Not What, But Why

The flourishing of grassroots activity taking place around the rebuilding of the Liberal Party has produced a multitude of ideas coming from numerous regions of the country. I’ve enjoyed the perspectives and the zeal with which they are brought forth.It seems to me though that we might have the wrong emphasis. The issue isn’t so much what we need to do to discover relevance again but why we are undertaking this exercise in the first place. Things are wrong not just in the party but in politics in general across the land and simplistic answers alone like proportional representation will never provide the ultimate solution. The gap between government and citizens has never been wider. To decipher the best solutions for that reality we would be better to consider why things went wrong before rushing in with ideas of how to fix it.Early American president James Madison put down his ideas of the nature of politics in his seminal The Federalist Papers and they have some bearing on the Canadian context. We won’t like his basic view of politics in general but there is some truth in his reasoning.  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he states, building on his premise that politics brings out the worst in people and cultivates their selfishness. He believed that people would always endeavour to use politics as a means of furthering their own selfish interests. To improve their odds of getting the desired results, citizens would form groups to pressure government.In Madison’s view, the more interest groups the better, for in many ways they would cancel themselves out. The root of this entire system was based on competition. In a perfect world the best would win out. But it’s not a perfect world. What developed instead was sizeable government bartering with sizeable lobby organizations. No trouble guessing who got squeezed out – the citizen.But it wasn’t the average citizen, who remained largely indifferent to political developments and primarily concentrated on their own personal interests. Rather, it was the smaller grouping of Canadians that stressed common values over the grouping of forces arrayed again once another. They found Madison’s construct to be threatening to the Canadian potential of working together to overcome challenges. They viewed his ideas of democracy as an endless round of political competitions. Sure, Madison’s ideas could be democratic, but as the amount of special interests grew exponentially, the political wars expanded in kind, and the common good was lost.The Liberal Party, like the others, spent a great deal of time attempting to recruit these more energized citizens as a way of gaining power, but while the party establishments talked often of the common or national good, they maintained it could only be achieved through these citizens assisting them in winning elections. Winning became the primary driver for citizen engagement. Those citizens involved accepted those parameters and worked diligently to assist their respected parties. And for a time it worked as the parties themselves discovered respectful and cooperative ways to pursue the national interest.The political infighting and poor record of performance in the House of Commons of recent years has now successfully alienated many of these citizens from the political process itself. Certainly, the more exclusive partisan types remain, feeding the historic system of competition, but a good portion have moved outside and bemoan what had become of cooperative politics. They now comprehend that supporting a system of intense battles of political self-interest can never achieve the national interest.This is the emerging context in which the Liberal Party now seeks to rebuild itself. If it is to rise again as a political force, it must find some way to engage the keen citizens in a renewed pursuit of the common good. And for that to happen it must look for methods in which these grassroots citizens can make their way into the party mechanisms to infuse it with a new spirit. They have grown fatigued with the idea that all can be changed at the ballot box, as one election after the another fails to break down the walls of partisanship and build a larger national pursuit.The Liberal Party is decidedly more dynamic than its 34 seats suggest, but it will never maintain that interest unless they get this renewal right. The other parties must face this as well, as their own futures will have to be squared with a lower citizen interest across the country.For those engaged citizens attempting the renewal of the Liberal brand, it would be good to recall how Walter Lippmann viewed citizens. He wrote that they were like theatre goers who arrive in the middle of the third act and leave before the end. Why? Because they have neither the capacity nor the interest to direct public affairs properly. That’s why they choose leaders to do the work instead. That political arrangement is now under question. But we all will have to work hard and endure in our pursuit of more sensible citizen participation. And it’s surely time because we now live in a land of so many interests that only the public interest is the one no longer substantially represented. This is where we come in. It is the “why” for all of our best efforts, regardless of “what” they might entail.