Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  The remark I remember best, the one that got me thinking about the book I did want to write, came from a taxi driver. As I got into his cab, he pulled his rear-view mirror to get a closer look.

  “Are you who I think you are?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “I voted for you.”

  “I’m glad somebody did.”

  Then he shrugged and said, “It’s politics.”

  It was if he was saying, “Look, this is how the world is. You did not know it before. You know it now.” As we talked, I learned that he was from Lebanon and had been in Canada for twenty years. He combined a cabbie’s shrewd grasp of the democratic politics of his new country and a sardonic memory of the brutal confessional politics of Lebanon. I began to see that “politics” was the word he used for the baffling combination of will and chance that determines the shape of life. The way taxi medallions are awarded in a city, for example, was politics. The way dictators continue to rule poor countries was politics, the way Lebanon was carved up by the civil war was politics and, he was saying, the way well-meaning innocents get beaten was politics. When I paid my fare and left him, I wanted more than anything to write about this politics, this brutal game, this dramatic encounter between fate and will, malignity and nobility that fascinated him as much as it fascinated me.

  On August 22, barely three months after winning the greatest political victory of his life, Jack Layton died of cancer at his home at the age of sixty-one. Along with thousands of others, Zsuzsanna and I attended his memorial service in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall and afterward walked home through streets filled with melancholy citizens struggling to come to terms with the bitter ironies of fate. I remember a conversation with one woman who wanted to explain why the media were wrong for criticizing Jack for failing to disclose the true state of his health when he was campaigning. “I’m a cancer survivor,” she said. “You say what you have to say. You believe what you have to believe, in order to get through it. Politics doesn’t come into it.” I could only agree.

  Sometime in late August, I went to see the Red Sox play the Blue Jays in the Rogers Centre in Toronto. I love the game. My mother loved it too and we spent happy hours of my childhood watching games on a black-and-white TV. Even the game’s longeurs are loveable because they offer opportunities for reverie. As the beer cans and hot dog wrappers accumulated at my feet, I got to thinking that what politics most closely resembles is sports. There is the same team play, the same locker room banter and the same pain when you get beaten. Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn’t one. There is no referee and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can’t cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes. In sports you play by the rules. In politics you just play and the winner re-writes the rules afterwards.

  I recalled a wonderful passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which Prince Andrei, waiting for the Battle of Borodino, reflects on the difference between war and chess. In chess a bishop is always more powerful than a pawn, while in battle a platoon can sometimes overpower a company.7 War, in other words, has no rules—just strategies. There is an unpredictable element—will, courage and chance—that can decide outcomes. That also seemed true of politics, a supreme encounter between skill and willpower and the forces of fortune and chance.

  Finally, sitting there in the stands as the late afternoon shadows moved across the field, I reflected on the way failure is built into baseball the way it is built into politics. “All political careers eventually end in tears,” someone once said. It’s also true of sports. All the great careers in sports end in rueful acceptance that muscle memory, killer instinct and inner fire have mysteriously ebbed away. But failure does not just frame the end of every sports career. It’s built into the moments of success too. The greatest people who ever played the game of baseball reached base only three times for every ten they were at the plate. In the late innings of the game, I began to watch the batters after a failed at-bat, how they returned to the dugout, ignored the crowd, never tossed their batting helmet, and withdrew into themselves, mentally adjusting some feature of their action so that they would knock it out of the park next time. There was a discipline at work here with these journeymen baseball players that struck me as admirable. As the game came to an end and the stands began to empty, I thought back to the night I lost the election, standing at a podium in front of a disconsolate crowd that already was dwindling and beginning to file away into the night. I had always been aware, throughout my political career, that down there in the crowd or out there watching on TV, was a young man or woman who would be thinking, I could be him. That young person was still out there. I hoped he or she was thinking, He didn’t get there, but I will. Now I felt, with all my heart, that I wanted to give them every encouragement. I didn’t get there, but you will.

  I realized the truth of what Elinor Caplan, a retired politician, once told me: you’re never out of politics. You may have been sent back up into the stands, but you’ll still be watching the game. I’m up in the stands now, watching the ones who are stepping forward to take my generation’s place, and I’m waiting for the one—the natural—who has what it takes. Everything I’ve written is for the young man or woman who believed in me and saw me fail. I’m writing this to help them succeed when their time comes. I took a long time to understand whom I was doing politics for. Now I know. I took a long time to understand what politics should be about. Now I know that too, and it is what I want to talk about now, at the very end.

