September 21, 2021

The End of Political Contempt

In September 2020, something shifted for me, after an agonizing decade of partisan politics. It was a decade that began with the inexplicable election of Rob Ford as our city’s mayor, complely bursting my comfortable left-wing Twitter bubble, continuing on to you-know-who’s election to the White House in 2016, and then Rob Ford’s less likeable brother becoming premier of Ontario in 2018. Which would kick off a roller coaster of a four year term in which incompetence has been matched only by sheer callousness.

So much has been terrible in Ontario since 2018 that it’s easy for all the specifics to be lost in a whirlwind of nightmarish absurdity. From the widespread consultation of parents on school curricula whose results were never released, to random plans to scrap the full-day kindergarten program, undermining conservation authorities to permit development of green space, policies keeping communities from accessing developer funds to build vital infrastructure, plans to gut public health programs, and so much more—including the egregious act of arbitrarily interfering with Toronto’s municipal structure in the middle of an election, subverting the democratic rights of millions of people.

Labour disputes beginning in the fall of 2019 meant that the school year was regularly disrupted right up until schools closed altogether due to Covid in March 2020—and children in Ontario would remain out of school for the following 18 months longer than anywhere else in the country.

But when schools reopened in September 2020, I just couldn’t do it anymore, the fighting, the anger, the rage. I could no longer go on treating the government as my adversary. It would be impossible to send my children to school and preserve my mental health under such an arrangement, and so I had to shift my perspective. It helped too that the government—in spite of numerous pandemic failings, in particular in the area of long term care, resulting in thousands of devastating deaths—stopped behaving egregiously with such consistency, and seemed to understand (although always too late, always as a reaction) that people need governments after all. And while they weren’t a great government, or even a particularly good one, they were the government that we had right now and I had to put my trust in them as we made our way forward into a most uncertain future.

When I look back on the last five years of my own political action, there’s a lot that I reflect on. I am grateful for the empowerment and unity of the women’s marches, for example, the first time I ever walked in a crowd carrying a placard. But I wonder too if we’d be seeing the same display of rabid right-wing activism today, seemingly ordinary moms putting their kids on display, if there had been no pussy-hatted inspiration. (Those people have never had an original idea in their lives.) I have also reconsidered my feelings about the government of Ontario’s illegitimacy after they were elected in 2018, joining in calls for leaders to resign. While I do think this government’s tenure has brought significant damage to our province and its institutions, both the last year in American politics and our most recent election in Canada have underlined to me how fragile our democracies are and that those who try to delegitimize democratically elected governments do so at all everyone’s peril. And I’m thinking again about the power of rage as a political tool, which seemed all fine and well when we were raging for our own truly noble causes, but what happens when other angry people start to use that tool too, and their anger is cruel, divorced from reality and terrifying?

When I look back at the last five years of my own political action, what I regret is the contempt I felt, contempt which is not so different from that which resulted from Barack Obama’s political success in 2008, and which has a direct line to the election of Obama’s successor 8 years later. It was actually Trump’s election which made our own contempt for Premier Doug Ford all the more vociferous—does the world really need more than one yellow haired angry populist? (Apparently we needed three.) But of course it was contempt for the previous premier, Kathleen Wynne, that had paved the way for Ford’s unlikely win in the first place.

“Contempt is the opposite of empathy,” Edward Keenan wrote earlier this month in The Toronto Star. “And as U.S. President Joe Biden has said, “empathy is the fuel of democracy.” If we cannot imagine ourselves in the shoes of other people, we have little hope of working with them in a healthy democratic society.”

The Ontario government has been terrible and inept, but they were voted in—not for better, but for worse, it’s true—by a fair election by my fellow Ontarians. And this idea that I myself perpetuated that somehow those people’ votes were less valid than mine or didn’t matter is so absolutely anathema to a functioning democracy—and we see the same dynamics playing out now in far right politics underlined by racism and white supremacy. “Canada use to be a great country to bad its not anymore cause of people like you,” in the brilliant words of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook last week, and you could almost print that on a little red ball cap, you know?

“I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.” In the tidal wave of despair that was 2017 and onward, that viral phrase (often mis-attributed) was something to cling to, so perfectly articulating the powerlessness and despair that so many of were experiencing in the face of cruelty and obtuseness. The first time I saw that phrase, in a tweet, no doubt, I am sure that I RT’d it. THIS. But here is something else I’m thinking twice about, this politicization of care, or maybe the partisan politicization is what I mean, because care is certainly political. But I’m resisting the arrogance now that me and people who think like me occupy a kind of moral high ground, and that people who vote for other political parties don’t care for other people too, that they aren’t good neighbours, and generous friends, and charitable donors, and nurses, and teachers, and personal support workers. I’m resisting the idea that in order to care, you have to care the same way I do. I’m resisting the idea that we have no common ground.

Last night was the first election in as long as I can remember that didn’t, to paraphrase Sally Rooney in her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, “make me feel like I was physically getting kicked in the face.” The election that nobody wanted, perhaps, but its low stakes were almost refreshing—the angry Trumpy man in the purple suit leads a racist fringe part emboldened by anti-vaxxers this time but, statistically speaking in Ontario, our anti-vax population is so tiny that they’re having a hard time spreading the Delta variant, let alone fascism. And while I know details are sketchy and shifty, the other parties were all talking about vaccine mandates, and climate change, and the PC leader was at least trying not to come across as a troglodyte who wants to get all up in my uterus, and I’ve got to give him points for that. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

It’s certainly better than the alternative. A phrase that’s occurred to me several times in the past year or so, especially since we’ve seen the alternative, glimpsed on January 6 in Washington DC, in democratic crackdowns in countries like Belarus and Afghanistan, and so many more, places where political contempt has opened the door to extremism bringing forth a vicious spiral of democratic unravelling. I don’t want to do that anymore.