Resist the pull to the centre

Canada’s leftwing parties risk losing supporters to religious reactionaries

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

Canada’s leftist parties are being encouraged to become more “moderate”—that is, to become more fiscally conservative. British Columbia’s NDP have followed this course much to the delight of our major media outlets. The civic COPE party, to their credit, have not. While moderation might be appealing in the short term, its long-term effects are disastrous. Before jumping onto the moderation bandwagon, Canadian leftists should consider how moderation has affected the American working class.

As Thomas Frank argues in What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Henry Holt and Company, 2004), in the 1970s the Democratic Party started moving away from its working-class constituency. The party began intensely courting corporate interests knowing that corporations could generate far larger campaign contributions than organized labour could ever hope to offer. Since then, the Democrats have remained socially liberal while becoming ever more fiscally conservative. While this lets the economic elites make out like bandits, it's left working class America without the political power to advance its economic interests. Bereft of political clout, the standard of living for the majority of Americans has been falling fast.

While the top 20 percent of Americans have seen their income rise since the 1970s, incomes have been stagnant for the majority, and they've actually fallen for the bottom 20 percent. According to Jeremy Rifkin in his book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (Tarcher/ Putnam 2004), of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the US is dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce; in the 1990s the US average compensation rate grew at an annual rate of only about 0.1 percent, even though Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in other developed countries and receive less vacation time. Rifkin also points out that for child poverty, the US ranks 22nd among the developed nations. The January 12 2005 edition of the New York Times points out that the US is 41st in the world in infant mortality, falling behind even Cuba. In terms of overall health performance, the World Health Organization ranks the US in 37th place; in terms of fairness of health care, the US placed 54th. According to the December 12th 2004 edition of the New York Times, among all the countries of the world the United States ranks 49th in literacy. The edition also notes that American workers lack so many basic skills that US businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training.

American workers are suffering terribly and they're justifiably outraged, but their material interests are ignored by a corporate media that studiously avoids examining class conflict. Since these workers rely upon the mass media to make sense of the world, they’re left without a conceptual vocabulary to understand their predicament. Frank argues that the right has masterfully exploited this situation by reframing the class war between capitalists and workers as a cultural war between liberals and conservatives. The right does this by focusing on the problems created by this social catastrophe rather than its root economic causes.

For example, the American entertainment industry is compelled to make a profit just like any other capitalist industry. If profit is most easily obtained by catering to the worst features of the human psyche then, barring regulation, this is what the industry will do. The problem doesn't start with what the industry produces, such as pornographic television and celebrity culture, but with the economic forces driving it. The right, meanwhile, will focus solely on the products, ignoring the economic forces completely. Moving to a deeper level of analysis, the capitalist system thrives upon unrestrained consumption and competition; the values it encourages are therefore materialistic and selfish. If consumption and competition aren't mitigated by the institutions of the welfare state, then materialism and selfishness will spread quickly to the detriment of our communities. The problem doesn't begin with the values, but rather with the economic structures that generate them. Again, the right will focus on the values to the exclusion of their economic underpinnings.

Right-wing demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly will thunder on about the symptoms without once addressing the disease. They'll then associate these problems with "liberalism," a term they use to refer to a conspiracy that's out to destroy American culture and replace it with the aristocratic, debauched, and possibly satanic culture of "Old Europe." This, incidentally, is why John Kerry was routinely called "French" during the last presidential election. By then associating liberalism with the very institutions that promote social equity, the right rallies working class Americans to dismantle their own safeguards against exploitation.

Christian fundamentalism provides a politically potent religious justification for the culture war. In The Battle For God (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), Karen Armstrong provides a framework for understanding fundamentalism's contribution to the right's resurgence. Following the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, Christian fundamentalism became an object of ridicule throughout the United States. Feeling persecuted and marginalized, American fundamentalists largely withdrew from the mainstream and created a counterculture, one with its own well-organized academic, media, and social institutions. This counterculture gathered in strength until the 1970s, when it aggressively re-asserted its influence in a nation that had until then seemed irreversibly secularized.

Since then, Christian fundamentalists have gone a long way towards not only capturing the Republican Party but also elevating that party to a position of nearly unassailable power. They simply couldn't have made these gains if the Democratic Party hadn't turned its back on America's workers. If those workers still had good jobs, a decent safety net, and political representation, they wouldn't have been nearly as vulnerable to the manipulations of the Religious Right.

The same dynamics could occur in Canada. We’re already barraged by right-wing American media. Through the influence of conservative media empires like CanWest Global, as well as the mounting political pressure on CBC Newsworld to cancel programs like Counterpunch, Canadian news media are already shifting towards the right. As the opposition to same-sex marriage and the growing power of fundamentalists in the Conservative Party demonstrates, Canada’s Religious Right is feeling humiliated, and it’s gathering its ammunition for a culture war. If the provincial and federal NDP parties follow the Liberals down the path of “moderation,” working class Canadians will lose their last political voice in Parliament. This would make them very vulnerable to recruitment by reactionary religious and political movements. We ignore this threat at our peril.

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