Apologia Pro Vita Socialista

So like I say in the "Coming Attractions" thing right below this post, I have an odd political self-identity, that Jay once very ably summed up in an email I quote here without permission.

"1) Willing to experiment with private delivery, and possibly accept two-tiered health care,
within a limited, public-good-focussed context.
2) In favour of robust military action in Afghanistan; impatient with facile peacenik platitudes; in favour of more money for the military generally
3) Opposed to proportional representation
4) A hard-liner on separatism
5) A member of....the NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY? (!!!)"

I'll admit that this seems a little offbeat; and I'll also cop to the fact that these issues are ones that are generally important to me, though I've gotta say that I've never loudly asked a group of people I didn't know were gigantic nerds if they wanted to come back to my place to discuss proportional representation, unlike some people I could name.

So why, exactly, am I a "right-wing New Democrat" rather than a left-wing Liberal or a floating voter or an independent or what have you? The answer is sort of complicated-I've no doubt that a desire to irritate my rock-ribbed Liberal family is part of it, as is a general dislike of the clubby culture of entitlement and corruption that genuinely does infect the Liberal party. But ultimately, I think that I'm a New Democrat because ultimately they're the party that is most committed to building a better, fairer society, rather than tinkering around the edges of our current society.

Here's what I mean. The issues on which I form a minority of one within the NDP, like proportional representation and health care and separatism, seem to me to be issues of mechanism: how we create given goals, like a health-care system or a Parliament or a federation. This is vitally important. But it seems to me that an even more important component of politics, ultimately, is who you think needs to be served by the political system-what clients need to be served better by the state to create a better society. And I find myself increasingly out on the left wing of the culture wars, arguing for feminism and gay rights and secular values and so forth. In this country, thank god, we don't really have a vicious clash of "values" yet, though I worry that in twenty years we will be fighting the same battles the Americans are fighting now. It has to be said, though, that when these fights arise the NDP always seems to be out on their own saying forthrightly that a fairer, more inclusive society is a good thing in and of itself.

Take gay marraige, the last gigantic carnival of appeals to prejudice and emotion we had in our political arena. The Conservatives were pretty forthright in standing foursquare behind the continuation of bigotry. The NDP was equally forthright in saying that gay men and women should be allowed to have the same marraige rights as everybody else. So far, so entirely expected.

And then there's the Liberals. Under the ridiculous, desperate-to-please leadership of Paul Martin, they hid behind the charter, unwilling to say whther they thought extending the right to marraige was a good thing in and of itself, relying on legalisms about the notwithstanding clause. What irritated me most-then and now-is that this approach to government refuses to talk about what the laws mean to people. Not "the people" or society writ large, but ordinary men and women living their daily lives. I got extremely tired of the parsing of the Charter, and what the Supreme Court had to say when the question was referred to them by another Liberal government seeking cover-I wanted to hear what the different parties thought was important about marraige, gay or straight, to real live people. And two of the parties answered the question, and only one of them answered it in a way I thought was just.

And this stuff, about the establishment of a secular society where we can all try to get ahead, comes up all the time. Equal pay for men and women. Abortion regulations. Established state parochial schools. Labour law. Take your pick.

I dunno. I realize that it sounds weird for a white, heterosexual man from a comfortable family background to say what motivates him in choosing a political party are issues of race, gender, sexuality and class, but those are the issues that tell you where a party's heart is-not their stand on tax rates and administrative reforms to the health care system. That's not to say the other stuff isn't vitally important, but I think that precisely how we order our health-care bureaucracy and the size of our military and how we elect MPs to Parliament and the precise stance federalists in Canada should take vis-a-vis the separatists are all issues on which people of good intentions can and do disagree. The question of whether a better, more inclusive, society should be built isn't in my view, and while there are certainly people who believe that "it's not too late to build a better world" in all of the other parties (including, it would seem, all of my friends) I think there's a higher proportion of people in the Conservative and Liberal parties who like the current world just fine, thanks very much, or who would like in fact to build what they think would be a better world but which I think would be an awful lot worse.