  TEN

  THE CALLING

  YOU MIGHT WELL DRAW the wrong conclusion from this tale of mine. You might be thinking that politics is a dirty game that should be no business of yours. I hope you’ll finish reading this book believing something very different: that it’s a noble struggle that will require more self-command, judgment and inner toughness than you ever thought you possessed. The nobility lies in the battle to defend what you believe and mobilize others in the fight to preserve what is best about our common life as a people. The challenge lies in trying to change what must be changed and preserving what must be preserved, and knowing the difference between the two.

  Before you enter the political arena, old hands may tell you to be careful, not to say or do anything that will tarnish your chances in the future. You will be told not to accumulate baggage. I entered politics with a lot of baggage and I paid full freight for it, but it’s better to have paid up than to have lived a defensive life. A defensive life is not a life fully lived. If you take prudence as your watchword, your courage will desert you when the time comes to show your mettle. You can be sure that politics will demand more of you than prudence.

  You can’t know, in advance, what you’re in for, but really, our lack of foresight in life is a blessing. Don’t be afraid to take the plunge and don’t be afraid to fail. If you can free yourself of the idea that failure is a disgrace, you won’t be crushed by it and you won’t be spoiled by success either. Strive for success and don’t allow any excuses for failure, but above all learn equanimity. You can always control the factors that depend on you alone—your courage, will, determination and humour—but you can’t control the forces that come into play when you enter the public arena. Since Fortuna largely determines political careers, you have no reason to rail at fate if she turns against you. Don’t make the mistake of supposing you control your fate. That’s called hubris.

  Embracing a political life means shedding your innocence. It means being willing to pay the costs before you even know what they are going to be. It means knowing who you are and being adamant about what a political life is for. You can’t succeed unless the people who elect you believe that you’re in it for them. If you’re not in it for them, you shouldn’t be in politics. It might take a long time to figure out who you do politics for. You learn this slowly over a hundred meetings with strangers and you gradually take their cause to be your own. They become the people you serve and the ones you justify yourself to. Becoming their representa
tive is a relationship that changes you forever, and its rewards are great. If they believe in you, they will stick with you through thick and thin.

  You aren’t entitled to their loyalty. You earn it from them every day. You earn it by being who you say you are and by showing that you are on their side. If you have standing with them, they will stick with you even when they disagree. They will trust you to lead them if they believe your convictions are sincere.

  Citizens know the difference between someone who seeks their approval and someone who seeks their respect. You don’t always have to be popular to succeed. Your people don’t have to like you but they must respect you, feel that you have integrity, believe that you are working for them.

  Your opponents will try to define you, and if they succeed they will have beaten you, so you must keep control of your story. The story you need to tell should be about the community and country you want to build. You need to tell a story that links your fate to theirs, your life to theirs, your cause to their own. You need to fit policy and your personal story into a convincing narrative. The story you need to tell is how to strengthen the common life, how to stand together against the forces of inequality, envy, division and hatred that are ceaselessly pulling our societies apart, and how to defend the eternal proposition of all progressive politics: that we must share our fate and live in justice with each other. A story about shared fate and justice will be a national story, one that should draw upon all the sources of common experience that hold us together as citizens and give us common allegiance to one another and to our institutions. It will be a story that tells us we should be better than we are.

  Antagonism is the essence of politics and you will need a fighter’s temperament in order to prevail. People won’t stand with someone who doesn’t know how to defend himself. Of course it’s painful to be attacked, but really it’s a kind of vanity to take it personally. Becoming an adult is a matter of learning never to take things personally: defend your honour and integrity, by all means, but never allow your inner core to be touched by personal attack. Do not give your opponents the satisfaction. At all times defend your standing, your right to be heard.

  You will give as good as you get in combat, but a wise politician knows the difference between a clean hit and a dirty one. Voters may vote for politicians who fight dirty, but they don’t like them, and you’re in politics to earn respect, not fear.

  You don’t want to be an innocent, but you don’t want to be a cynic either. You don’t want to succumb to the cynicism that says voters don’t know what they want and don’t care. You need to keep faith in the judgment of the people, no matter how often their votes go against you, no matter how often your faith in them may be tried. If you don’t believe in the ultimate rationality of citizens, you don’t have the faith needed to make democracy work. Democracy only deserves its moral privilege if there are good reasons to believe in the judgment of the people. Accepting their verdict can be hard at times, but there is no other referee.

  To enjoy politics and to do it well, you have to believe that you serve everyone, whether they voted for you or not. Even when political reality forces you to choose one group’s interests over another’s, you should never forget that the losers have paid a price for the choices you’ve made. To be a good politician is to be responsible to the people who put you there, and to be responsible for your actions.

