Fire and Ashes (22 page)

Antagonism is the essence of politics and you will need a fighter’s temperament in order to prevail. People won’t stand with someone who doesn’t know how to defend himself. Of course it’s painful to be attacked, but really it’s a kind of vanity to take it personally. Becoming an adult is a matter of learning never to take things personally: defend your honour and integrity, by all means, but never allow your inner core to be touched by personal attack. Do not give your opponents the satisfaction. At all times defend your standing, your right to be heard.

You will give as good as you get in combat, but a wise politician knows the difference between a clean hit and a dirty one. Voters may vote for politicians who fight dirty, but they don’t like them, and you’re in politics to earn respect, not fear.

You don’t want to be an innocent, but you don’t want to be a cynic either. You don’t want to succumb to the cynicism that says voters don’t know what they want and don’t care. You need to keep faith in
the judgment of the people, no matter how often their votes go against you, no matter how often your faith in them may be tried. If you don’t believe in the ultimate rationality of citizens, you don’t have the faith needed to make democracy work. Democracy only deserves its moral privilege if there are good reasons to believe in the judgment of the people. Accepting their verdict can be hard at times, but there is no other referee.

To enjoy politics and to do it well, you have to believe that you serve everyone, whether they voted for you or not. Even when political reality forces you to choose one group’s interests over another’s, you should never forget that the losers have paid a price for the choices you’ve made. To be a good politician is to be responsible
to
the people who put you there, and to be responsible
for
your actions.

This faith in the people is on trial in our time. In fully half the world there are regimes that combine authoritarian oligarchy with market principles—China and Russia come to mind. They all proclaim their superiority to the cumbersome, partisan, divided democratic politics of our free societies. We have no reason to suppose that democracy’s eventual victory in this battle of ideas is assured. There is no guarantee that history is on liberty’s side or that democracy will prevail against its resurgent competitors. Seen in this international dimension, a politician’s duty is not just to defend democracy at home but to vindicate its virtues to the larger world. You are in the arena because the vindication democracy needs most is not in words but in deeds, not in theory but in action.

You are the custodian of democracy, of a relationship of trust with the people, but also of the institutions of your country. If you get to serve in a legislature, try not to forget the wonder you felt on your first day, when you took your seat and you understood that it was the votes of ordinary people who put you there. Try to remember, too, that you are not smarter than your institutions. They are there to make you
better than you are. Respect for traditions, for the rules, even some of the silly ones, is part of your respect for the sovereignty of the people and for the democracy that keeps us free. Respect for institutions means you shoulder an obligation to treat your adversaries as opponents, never as enemies. Politics is not war: it is our only reliable alternative to it. Democracy cannot function without a culture of respect for your antagonist. In politics, you have loyalties to yourself, to your party, to the people who voted for you, but also to the country. Since these loyalties conflict, you will want to be clear before you start that there may come a time when you have to put your country first.

In keeping your loyalties straight, it pays to have an appropriate respect for politics itself. We talk about politics as if it were just a game, but it’s too serious for that. We are legislators after all, and there may come a time when you will have to vote to send young men and women to fight and die. It’s not a game when the consequences are as large as these.

Politics is not “show business for ugly people.” The politicians I worked with weren’t in it for low-wattage celebrity. They wanted to serve someone, somehow, and most judged how well they were doing by whether they had achieved anything for their constituents. That’s the metric that matters, the one that keeps you honest.

Politics isn’t a profession either, since a profession implies standards and techniques that can be taught. There are no techniques in politics: it is not a science but a charismatic art, dependent on skills of persuasion, oratory and bloody-minded perseverance, all of which can be learned in life but none of which can be taught in a classroom or a consultant’s office. It’s also not a profession in the sense of a steady career. Your life in politics can be upended in an instant, so you need to make sure you had a life before and can be prepared to resume a new life afterwards. Knowing that you can stand to lose is the best guarantee that you can stay honest.

In a lecture he gave to frightened students in revolutionary Munich in January 1919, as they tried to get their bearings amidst the street violence that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I, Max Weber distinguished those who lived
off
politics from those who lived
for
politics. Only those who live for politics can understand it as a calling. His final words to those students are worth repeating here:

I would counsel you to think of politics as a calling. The term is usually reserved for priests, nuns and mystics, but there is something appealing about using it for work as sinful and worldly as politics. It captures precisely what is so hard: to be worldly and sinful and yet faithful and fearless at the same time. You put your own immodest ambitions in the service of others. You hope that your ambitions will be redeemed by the good you do. In the process you get your hands dirty for the sake of ends that are supposed to be clean. You use human
vices—cunning and ruthlessness—in the service of the virtues—justice and decency. You serve the only divinity left—the people—and you have to learn to submit to their verdicts. These verdicts can be painful and hard to understand, but we have nothing else in which we can put our faith, insofar as our common life is concerned.

