My wife and I (and our dog Charlie) attended Jack Layton's memorial service in downtown Toronto yesterday along with thousands of other mourners. It was a moving, emotional, soulful and remarkable ceremony, a testament to a fabulous human being's honourable political legacy and his fundamental decency as a person. It's tragic that just when Jack was in a position to maneuver himself and his party to possibly one day govern the country, he was taken from us.
I recall Layton getting elected for the first time back in 1982 when he ran for Ward 6 in Toronto, becoming a junior city councillor. I was in my first year as a journalism student and was "covering" the election as a school exercise and was at his election party. In the 1990s I interviewed Layton a couple times for articles I was writing. By then he had become a fixture on the left, and a consistently excellent councillor with an unimpeachable voting record on progressive issues. Most city councillors, including those on the left, usually sell out over something, especially to goodies offered by developers. But not Jack -- he was impressively incorruptible.
One of the ironies of the outpouring of grief over Layton's passing overlooks the fact that Jack was not very successful when it came to winning elections. In 1992 he ran to become Toronto's mayor against June Rowlands, who was a grumpy, right-of-centre political mediocrity -- and he lost badly. When he ran for a federal seat a few years later against the execrable Liberal Dennis Mills, he lost again. While he revived the fortunes of the NDP federally, the party was still only 19 per cent in the polls when the election was called this winter. Only due to the Liberal and BQ's leadership weaknesses and running a smart campaign did Layton shock everyone and push the NDP into new terrain.
Layton did have one weakness as a politician. Despite his incorruptibility and excellent track record and humanness, he had an unfortunate manner of coming off as a bit of a used car salesman, as a phony, and as being too perfect. It was weird seeing this in a person who was, in reality, far from being a phony and genuinely committed to his causes. This past election, perhaps because of his illnesses, suddenly he seemed more genuine and human and less than perfect. Which is why the country embraced him so.
One of the constants in the memorial service and in Layton's remarkable last letter was the emphasis on his optimism and message of hope. And his lack of anger or bitterness, even in the face of disappointments or setbacks.
But this got me to pondering about the politics of anger and just what sort of prime minister Layton would have turned out to be if he had won that post.
Another politician who has been labeled an optimist and master of "hope" is Barack Obama. But Obama is now in disgrace, having sold out and caved into the Republicans and the U.S. corporate elites at every turn. A man who seemed to embody the best of American progressive ideals in 2008 is now seen as weak and ineffectual and a tremendous disappointment.
There is nothing wrong about being optimistic and hopeful, of course. Yet I contend we are in a time when we need to see people on the left express more anger and less willingness to compromise. For 30 years, unions, social democrats, liberals and other progressives have caved into the right and the corporate sector in the hopes that by giving them something they will leave social programs, labour laws and other progressive institutions alone. And it never works. There is no such thing as enough for the right-wing. They see this willingness to compromise as a sign of weakness and they take advantage of it and demand more takeaways. And bit by bit we have seen our social safety net fray and the power of capital grow to the point it is now pretty much free to do whatever it pleases.
So if Layton had managed to get elected as prime minister down the road, would he have become another Obama, selling out the store? I doubt it, only because Layton was not known for being a sell-out during his political career (while a closer examination of Obama's brief political career before he became president revealed a willingness to throw the left under the bus).
On the other hand, the pressure brought to bear on Layton to maintain the corporate and economic status quo would have been immense. And here I fear Layton's politics of optimism and hope would have run aground.
The reality is, we are living in angry times. And we need leaders on the left who reflect and act on that anger. We have to recognize who our enemy is and articulate not the politics of appeasement, but the politics of class struggle and combat. Workers and the middle class and small businesses owners have been at the receiving end of a class war launched by the corporate sector more than 30 years ago -- and have been losing that war. It's time to get angry and demand that the next NDP leader lose his or her shit over all the terrible things capital is doing to wreck our economy, our planet and standard of living.
Messages of hope and optimism are great, but at some point people need to get really pissed off.
This article was first posted on The Progressive Economics Forum.
I liked this article as I like my anger too. But as my anger often misses its mark, this article missed the point of Jack Layton's message. The message is one of being..."loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world." It was a message meant to win votes, it did not say, 'do not be angry!' Jack's message was a progressive message and an olive branch to those who don't understand what we stand for. To even suggest that we should not be angry at the ingnorance and greed that exists in the world is an insult to what we have achieved recently on May 2nd and again on August 22nd.
Canada is being watched by the social democratic world to see if we can form gov't in the next four years. The New Democrats and Jack are a far cry from the US Democrats and Obama, but our challenges in overcoming the conservative power complex may be no less difficult, if we do not unite together instead of bickering over a very successful messaging campaign that could also win us the next Gov't of Canada.
Indeed we have. Right into 24 Sussex Drive, with a majority government. Right into Toronto City Hall. And soon, right into Queen's Park.
It's not about "language", as anything more than a superficial understanding would make clear. It's about being able to identify the problems, the culprits, and the victims; to name them; and to tell the truth about them.