  This faith in the people is on trial in our time. In fully half the world there are regimes that combine authoritarian oligarchy with market principles—China and Russia come to mind. They all proclaim their superiority to the cumbersome, partisan, divided democratic politics of our free societies. We have no reason to suppose that democracy’s eventual victory in this battle of ideas is assured. There is no guarantee that history is on liberty’s side or that democracy will prevail against its resurgent competitors. Seen in this international dimension, a politician’s duty is not just to defend democracy at home but to vindicate its virtues to the larger world. You are in the arena because the vindication democracy needs most is not in words but in deeds, not in theory but in action.

  You are the custodian of democracy, of a relationship of trust with the people, but also of the institutions of your country. If you get to serve in a legislature, try not to forget the wonder you felt on your first day, when you took your seat and you understood that it was the votes of ordinary people who put you there. Try to remember, too, that you are not smarter than your institutions. They are there to make you better than you are. Respect for traditions, for the rules, even some of the silly ones, is part of your respect for the sovereignty of the people and for the democracy that keeps us free. Respect for institutions means you shoulder an obligation to treat your adversaries as opponents, never as enemies. Politics is not war: it is our only reliable alternative to it. Democracy cannot function without a culture of respect for your antagonist. In politics, you have loyalties to yourself, to your party, to the people who voted for you, but also to the country. Since these loyalties conflict, you will want to be clear before you start that there may come a time when you have to put your country first.

  In keeping your loyalties straight, it pays to have an appropriate respect for politics itself. We talk about politics as if it were just a game, but it’s too serious for that. We are legislators after all, and there may come a time when you will have to vote to send young men and women to fight and die. It’s not a game when the consequences are as large as these.

  Politics is not “show business for ugly people.” The politicians I worked with weren’t in it for low-wattage celebrity. They wanted to serve someone, somehow, and most judged how well they were doing by whether they had achieved anything for their constituents. That’s the metric that matters, the one that keeps you honest.

  Politics isn’t a profession either, since a profession implies standards and techniques that can be taught. There are no techniques in politics: it is not a science but a charismatic art, dependent on skills of persuasion, oratory and bloody-minded perseverance, all of which can be learned in life but none of which can be taught in a classroom or a consultant’s office. It’s also not a profession in the sense of a steady career. Your life in politics can be upended in an instant, so you need to make sure you had a life before and can be prepared to resume a new life afterwards. Knowing that you can stand to lose is the best guarantee that you can stay honest.

  In a lecture he gave to frightened students in revolutionary Munich in January 1919, as they tried to get their bearings amidst the street violence that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I, Max Weber distinguished those who lived off politics from those who lived for politics. Only those who live for politics can understand it as a calling. His final words to those students are worth repeating here:

  Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would have not attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders or heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say, “In spite of all” has the calling for politics.1

  I would counsel you to think of politics as a calling. The term is usually reserved for priests, nuns and mystics, but there is something appealing about using it for work as sinful and worldly as politics. It captures precisely what is so hard: to be worldly and sinful and yet faithful and fearless at the same time. You put your own immodest ambitions in the service of others. You hope that your ambitions will be redeemed by the goo
d you do. In the process you get your hands dirty for the sake of ends that are supposed to be clean. You use human vices—cunning and ruthlessness—in the service of the virtues—justice and decency. You serve the only divinity left—the people—and you have to learn to submit to their verdicts. These verdicts can be painful and hard to understand, but we have nothing else in which we can put our faith, insofar as our common life is concerned.

  Cynics will dismiss this vision of politics as a piece of self-important delusion, but for those who have actually done it, like me, it has a ring of truth. It is a vision of what politics could be that enables you to understand what politics actually is. It is in the nature of a calling that it remains beyond our grasp. Those who are called know they are not worthy of it, but it inspires them all the same. So think of politics as a calling that inspires us onward, ever onward, like a guiding star. Those of us who answered the call know that success or failure matters less to us than the simple fact that we did answer it. What we hope now is that others, more resolute, more daring, more devoted, will answer it too. It is for these young men and women that this book was written.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water, transl. Helen Lane Farrar (New York: FSG, 1994); Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back, transl. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007); Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others (New York,: FSG, 1988).

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. See my The Russian Album (London: Vintage, 1987).

  2. George Ignatieff, The Making of a Peacemonger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 73.

  3. George Monro Grant, Ocean to Ocean (Toronto, 1873); see also my True Patriot Love (Toronto: Penguin, 2009).