For decades politicians have freely played voters for fools. Now the bill is coming due as Tea Party anger seeps out of the U.S. and into elections from Toronto to Stockholm.
Rob Ford’s commanding lead in the contest to control Canada’s largest city is far from the most extreme example. National elections in sensible, socialist Sweden shifted the balance of power this week to a fringe party tainted by a neo-Nazi history and policies smacking of racism.
Sudden swings that sweep away the status quo are thing new. But as the Second World War reminds us, the results are often catastrophic.
Hopefully no similar horror lurks in our future. Even so, a phenomenon blooming darkly in so many places requires some inquisitive digging around its roots.
Start with this capital and one of its most partisan ministers. John Baird, Stephen Harper’s very right-hand man, lit a firestorm as MPs returned from their long summer holiday.
Preloading for the gun registry vote Conservatives lost Wednesday, Baird savaged Toronto elites, notably Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton, for imposing their neon, big city will on salt-of-the-earth small-town Canadians.
Poking the privileged is good politics. It’s also brazen coming from someone whose perks include a chauffeur-driven car and gold-plated pension.
In shooting at the easy target Baird missed that his own leader is from Toronto and that five sprawling urban centres are now home to most Canadians. He missed, too, that those in Parliament sit on the far side of the great Canadian divide.
Marking that line are the indexed pensions that politicians and bureaucrats know are secure. But there’s more to it than that. Once ballots are counted, parties routinely sacrifice the public interest to the pursuit of power.
Two among the infinite examples help explain how those sent here to represent “us” become “them.” Liberals were so grasping in office that a flag-waving sponsorship program slid into a scheme paying off the party’s Quebec friends and bills.
Conservatives, elected in part to punish Liberal ethics, are spending a record $130 million on advertising, much of it praising themselves for extending a helping stimulus hand to a hard-hit country.
Political cynicism was more easily tolerated when times weren’t so tough. Now mad-as-hell citizens and taxpayers almost everywhere are venting at establishment politicians who can’t or won’t do what’s necessary to ease the roiling anxieties of recession life.
Often mistaken for a cure, that anger is a symptom. Simplistic solutions have proven power to rearrange the political order. But that power fades when the problems persist and outsiders begin behaving like insiders.
Seasoned politicians recognize that dynamic and its threat to their survival; they just can’t change it much. So many leaders have broken so many promises that only the most naïve or quiescent voter still believes that parties steeped in tradition and hierarchy will act more honourably in the future than in the past.
Lashing out is a familiar and feel-good form of democratic justice: Voters have long used one party as a stick to beat sense into another. What’s changed is that a wider swath is now being cut by those fearful of what lies ahead for them and furious at politicians who are doing just fine while others suffer.
Some incumbents, including Conservatives here, hope to save themselves by aligning with the angry against the elites. Wish them well for they are again trying to play voters for fools and sooner or later will pay the ultimate political price.
James Travers is a syndicated national affairs columnist for The Toronto Star.