How Electoral Democracy Really Works

 

Three-term London mayor Sadiq Khan

Conventional wisdom is that in a democracy, being a minority means being oppressed. What could be more obvious? Democracy means majority rule. And so we institute all manner of preferences and handouts for minorities. In the name of “equity.”

But this is not how an electoral democracy actually works. In order to achieve public office at any level, you need an army of committed volunteers; you have to belong to a committed, close-knit, well-organized group with a shared agenda. For generations, every mayor of Toronto was a member of the Orange Order. A Greek alderman explained how it worked to a political newbie: you need to belong to some minority to get volunteers.

Of course, this describes a political party. But it also describes a minority ethnicity. And within the political parties, the way to get the local nomination is with your army of ethnic volunteers and people who will bus in to vote for one of their own. Even if there is no nomination contest, the political party will want a candidate with some strong local ethnic ties, because they want these volunteers in the election proper.

Accordingly, members of minority ethnicities have a built-in advantage. They automatically have an army of volunteers who will support and work for them on the basis of their religion, skin colour, or cultural affiliations. The average majority Canadian does not have that. They must build it from scratch, if they can. And this is still without considering the benefits of an ethnic block vote—as Quebec, for example, has used effectively in Canadian federal politics.

In power, these special interest groups are then able to vote themselves special privileges. So we have the edifice of multiculturalism, affirmative action, special handouts based on race, and the like.

To be fair, there is as well a second factor: if some group of people has extra time on their hands, they have the time to organize and agitate for their special interests. This is why retirees have always had an outsize voice in our political life. They have the time to engage in politics.

This is also the key advantage of farmers and teachers, who also always get priority for their interests in our political life. They will insist that they work hard, and they do, but their work is seasonal. They have an off-season for organizing and agitating. 

The free time available to suburban women has always been behind feminism’s success. They will insist that women have been traditionally oppressed and overworked; the opposite is the truth. Publishers of books and magazines, TV networks and film distributors, have known for generations that the vast majority of their audience is female—only women have enough leisure time. Freidan’s essential complaint, that launched the feminist revolution, was boredom. Women have time to organize to get what they want.

And it is why homosexuals have an outsize influence. Because they do not have kids and families, gays have fewer responsibilities; and so more time to devote to political action. 

We may not be able to fix this problem of minority rule. It may not even, overall, be a bad thing; at best, it can counterbalance possible discrimination against a minority. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, certainly makes it worse.

But at the very least, we should be aware of what is going on.  The special interest groups are not being given preferential treatment because they are or were oppressed, but because they hold power. They can take what they want, and so they do.

Maintiens le Droit

 

A literary friend, an immigrant to Canada, laments that

“The biggest damage done by racism is that it has shut down critical enquiry and self-critique among minorities. In an attempt to salvage our identity, we paint a blameless picture of our identity, race, ethnicity, religion, culture, and community. ... Racism makes us afraid of self-critique for fear that it may be used against us.”

This take is wrong. Groups that are discriminated against do not close ranks and refuse to criticize one another. Just the reverse: individuals try to “pass,” often by condemning their own group. You get “Uncle Toms”; anti-Semitic Jews; or, as George Bernard Shaw once said, “the Irish are the most honest of all races; they never have anything good to say about each other.”

The fact that we see the exact opposite in Canada’s communities of recent immigrants informs us that the problem is not discrimination against “minorities.” As should be obvious: in contemporary Canada, minority status is celebrated by government. “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” is official government policy. The better comparison is with “professional courtesy”: a doctor is never supposed to criticize another doctor, a lawyer another lawyer, because it might threaten their shared prestige.

Indeed, given Canada’s “hate laws,” anyone criticizing multiculturalism, diversity, or any particular immigrant or foreign culture faces a possible prison term. It is therefore safer for any of us to say nothing against, for example, the rather less than admirable government of Iran, or China, for all that they may oppress their own people, or be opposed to individual rights and human equality. Someone might take offense, and our lives be ruined. It is perfectly fine, safe, and socially acceptable, on the other hand, as my friend notices, to criticize the government or the culture of Canada. Or other nations, like the US or the UK or France, that are friendly to Canada and share its values.

Sadly, my immigrant friend has not yet strayed off the plantation. She naïvely supposes that the left supports free speech. She is puzzled, therefore, that she cannot get literary magazines to publish anything she writes that is critical of the government of her home country.

