At first blush, 'proportion of populace engaged in candidate selection' seems a reasonable way to evaluate the democratic legitimacy of a nominee. However, we need to consider three additional parameters:
1. dominance of negative partisanship in plurality of voters
2. likelihood of majority gov't (guaranteed under party duopoly, likely w/ weak second-tier parties)
3. voluntary party membership (i.e., non-universal participation in nominee selection)
Canada's situation with regard to #s 1 & 2 is debatable. However, as is often the case, we have the advantage of a comparatively less equivocal model to our south. The US offers a spectacular and, I would argue, cautionary demonstration of candidate selection dynamics that, while seeming to be more participatory, result in nominations that, in practice, tend to undermine the foundations of representative democracy.
The selection of Donald Trump in the 2016 and present election cycles is the crystallization of a shift that, with hindsight, was already playing out in Republicans' 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater. In that primary race, the greater activation of delegates in the party's smaller, but more ideologically skewed wing overwhelmed the moderate party establishment's staid efforts to field a centrist candidate. Over the course of the primary campaign, the Goldwater camp discovered that amplification of a nominee's oppositional and combative qualities was a path to consolidating a winning plurality. But primary dominated by Goldwater's 'divide and alienate' strategy rendered a nominee who, taking the stage to accepted his party's nomination, continued to aggressively brandish his ideological cleaver:
"Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case. And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by un-thinking and stupid labels. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Responding to Goldwater's subsequent electoral loss, the Republican party relied on the same assumption that Democrats would four years later, when their convention was overwhelmed by ideological extremism: the solution to polarization and demagogy was to solicit more popular engagement. By engineering more direct democracy into their candidate selection processes, the thinking went, primaries would better approximate the general election. Success running the former gauntlet would naturally presage success running the latter one.
An over-simplistic and, ultimately, questionable assumption underlies that proposition, however. There is no guarantee that primary politics will enjoy functional congruence with the politics of a general election. In fact, there are many reasons to presume the opposite, that characteristics that appeal most strongly to the raw, animal spirits of a tribe would be maximally off-putting to those who have self-distanced from that tribe.
Under the three conditions identified above, party establishment and party enthusiasts come to define "winning" very differently. The further the Republican party comes under the thrall of a hyper-engaged MAGA minority, the more they act to "own the Libs" in the day's news cycle and the further they retreat into ideological extremism that threatens the candidate's broad popularity even within his own party. Trump waves the same 'alienation cleaver' at every opportunity:
"And they say, always trying to demean, well, MAGA really represents 48% of the Republican party. No, it represents 96% and maybe a hundred percent we're getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We wanna get Romneys and those out."
Taken to their logical extent, most flavours of populist ideology are, paradoxical counter-majoritarian claims to universality. What that means is that, regardless of the objective, numerical proportional support they enjoy, they cannot tolerate ideological pluralism. Accordingly, participation in a pluralistic political system is anathema. The natural 'split decisions' that democratic elections inevitably deliver hint at the fundamental unreliability of open, general elections. A losing result supports the movement's contradictory tenets: that they represent, overwhelmingly, the will of the nation and, at the same time, are an embattled minority that being forever unjustly and systematically persecuted. The contradiction is resolved by planting the ideological cleaver into the ground to fashion an ad hoc political divide that distinguishes those with an authentic claim to membership in the polity from pretenders. The RINOs don't count--or shouldn't. And, once 52% of the party has been successfully purged, Trump will enjoy 98% support, a proportion more befitting a populist. It is what one should expect from such ideological perfection.
Leaders of conventional political parties--those who, literally, subscribe to the habits of mind and endorse the procedural traditions by which representative democracies convene--believe they are justified in their beliefs, seek the power to realize those beliefs and pursue victory over those opposed. They differ from populists in the singular and noble concession they make to both the ideal and the mechanics of representational democracy: that victory must be an electoral one. Implicit in that commitment is a host of a priori assumptions regarding: the terms that define the extent of order and membership in its electorate; the demands on inclusivity that acceptance of majority rule requires; the provisions that curb, if not the will of the majority to press its numerical advantage, then at least restricts its use of government to do so (thereby securing the system's popular endorsement on an inclusive and universal basis, even from presumptive minorities).
