Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  If partisanship were only a circus trick—riding two bloody horses at once—the worst that could be said is that it is a poor show. But the voters’ problem with it runs deeper. Partisanship divides an already divided society and turns adversaries into enemies. An adversary has to be defeated, while an enemy must be destroyed. You cannot compromise with enemies. With adversaries compromise is possible. An adversary today can become an ally tomorrow. In my time in politics, I served in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The word “loyal” defines opposition as a legitimate function in any democracy worth the name. Governments ought not to question the loyalty of those who oppose them, though the government I faced did so continually. They treated us not as adversaries, but as enemies. Democracy depends on persuasion, on the idea that you might be able to win over an adversary today and turn him or her into an ally tomorrow. In the politics we have now, persuasion is dying. In parliamentary democracies and republican legislatures alike, votes are decided in advance and nothing turns on persuasion, on attempts to reach out across the aisle. Party discipline eliminates the need to persuade and hence the incentive to be civil. When persuasion doesn’t come into democratic debate, exchanges become pointless displays of venom. Nothing lowers a citizen’s estimate of democracy more than the sight of two politicians hurling abuse at each other in an otherwise empty chamber, but this is now a common sight in legislatures around the world. As power ebbs away from legislatures and accrues steadily to the executive and the bureaucracy, debate within democratic chambers becomes both unpleasant and meaningless. Democratic peoples have reason to fear this double phenomenon—waning legislative democracy and heightened partisanship—because taken together they weaken one of democracy’s crucial functions: to keep adversaries from becoming enemies.

  The cure lies in civility, but civility is more than politeness. It’s the recognition that your opponent’s loyalty is equal to your own just as his good faith is equal to your own. This recognition does not preclude adversarial competition, even a tough punch or two, but it proceeds from a shared understanding that democracy, properly speaking, is the politics of adversaries. Against this, we increasingly have the politics of enemies. In this perversion of the game, politics is modelled as war itself. The aim is not to defeat an adversary but to destroy an enemy by denying them standing. We need to attend carefully to where all the loose macho talk about politics as war can lead. War, Carl von Clausewitz said, was the continuation of politics by other means, but politics is not the continuation of war.6 It is the alternative to it. We care about politics, defend it, seek to preserve its vitality, because its purpose is to save us from the worst.

  Our Conservative opponents had little originality but all the ferocity born of thirteen frustrating years in opposition. They had borrowed the entire playbook of negative attack from their American republican counterparts, together with the mental world that went with it: politics as war and adversaries as enemies. The war metaphor has insidious effects: it legitimizes a “take no prisoners” approach. War talk provides the standard justification for the black arts of negative advertising. Negative advertising certainly works, but it turns ordinary people off politics, reinforces the gulf between the people and the political class and makes it ever more difficult for political leaders to rally, inspire and motivate. Negative advertising poisons the well of politics, kills the trust between governors and governed on which good government depends.

  Turning an adversary who must be defeated into an enemy who must be destroyed also has the effect of defining compromises and deals—the humble trade plied in most democratic legislatures—as betrayal or treachery. Once compromise is defined as betrayal, democratic systems become unworkable.7 No true politician can afford to make eternal enemies. He needs to turn adversaries into allies if he is to do the job that democracy demands.

  Of course there are limits to compromise, and political leaders must know where the blurry line lies that separates an honourable from a dishonourable compromise.8 Politicians must have the spine to know that not every principle can be traded for the sake of a deal. At some point an adversary will demand something that threatens a vital interest; at some point they may even take an action that raises questions about their respect for the rules of the game itself. At this point, to compromise is to appease.

  By early 2011, the Conservative government’s new budget was looming and it was becoming apparent that voting to sustain the government in office had become impossible. Twice the Speaker had sanctioned the government for contempt of Parliament, an unprecedented event in the history of our country. To roll over and pass their next budget would have been an act of appeasement. There would have to be an election, whether or not it was the right time for us.

