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| Great White North |
| The triumph of drivel |
| 2015-10-21 |
| "While Mr Trudeau is the product of two political families -- his father was prime minister -- he came to politics late, after working as a snowboard instructor." A friend in Washington ping'd me this webpage snip from the New York Times this morning, together with his condolences. It captures, perhaps, more adequately than the editors realized, the mindset of our prime minister-elect. We are in a new political era, not only in Canada I'm afraid. I think of Obama in USA, Trump and Sanders rising; Corbyn across the water; the various "national front" and regional separatist parties now topping the polls in Europe; governments like Syriza's re-elected in Greece. What do they all have in common? Ideologically, one might say they are all over the map. Moreover, self-serving malice and incompetence are normal in politics; it would be unreasonable to present either as an innovation. I am not looking for the kind of commonplace that applies to politicians in all places and times. Yet we were once dealing with a class of political tradesmen who had clawed their way up the ranks. They arrived in office with some notion of how things work. In the case of Canada's outgoing prime minister, there was some appreciation of economics, or accountancy. Much as I despised his Liberal predecessors, they also knew what a budget was, and could discern differences between large and small numbers. The elder Trudeau, genetically half-Scotch like me, was a notorious tightwad with his own money; his contrasting extravagance with the public purse showed that he was at least sharp enough to tell them apart. By extension, these "old style" politicians were also mentally fitted out with clues to what other departments of government did, or tried to avoid doing. There was a certain "professionalism," a painfully-acquired knowledge of the ropes, and how to pull them. Prime Minister ChrĂŠtien, for instance, I despised as a man, in a personal way, given dealings between us; but I could admire him as a political craftsman. Many others, likewise, including Harper most of the time. Cynical or sleazy they might be, but some knowledge of "the system" was de rigueur. The elder Trudeau had spent most of his adult life preying at the edge of the Dominion bureaucracy; he (alas) knew what he was doing when he went in to ravage Canada's justice system. Now we have "airheads." The term is perhaps over-colloquial, but I think it best expresses the quality our new leaders share, wherever they might fall on the old left-to-right spectrum. While some (like the younger Trudeau, or Bill Clinton's wife) come from political families, or have had (as Corbyn) a life-long obsession with madcap political schemes, the connecting bits are missing in their overview of governance. Mrs Clinton's embarrassments with email make a good example. The shocking thing is not that she broke secrecy regulations that have landed lesser government officials in gaol. It is that she truly did not know any better. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 OTOH, it was the "professionals" who created the cultural/political morass that birthed these monstrosities. |
| Posted by: charger 2015-10-21 20:01 |