Why can’t Gerald Butts be friends with Steve Bannon?
Friendship a bonus, not a scandal
Is Gerald Butts, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief adviser, “friends” with Steve Bannon, the far-right nationalist who was until Friday President Donald Trump’s chief strategist? So claimed Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, in an article published this week. “They met in New York during the transition and now talk regularly,” Lizza reported. “Bannon sees Butts as a sort of left-wing version of himself.”
So long as they have a productive professional relationship, I can honestly say I don’t care if they’re “friends.” Some Canadians harbour fantasies of their government “standing up” to Trump, but the Liberals have done the only thing it’s possible to imagine any responsible Canadian government doing when a madman wins the White House: make the best of it; flatter the madman when necessary; forge positive relationships wherever possible. They seem to be doing it well. Butts and Bannon certainly wouldn’t be the oddest friendship to emerge from such bizarre circumstances.
A lot of people do seem to care, though. Many have proactively decided to interpret the word “friend” to mean … well, something other than what they would normally interpret “friend” to mean. Surely Bannon and Butts merely share a constructive working relationship, people reasoned on social media, or a mutual understanding of each other’s positions, or a grudging admiration for each other’s hard work.
That was a perfectly natural thing for Liberal partisans to do: especially if you lean left, passionately supporting the red party requires Herculean tolerance for cognitive dissonance. In the Trump era, when Global Affairs spends $30,000 to schmooze Ivanka Trump on Broadway and Canadian consulates try to convince Haitians facing deportation that there’s no hope for asylum in Canada, it’s a Scanners-style head explosion waiting to happen. Best to assume this alleged “friendship” simply doesn’t exist and soldier on. More interesting, especially since Butts hasn’t denied this “friendship,” is how many non-partisans doubt Lizza’s report.
When NDP leader Thomas “Yes I’m still here” Mulcair issued an idiotic demand for Butts to “disavow” any friendship with Bannon, Toronto Star Washington correspondent Daniel Dale added some useful context on Twitter: “It is not clear that Butts has anything more than a strategic professional relationship with Bannon.”
It’s not “clear” exactly, no. But a well-regarded reporter for a well-regarded publication did choose to use “friends” instead of “strategic professional relationship.” You don’t become The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent without a vocabulary capable of describing the difference.
Also on Twitter, former Globe and Mail editor Ed Greenspon took factual issue with some of Lizza’s reporting and wondered: “If they can’t get that right …” Former Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias, who admitted she had no reason to be pumping Trudeau’s tires, observed that Lizza’s claim had “no attribution.” “No intelligent person thinks it’s an actual ‘friendship’,” University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane tweeted.
Is it possible I’m the one lunatic who thought it might be true, and wasn’t bothered by it? This certainly isn’t the first time Butts and Bannon have been reported to get along. And it would hardly be the first time historical circumstances generated unlikely genuine friendships involving widely reviled people: Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell; Hunter S. Thompson and Pat Buchanan; Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. I thought people generally looked fondly on these friendships. I can’t see how the world would have been a better place without them.
I also can’t help wondering what this would all look like if Butts were Stephen Harper’s chief adviser. Ha ha, OK, I don’t “wonder.” It would be bedlam. Rob Silver, one of the most chilled out partisan Liberals you’ll ever come across, called Mulcair an “a--hole” for demanding Butts disavow Bannon. But Silver knows very well many in his party would be giddily enraged were the situation reversed. Many of the people currently prepared to grit their teeth and stay silent, trusting Butts not to somehow turn alt-right in Bannon’s presence, would be telling us this new racist regime in the White House was exactly what the Harperites had always hoped for.
So much of Canadian politics, not lest with respect to U.S. relations, is based on the fantasy of having more influence than we really do. Jean Chrétien will dine out for the rest of his days on not sending Canadian troops to Iraq. We doubled down in Afghanistan to compensate, of course, but no one ever asks him about that. Butts has no choice but to make the best of the situation, and the same would be true of his alternate-universe Conservative or NDP equivalent. I suspect the majority of Canadians realize that. It’s nothing but partisan social media delusion to pretend otherwise. And if unlikely genuine friendships develop out of this inescapable necessity, I’d call that a bonus, not a scandal. The world certainly wouldn’t be any better off for everyone hating each other because they disagree on politics.