But, of course, all of this rests on the Enlightenment's legacy of empiricism and rationality. If we abandon modern conceptual plumbing, the ungoverned seeps and torrents of thought, both private and public, will eventually erode the banks of our political levies.
And that's why you make a category error when you lump climate change in with ideologies based on moral values or supernatural claims. There is a fact of the matter. Your intellectual arrogance regarding the science means you are in the wrong twice over. First, because your facile 'proof-by-grade-school physics' doesn't carry the water you claim. But, second, by treating that factual question as anything but the grounds of a primary--even singular--contest, you are recharacterizing a material situation as a moral one. The shape of the faux-rationalist argument goes something like 'even if climate change was happening--which it isn't--it is mere _belief_ and, as such, is disqualified as basis for government policy like any other article of faith'.
It's both politically convenient and intellectually lazy to use a pseudo-sophisticated structural argument to foist the question into the social-critical realm of 'power'. That's just not the kind of thing it is. It is a shame, as I've suggested to you before, that your politics supersedes your curiosity and ample intellect in this regard. If you put the time and energy into chasing down the facts-of-the-matter, rather than marshalling low-quality, marginal 'science' (buttressed by more casual finger painting notions lifted from Marxist/structuralist/critical theory like 'normal science') to your cause.
The problem for you is that you are willing to rest question of Trudeau's legitimacy, i.e., whether he is doing a good job representing Canadians' interests and responsibilities, on the question of climate change, but then want to make a rather liberal claim to belief pluralism. The problem with climate change isn't that it's the theocratic imposition of a state religion, it's the persistence of a philosophical bait-and-switch in service of whatever ideological motives or material incentives are elbowing the decisive discursive instruments of empiricism out of the way.
While I agree fully with your assessment of Trudeau, getting rid of him only solves little, The Freedland,Carney circus will carry on their destructive socialist tripe. The party must be reduced to a rump or less.
How hard is it to find someone with common sense?
At first blush, 'proportion of populace engaged in candidate selection' seems a reasonable way to evaluate the democratic legitimacy of a nominee. However, we need to consider three additional parameters:
1. dominance of negative partisanship in plurality of voters
2. likelihood of majority gov't (guaranteed under party duopoly, likely w/ weak second-tier parties)
3. voluntary party membership (i.e., non-universal participation in nominee selection)
Canada's situation with regard to #s 1 & 2 is debatable. However, as is often the case, we have the advantage of a comparatively less equivocal model to our south. The US offers a spectacular and, I would argue, cautionary demonstration of candidate selection dynamics that, while seeming to be more participatory, result in nominations that, in practice, tend to undermine the foundations of representative democracy.
The selection of Donald Trump in the 2016 and present election cycles is the crystallization of a shift that, with hindsight, was already playing out in Republicans' 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater. In that primary race, the greater activation of delegates in the party's smaller, but more ideologically skewed wing overwhelmed the moderate party establishment's staid efforts to field a centrist candidate. Over the course of the primary campaign, the Goldwater camp discovered that amplification of a nominee's oppositional and combative qualities was a path to consolidating a winning plurality. But primary dominated by Goldwater's 'divide and alienate' strategy rendered a nominee who, taking the stage to accepted his party's nomination, continued to aggressively brandish his ideological cleaver:
"Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case. And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by un-thinking and stupid labels. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Responding to Goldwater's subsequent electoral loss, the Republican party relied on the same assumption that Democrats would four years later, when their convention was overwhelmed by ideological extremism: the solution to polarization and demagogy was to solicit more popular engagement. By engineering more direct democracy into their candidate selection processes, the thinking went, primaries would better approximate the general election. Success running the former gauntlet would naturally presage success running the latter one.
An over-simplistic and, ultimately, questionable assumption underlies that proposition, however. There is no guarantee that primary politics will enjoy functional congruence with the politics of a general election. In fact, there are many reasons to presume the opposite, that characteristics that appeal most strongly to the raw, animal spirits of a tribe would be maximally off-putting to those who have self-distanced from that tribe.
