Institutional Racism In Conservative Ideology

This post has been evolving for quite a long time.  However, in the last few days, a series of pieces have been published which bring together several threads of thought that I have been exploring for the last several years.  

There has long been a degree of bigotry and racism underlying modern day conservative ideologies.  At a glance, it appears to have its roots in the politics of religious literalism and the desire for simple, black-and-white explanations of the world in which we live.  My thinking on this matter has clarified enormously in the last few days.

The first part of this was a very thoughtful analysis published in the Toronto Star:  "The Ideological Roots of Stephen Harper's Vendetta Against Sociology".

Harper’s two disparaging comments about sociology, however, also need to be understood alongside his gutting of the long-form census in 2010. It is widely accepted that this action fundamentally undermined Canada’s ability to understand its own demographics, long-term social trends, and inequalities — in short, its sociology.

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents. (This ideology traces back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society.”) Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for the problems they face.

If this isn't chilling to you, it certainly should be, because it is a concise explanation of the apparent blindness of the Harper government to the consequences of decisions such as cancelling the long form census and other tools which can be used to inform government policy.

The second and third pieces of this story were published in the Calgary Sun today.  The first being Lorne Gunter's column:  Aboriginal Leaders: Canada's Shame in its Relations With First Nations.

Aboriginal leaders claim the Harper government's decision highlights Canada's "shame" in its relations with First Peoples. They believe it is proof of widespread racism and sexism in the government and in the broader Canadian society as a whole. 

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says the Harper government is "out of touch" and "on the wrong side of history." 

The United Nations - that paragon of sanctimony, hypocrisy and inaction on real human rights abuses around the world - has chimed in. 

And even the country's police chiefs have insisted something must be done. 

So does all this support mean an inquiry really would be a good idea? 

No, it is simply another example of how much our nation's elites (police chiefs included) are seized by political correctness.

It's true that aboriginal women and girls are killed or disappear with greater frequency than non-aboriginal women - nearly three times as much. But the "why" is not as much of a mystery as our chattering classes would have us believe.

Most murdered or disappeared aboriginal women are not the victims of some vast conservative conspiracy or of white racism. They are the victims of the men in their lives.

Most killed or abused aboriginal women are killed or abused by aboriginal men - not callous white cops or violent white johns.

Wait a minute.  Nobody in their right mind is going to believe that a public inquiry is going to identify the guilty culprits.  That isn't the purpose of an inquiry.  The purpose of such an inquiry is to ask much bigger questions.  Questions such as whether the conditions on reservations contribute to domestic violence, and how a man like Picton managed to operate for multiple years, or why aboriginal people are grossly over-represented in Canada's prisons.

Of course, if you take a simplistic, black-and-white view of the world, any murder boils down to "catch the offender and punish them".  Simple, easy and horrendously misguided.   If you don't ask the big picture questions about these situations, you will never fully understand what is going on.  In fact, one is left very much in the dark, with the rather ridiculous assumption that bad people do bad things and that's all there is to it.

Anyone with even a little bit of grounding in reality and common sense will have long ago realized that people respond individual to their circumstances, and collectively to their environment.  Sociology is the study of societies and their behaviours.  The systems within a societal context will influence the individuals living in it.

In Canada, we have over two centuries of relations with the First Nations.  There are enormous problems with these relations, and much of it goes to the differences in what the First Nations understand the treaties to mean and how the Indian Act enacts those same treaties.  I know there are a plethora of other issues to be considered as well, but at its core, the Indian Act is a profoundly flawed piece of legislation which assumes the "superiority" of Colonial-era British society relative to the First Nations and very much embodies a series of structures that to modern eyes arguably impose a degree of structural and system racism which acts against our First Nations.

The overly simplistic rubric of the Harper Government blinds it to these issues.

The second item was a column by Michael Coren:  In The Wake of Tragedy a Sobering Reality

As a Catholic I can tell you with absolute certainty that if countless horrors had been committed by Catholics in the name of Catholicism, I and legions of my co-religionists would protest. I know the same would be true of most other religions and cultures.

Coren's claim that he would protest if countless horrors had been committed in the name of Catholicism is of course completely undermined by his own past utterances on a wide range of matters, not to mention his relative silence with regards to the sex abuse scandal that has plagued his Church for decades now.

But, we are told, these repeated beheadings and murders have nothing to do with most law-abiding, civilized Muslims. Perhaps so, but then it could be argued that neither does a book by Salman Rushdie or a drawing by a Danish cartoonist but that hasn’t stopped endless demonstrations and threats. 