  When the election call finally came in March 2011, deep inside, in that place of repose that any politician has to find within himself, I felt ready. My apprenticeship was over. It was time to show what I was made of. I remember the thirty-five days of the campaign as being the happiest time in my political life. We had a plane, a team on the ground and in the air, and our campaign machinery seemed to hum with efficiency—perhaps because I had left the logistics to a team I trusted. I had a platform I passionately believed in. It put the focus on equality of opportunity for every citizen. We were going to make sure that the Cree kid from the reserve would actually finish community college. We were going to guarantee that a doctor would see the woman who had waited six hours in a hospital corridor. We were going to make sure that every working family could afford a college education for their children. We wanted care in the home for families crushed by the burden of Alzheimer’s disease. We were going to pay for our promises by pushing Pause on corporate tax breaks. We were also going to go after tax breaks for high-end people holding stock options. Income should be taxed as income, however it was earned, and these high earners were getting a break to the tune of $650 million. It wasn’t about punishing success; it was about fairness. We launched the platform in an Ottawa gymnasium in front of an enthusiastic crowd, and a live Internet feed carried it across the country. For the first few weeks of the campaign, we were flying high. For the only time in my political life, I felt in full command of my message, my troops and my destiny. When I look back now at a book of photographs from that campaign, taken by a young photographer, Georges Alexandar, I’m smiling in every shot: waving from the top steps of our campaign plane, diving into packed halls to shake hands, striding up and down on stage with a mike in my hands, my face lifted up by the reaction of the crowds. From the photographs, you’d never imagine how it all turned out.

  Each day concluded with a rally, and the rally always began with me warming up in the green room. I would pace about getting the blood to flow, hopping back and forth on my feet like a fighter. I know, it’s not what you’d expect, but by then I understood how physical politics is, how important it is to get your blood flowing, to keep the pace up, to generate some electricity in the hall. From backstage, I could hear the noise building, and I would be alone with Zsuzsanna, taking a last swig of water and trying to ride the rush of adrenaline. Then the music would start up and out we would go into “the tunnel of love,” the crowd parting as the advance team moved forward in a low crouch in front of me, moving the cameras back and leading me toward the riser, where I would stride out and wave, and take the mike in my hands. In front of me were hundreds, sometimes thousands of uplifted faces, and I’d always notice the young parents with children on their shoulders, because their kids seemed to be floating on top of the crowd.

  Down in front there were the ones in wheelchairs, with their caregivers behind them. In between, craning their heads to get a better look, would be the volunteers, the door-knockers, phone-bankers, the grassroots without whom a party cannot function: retired ladies, old guys in windbreakers, kids from the local colleges, collections of Sikh taxi drivers at some venues, Hindu truck drivers at others, Chinese or Filipino hotel workers. I’d look out and sometimes I’d say: Look around you. Look at
this crowd. Feel your strength. The whole country is in this room. Some nights it was the Knights of Columbus Hall, or the Veterans Hall, or the Centennial Lounge, the Polish Club, the Casa Italia, or even Harry’s Pub. Other days we were in high-school gymnasiums or low-ceilinged hotel ballrooms, with waiters in their white shirts and bow ties listening at the back. There was something immemorial about the campaign. It was politics, old style. The campaign crew may have been tweeting at the back, but up front I could have been wearing a frock coat and standing on a soapbox. Were we continuing a grand tradition or assisting at its last rites?

  There was always a flag behind me on the stage, and in some big venues I’d have a runway extending out into the crowd so that the people could get close and I could shake their outstretched hands. On a good night—and there were lots of those—I could feel that people were more than listening: they were adding a momentum of their own. Complicity flowed between us, so I felt that we were helping each other reach the next plateau at the same moment. By then I had gotten rid of the lectern, taken off the jacket, shed my professorial tics, stopped trying to be clever and tried to reach inside to the simple core of my beliefs, so that together we could reach a moment of pin-drop attentiveness where the message could get through. One night in the packed hall of a northern town, as I talked about the government and its aggressive and partisan contempt for our institutions, I remembered a line from a Bruce Springsteen song, “My City of Ruins.” Rise up, I said. Rise up, the crowd replied, and soon everybody was saying it. Rise up. It became a call and response at every meeting. For a moment there, we thought we had caught a wave.

