U.S. House Speaker debacle latest symptom of decaying democracy in North America

HALIFAX—You don’t have to be a political junkie to realize that democracy is in peril these days. In Canada, both in the last Ontario election, and then again in a recent federal byelection, voter participation was like the attendance at Twitter’s first Christmas party under Elon Musk. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre has removed the middle ground in the country’s national politics. Like Emmanuel Goldstein in the classic dystopian novel 1984, Trudeau is the whipping boy of choice for every issue and every problem, or at least he is as far as Poilievre is concerned, writes Michael Harris. The Hill Times photographs by Andrew Meade Then there are the extremist politicians. The hard-right leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is not so much opposing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as vilifying him. Pierre Poilievre has removed the middle ground in the country’s national politics. Like Emmanuel Goldstein in the classic dystopian novel 1984, Trudeau is the whipping boy of choice for every issue and every problem, or at least he is as far as Poilievre is concerned. A case in point: Trudeau supports supervised injection sites for recovering drug addicts, as does the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Why? Because it saves and even restores the lives of a very vulnerable group of people. Poilievre’s take? The Liberal government is deliberately fuelling the opioid crisis by flooding the streets with tax-payer funded “poison.” Anyone whose reading material rises above the level of comic books and Twitter knows better than that. In the U.S., Republican rookie George Santos, a serial liar and electoral fraudster, is about to be seated in Congress as that body’s first fictional member. That is, if the House of Representatives can manage to elect a Speaker. As of this writing, a portion of the nutbar wing of the Republican Conference is thwarting the will of 90 per cent of its colleagues. As a result, your average condominium board is more productive than the paralyzed federal legislative branch of the greatest democracy in the world. U.S. Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy was finally elected early on Saturday morning, Jan. 7, the U.S. House Speaker in a historic post-midnight 15th ballot. Politics at its best is the civil mediation of different views between parties on issues big and small. Once upon a time, the keenest rivals could find enough middle ground to talk, rather than bludgeon, their way to an accommodation. It wasn’t unusual to see political rivals sharing a human interaction or a drink from time to time. Now it is front-page news if that happens—as evidenced by the national attention the joint appearance of U.S. President Joe Biden and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell garnered when they united to praise recent bipartisan infrastructure legislation. It was as if the leaders of North and South Korea had become Huggy Bear and Kissy Face on New Year’s Eve. What is behind the hyper-partisanship that imperils democracy itself? Part of it comes down to the Vince Lombardi principle: winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing. People like Republican Newt Gingrich started the political decline back in the 1990s by effectively ending bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress. During the period in which Gingrich held the gavel in the House of Representatives, the Republicans became the party of “no.” Newt’s nihilism turned legitimate opposition politics, which rightfully tries to hold the government to account, into non-stop obstructionism. The goal was no longer to improve legislation through debate and amendments. The goal was to stop anything that the other side might get credit for, and to turn every government initiative into a reason for holding an election. In Canada, think of it as Poilievre's “everything-is-broken” gambit. Donald Trump put the politics of 'no' on steroids. Unless you were with him to the point of personal debasement, and even illegality, you were against him. Photograph courtesy of Flickr Donald Trump put the politics of “no” on steroids. Unless you were with him to the point of personal debasement, and even illegality, you were against him. Any party member who worked with the Democrats on anything was a RINO: Republican In Name Only. And since Trump called his adversaries in politics and his critics in the media “enemies of the people,” that also meant that Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney were collaborators. How did the biggest congenital liar in American history win the presidency and get 75 million votes when he lost the White House four years later? Part of it comes down to what Republican political guru Arthur Finkelstein had to say about mass communication. Finkelstein, who helped Ronald Reagan and George Bush get to the White House, and Benjamin Netanyahu to his first stint as Israeli prime minister, pointed out that it was very difficult to tell the difference between truth and falsehood on the internet. It was a place, he observed, where the public knew more and more about less and less. Social media platforms, with their dubious record of putting out lies under the fig leaf of free speech, were the perfect staging areas for spreading fundamentalist and partisan misinformation. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that the social media cohort, Generation Zers, are in crisis because of that phenomenon. They flocked to Instagram after Facebook acquired it in 2012, and immersed themselves in the selfie era. Their lives were moved to their phones, and an ersatz world replaced the world of real relationships. The result was a generation of “weakened” children and teenagers with “extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” As well as harming Generation Z, Haidt believes that the move into a virtual world has imperilled democracy. “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation and interaction into the Centre of the Colosseum.” We are not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform before spectators who “want blood.” And what tosses the most red meat to those “spectators?” According to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the algorithm used by the social media platform puts more weight on “angry” reactions than regular likes. Emotional reactions make a bigger splash on social media than the merely factual. As Pierre Poilievre tries to wear out the outrage and anger receptors of Canadians on social media with his half truths and baseless allegations, everyone would do well to remember the words of Nobel laureate Maria Ressa: “No integrity of facts, no integrity of elections.” In a healthy democracy, trading a good press conference for an incendiary tweet is a very bad move. Michael Harris is an award-winning journalist and author. The Hill Times

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U.S. House Speaker debacle latest symptom of decaying democracy in North America

It didn't used to be unusual to see political rivals sharing a human interaction or a drink from time to time—now it's front-page news.

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