Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 9, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba WHAT are the three hardest words to say? “I love you”? “I am sorry”? “I was wrong”? Well, if you’re a political party of the centre-left those three words are: “The working class.” Yes, it’s fit for a Monty Python skit. Centre-left politicians avoid the phrase as if it were roadkill. I was reminded of this fact recently relistening to Kamala Harris’s first public address at the cam- paign headquarters she inherited from U.S. Pres- ident Joe Biden. To those cheering in Delaware, she pointedly avoided the phrase, indicating that her campaign would be constructed around the American middle class: “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” Of course, there is nothing wrong with the mid- dle class. And if democratic politics is rooted, at its best, in aspiration, then what’s wrong pitching to the middle-class? Left-of-centre parties in North America have a long tradition of avoiding anything that smells remotely of class analysis. Peppered references to ‘working people’ and, more recently, ‘hard-working families,’ seems to be the acceptable limit. But if one pulls back from that practice of real- politik, the absence of references to ‘the working class’ is frankly gobsmacking. In its place, Hillary Clinton’s inopportune ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016 was taken by many working-class people as targeting them as a class; an off-the-cuff Freud- ian slip prompted by a disdain hiding in plain sight. Are the working class an embarrassment? Are they unclean? Four years on, the Biden administration attempted to bring back to political centre stage the link between the Democratic Party and organized labour; historically central to the fight for increased wages for the working class. In the U.S., that link had been shredded by Bill Clinton’s ‘New’ Democratic Party of the 1990s. That act of centrist vandalism — reproduced in the U.K. by Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ — arose from care- ful work of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) (the 1980s/’90s version of Project 2025, but for the left). Clinton repositioned the Democratic Party, tar- geting the aspirations of the educated, mobile upper middle class as he presided over the de-industrial- ization of U.S. manufacturing. He declared ‘the era of big government is over,’ facilitating trade policies and pink slips to much of the industrial working class. The North American Free Trade Agreement welded Canada’s future to that vision. The cold calculation was that wage-labourers had nowhere else to go. They could vote for par- ties that had traditionally defended their interests, or they could stay home. Well, that Faustian bargain has come due. And it is the political right that now feels empowered to deploy the language of “the working class,” without shame. False messiahs (Donald Trump), and class defectors (JD Vance), aside, this rever- sal in the body politic is still not close to being fully digested. The coming election in November will test the political potency of the right’s appro- priation of this originally Marxian designation. In this sense, Vance as Trump’s VP pick is decidedly not a mistake. If you think this ongoing reversal applies only south of the 49th, think again. Can one find a single reference to ‘the working class’ on the centre-left NDP website? Perhaps under “Affordability?” No. Under “Economy?” No. How about in the party’s hundred-page-plus “Ready for Better: New Democrats’ Commitments to You?” Nope. Yes, references to working Canadians, working families, but not a single reference to the working class. Instead, “A New Democrat govern- ment will bring together all levels of government, together with business and labour leaders, to develop a national industrial strategy to build an advanced low carbon manufacturing economy in Canada that will provide good middle-class jobs to Canadian workers.” When it comes to class antagonism, apparently, for the Canadian left “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” Not so with the Canada’s Conservative Party. Comrade Pierre Poilievre can’t say enough about the working class as he positions himself for Can- ada’s next federal election. He vows to deliver the working class into the promised land. His “daily obsession will be about what is good for the work- ing-class people of this country.” Poilievre’s ear- lier fight to end closed-shop union dues payments is now, happily, forgotten. And much else besides. Poilievre’s new attack ads against the NDP speak to this new strategy of the political right. If Marx was right — that history is first trage- dy, then farce — then perhaps the working class can look forward to some diverting vaudevillian entertainment in the coming years while its share of wealth continues to decline. And all this as defenders of those who sys- tematically benefit most from the working-class ‘champion’ its cause and those claiming to deliver economic justice for the working class express a ‘love’ that dare not speak its name. What a mad, mad, world. It must be the summer heat. Oh, and as the absurdism of Python remind us, the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. Who’d have thought? Paul Abela is an associate professor in Philosophy at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 FRIDAY AUGUST 9, 2024 Ideas, Issues, Insights The uncommon concept of common sense T O say common sense isn’t very common is not an original observation. If common sense were more common, we would live a peaceful society with justice and equality for all. We would care for each other in the ways we want to be cared for ourselves when it was our turn to need help. Empathy would be the norm, not the exception. Everyone would have enough food, clean water, shelter and opportunity — because any other path leads to anxiety, unhappiness and danger for our society. Work would be available and meaningful for anyone who wanted it. We always would make our decisions with children in mind — whether our own or others — providing and caring for the next generations as our ancestors provided and cared for us. We would each be special and important — but not more special and important than anyone else. We would respect the privacy and choices of other people, just as we expect them to respect our privacy and choices. We would ensure that our freedom was only constrained by social and cultural boundaries that also guaranteed the freedom of others. We would all just be humans, not separated by artificial distinctions of geography, race, ethnicity, gender, orientation or age — or by anything that would lead us to forget that we are all citizens of Earth with the same needs and desires as everyone else. Violence would be a last resort as we followed the Golden Rule, which is both commonsensical and utterly pragmatic. By now, you must be thinking I poured way too much sugar in my morning coffee. However sickly sweet these sentences might seem, they describe a “common sense” perspective but (alas) not for politics and politicians these days. While I confess having to look up the word to be sure of its definition, my pretty picture would be dismissed — likely with anger — as being “woke.” Imagine my confusion when politicians who expect to be elected (or re-elected) proudly attack people who are “woke” as though there is some badge of honour associated with being an advocate of racism, sexism, ageism, injustice and a general overall lack of caring, empathy or basic human decency. I hope you appreciate the ironies here, because the next federal campaign will include the self-de- scribed “common sense” Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre. To continue my confessions, I only know this because of the barrage of robo- calls I (and others in Manitoba) received on my personal cellphone before his latest BS (Bumper Sticker) event — “Axe the Tax” — in Winnipeg in support of the Conservative candidate in Elm- wood-Transcona. I rarely get calls on my cellphone. When I do, it often means bad news. So every time it goes off my heart stops until I answer the call, wherever I happen to be and whatever I happen to be doing. You can therefore perhaps imagine my irritation at these recent, frequent, calls, including a recorded message from Poilievre inviting me to the party on behalf of the “common sense” Conservatives. I hope the people of Elmwood-Transcona use this byelection as an opportunity to send a mes- sage, not to the Trudeau Liberals or the Singh NDP, but to the robocaller Conservatives and vote for anybody else. If this is a sign of what they think “common sense” means, they are demon- strating an utter disrespect of personal space, privacy and the boundaries of other people’s lives, making their idea of government anything but “common sense” for most people. What’s more, given this column actually had its roots in my fuming at the way Poilievre called for a “warrior culture” in the Canadian Armed Forc- es last month to replace its “woke” culture, you get the further irony. (This diatribe was appar- ently linked to the appointment of the first female chief of defence staff and the recent federal mandate for all government washrooms to include a tampon dispenser.) So, if a “common sense” perspective on life, the universe and everything is really what I de- scribed at the start of this column, the Conserva- tives are therefore apparently claiming to be the most “woke” political party in Canada and leader Poilievre the most “woke” of all. Unless, of course, the sloganeers in charge of the Conservative BS (bumper sticker) bus forgot to look up not only the definition of “woke” but also of “common sense.” Oops. (Cue the laugh track.) I would like to hear that the Conservative Party was anti-racist, pro-choice and intersectional in its opposition to all kind of injustice. That it cared not only for all Canadians but also for their children, and — unlike Republicans to the south — even for childless cat ladies. But the word “empathy” is apparently not in Poil- ievre’s dictionary. Alone among Canadian federal leaders, his tweet after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump (by a young Republican) harshly concluded: “I am also happy that the suspected shooter is dead. Democracy must prevail.” Dead men tell no embarrassing tales. That must seem like common sense to him. Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba. The three hardest words to say in politics Trump and winning — and whining DONALD Trump is three months away from a presidential election that is likely to deter- mine whether he goes to jail for a consid- erable amount of time. And not even stakes that high are enough to get the Republican nominee to stop publicly raging and ranting about perceived betrayals by allegedly dis- loyal GOP officials, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Speaking at a rally in a Georgia State University arena in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump periodically sounded like he was running for governor against Kemp. Telling the audience that “your numbers in Georgia are very average, your crime numbers, your economic numbers, all of your numbers, you’re very average. You can do a lot better and you’ll do a lot better with a better gover- nor,” Trump said of Kemp, whose approval rating is a robust 63 per cent. “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very av- erage governor.” Oh, and Trump referred to Kemp, who is perhaps an inch shorter than the former president, as “Little Brian, Little Brian Kemp.” Complaining about Kemp and Raffen- sperger — the state’s top election official, whom Trump told as he tried to overturn the 2020 election, “I just want to find 11,780 votes” — Trump alleged “They don’t want the vote to be honest, in my opinion. They want us to lose, that’s actually my opinion.” Trump is laying the groundwork for anoth- er election conspiracy theory and another set of excuses if he loses the state of Georgia in November. Maybe it’s a sign Trump is panicked because switching out Biden for Harris couldn’t have gone much better for the Dem- ocrats. (Notice you can find a lot of Repub- licans insisting that Harris’s becoming the nominee without winning a single primary or caucus is undemocratic but you can’t find many Democrats making that objection. As former Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis once said, “Just win, baby.”) But more likely, Saturday night was just the seemingly billionth example that at any given moment, Trump cannot prioritize any- thing, not even his own long-term interests, above his sense of grievance. Kemp and Raffensperger refused to help Trump game the 2020 election results, therefore they’re the enemy — regardless of how useful their support could be for 2024 in a state that could have a big influence on Trump’s fortunes. The more intensely someone tells Trump not to stick a fork in an electric socket, the more Trump lunges to jab it in there, just to prove he can. A minuscule portion of blame goes on the news media, as reporters are drawn to con- flict and “Trump vs. other Republicans” is always a storyline that excites them. Trump spoke about other issues during his 90-min- ute address in Atlanta — the border and crime, albeit in typical Trump hyperbole: “If Kamala wins, it will be crime, chaos and death all across our country.” But none of them could spark as much coverage or atten- tion as the Republican presidential nominee denouncing the Republican governor of a key swing state. What gets Trump’s blood flowing is his endless sense of victimhood, his perpetual whining that all his problems are the result of shadowy forces conspiring against him, and his stubborn insistence on relitigating the 2020 election, even when that is light- years away from the top priorities of the voters he needs to win. Voters consistently list the economy as their top priority, the latest jobs numbers are disappointing and the markets are slid- ing. Overseas, tensions between Israel and its enemies are at their worst in decades. (Trump never got around to mentioning Is- rael in his Atlanta remarks.) About the only silver lining in Trump’s Saturday appear- ance is that he didn’t take the opportunity to repeat, of Harris, “I didn’t know she was Black.” We may well look back and conclude that the apex of the Trump campaign was about 20 minutes into his convention speech, be- fore Trump decided to wing it and segue into thoughts about the Green Bay Packers and his now trademark reference to “the late, great, Hannibal Lecter.” The GOP conven- tion feels like a decade ago and Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt feels like a lifetime ago. Trump had a fairly easy path to victory against Biden and beating Harris is still very much within the realm of possibility. But he just doesn’t seem interested in stay- ing focused and putting in the work. Great pick, Republicans. — The Washington Post PAUL ABELA JIM GERAGHTY PETER DENTON JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS FILES Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks at an Axe The Tax rally at the Club Regent Casino hotel July 28. ;