  We were “working the base,” firing them up so they’d be there when we needed them, to write us a cheque, man the phone lines, knock on the doors when election day rolled around. By then we had worked the terrain so often I recognized the old hands. I’d point at them from the riser and they’d wave back. Afterward, they’d crowd around and I could feel they believed that we could win. When they felt it, I felt it too.

  Sometime during the campaign, I visited the editorial offices of La Presse in Montreal to explain our platform. Lysiane Gagnon, an influential columnist, listened and then turned to me and said in a queenly tone, “But Mr. Ignatieff, politics is not social work.” Our platform wasn’t social work: we thought investing in our people was the key to keeping ahead of the new giants, China, India, and Brazil. That was the master idea: bearing down on inequality, making sure nobody was left behind so we’d all get ahead. And we believed that we could shape the future instead of being shaped by it, that we could unite people, not divide them, and that we could hand the country over to the next generation in better shape than we found it.

  People who’d never been to a political meeting before came out to hear us. I remember a tall, rail-thin man of about sixty years of age in jeans and a cowboy hat in a northern town, Sudbury I think it was, who got up after I had finished talking about our plan for home care and told the crowd that he had been driving a rig for thirty years and had to come off the road because his wife began forgetting everything. There was no one else but him to keep her from wandering out of the house. Your plan, he said, would help me. That’s what I believe, he said, and he sat down. I never felt more validated in my whole life in politics. People like him were who I wanted to be prime minister for.

  The press was on the plane with us and we talked to them and took questions every day, without, I’m happy to say, making one of those gaffes that can cost you an election. One of the younger reporters told me later that our campaign was the kind of political experience she went into journalism to cover. The prime minister kept the press behind a rope line and locked them into a kind of bondage relation that left them cowed and dispirited. He is a strong strategist but a weak campaigner and I was struck by how little he had to say that was positive or inspiring. His campaign raised one lurid spectre after another: fear of economic ruin, crime, immigrants, foreigners, expatriates and strangers, fear of the future, if they weren’t returned to power. I just couldn’t take it seriously, though I should have done. They certainly knew how to play upon resentment. They ran ads sneering at my education. A college degree these days may only land you in the unemployment line. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to portray us as Liberal elitists to people who’d never had a decent education and as tax-greedy hypocrites to people who had. Resentment is the master invalidator and there is so much resentment to go around, in societies as unequal as ours, that it can be attached to almost anybody if an opponent spends enough money to stick it there. I wasn’t about to make class war on “the wealth creators” and “the job creators,” but I did think the middle-class families I saw were slowly losing ground and deserved some help. What is liberal politics but the faith that some forms of hopelessness and fear can be beaten only if we fight them together? It’s wrong that a family has to be bankrupted by nursing an incapacitated relative at home. It’s wrong for families to be crushed by unemployment and illness and drug costs. It’s wrong that so many people still feel a decent education is beyond their reach. The very idea of a good country is that all of these good things should be within the reach of anyone prepared to work for them. Our master thought was that a liberal politics exists to take the fear out of our common life. I believed we were striking a chord, at least with those who had experienced that kind of fear in their lives.

  I was wrong. Nothing we said, no matter how devoutly we believed it, made any difference. I look back now at those huge crowds, those great nights, and I see that we were just talking to ourselves. Our party became an echo chamber: all we were hearing was the sound of our own voices. I bet on fixed allegiance, on memory, on loyalty to what we had done. I bet wrong. Political allegiance is no longer a tradition: it’s just a preference, and it can change faster than a blink of an eye. I thought we could count on a third of our people as our base. They’d vote for us if we gave them a half-decent reason. We learned that our base was no larger than one in five of our people.

