Year-End Reflections

Walking Balmy Beach with Zeus the Wonder Dog at sunset on December 31, 2020 (Toronto)

Earlier this year, my sister Martha put us on to Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s blog, Letters from an American. Like us, many of you have come to rely on Heather for a late night/early morning daily fix on the tumultuous U.S. political scene.

Heather is an American historian residing in Maine. She teaches at Boston College and describes herself as a Lincoln Republican. In yesterday’s letter, she reviews the developments in the U.S. in the first 20 years of the new century. Her thesis is that going back to the 1980s the United States has been in a push back led by conservative/reactionary business interests against the New Deal activism of the previous 50 years. The counter revolution started with Ronald Reagan and has culminated in the anti-democratic government of Donald Trump. Thankfully that era, she argues, is coming to a close. The past 20 years have been the “end game of the Reagan Revolution,” she writes. This year the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the bankruptcy of the Conservative Movement’s efforts to destroy government “of the people, by the people and for the people”.

Heather’s reflections have stimulated me to offer my own year-end thoughts on this big picture.

In the period since the start of the Great Depression in 1929, our politics in Canada have undergone a similar cycle though expressed differently. The CCF, the predecessor of the New Democratic Party, was founded in 1933 and introduced an explicit democratic socialist/social democratic agenda into the Canadian political conversation. This dominated the political agenda in Canada into the 1980s. It was partially adopted by non-CCF/NDP governments at the federal level and in varying degrees provincially. The defining motto of the Canadian Liberals who governed Canada for most of this period was “never do by halves that which can be done by quarters” -- an observation made decades ago by Frank R. Scott who distinguished himself in Canadian law, literature and politics. It defined Canada’s response to the western social democratic revolution of the mid-20th century so comprehensively described by the late British historian Tony Judt.

Still we too suffered the conservative/reactionary neo-liberal counter-revolution, as did Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Federally this was experienced in part during the Conservative and Liberal governments of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, then in more full-throttle form with the Conservative government of Stephen Harper that ended in 2015. So our cup is a quarter full compared to that of Donald Trump’s America as this year ends.

Now we too stand at the end of the first year of the pandemic, in slow recognition of the revolutionary requirements forced on us by our own creation, the global climate change crisis, by the continuing public health crisis, and the growing awareness of the need for a politics of compassion in pursuit of the common good.

My own sense is that we can come to a correct perspective on how to choose the path forward from looking at different paths, with each path reflecting common values, the values that underpin Lincoln’s vision of government “of, by and for the people”. Each is a path that has influenced my own life and worldview: democratic socialism, progressive mainstream Christianity, and a deep sense of our interdependence and shared obligation to care for the whole of creation. For me each path reveals what’s wrong with how we govern ourselves as a global and local society, and how we might get out of the crises we are in.

The core value is said to be at the centre of all religions and most philosophical systems of thought: the Golden Rule. In my tradition, we interpret this rule as to do unto others as you would have them do to you. Or, more simply, love your neighbour (including our non-human neighbours, all of creation). On that is founded the crucial idea of respecting all our neighbours, i.e. of social equality. Economic equality and solidarity flow from that as does an analysis of what has gone wrong in our treatment of the environment and what we might do about it.

A paradigm cultural shift in world view, in the principles of how we collectively choose to govern ourselves, to a full acceptance of Lincoln’s democratic principle, is called for by world religious and secular leaders from whichever path they reach this point in the road.

We need to recognize that, for whatever the technological and material successes that capitalism has brought many of us in the past centuries, it has failed decisively in leading to a world of equality, solidarity and fraternity. It has led us to poison the air, water and earth essential to our existence, to fatally degrade our environment to the point of threatening our very existence as a species and all the other species with whom we share this miraculous planet.

Generations before us saw this coming and sought to build a new world around the concept of cooperation, and love of neighbour. This was to be a world of peace, justice and harmony, in which systemic racism, the rule of the patriarchy and discrimination of all kinds was to be a thing of the past, as promised in sacred writings and teaching and in the dreams of people regardless of their religious or social practices.

This approach expected governments to act on behalf of the people and to be accountable to the people for pursuing and protecting the common good.

Our hope for 2021 is that we can make progress towards achieving that goal and that dream.

W.L.M.K.

by Frank R. Scott

How shall we speak of Canada,

Mackenzie King dead?

The Mother's boy in the lonely room

With his dog, his medium and his ruins?

He blunted us.

We had no shape

Because he never took sides,

And no sides

Because he never allowed them to take shape.

He skilfully avoided what was wrong

Without saying what was right,

And never let his on the one hand

Know what his on the other hand was doing.

The height of his ambition

Was to pile a Parliamentary Committee on a Royal Commission,

To have "conscription if necessary

But not necessarily conscription,"

To let Parliament decide--

Later.

Postpone, postpone, abstain.

Only one thread was certain:

After World War I

Business as usual,

After World War II

Orderly decontrol.

Always he led us back to where we were before.

He seemed to be in the centre

Because we had no centre,

No vision

To pierce the smoke-screen of his politics.

Truly he will be remembered

Wherever men honour ingenuity,

Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.

Let us raise up a temple

To the cult of mediocrity,

Do nothing by halves

Which can be done by quarters.

The Eye of the Needle: Satire, Sorties, Sundries. Montreal: Contact Press, 1957.