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NOT THE SAME OLD WORLD
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 3 • May 25, 1995 |
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We need to shake up our party. It doesn't have the right voice for Canada. It is culturally out of touch. It has become inwardly turned. For years, federally, we were the 18 20 per cent party, as if that were respectable and 30 per cent would be nirvana. Now we're the 7 per cent party and don't even have our old illusions. We have become particularist and irrelevant, just at the moment when we should be making contact.
Shaking up our party really means shaking up ourselves doing things in a new way.
We have become a cautious, defensive party, perhaps because few of us actually believe that social democracy has a chance. In federal elections, we appeal to the same, increasingly circumscribed, constituency, a traditional one that we anticipate we might be able to carry. As for other segments of the population, how many times have you heard someone say, "Why bother with them, they're not our voters"? True, it means writing off the majority of the population, but we assume we could never possibly convert them anyway. We hide from large arguments and controversy, afraid that it will lose us a few votes.
We also talk about how, given the ideological times, we cannot hope for much. "Democratic socialism is finished, for our lifetime at least," goes the refrain. The best we can do is to preserve a little bit of a different colouration than the United States, with things like medicare and the CBC. Some people even talk about how the social safety net provides us with our identity, different from the Americans. The social safety net is an important difference, and worth going to the barricades for, but it is too incomplete to sustain social democracy, much less to make us a proud nation.
If we do not have confidence ourselves in the power of the democratic socialist argument, it is not surprising that the public does not have confidence in us, either. In the end, even the consolation prize a slightly more humane, Americanized society for Canada is at risk.
I do not share this pessimism. Democratic socialism is as appropriate as ever. People, and their communities, and the land they live on, and their cultural self expression, are primary. This root idea of democratic socialism needs, however, to be articulated in the context of a new age and with a different language. The future is a far different place than the one in which our movement began.
We live, to start with, in a world of television, of extraordinary mass media power, of the information age, and the sweeping commercialization of popular culture and of society. This should be at the top of our agenda. The commercialization of society in particular, with its inculcation of the idea that consumption is the meaning of life, undermines social democracy. The party's original intellectual capital, now largely depleted, was put in place prior to television. We have never made the adjustment. We're paying for it.
We are also in a world where technology and the nature of work have changed, and are continuing to change dramatically, and where, despite foodbanks and the struggles of many, most people are far better off materially than when our predecessor party, the CCF, began. The days when farmers and when workers in crudely mechanized heavy industry made up the majority of the working population are long gone. On top of all the other changes, more and more people are working at home or out of their homes.
We are in a world where business has become bureaucratized and globalized, and where communications, culture, and entertainment have been captured by this same pattern quite a bit different than the buccaneer capitalism of an earlier age. This is a world, moreover, in which just those sectors communications, culture, and entertainment are growing rapidly.
We are in a world, finally and most importantly, where the environment has become a primary consideration, and where questions of population, the preservation of species and plant variety, and the nature of cities and transportation become crucial.
Not only have we failed to articulate social democracy for this changing world, but also our sister parties in western Europe have lost their imagination and been thrown on the defensive. The regeneration of our movement is not going to happen in Britain or France. We here in Canada, on the other hand, if we show creativity and self confidence, have the chance of leading the way. I believe that when we do make the adjustment, we will suddenly blossom into a party that once more speaks for the future and captures the public imagination. |
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