Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Canada’s government is trending right — Canadians aren’t

One of the few advantages of aging is the ability to see how things change. On the topic of how Canadians see themselves, their values and their identities, we have been recording and analyzing these trends for some time.

In preparation for a presentation to the annual State of the Federation conference at Queen’s University we were asked to update a presentation that we did on this topic in the late nineties. The picture that emerges from this update is fascinating and disturbing at the same time. We have looked not only at the values and attachments of Canadians but also at how these are inextricably connected to shifts in the economy, class structure and the role of the state.

The connections to the state may not be obvious at first glance. Richard Gwyn and others have argued (and we concur) that Canadians’ national identity was forged out of what he calls “state nationalism” — a dialogue of citizens and national institutions such as Medicare, peacekeeping, diplomacy, national railroads and the CBC. In the current context it is very interesting to consider how national identity might be evolving in an era where the state has taken a decidedly different trajectory on both the appropriate roles for the state and the relative size and role of the state in Canadians’ lives.

The connections to the economy also may be less clear but changes in societal outlook are undoubtedly reshaping how Canadians see their society and the country. As affluence and power have shifted westward, so has national attachment and confidence in national direction.

Overall, however, the new national outlook is heavily affected by a growing fear that progress is no longer an inevitable byproduct of effort and skill. As Canadians look forward they are fearful of relative decline in a new global economic order. They also are increasingly resentful about a new class order which seems to allocate the lion’s share of the meager growth the economy is generating to an extremely narrow cadre of privileged Canadians.

Nowhere is this sense of stagnation and decline more pronounced than in the beleaguered middle class. The self-defined middle class, while still the largest class label in Canada, has shrunk significantly over the past decade. Members of the middle class are no longer moving upward to join the more affluent class. Rather, the overall movements are all downward, with erstwhile middle class households descending into the working and poorer classes.

When asked to assess the losers and winners of the last generational period it is starkly clear that the middle class are seen as the collateral damage of this 25-year period. The rich have gotten richer and everyone else hasn’t. This seems to be affecting broad attitudes to the idea that less government and lower taxes is a ticket to greater prosperity.

Meanwhile, we see some widening rifts opening up on the values that should direct our society.

Values are propositions about what constitutes good and bad, right and wrong. They are at the heart of defining the kind of society we want to live in and hand off to our kids, and how we want to be seen by the rest of the world. There can be no overall common values framework in our increasingly pluralistic world but it is important to understand the point of consensus and strain in values. While values only change slowly, when they do change they are much more important than the ephemeral shifts in public opinion and attitudes.

The most powerful predictor of one’s values is one’s self-identified political ideology. Many values group clearly into the conservative and liberal columns, while others — such as freedom and respect — transcend ideological boundaries. There are some very important changes in ideological orientation which mirror shifts in individual values.

The most notable changes are twofold. First, Canadians have become much more ideologically polarized. This new trend, which began roughly five years ago, displaces a previous trend to de-ideologicalization. Many years after Daniel Bell wrote of the end of ideology, Canadians seemed to be eschewing ideology in favour of a more pragmatic, eclectic and politically promiscuous outlook.

The arrival and continued success of the first Canadian government which clearly (at least rhetorically) governs from the right has disrupted this pattern and produced a newly-polarized citizenry that has vacated the center. We see this polarization expressed pervasively in more specific attitudes to most of the key policy issues of the day.

The second key change may be even more important but is certainly not evident in the media and popular discussion of shifts in values and ideology. There have been several pronouncements about how Canada is ‘bluing’ or shifting to the right. Certainly that would seem to make sense in light of what is going on in the political marketplace, particularly at the federal level. Yet it seems to fly in the face of the tracking of ideology and the more rigourous tracking we have conducted of core social values.

When looking at values overall we are struck by their level of stability. This is to be expected and welcomed; values constitute the moral charter for societies and it would be a very bewildering and unstable world where values were shifting rapidly. But within this placid world of normative stability there are some conspicuous exceptions. All of the values which are demonstrating downward trends are conservative values.

Respect for authority and traditional family values, still very important in older and conservative Canada, hold no resonance in younger and university-educated Canada. The overall trajectory in all portions of society is downward for these and related conservative values such as minimal government and security. Not only are these trendlines significantly downward but this decline in subscription to conservative values is even more pronounced in younger Canada, metropolitan Canada, university-educated Canada and among women.

All of which leads us to an obvious question: If Canada is abandoning (relatively) conservative values, then why is a conservative government in power? And what are the implications for these ironic cross-current trajectories for the future of national identity and the social fabric?

One could argue that this growing contradiction between public values and government values is neither healthy nor sustainable. The disconnections are particularly acute among Canadians under age 40. This profound and growing generational tension coincides with a period characterized by growing fears that we are approaching the “end of progress”. This links to extreme foreboding about the longer-term economic future and a growing demographic tilt to an aging society.

The combination of this new gerontocracy — which fails to capture the younger, more cosmopolitan part of our society — could have the negative effect of reinforcing the sclerotic stagnation evident in the current economy.

The question of why this has happened has much to do with the changing nature of political practice and associated technologies. It is healthy that the new nationalism captures some of the erstwhile disaffected portions of society (e.g. Albertans and older male voters). We must, however, weigh the costs of this new national bargain against the mounting evidence of an even larger source of alienation at precisely the wrong time and in precisely the wrong parts of our society.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Frank Graves

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