This article was originally published in The Gazette.
For some, the main aim is to be in government. For others, it's about ideals. Yet the electoral road is littered with abandoned principles.
Émilise Lessard-Therrien, elected at the end of November to serve as Québec solidaire co-spokesperson alongside Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, resigned last month. There is an inherent tension between the far-reaching ambitions of the political left and the real-world limits of political power, writes Concordia history professor Steven High. Photo by Ryan Remiorz /The Canadian Press
Watching the drama unfold with Québec solidaire — with the resignation of co-spokesperson Émilise Lessard-Therrien over differences in the party’s “vision” — I can’t help feeling we have heard it before. And, indeed, we have. Around the world, parties on the left regularly tear themselves apart over the perceived incompatibility of protest and power.
There is an inherent tension between the far-reaching ambitions of the political left and the real-world limits of political power in a liberal democracy under global capitalism.
For some, there is no point going into politics unless the primary aim is to be in government. For others, it is the program behind the party that matters. Yet the electoral road is littered with abandoned principles. Far too many left-wing governments have left their followers disillusioned.
Just such a debate tore apart the Ontario NDP during the early 1990s when Bob Rae governed the province. He would eventually come to understand this tension in the linear terms of political maturity. He opened his political memoir, From Protest to Power, not with the thrill of election night, as one would have expected, but with the NDP’s retreat from deficit financing and eventual embrace of austerity. Clearly, Rae preferred the hard realities of power to the virtuous certainties of oppositional protest.
Yet, as political economist Mel Watkins reminded us in his review of Rae’s book, “the irony here is that when a government of the left wholly abandons protest, it loses its power.” He is right: Protest and power are best understood as complementary, not competitive.
That said, I do think the political left needs to do much more to truly prepare itself for being in government if it is to break the cycle of disillusionment. Here again, the Ontario NDP’s years in power offer some hard-earned lessons.
It swept to power in 1990, taking 74 of the legislature’s 130 seats with just 37.6 per cent of the vote. It was a government like no other. Fully 40 per cent of the newly elected caucus were trade unionists. One of the strongest ministers, Frances Lankin (now a senator), had previously been a prison guard. There were only five lawyers in government. It was a labour government in the truest sense.
However, the Ontario NDP had never been close to power before and so never had to wrestle with its constraints. Its policy thinking reflected this lack of context. To say the NDP was unready for power fails to capture just how fundamentally unprepared it was. As the election neared, key advisers huddled around a government telephone book and tried to guess what each person in the outgoing premier’s office actually did. They had no idea. The NDP’s transition team was formed only the day after the election.
And the timing didn’t help. Canada was plunging into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, forcing the NDP to scramble. About 300,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in Ontario between 1989 and 1992. Welfare rolls doubled. For the first time since the 1930s, provincial tax revenues actually decreased.
When I interviewed Rae and other members of his cabinet for my next book, The Left in Power, they all said they were learning on the fly. Ultimately, Rae saw himself as a pragmatist. You had to accept political and economic reality if you were to get things done.
But the funny thing about pragmatism is that the perception of reality has as much to do with dominant ideologies as anything else. Writing about Thatcherism in the 1980s, sociologist Stuart Hall once explained, “Ruling or dominant conceptions of the world do not directly prescribe” what we think, but “the circle of dominant ideas does accumulate (and) becomes the horizon of the taken-for-granted: what the world is and how it works, for all practical purposes.” The challenge, then, as now, is to define political reality.
If history reveals anything, it is that electoralism, with its opportunistic political triangulation and focus groups, is an ideological dead-end for parties of the left.
Steven High is a professor in the department of history at Concordia University.