We're not independent, we're not free, and we have no reason to be "content" in our struggles for social equality. Your version of "social democracy" is a cruel lie and a fraud.
I read Bruce Livesay's piece, "Jack Layton and the Politics of Anger," with more than a little disappointment this morning. Let me start by saying that I understand that many of us on the Left, if not all of us, are angry. One of Bruce's main points-that political leadership tends to court the Left only to sell it out once in power-is a read of history that is entirely fair.
But Mr. Livesay lost this reader when he decided that being angry is our only option for moving forward with our shared discontent, and with his further assumption that we must get "pissed off" about the class struggle we are apparently losing.
For too long the global Left has allowed the arc of their history and story to be told as a tragedy. We are scarred deep by being sold down the river by leaders like Obama or Trudeau, and we lament sacrifices and compromises more than the Right ever would, when we actually manage to seize big "P" political power. Reams of books have taken on this tragic narrative of the failure of the Left, especially in North America-indeed, additional reams of books have been written about the first books.
But tragedy-which has historically been used to stoke anger about injustice, channeling the discontent that is the very impetus for progress-is a cheap and dangerous motivator, especially in Politics. Much more difficult, and yet much more engaging, is a romantic read of the way things are, the way things could be, and the possibility of channeling that discontent and sense of injustice into a new, better future.
Jack, and the host of strategists around him, understood that we all have fears, and that it is impossible to not be angry about the way things are. But when Jack and his team tapped into the sense of discontent that demonstrably motivates us to want change, they didn't rally us around a sense of tragic loss, stir our anger, or send us into the streets to try and smoke out the corporatist enemy many too glibly label as "capital."
Layton was remarkable as a leader because he tapped into the underlying feeling of discontent that marks our time by offering Canadians a romantic vision of how things could be, and he did so by re-affirming social democratic principles that refuse to use divisive class categories as the starting point for an alternative vision of solidarity in this nation.
That, I would contend, is what we have felt with the loss of Jack. We lost a leader that could ring the idylls of Canada's too-often corporatist political culture. Jack carried forward social democracy's most powerful message: that freedom is the realization that we are interdependent, and that we can only be content in that freedom as long as we strive for social equality. Jack re-connected issues on the Left with millions of Canadians by using what some call (in elitist language, no less) "car-salesman" or clichéd language.
But the NDP was so successful because it did not use the divisive language so central to the politics of the Right, and freed the pressing social justice issues of our time from what can often be an echo-chamber of righteous indignation and esoteric language on the Left. This "car-salesman language" was intensely romantic in its optimism, and in doing so it offered a powerful offset to the cynical view that politics is just some real-politick game played by a few big players speaking to and working only for themselves and their backers.
This could never have happened if Jack had used partisan and tragic language as his foundation. The NDP and the Left would not be where it is today if Jack had "lost his shit," and channeled our discontent into us-versus-them anger. We've seen where those politics have taken the Right, and the Left-Canada's Left-has a more to offer. If the Left sinks back into a political language of anger that stokes divisions, rather than demonstrating that we are all interconnected and that freedom comes from working towards ever-greater equality, that would be a tragedy.
Your Jack Layton must have been a wonderful person and an accomplished politician and no doubt Canada justifiably praises him. However, I sign on to your [Bruce Livesey's] final graphs - and apologize for editing to suit my progressivism.
Messages of hope and optimism are great but, at some point, people must get angry - we must "GET MAD" (as Peter Finch's character Howard Beale says in the 1976 film "Network") but nonviolently, of course.
We live in angry times when high officials - pointedly among our leading Western imperialists in the world and up and down their domestic governmental hierarchies together with their corporate partners and paymasters - act with impunity against the public interest. And leadership on The truly Progressive Left must show its understanding of this aggression, reflect it, and use its own anger to fuel corrective and courageous action.
Working people, people seeking quality education at a price they can afford, small business owners for more than 30 years have been on the receiving end, the losers, in an endless rift, class aggression launched and worsened by corporate sectors.
It is time to get mad. Demand that leaders lose their tempers about the terrible things capital has done and is doing to wreck economies and the planet, human beings' reasonable standards of living and their aspirations.
We must articulate not a politics of appeasement, but a politics of human struggle, an aggressively persistent nonviolent struggle.
Mr Livesey is absolutely right...there is a place for hope and optimism...and a place for political activism based on genuine anger at an ideology that is running rough shod over the populations of North America and much of Europe...not to mention the abuses it has perpetrated on the developing world...the outrage should be palpable to the vast majority of us on the unreglated free market "road to serfdom" we are currently careening down....
Right on! Bruce Livesay and David Fennario. Much as I love the sentiments of Jack Layton's final paragraph and stood up and cheered when Stephen Lewis called that letter a "manifesto for social democracy" I have to agree with David Fennario's rewrite. We on the left ARE angry so it's high time to stop being polite. Would we ask a rapist to kindly stop or would we fight to the death to push that person off us? I don't know about the rest of the Progressives out there, but I'm feeling pretty brutalized by the Right and I am very angry and very ready to fight back.
Jack's Final Message is a Recipe for Disaster