  We thought we needed policy and platform. We thought we needed organization and candidates. We thought we should at least show up, even if we didn’t have much chance of winning in some places. It didn’t turn out that way. One of our candidates eventually lost to a young NDP woman who thought she had so little chance of winning that she spent some of the campaign on holiday in Las Vegas.

  I had a too literal understanding of everything. I thought I was in an election. We were in a reality show. I thought content mattered. I thought the numbers in a platform should add up. Ours did and theirs didn’t. None of it mattered. It was a case of parallel universes. We were in one, our adversaries were in another, and the voters were in yet another. The winner was the one who understood this first, who crossed over into the voters’ world and won ninety seconds of their attention. That was all the time any of us were going to get. Our adversaries did get there first, with millions of dollars to fill those ninety seconds with ads that repeated, over and over, that I was just visiting. I wasn’t in it for them. They had understood a basic reality of the new era of the permanent campaign better than we had. We began our campaign in March 2011. They had begun theirs two years earlier.

  On the last weekend of the election, a caucus colleague of mine, Scott Brison, fighting to hold his seat in rural Nova Scotia, told me he kept running into people who had been his supporters and were now saying that they wanted to vote for him as usual, but their problem was that I was an American. That was what they were hearing on the TV every night.

  Fortuna also played a decisive part in the result. Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party, had been waging a brave battle against prostate cancer for about a year before the election. When I last saw him in the lobby of the House of Commons, he was pale, sweating profusely and levering himself past on crutches, because his hip had just fractured, but still smiling a gallant smile. At the beginning of the election, it was widely rumoured that the cancer had spread, but he assured the press and public
that he was just fine. He began the campaign struggling to complete his day, but as the weeks went on, he reached inside and tapped a reservoir of charm, energy, humour and enthusiasm. By the end he was waving his stick in the air to crowds that grew by the day, drawn by his courage, his joie de vivre and his combativeness. His long service in the Commons made him a familiar figure and an alchemy began to take place, transforming him from just another politician to “Jack,” everybody’s favourite Canadian, a symbol of hope for everyone who’s ever had to face cancer. His transformation in the campaign was an astonishing achievement, and it is not disparaging it to say that it was made possible by a masterful display of political guile. In Quebec, he parlayed his Montreal roots into breakthrough support for his party, cemented by his neat way of saying one thing in Quebec and another in the rest of Canada. In Quebec he said he would accept a simple majority vote if Quebeckers wanted to secede; in the rest of Canada he said even a majority vote would require further negotiation. We argued that it was wrong to say one thing in one part of the country and another in another, especially on an issue as important as national unity, but by then the crowds were moving toward Jack and no one was listening to a word we said.

  I’m not sure when I knew the tide was turning against us. Certainly, my chief of staff, Peter Donolo, must have known what our overnight polling was saying, but he didn’t tell me and I didn’t want to know. It was too late to change our strategy anyway, and I was having too much fun preaching to the converted in those crowded halls. I do remember realizing that the two national debates on television, one in French, the other in English, did not do me any good. Looking back I see now that we became so consumed by the run-throughs of our mock debates that we failed to settle on a basic strategy. This was, after all, my one chance to show most Canadians that I wasn’t just visiting, and my one opportunity to show some charm and warmth. Instead, I jabbed at Mr. Harper relentlessly and probably came across as just another of those angry partisan politicians. Jack Layton had done three national debates and he knew better. He smiled a lot, waited for his moment, and when I jabbed at Harper for demeaning our democracy, he jumped in and pointed out my attendance record in the House, adding that if I was campaigning for a promotion, I ought at least to show up for work. He knew that I’d been doing open town halls across the country, but the blow landed. What I remember best about the debates was afterward, in the green room, hearing the cheer as the prime minister returned to his dressing room next door. The spectacle of Jack taking me apart was music to Conservatives’ ears. The visceral roar through the partition wall told me all I needed to know about how the debate had actually gone.