But it is “the left” that has passed and aggressively supports restrictions on free speech such as those “hate laws.” It is the left that has advanced “deplatforming” opposing views, that has shown up to riot when the wrong speakers are invited to campus, that has engaged in widespread blacklisting, “political correctness,” legally required speech--forcing people to use designated gender pronouns--and so forth. Liberalism, the political philosophy that believes in human rights like freedom of speech, has been gradually forced to the right in North America. Perhaps it started with the rejection by the left of the right to life.

“The left” as such has no particular problem with dictatorships, and broadly supports intrusive government. 

Liberalism is also the philosophy that believes in human equality. It is not helpful to divide people up into “minorities,” as the left always does. Properly speaking, all Canadians are members of ethnic minorities within Canada, and all humans are members of ethnic minorities in global terms. And how we are divided into special interest groups is perfectly arbitrary: why, say, skin colour, and not height? Is a second-generation Chinese immigrant really more culturally like the Chinese of Beijing than like the kid on the next block?

Instead of accentuating our divisions, we ought to be working together to create one unified Canadian culture, and one world culture, open to all of us. That is the special opportunity that Canada, as a post-ethnic nation, offers us.

Blowing in the Wind

A few days ago, I wrote about the slaughter in Christchurch, and that of course everybody is going to come out and say they are against murder and hate; but they always say that, and it does nothing.

Actually, this time, in Canada, not everyone has done so. And this looks significant.

Andrew Scheer’s initial statement seemed to avoid saying that the victims were Muslim.

“Freedom has come under attack in New Zealand as peaceful worshippers are targeted in a despicable act of evil. All people must be able to practice their faith freely and without fear.”

He was quickly criticized for this omission, and sent out a second statement that was more explicit. 

Maxime Bernier

Maxime Bernier did not. He first said nothing about the incident, and then, when challenged, responded that there was no call to issue a statement. He did not automatically issue statements whenever Christians or others were attacked either.

“Some journalists have no decency. Did this one harass me or anybody else when dozens of Christians were massacred in Nigeria and the Philippines weeks ago? Why not? As a rule I don’t comment on these horrible tragedies in other countries. Period.”

Bernier has a point. Islam has been given more consideration in Canada in recent years than Christianity or Judaism. Witness House of Commons resolutions consciously and deliberately condemning “Islamophobia,” without referring to other religions—religions that suffer more actual hate crimes.

But this reaction, by Scheer and Bernier, suggests that politicians are now no longer certain they gain politically by defending Muslims. Even at a time when one might expect natural sympathy. That’s chilling. They are making a careful calculation instead; fingers are to the wind. And the direction of the wind may be shifting.

Important moral for any minority in a democracy: do not trust government to protect you from a lynch mob. The same lynch mob elected them. 

There is a reason for the blindfold.

This is one of the great overlooked advantages of Empire. The authorities in London, and those they sent out to administer, were divorced from local factions and prejudices. They could view disputes with a disinterested eye, and so would dispense justice. Good news for minorities everywhere: Sikhs in India, Ibo in Nigeria, Hakka in Malaysia, French in Canada. This is always less probable in either a democracy or a local oligarchy.

Witness the very different experience of aboriginal people in Canada, under the Empire, and in the US. Thomas Darcy McGee found the same to be true for the Irish: Montreal treated them more fairly than Boston, where the signs went up that “no Irish need apply.” Witness the disparate treatment of Africans in the two countries. 

It was real.

In theory, liberal democracies also have checks and balances built in to restrain the mob. This is the point of the Senate, in either Canada or the US. This is the point of a constitution and a separate judiciary. To some extent, this is the point of a federation.

Unfortunately, we have increasingly politicized them.

While all the talk has been, for the past forty years or, about celebrating minorities, do not be misled. Our system is not set up for this, and this was never true. It looked true only so long as so-called “minorities” constituted a majority voting bloc, and some disliked minority—such as “cisgendered Anglo straight white males”—could be falsely presented as the majority. But the focus of the mob can just as easily, and abruptly, swing to another victim: the Jews, or white women, or the Muslims, and so forth. We are beginning to see this.

First they came for the cisgendered Anglo straight white males, and I said nothing, for I was not a cisgendered Anglo straight white male. Then they came for the Jews, and I said nothing, for I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Muslims …