WISING UP - OR DUMBING DOWN?

One of my regular readers always writes with the authority of someone with a lot of knowledge and insight – two qualities that are rare in what is more a “dumbed-down society.” She wrote to ask if I was going to write about the mayoral contest in Toronto or George Ignatieff. I said that I didn’t have enough strong ideas about either one, except that the Toronto mayoral contest seems to be clear-cut case of everyone coming in second. As for Ignatieff, I am disappointed in his utter lack of political acumen, especially for man as learned as he is. I posit that perhaps he is too affected by what his advisers, survey results tingling in their brains, tell him to do. Which, if you will excuse my repetition, is at the heart of the point I want to make.

We really do live in an era of consumer-driven reality. If the developer who builds brain-numbing cookie-cutter subdivisions can say: I give the public what it wants,” it is a sad commentary on critical judgement. But it is not just the unwashed masses (I don’t mean to sound patronizing) who slavishly follow trends – it is often our most exalted leaders who are simply not “leaders” but followers. If the game is to ingratiate yourself with a non-thinking voter, then jumping at current poll-driven trends is the clearest evidence. Does anyone recognize that millions are spent with lobbyists to “help” the voters make up their own minds? Surely you jest!

It has become orthodox dogma that deficits are bad. David Axelrod, Obama's most inside insider, is supposed to have told his boss that “Polls tell us the American people are worried about deficits.” So when the G20 met, the U.S. President signed on the deficit reduction “truth.” All with an eye on the mid-term election where the Democrats are going to get a spanking. It would be far more difficult to have tried to explain to people (and most voters on both sides of the border are like this) in 30 words are less, why deficits are not bad. The fact is, the deficit–haters, like all of the orthodox Right, have no trouble defining the evils of deficits with nonsense like:”Our grandchildren will bear the weight of all that debt. That should not be our legacy to them.” Not one of them suggests that equally our legacy to them should not be today's lost generation where high unemployment, pessimism and despair are rampant; where the only way unemployment was going to abate was if Big Business started hiring. Memories of the widespread suffering of the Great Depression are far more real and tragic than the supposed “burden” of debt which may or may not face the coming generation.

Behind all this is the reality that people have stopped thinking. Deficit-fighting has proven once again to be good politics. The fact that the most visible paradox is that it is the most vulnerable who suffer when we continue to protect a system that has already put is in great peril.

What I want to say about it is simple: a great leader is one who can inspire and inform the voter; who can, without using imaginary and emotional arguments, can persuade them that with continuing deficits we can beat the gloom.

Unnoticed of course is the other reality: when we have the money we don’t save it. It comes down to the individual worker who is characteristically one paycheck away from going on welfare. We do not understand, and don’t want to understand, that the nonsense of political strategy is to buy the vote with tax cuts. It is those very cuts that put the coming generation (if we really do care about them) with the results of our stupid, mindless prodigality. No government in my memory has ever said it wants to grow surpluses by withholding vote-grabbing tax cuts. Politically it sounds good: George Bush’s famous:” Ordinary folks know better than government what to do with their money.” They don’t. No fault of theirs (or mine.) We are raised to believe in The Dream, that an abundance of plenty is limitless and only when the tap is turned off do we get angry, but at all the wrong people.

Which is precisely why politicians run and hide when anyone suggests that deficits are necessary when times are tough, but the corollary to that is: when times are good, don’t give the money away – you might need it. There is always a rainy day.