Left is left and right is right, and never the twain shall meet, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling. Of course it isn’t true anymore.
You may have noticed that the Conservatives and the NDP have the same tax policies and similar environmental policies. They both want to take the HST off heating and electricity bills, for example. This is a policy that most economists think is simply stupid. Both party leaders probably know they are making promises that they shouldn’t make and shouldn’t keep. Something has taken over their minds. But what?
It could be nothing more than simple opportunism. Maybe they can’t find any other sticks to beat the Liberals with. It could be that Tim Hudak has gone so far to the right he is coming back on the left. Or Andrea Horwath may have gone so far to the left that she has reappeared on the right. It could also be stupidity, but I hate to think that.
Maybe something deeper is at work. Here is a theory that makes sense of the weird world of Ontario politics. The American Civil War may explain one of the strangest features of the Ontario election.
According to American mythology, the U.S.A. was founded with two powerful ideas. One was “no taxation without representation,” and the other was a special kind of anti-government sentiment – the colonials resented being ruled by a foreign power. I admit that I learned this from Walt Disney, but most Americans learned their history from Walt Disney too, so it really is the standard version of U.S. history.
The slogans have one thing in common: they assume government and taxes are okay if there is real democracy.
The strange thing about the U.S.A. today is that “no taxation without representation” has become “no taxation, period.” At the same time, the revolutionary idea that government from abroad is bad, and that people should govern themselves has become a commitment to small government, minimal government, or even no government. Government by the people and for the people has lost out to government by no one, for no one.
Representation, which stands for democracy and self-governance, has disappeared from the motto. Taxation with representation is still just taxation.
Undemocratic government and undemocratic taxes used to be the problem. Now government and taxes are the problem. The miraculous power of democracy to turn taxation into the people's choice seems to have disappeared. The idea that only a democratic government can be trusted has turned into the idea that not even a democratic government can be trusted.
So how did the revolutionary democratic ideals of the U.S.A. turn into the counter-revolutionary and undemocratic ideas of the Tea Party, the NDP, and the Conservative Party of Ontario? The American Civil War created a country with two kinds of citizens: the victorious and the conquered. For the conquered South, even a democratically elected government was an alien and illegitimate government. The price of ending slavery in the U.S.A. was to create a population that could never again trust representative government. As the South has grown in power, faith in American democracy has shrivelled. Slavery was the tragic flaw in the character of the U.S.A. Ending slavery may have undermined the democratic strain that made the U.S.A. seem heroic.
It may even bring the world economy down. Capitalism is astonishingly productive. It generates huge mass of capital that must be re-invested. But the more capital there is, the harder it is to find profitable places to invest it. Sooner or later investors will give up, and that always leads to a recession. John Maynard Keynes showed that government could keep the system cranking over by putting some of the capital to work when businesspeople lose their nerve.
Right now the world is awash in capital looking for places to go. Greece, the U.S. and the North American consumers have all reached their credit limits. Economists are again asking government to step up. And because of the wounds of an old war, two of Ontario’s political leaders want to go in the other direction.
