For Justin Trudeau, it’s the risk on which “I’m gambling my entire career.” Another recently minted leader, Liberal Brian Gallant in New Brunswick, wants to “make sure that politics is about inclusivity, it’s about accountability, it’s about civility, less patronage. . . .”Politicians attempting to rise above the fray are rare these days. Just suggesting it usually gets them laughed off for naïveté, as if politics can only be practised by cynical manipulators.
Trudeau and Gallant both happen to be Liberals, but there are members of other parties and millions of ordinary Canadians who are waiting for someone, anyone, to take the high road in politics. They are heartsick at what is going on and wish that public affairs could be practised without so much psychological violence.
Must politics be so nasty that new leaders consider civility, supposedly an essential Canadian trait, to pose a grave risk to their interests? If so, that’s wrong.
Trudeau promises that under his leadership, Liberals won’t use attack advertising. It might be two years before we know if that’s true, because there’s no election in sight until the fall of 2015. Promises are easy now. Yet now is the time to talk about attack ads, civility in politics and how the former undermines the latter.
Negative messaging attacks character and in that sense, it’s pure bullying. Nobody reading this needs to be reminded how bullying has become a toxic factor in society or how well it works in media. And it isn’t just for kids.
I’d argue that political attack ads, like those launched by the Conservatives against Trudeau, constitute a form of cyber-bullying. They’re aimed at a visible target like Trudeau, but they go way beyond that. The real target, or victim if you will, is the broader audience.
Trudeau gets the treatment directly but you and I are also being intimidated. That makes it cyber-bullying on the mass scale; call it intimidation during the hockey game.
Political parties know that attack ads work best among the politically less aware and less engaged members of society. They’re not nearly as effective among those who are more involved, who follow politics from many sources and form their own opinions.
For the far larger number who tune out between elections, who often show up as “undecided” in the polls, attack ads hit home. Since they only start noticing politics when they feel they might have to vote, they’re tuning in just in time to pick up the attacks.
Now attacks ads do work in the sense that they undermine the reputation and credibility of their target. We saw that in the Conservative attacks on Stéphane Dion in 2006 and Michael Ignatieff in 2011.
But I think their real message is this: if you support these candidates, then you too are stupid, or disloyal or empty-headed. After all, if Justin Trudeau is unfit for office, then you must be pretty stunned not to see that. That’s how you’re being bullied, too.
The Liberals and NDP have also resorted to very unpleasant campaign advertising in the past, so let’s not let them off the hook. And so do many politicized interest groups, some on the left portraying Stephen Harper as a crypto-fascist. Their message: if you support Harper, you’re a right-wing nut.
We keep hearing that attack ads backfire, but parties keep using them. That’s because voters haven’t thought hard enough about what the ads do to us collectively. We’ve put up with bullying.
But maybe that’s changing. As the initial wave of Tory attack ads hit the air in the hours following Trudeau’s election as leader, the Liberals said they raised $336,000.
For good reasons of free speech, we’ve separated political attack ads from other forms of cyber-bullying. But they aren’t much different. It’s time we told the parties that we’ve had enough; we won’t be bullied any more.
Original Article
Source: thechronicleherald.ca
Author: DAN LEGER
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