Politics of the trivial incite nasty behaviour in Commons

When the only guide is what you can get away with, it’s only a matter of time before the rules are trampled upon

The difference between a professional athlete and an amateur is not that the one gets paid and the other does not, or that one wants to win more than the other. It is that to the amateur athlete, it matters how he wins. Whereas for the professional winning really is the only thing.

Perhaps you were shocked to hear about the latest scandal to hit professional football: reports that the New Orleans Saints paid players a bounty for every opposing player they injured. Yet people who know a lot about these things say there is nothing new here: professional football players are always trying to hurt each other.

I don’t believe that’s true. There’s a difference between “making ’ em pay,” causing a receiver to hesitate to reach for that pass, and actually crippling someone. But there’s also no doubt that players are less concerned than they might be not to cross that line. They’ll rush right up to it, and let fortune care for the rest.

Now suppose people are paying them to cross it. In a way, it’s a break with established norms. But in a way it’s only an extension. It’s obviously against the rules. But the rules aren’t really the issue, are they? It’s the professional ethos, the willingness of players to do whatever it takes to win, that is really at work.

For an amateur, merely obeying the rules is not enough. He is guided also by his own sense of fair play, and by the conventions of sportsmanship — including the convention that one should obey the rules. Whereas it is accepted in professional sports that players may break the rules if they can get away with it, and once you’ve told players they can break some rules it’s hard to tell them they can’t break others. Not impossible, but hard.

Something like this has happened to our politics. There are no amateurs in politics, or not in the sense I’ve described. In politics, as in professional sports, the only thing that matters is winning. As in sports there are rules, in this case the law, but again it is morals and convention that really govern behaviour.

We don’t yet know whether anyone in a position of authority encouraged people to break the law in the robocall matter. What we do know is that politics has been spinning closer and closer to that line, to the point that we are no longer terribly surprised to see it crossed.

But there is an objective reality to sports, at least. The field is so many yards long, there are so many players on it, and so on. Whereas politics is made up entirely of moral confusion.

You win, not by running faster than your opponents, but by sowing doubts about them in other people’s minds — fairly or otherwise — and by presenting an idealized picture of yourself. For anyone in politics, consequently, the automatic, unthinking response to any event is: how can I turn this to my advantage? How can I make myself look good, and my opponent look bad, regardless of what either of us deserves?

Of course, all of us succumb to the same temptation now and then. The difference is that people in politics do it for a living. The self- serving instinct is for them not so much a personal weakness as a professional obligation. As such it is woven into their every waking moment, all day, every day, to the point that some begin to believe their own rhetoric, persuading themselves that politics is not a contest between parties, but a struggle between good and evil. ( This is especially true among those drawn into politics at a young age, who have known no other reality.)

Tactics and behaviour that would otherwise be regarded as abhorrent thus become accepted, even justified: the stakes are that high.

What is difficult enough in the world of sports, deciding which rules may be broken and which may not, becomes next to impossible. The only guide is what you can get away with: what other parties have got away with in the past, and what you hope to get away with now.

For the most part, the convention until now has been to stay within the law. But for how much longer? Politics is a winding moral road, shrouded in fog. There are guard rails along it, to be sure, but if you build up enough speed you’re sure to sail through them.

So there is a context for the Conservatives’ own particular forms of misbehaviour. It does not excuse them, nor does it explain why they have pushed things so much further.

But it surely has something to do with how trivial Canadian politics has become on their watch.

It is not coincidental that the less there has been to separate the Tories from the other parties, the more viciously they have acted toward them; the less there has been to argue about, the nastier those arguments have become.

Or as the political scientist Wallace Sayre observed nearly 40 years ago: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”

People with real doctrinal differences recognize something of themselves in each other, even as they disagree. Whereas people who believe in nothing are driven only by their hatred and their selfloathing.

Watching the Tories defend themselves today, with their characteristic mixture of bluster and spite, it seems more of a piece with the behaviour of which they are accused than a refutation. Scandal may be the symptom, but partisanship is the disease.