Friends, I am hearing my favorite thing to possibly hear: sour grapes from chauvinists and reactionaries, including liberals. Of course, they couch these sour grapes in admonishments, and protestations about how little they care, anyway. But this is nonsensical, because on the admonishment they always admonish to be banal and anesthetized, and on the protestations of not caring, well, here they are, caring.
We need a name for this little slice of history, these few hours before the election of Avi Lewis as NDP leader and we hit the ground running on a brand new day. I am proposing ‘The Great AntiDemocratic Chanting,’ because it is as though these right-wingers and Carneyites are trying to read out the last of their liturgies before they can no longer do so.
In the last election, Canadians, particularly New Democrats, were asked to stand down to put up a united front against Trump. As Karl Belanger noted, Jagmeet Singh had already provided the permission structure to do so by having been in a supply and confidence agreement for so long. But months later, when it comes time to pick a new NDP leader, do you think any of our commentariat could remember that? The ask that was made? Country above party? No, obviously not. Rather it is endless superficial harping about what bad shape the NDP is in, which, it is alleged by this chorus of fatuous media elites, is to do with endemic issues to the NDP, and not broader circumstances and recent past. This is hypocritical and low, but it is also irrelevant. Why? Because the prospects of the NDP have never been better, actually.
What we need to be able to do is to view the achievements of Jack Layton as the high-water mark of the strategy of differentiation through integration. The ‘Orange Wave’ was the best that could possibly be achieved under the conditions of being pliant and amenable to the basic tenets of ordoliberal orthodoxy and the Washington Foreign Policy consensus. Jack Layton’s party dutifully and obediently voted for and participated in the bombing of Libya, for example. But that strategy won’t work anymore, first because the economic situation has drastically worsened, such that no actual solution could be pitched in terms which would be acceptable and anodyne to the ordoliberals, and because the world situation has deteriorated to such a point that the Washington consensus is not merely an unpalatable insistence, but, under Donald Trump, a threat to the entire human community.
Trying to recreate that magic, over and over and over again, and failing to do so, has leveled and ratcheted the party down to the position it is in now. The carpers and chanters in the media would have you believe the leadership candidates were themselves responsible for this, but they aren’t.
Yes, the party only has 6 MPs. Yes, the former 7th high tailed it off to Carney’s caucus. Yes, the party has a big dinner bill. But that doesn’t matter, actually. Rather, what matters is that for the first time in a generation the party won’t have a leadership and party structure which hates and reviles from its own membership, which seeks to constrain, tamp down, purge and debilitate its own membership for wanting the party to earnestly and seriously be a voice for critical and working class Canadians, working people, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ2S+ people, the vulnerable and marginalized, the insufficiently fed and housed. Many NDP brass have notionally purported to be for these things, but have, in practice, prioritized the policing of an extremely narrow band of acceptable political expression. And, through that policing, they have alienated and traumatized hundreds and hundreds of party members and activists across the country, and of course demoralize the entirety of the party, especially the base.
Why does it do this? Why has the party prioritized policing this tiny window of permissible party political expression over, say, revitalized party democracy? It has been a continuous and never-ending effort to appease precisely the reactionary, chauvinist media bobbleheads who are now tearing their hair out, though assuring us they don’t care, and are admonishing of what a disaster not appealing to and attempting to appease them will be, even though they are not supporters of the party themselves.
This deranged effort, to constantly prioritize the ordoliberal media reception and perception of the NDP, over and above the health, well-being, and vitality of the party itself and its members, has been the key source and wellspring of each and every one of the NDP’s problems. No electoral good has ever come from it, nor would it now, were the NDP to be suddenly cowed by The Great AntiDemocratic Chanting.
This doesn’t necessarily entail being hostile to the media, but it does entail recognizing that the media is hostile. The privately owned presses are extremely right wing, and mostly foreign, mostly US owned, and the CBC is a dilapidated bunker of extremist ordoliberal platitudes. Any engagement with the media ought to be to make it impossible for them to ignore this or that critical point, to identify what it is which they are refusing to have said on their programs, and to say it from the perspective of critical and working class Canadians. Those moments, when Canadians leap up and point at their screens and say ‘that’s what I’ve been saying.’ Those are the media moments we are after.
The media moments we should never be after are effusive praise for efforts to be as anesthetized and anodyne as the media blob would prefer the NDP to be.
So, as we are treated to the extremely good faith admonitions of right wing commentators, and the protestations of disinterest from live, daily cable and press coverage, remember: The Great AntiDemocratic Chanting is the last thing they get to do. They’re trying to get their kicks in when they can because, come Monday morning, there will be an on the ground, new NDP Administration, which members will have overwhelmingly chosen to lead party revitalization efforts, and will have chosen them because NDP members, from Coast to Coast, believe that they can do it.
The kicks, carps, caterwauls and whatnot from The Great AntiDemocratic Chanting ring hollow because an earnestly and sincerely democratic socialist NDP is not electorally unsaleable, nor are enlightened ecological industrial policies which prioritize emerging energy sectors, these things are incredibly saleable, and Avi Lewis is uniquely positioned to lead party democratization and make that pitch. And, moreover, their profession of disinterest ring extremely hollow, first because they are making such an enormous fuss about something they allegedly don’t care about, but, second, because many of them are cynical, and know exactly what is coming.
A revitalized NDP will be back, competing in the polls, taking ground, in a matter of weeks and months, and at the next election there will be no ‘oh, for the good of the nation, will you lay down just this one time,’ there will be a democratic socialist option on the ballot.
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