Then there is the reality of the Islamic response. While I am sure that most Muslims are appalled by what happened to James Foley, even a cursory glance at social media reveals thousands of comments defending and justifying what happened, by Muslims on every continent. It might be comforting to believe that Islamist violence and bloodlust is a fringe psychosis, but every survey and all of the anecdotal evidence indicates that a sizeable minority of Muslims support it, an even greater number feel it is in some obscure way justified, and more still refuse to condemn it.

Funny how Coren can see this so clearly in the Muslim faith, and is so quick to call it out while turning a blind eye to the centuries of misdeeds done in the name of Catholicism.

While Coren may well be his own special brand of crazy, his blindness to the systemic racism and bigotry of his position is no different than that of Harper.  The simple, harsh reality is that the ideology they all subscribe to blinds them to the systemic problems they are creating and the very problems which aggravate already awful situations.

The minute you take a position that there "is no such thing as society", it becomes easy to wash one's hands of collective responsibility.  Perhaps the even greater irony of that is that same flight from collective responsibility makes it easier to label entire groups as "other" and criticize them for not meeting whatever arbitrary standard you may set.

I am quite certain that if you were to confront Harper, Gunter or Coren with the implicit bigotry of their positions, they would deny it.  Their very ideological constructs are so limited in their understanding of large, complex systems like societies that they cannot comprehend the idea that their positions foster othering and judgments on incomplete information.

A stage is not only set upon which racism and ethnic bigotry can flourish.  In Harper's Canada, it is not only growing and flourishing, but the flames of ire are being fanned by it.  I can only hope that we are able to replace our current government with one whose perspective encompasses a much broader view of what Canada is, and what it can become.

Societal Dysfunction and Why We Need Food Banks

A friend made the following, very perceptive, comment the other day, and it serves as the inspiration for this post.

What is wrong with us/our governments that we either cannot or will not address the systemic issues that force so many people to rely on food banks? They were supposed to be temporary! Now they are a fixture and needed more than ever. That is a systemic societal failure.

On the whole, there is an underlying point to this comment that I want to address in the context of today's political environment, because it is our politics which I see as central to this issue.

How did we get to the place that we are in today?  It's a long story, and one that begins in the UK with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.  Thatcher was the first of the "Neo-Conservative" heads of state that swept the world during the 1980s and 1990s.

The emergence of the modern day food bank coincides with the rise of this new breed of right-wing conservatism in our political discourse and the global recession of the early 1980s.  Calgary's Interfaith Foodbank marks their beginnings as being in 1982 at the height of the recession.  This, in my opinion not just mere coincidence, but an important confluence of events.

Thatcher all but dismantled labour unions in the UK, and in the United States her close friend and ally Ronald Reagan went after social programs including education.

Further following his less-government intervention views, Reagan cut the budgets of non-military^[153] programs^[154] includingMedicaid, food stamps, federal education programs^[153] and the EPA.^[155] While he protected entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare,^[156] his administration attempted to purge many people with disabilities from the Social Security disability rolls.

On Russell Brand's Interview

I heard Brand's interview late last week, and I've been stewing on it ever since.  

On a lot of topics, I have to say that I agree with Brand's frustration.  The existing power structures are not healthy - in fact I would argue that they have been subverted by a series of forces and factors over a very long time.  

Yes, there are enormous problems with environmental destruction, income inequality and political power distribution in general.  I agree with Russell Brand on these principals - these issues deserve our attention, and to be addressed on the political stage.

To some extent the early signs of the population recognizing what has evolved, and how broken it has become.  The "Occupy" movement is one example of a broad-based recognition of the links between money and power.  In Canada, the Idle No More movement has rightly brought a unique focus on the treatment of First Nations in Canada.  

Where Russell Brand lost me (and it happens quite early in the interview) was in his justification for not voting:

It's not that I'm not voting out of apathy, I'm not voting out of absolute indifference, and weariness, and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now and has now reached a fever pitch, where we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that [is] not being represented by that political system, so voting for it is tacit complicity with that system.

First of all, I have a fundamental problem with Brand's approach here.  He is essentially saying "I won't vote unless somebody changes things to something I like".  That is pushing the responsibility for the change outward and away from him.  It is one thing to say "things have to change", and have some ideas as to what shape you want things to take, quite another to take the stance that Brand has taken.

