THE POWER OF POISON POLITICS
Author James Hoggan on the toxicity of propaganda and populism,
James Hoggan is best known as a co-founder of the whistle-blowing DeSmog Blog and a sworn enemy of climate change deniers. He’s also chair of the David Suzuki Foundation. With his latest book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up, the Vancouverite plunges into the murky depths of how politics is done in an increasingly polarized world.
When does political debate become toxic?
When it becomes ad hominem (focused on personal attack rather than political position). The problem is far worse than name-calling. From the political philosophy point of view, it’s a kind of silencing.
It’s anti-democratic and undermines the root of healthy democratic public squares. A good example was the Harper government’s attack on people opposing pipelines in B.C. They were called “foreignfunded radicals.” It was designed to say “you can’t trust these people because they’re un-Canadian.” It’s essentially dividing the public square into opposing teams.
The Brexit debate in the U.K. is still raw. To what extent did toxic propaganda play a role?
The bad guys were “immigrants.” It showed the power of fear and the anxiety of the beleaguered mind. People are afraid for their economic future, their community and some don’t like change. When they see worrying things happening around them, they look for reassurance. It becomes an emotional, not a rational conversation, and “everything is OK as long as you follow the demagogue.”
Now there’s the U.S. election with Donald Trump. Is the emotional taking over from the rational there?
I think it already has. When you talk about banning Muslims and building a wall with Mexico, it’s not a conversation about reason. Fear becomes anger, and anger becomes hate.
This is very dangerous, and the thing that makes me scratch my head is how we treat it like normal speech. But it isn’t normal. It’s demagoguery.
Populism is the new buzzword. How does it relate to toxic politics?
I think it’s different. In President (Barack) Obama’s speech he tried to explain that he’s a populist and Trump isn’t. He says there is nothing wrong in speaking to people’s fears and sharing their concerns, making policies to address them.
The demagogue says “they” are the problem and I’ll protect you from them. It’s very different from saying we have big challenges to face — globalization is changing the nature of our economy and we need to do something. There is good and bad populism.
How does politically generated fear work on society at large?
Trump is an example: a demagogue who has to keep attacking Mexicans, even a “Mexican” judge. Fear becomes a drug — he needs it tomorrow and then the next day. He has to keep reassuring people that he has the answer to the fear, because reality has a way of creeping back in. But the biggest problem is it ends up changing societal norms. It’s the re-emergence of racism, hate, bigotry and hateful ways of looking at the world that people were embarrassed to talk about. It undermines the norms we were starting to develop about the need to coexist. It makes it OK not to be “politically correct,” which is code for “it’s all right to be racist.”
When hype becomes mainstream political speech are we reaching the point of no return?
Just like you can pollute and sicken the natural environment, you can make the public square toxic. When things become highly polarized, problems look unsolvable. People today have very high levels of distrust. They believe they can’t make a difference. They may vote, but they don’t participate.
Then you can’t solve problems because people don’t believe you can do it. That’s where this toxic, highly polarized rhetoric leads.
Can the media play a role in clearing the air?
We need more investigative journalists — but unfortunately just when we need more, we have less, because money is moving away.
The problem is that there has been a war on objectivity. Propaganda isn’t just misinformation. There’s a reinforcing sense that there is no such thing as fairness, evidence or objectivity. But objectivity doesn’t mean everything has two sides. There can be false equivalency. If evidence and opinion become the same thing, 97 per cent of the world’s atmospheric scientists can lose the argument to one senator who comes from a coal or oil state.
Toxic rhetoric aims to pit “us” against “them.” Is that breaking down the fabric of society?
I think it does, when it’s every man for himself instead of we’re all in it together. Democracy is about being in this together. A lot of the problems we face now — terrorism, immigration, economic instability, climate change — are ones we are not good at dealing with.
If you are willing to do absolutely anything to win an election, there are consequences. It eats away at the social fabric and the ability to find common ground.
Has the age of slogans, hashtags, Twitter slurs and trolling chilled real political discourse?
Absolutely. One of the big problems today is short attention span. We want to avoid anything complicated, spending more time on an issue than reading a slogan. People are impatient. Some things are just hard, they’re complicated and they need to be faced. They have no simple answers.
How can democratic societies fight hate-filled toxic rhetoric without stifling free speech?
It can be done. What happened in the last Canadian election is an astonishing example of how a more progressive narrative prevailed. But we shouldn’t think it’s not going on in our country.
A non-violent reaction to toxic rhetoric is good. When you don’t respond in kind you deprive whoever is attacking you of the self-justification needed for them to continue. You don’t have to stir up a hate narrative on both sides. That is what the election showed us.
But even if we live in Canada it doesn’t mean the government is giving you the highest level of democracy. It requires critical thinking, dialogue, paying attention, listening to the other side and being able to recognize the difference between someone who is undermining democracy, and someone who’s building it. If there’s anything I learned from writing this book, it’s that democracy takes work. It’s not a given.