Under the three conditions identified above, party establishment and party enthusiasts come to define "winning" very differently. The further the Republican party comes under the thrall of a hyper-engaged MAGA minority, the more they act to "own the Libs" in the day's news cycle and the further they retreat into ideological extremism that threatens the candidate's broad popularity even within his own party. Trump waves the same 'alienation cleaver' at every opportunity:
"And they say, always trying to demean, well, MAGA really represents 48% of the Republican party. No, it represents 96% and maybe a hundred percent we're getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We wanna get Romneys and those out."
Taken to their logical extent, most flavours of populist ideology are, paradoxical counter-majoritarian claims to universality. What that means is that, regardless of the objective, numerical proportional support they enjoy, they cannot tolerate ideological pluralism. Accordingly, participation in a pluralistic political system is anathema. The natural 'split decisions' that democratic elections inevitably deliver hint at the fundamental unreliability of open, general elections. A losing result supports the movement's contradictory tenets: that they represent, overwhelmingly, the will of the nation and, at the same time, are an embattled minority that being forever unjustly and systematically persecuted. The contradiction is resolved by planting the ideological cleaver into the ground to fashion an ad hoc political divide that distinguishes those with an authentic claim to membership in the polity from pretenders. The RINOs don't count--or shouldn't. And, once 52% of the party has been successfully purged, Trump will enjoy 98% support, a proportion more befitting a populist. It is what one should expect from such ideological perfection.
Leaders of conventional political parties--those who, literally, subscribe to the habits of mind and endorse the procedural traditions by which representative democracies convene--believe they are justified in their beliefs, seek the power to realize those beliefs and pursue victory over those opposed. They differ from populists in the singular and noble concession they make to both the ideal and the mechanics of representational democracy: that victory must be an electoral one. Implicit in that commitment is a host of a priori assumptions regarding: the terms that define the extent of order and membership in its electorate; the demands on inclusivity that acceptance of majority rule requires; the provisions that curb, if not the will of the majority to press its numerical advantage, then at least restricts its use of government to do so (thereby securing the system's popular endorsement on an inclusive and universal basis, even from presumptive minorities).
But, of course, all of this rests on the Enlightenment's legacy of empiricism and rationality. If we abandon modern conceptual plumbing, the ungoverned seeps and torrents of thought, both private and public, will eventually erode the banks of our political levies.
And that's why you make a category error when you lump climate change in with ideologies based on moral values or supernatural claims. There is a fact of the matter. Your intellectual arrogance regarding the science means you are in the wrong twice over. First, because your facile 'proof-by-grade-school physics' doesn't carry the water you claim. But, second, by treating that factual question as anything but the grounds of a primary--even singular--contest, you are recharacterizing a material situation as a moral one. The shape of the faux-rationalist argument goes something like 'even if climate change was happening--which it isn't--it is mere _belief_ and, as such, is disqualified as basis for government policy like any other article of faith'.
It's both politically convenient and intellectually lazy to use a pseudo-sophisticated structural argument to foist the question into the social-critical realm of 'power'. That's just not the kind of thing it is. It is a shame, as I've suggested to you before, that your politics supersedes your curiosity and ample intellect in this regard. If you put the time and energy into chasing down the facts-of-the-matter, rather than marshalling low-quality, marginal 'science' (buttressed by more casual finger painting notions lifted from Marxist/structuralist/critical theory like 'normal science') to your cause.
The problem for you is that you are willing to rest question of Trudeau's legitimacy, i.e., whether he is doing a good job representing Canadians' interests and responsibilities, on the question of climate change, but then want to make a rather liberal claim to belief pluralism. The problem with climate change isn't that it's the theocratic imposition of a state religion, it's the persistence of a philosophical bait-and-switch in service of whatever ideological motives or material incentives are elbowing the decisive discursive instruments of empiricism out of the way.
While I agree fully with your assessment of Trudeau, getting rid of him only solves little, The Freedland,Carney circus will carry on their destructive socialist tripe. The party must be reduced to a rump or less.