of the alienated and the marginalized. In Toronto, that’s a vast and rapidly growing demographic — an increasingly poor and resentful mass of voters. They’re the traditional base of the New Democrats, but the NDP has wholly failed to connect with them. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are similarly shut out.
Will Ford follow in Long’s footsteps and turn on his own Conservatives? In their combative, streamof-consciousness television interviews, the Fords have been musing aloud about sending troops into Kuwait, so to speak: Doug would have a run at the Ontario premier’s job, and Mayor Rob has allowed that he would find it amusing to be prime minister one day.
Only a month before one of the hard-boiled nutcases among his enemies shot and killed him, Huey P. Long declared his intention to run for president. Roosevelt said Long had been one of the most dangerous men in America.
Having committed the most grievous outrage against Upper Canada decorum — the act of being vulgar, disgusting and elected while Americans were watching — Rob Ford has burned pretty well all his bridges to the Toronto establishment. He’s beyond the pale now.
He’s banished from the kraal, at large in the mist-shrouded wildebeest savannahs of the 905 belt. More than 383,000 people out there voted for him and there’s no sign of any mass exodus from their ranks. For now, Rob Ford is Toronto’s mayor. He is not going away.
Rob Ford is one of the most dangerous men in Canada.