The Sweet Spot in the Middle

 

A few things stood out for me in the one-and-one-half-hour-long interview Dr. Jordan Peterson did with Pierre Poilievre recently. If Poilievre becomes Prime Minister, he will defund the CBC and along with that, the new wave he will bring to Ottawa will deliver the repeated talking point that he will reduce government, taking it out of its interfering role in the business of citizens, thereby setting them free to manage their own affairs.

The first is a threat that’s become tiresome in its repetition by a host of earlier conservative contenders for power. Peterson drew attention to that fact, to his credit, but like the current Alberta premier rising to power via extreme talking points regarding, primarily, Alberta sovereignty vis á vis the government of Canada, so Poilievre is currently able to wave the whip of an imagined cultural, political coup d'état to the cheers of diehard reactionaries.

Clearly, the curtailing of personal freedom as a legacy of progressive governments is a myth that’s hard to dispel. The opening up of greater choice for individual citizens has always ridden on the backs of progressive, not conservative, political policies. Child benefits lifting millions of children out of poverty, Medicare that provides illness treatment for everyone, tuition-free basic education for everyone, even the freeing of slaves can be argued logically to have been a victory of progressive politics. In each case, freeing strategies have been opposed by status-quo-loving conservatism that to this day wishes even to reverse, for instance, the public education system in favour of promoting theme-based, private schools (USA) and initiating a greater role for private medicine.

It’s no surprise that Jordan Peterson and fellow reactionaries are opposed to, for instance, non-cis gender accommodation. Indeed, life was easier for many when individual liberties--like living one’s life in accordance with one’s make-up--were denied, when left-handed people were made to write with their right hand, queers made to hide or be thrown in jail. Individual freedom for everyone to live comfortably and to be respected for who and what they are is a progressive ideal, and a mightily liberating one for sexual and gender, racial, ethnic and other minorities. Peterson’s public refusal to recognize queer people’s individuality with new pronouns is just one petulant gunshot in the war to reverse citizen freedom for all but the conforming.

The kind of hypocrisy that characterizes Canadian reactionism was on full display in the interview. Making of the economy and climate change separate spheres and speaking about one without critical connections to the other ran rampant. Not to minimize the dilemma faced by fossil fuel workers as the transition to clean energy plods onward; attempts to make omelets without breaking any eggs is simply not on. Progressively, Jagmeet Singh is proposing a dedicated transition program (Jagmeet Singh promises programs, funding to get new jobs for oilsands workers | The Star) for people losing their jobs to this change.

The hypocrisy was on full display in the Freedom Convoy, where occupiers compromised the freedom of Ottawa Citizens and vaccinated truckers at border crossings in order to force a legitimate government to grant them what they called “freedom.” 

In the debate, Poilievre waded knee-deep into the “free enterprise” and “self-regulated marketplace” territories and apparently saw no contradiction when promising to do something about the high price of housing and the construction of low-cost housing. House building, rental rates, mortgage rates are largely consequences of the normal functioning of a free market and one can easily interpret his comments on that front to be advocating for government interference in the housing marketplace. Affordable housing as a government matter is decidedly progressive policy-making. 

You can find the interview with your favourite search engine by typing in “Peterson interviews Poilievre.” You and I should care about trends in the village square that is Canada, particularly if we know that the Canada we love is neither an unreserved capitalist state nor a socialist “nanny state,” but that its strength has always lain in its ability to combine the best of both leanings and reject the extremes. Not “personal freedom” or “civic responsibility,” but “personal freedom and civic responsibility.”

Occasionally we’re shown charts illustrating where Canadians lie on the Socialist to Capitalist political spectrum and by a vast majority, we hover right around the centre, not because we can’t make up our minds, but because it’s the politic that works in our democracy. We alternate between Liberal and Conservative governments nationally (and in several provinces) and the difference in how our affairs are being administered differs hardly enough to notice. 

Results of our elections seem to be driven much more by personality than by policy, the effectiveness of the ad hominem strategy in campaigning illustrated by the repeated denigration of Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and the Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, by both men in the interview.

At times like this, when events beyond our control have encouraged an immense, biting dissatisfaction in so many of us that we want badly to go back to a time before, governments get blamed for so much because, well, who else could be to blame? 

Pierre Poilievre, Jordan Peterson very clearly crave attention and influence and in Pierre’s case, power. The assumption that there’s enough of a reactionary wave to carry them where they hope to go may turn out to have been an astute calculation.

In the end, very basic principles are at stake here. We’ve faced them over and over and still are: is it OK for people of certain religious persuasions to see their choice of dress regulated by the state? If a man or woman refuses to take up arms for this country in answer to a wartime call-up, should there be consequences? Is a storekeeper or a pastor justified in allowing only masked persons to enter premises during an epidemic or pandemic? If authorities advise all residents to leave immediately to avoid an approaching fire, should fire fighters be obligated to rescue those who ignore the warning? Can a national government legitimately enact a citizen-wide directive to minimize the effects of, say, a pandemic, or must it allow individual citizens freedom to respond to the risks as they wish or believe, and are there exceptions? 

The workable range of our words and actions as independent individuals on the one hand, and as community members on the other, will always be very basic to the functioning of a democratic country. We need always to be wary of concerted efforts to push the population closer to one or the other poles; it’s just not who we are.