Coming soon: a faction-packed election blockbuster
Tom Flanagan, one of the rare Canadian political scientists who have also managed campaigns, believes you can learn a lot about politics by watching monkeys.
I realized this week, though, that you can also gain some understanding of the current state of politics by checking out the latest Hollywood blockbuster. The new Mad Max movie, which I saw last weekend, turned out to be excellent preparation for a daylong event this week featuring leading Canadian political scientists studying the phenomenon of the “permanent campaign.”
First, I should state that I’m no expert in post-apocalypse films — the Planet of the Apes movies were great and also possibly politically instructive, but I hadn’t seen any of the previous Mad Max instalments.
So I had no idea what was going on in the newest film. Why were they driving those tank-like cars? Why did Charlize Theron’s character have only part of an arm? And why was it that this new society had enough technology to build her a bionic limb, but not enough to find an alternative to gas-guzzling vehicles?
It turns out that you don’t need to know these things to appreciate Mad Max: Fury Road, because the main thing is the special effects. Apparently this is the state of things in filmmaking right now. If you like spectacular chase and fight scenes, you go to the theatre. If you’re more a fan of story and character development, you watch TV series.
And this, it seems, is where political life may imitate art. The official 37-day election campaign can be compared to movies these days — filled with special effects and chase scenes, which only hint at the characters and backstory.
The permanent campaign, in which the government and all parties are constantly on an election footing, is where the political types have gone to create the long-form tale.
Flanagan, former chief of staff and campaign manager to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, was one of the lead speakers at this week’s workshop on the permanent campaign and, yes, he did talk about the chapter in his new book in which he compares politics to primate behaviour. But he and others at the Canadian Political Science Association event also contributed some important thoughts to the question of how we ended up with a permanent campaign in Canada.
Flanagan believes it was created by money — specifically, the public subsidy to parties, set up by former prime minister Jean Chrétien in the early 2000s, wound down by Harper’s government and ending this year.
With this “avalanche of cash,” as Flanagan put it, all parties could afford to invest in the staff and technology to remain in a current state of election preparedness. For instance, under Flanagan’s initial direction, the Conservatives invested a lot of that cash in database technology, so the party could identify sources of funds and support 24-7, well before any official campaign got underway.
All parties are now catching up, as the workshop learned through several presentations on current political machinery. The end of the public subsidy, which put millions of dollars into political parties over the past decade, means that they all have to work even harder between elections to find the cash to run a serious campaign.
Political advertising, once only a feature of the official campaigns, now runs in between elections so that parties don’t have to waste precious time “introducing” their leader, including character and values, to the voting public. The between-election ads also give par- ties a chance to build a storyline around rivals, which will only be hinted at during the big election show. In-house pollsters perpetually merge political strategy with microtargeting at selected, focus-grouped segments of the electorate.
What gets lost in this permanent-campaign scenario? Ideology, for one thing. Parties permanently campaigning have to stay nimble in the face of public opinion changes and under strict, far more centralized control from the leader, as several presenters at this week’s workshop explained.
Policy debates fall by the wayside too, and the campaign’s goals are less about persuasion than “mobilization” of the support and funds already collected in between elections.
All of this is happening, incidentally, without the rules put in place during campaigns to ensure a fair fight and level playing field — a reality that we’re going to have to address at some point soon, many of the academics argued.
Post-apocalypse movies may not be the best predictors of the future, but if they are, I regret to tell you (spoiler alert) that after all the epic chasing and fighting in Mad Max, they all end up going back to where the movie started.
That’s not a bad metaphor, either, for the permanent campaign, in which the next election starts the day after the last one is over. sdelacourt@bell.net