Cynics will dismiss this vision of politics as a piece of self-important delusion, but for those who have actually done it, like me, it has a ring of truth. It is a vision of what politics could be that enables you to understand what politics actually is. It is in the nature of a calling that it remains beyond our grasp. Those who are called know they are not worthy of it, but it inspires them all the same. So think of politics as a calling that inspires us onward, ever onward, like a guiding star. Those of us who answered the call know that success or failure matters less to us than the simple fact that we did answer it. What we hope now is that others, more resolute, more daring, more devoted, will answer it too. It is for these young men and women that this book was written.

1.
Mario Vargas Llosa,
A Fish in the Water
, transl. Helen Lane Farrar (New York: FSG, 1994); Václav Havel,
To the Castle and Back
, transl. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007); Carlos Fuentes,
Myself with Others
(New York,: FSG, 1988).

1.
See my
The Russian Album
(London: Vintage, 1987).

2.
George Ignatieff,
The Making of a Peacemonger
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 73.

3.
George Monro Grant,
Ocean to Ocean
(Toronto, 1873); see also my
True Patriot Love
(Toronto: Penguin, 2009).

4.
W. L. Grant,
Principal Grant
(Toronto, 1903).

5.
George H. Ford, ed.,
The Pickersgill Letters
,
1934–1943
(Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948); Jonathan Vance,
Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation
(Toronto: HarperCollins, 2008).

6.
Victor Gruen,
The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1965).

7.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E3-_z5YPoM
.

8.
Pierre Trudeau,
Memoirs
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993). See the illustrations, p. 369.

9.
See my
The Rights Revolution: The Massey Lectures
(Toronto: Anansi, 1999).

10.
See my “Liberal Values in the 21st Century,” address to the Biennial Policy Conference, Liberal Party of Canada, Ottawa, March 3, 2005.

1.
Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince
(1513), ed. and transl. David Wootton (New York: Hackett, 1994), ch. 25.

2.
There is some dispute as to whether Macmillan actually made his famous remark. Elizabeth M. Knowles, ed.,
What They Didn’t Say: A Book of Misquotations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. vi, 33.

3.
See my
The Lesser Evil
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

4.
See my
Blood and Belonging
(Toronto: Penguin, 1993), p. 123.

5.
Ibid., p. 146.

6.
“… torture should remain anathema to a liberal democracy and should never be regulated, countenanced or covertly accepted in a war on terror. For torture, when committed by a state, expresses the state’s ultimate view that human beings are expendable. This view is antithetical to the spirit of any constitutional society whose raison d’etre is the control of violence and coercion in the name of human dignity and freedom.” Ignatieff,
The Lesser Evil
, p. 143.

7.
Ignatieff,
The Russian Album
(London: Penguin, 1997 ed.), epilogue.

8.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”
http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/renan.htm
.

9.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/02/ed-koch-obituaries/61684/
.

10.
http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?showtopic=1685
. The translation has been altered by Zsuzsanna Zsohar.

1.
Baldesar Castiglione,
The Book of the Courtier
(London: Penguin Classics, 1967), p. 67.

2.
Ignatieff,
Blood and Belonging
, p. 212.

3.
The Conservative motion read: “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” November 27, 2006.

4.
Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(New York: Verso, 1991).

1.
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&dir=lea&document=index&lang=e
;
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&document=faqelec&lang=e#a15
;
http://www.fec.gov/press/press2009/20090608PresStat.shtml
;
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/10/2012-election-spending-will-reach-6.html
.

2.
This is how the law stood in 2006. Since 2011, the Harper government has phased out per-vote subsidies for political parties and reduced donation limits.

3.
United States Supreme Court “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” 2010,
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
.

4.
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11tue4.html
.

5.
See my
Isaiah Berlin: A Life
(London: Chatto, 1998).

6.
See my “Canada and Israel: A Personal Perspective on the Ties That Bind,” an address to Holy Blossom Synagogue, Toronto, April 13, 2008.

1.
Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005).

2.
www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/exhibitions/Ottawa_image.php
.

3.
http://www.hillwatch.com/pprc/quotes/parliament_and_cabinet.aspx
.

4.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson,
Democracy and Disagreement
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

5.
Jane Mansbridge, “A Selection Model of Representation,” Kennedy School of Government research paper, 2008. See also Hanna Pitkin,
The Concept of Representation
(Berkeley: University of California, 1967).

6.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-coalition-documentation
. See also P. H. Russell,
Two Cheers for Minority Government
(Toronto: Montgomery, 2008).

1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVJ
3eSN6MBM.

2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjUkPbGwAg
. See also Drew Westen,
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
(New York: Public Affairs, 2012), ch. 2.

3.
Barack Obama, “Towards a More Perfect Union” speech, Philadelphia Constitution Hall, March 2008,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo
.