Second, I call out Brand's "standoff" stance for making the ever critical mistake of choosing not to use all of the tools available to him.  No democracy I am familiar with tries to factor for the opinions of those who do not vote.  Given the nature of Brand's grievances, a failure to vote is all the worse for his position - it all but guarantees that the "keys to power" are handed straight to those that would do the most damage in his eyes.

We have seen this happen quite clearly over the decades in Alberta since Peter Lougheed stepped aside.  Alberta has one of the worst voter turnout rates in the country - largely because the internal power structures have been so effective at dismissing inconvenient opposing opinions, and generally putting in place politicians who are (just) smart enough to step away from implementing the most destructive policies (Klein tried repeatedly to put in place the pieces to privatize Health Care in this province, but never fully implemented it because of the public resistance to it).

In many respects, this is the "boil the frog" approach to issues.  Take a long range approach and very carefully undermine things in ways that are not immediately obvious.  When the right crisis occurs, the public will accept the desired change as "necessary".

While I can agree with Brand that there seems to be a degree of "futility" in trying to vote against the power structure, it is utterly essential to vote.  You may end up voting for someone/something that is still distasteful to you (I've done it more than a few times), but symbolically it remains important because it is one of the mechanisms available to challenge the power structure that you object to.  It is not "being complicit in the system" as Brand accuses it of being, but rather using one of an arsenal of weapons to confront them on their own ground.

If voting is inadequate, then another option is to stand for office yourself.  Be the change that you want to see.  Stand for what you believe is right.  Certainly in Canada and the UK, there is no legislative impediment to doing so, and no legal consequences.  Again, this is using one of the tools of the system, against itself.  It can be a long, hard struggle to be heard.  In Canada, I have to give the Green Party and its leader Elizabeth May a lot of credit for the hard work that has been put in trying to become recognized and legitimate in the minds of Canadian voters - but they have come a long ways from their start in the early 1980s.

When we look to the United States, I will say that there is an exceptional problem evolving in the form of overt voter suppression laws.  In a number of states, Voter Id laws, in conjunction with a series of amendments to laws related to the acquisition of appropriate identification documents have created an environment where a significant number of otherwise legal voters are unable to vote because they cannot acquire the appropriate documentation.  This is a very serious problem, and one which may require drastic action to correct.

Brand seems to think that revolution is near, if not imminent.  I am not so sure of that.  Protests such as Occupy have done more to make the general public more aware of what is happening behind closed doors.  I do not think that they have gotten anywhere near mobilizing the collective mass of population to take up arms in revolt.  As much as I have railed against the rise of Corporate Feudalism on this blog, I for one am not about to demand armed revolt either.  Protests on the streets have little impact on those whose power base is found in the boardrooms of our nations.

In Calgary, we got a lovely little taste of that when a video recording of a Real Estate Developer's conference session was leaked to the media.  Make no mistake about it, the people behind that organization, and the Manning Centre, don't give one whit about groups on the street.  It doesn't even enter their consciousness.  What got their attention was when in 2010, their candidate for Mayor - Ric McIvor - got roundly trounced by Naheed Nenshi.  They then spent the next couple of years trying to put together a counter-strategy to undermine a Mayor that apparently isn't sufficiently compliant to their wishes - to the extent of spending over $1 Million to "train" candidates through the Manning Centre.

While Brand might want "revolution", that is very short-sighted of him.  First of all, revolution will create more shadows in which undesirable power structures can evolve and seize power - and those powers can often be as bad or worse than what is to be overthrown.  We should not ignore that reality.  The best disinfectant for corruption is light, not more shadows.  Additionally, Brand's call for revolution overlooks the fact that a new power structure has emerged in the world that renders the nation-state impotent.  The multi-national corporation is able to supersede or subvert nation level laws.  This has been the case for decades, but it has only come to light as a significant political power since the late 1980s, as Neoliberal policies enabled economic "globalization" and corporations started moving work to countries where labour was cheap.

Do things need to be changed in the Western democracies?  Absolutely.  I think that the changes that are needed require people to see the would-be puppet masters for what they are, and then to take steps to undermine them.  At the level of the Nation-State, that can mean more rigorous accountability and legal structures which weaken the ability of the multi-national corporations to subvert the powers of national governments.  At a higher level, the world needs to develop a coherent legal / governmental structure that protects the citizens of all nations from the predations of multi-national power.  I do not believe that the world is ready for that yet though.  There are enormous cultural and logistical barriers yet to be overcome.  Structures like the EU to a certain extent reflect what I believe the long term direction will be, but they are far from a complete implementation which will successfully overcome the psychopathy of corporate interests.