Can leadership candidates ever not hate each other? At the risk of giving the punch line away too early and spoiling the entire column, the answer is “probably not.” It’s the old story of civil wars being the most vicious, of the implacable hatred between cherished comrades when they fall out, of family rifts and separated couples poisoning their kids’ minds about each other.

In his masterpiece Catch-22, Joseph Heller describes the hostility of several American offices to an ordinary G.I. Joe:

“These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.”

The leadership process makes conflict almost inevitable and deeply divides the party. In politics, a party leader is a big deal. If you decide to run it’s because you’ve come to believe you’re the best person for the job. From there it’s a short hop, skip and jump to being convinced you’re the only person for the job, indeed the indispensable one. Soon you have not a soupcon of doubt that if anyone else won it would be a disaster of irreparable, epic proportions.

As the campaign goes on, and especially when the candidates are forced to meet repeatedly in debate — listening for the hundredth time to each other’s tedious gags, spin lines, talking points, personal stories, promises, banalities — their animosity, even contempt, for each other steadily grows. Only the potential need for a second-ballot deal prevents a public eruption. When the losers are forced to line up behind the victor after the final ballot, you can be sure they’ve been strip-searched for hidden weapons.

I should make clear that this mutual contempt among leadership candidates is not quite an absolute. But it’s commonplace enough to be a general rule with occasional exceptions in countries where people actually compete to be leader.

If these feelings appear later to dissipate, it’s usually due to opportunism — the bitter antagonists obliged to work together or the winner choosing the loser as a lieutenant, as in Mulroney-Clark, Chrétien-Martin, JFK-LBJ, Obama-Clinton, Ignatieff-Rae. The high profile Romney-Perry fiasco has yet to play itself out of course, but it does seem likely one will punch the other’s lights out on national TV one night, a fitting climax indeed.

In some prominent cases, such as John Turner versus Jean Chrétien, no rapprochement was ever consummated, while the two Miliband brothers who last year competed for the leadership of the British Labour Party constituted a saga somewhere between a Greek tragedy and the Book of Genesis.

In France, both Ségolène Royal and Francois Hollande wanted to be the Socialist Party’s candidate for president. She won the nomination last time, lost the election, they split up, he’s now the candidate. Solidarity forever, for better and for worse.

You might think that the winners would be more gracious than their whupped opponents. You would mostly be wrong. Many winners never forget or forgive. Here is a syndrome that knows no party or ideological lines. I recall one NDP winner who went on to become premier of the province and who years later still could — and at the slightest excuse gladly would — spew out the names of dozens of activists who had betrayed him by supporting his unworthy opponent. Brian Mulroney famously never forgot a slight, nor did the ruthless Mr. Chrétien.

Does this syndrome apply to women as well? The record here is both short and mixed. My spouse, who nominated Audrey McLaughlin when she became Canada’s first woman party leader, reports that her campaign totally banned all negative references to their opponents, even though the rule was not at all reciprocated.

Down south, in the bitter contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for their party’s presidential nomination in 2008, Mr. Hillary was far more vicious than his wife, bordering on unforgivable racism; yet Hillary’s reputation for tough hardball politics was equal to Bill’s. The Republicans could have fought the entire election against Mr. Obama by invoking the slurs his Democratic brothers and sisters used against him.

On the other side, Sarah Palin was far from the first vice-presidential candidate to think she was superior to the presidential candidate that selected her, merely the most delusional.

One of the most remarkable leadership races I ever participated in was between Walter Pitman and Stephen Lewis for Ontario NDP leader a few centuries ago. It was a contest that both broke all the rules while demonstrating them at the same time. To our astonishment, many Pitman supporters, all of whom knew Mr. Lewis well and were even old friends, turned viciously against him during the campaign, then offered their undying loyalty the moment it was over. As for the front men themselves, Mr. Lewis never had anything but the warmest affection and regard for Mr. Pitman — it’s hard to feel otherwise about the man — while Walter always thought Stephen ought to be leader, ran largely to ensure there’d be a contest and revelled in his own defeat. Walter Pitman is as good a definition of mensch as any I know.

This provides us another hard-and-fast rule. Whatever the candidates say about each other publicly, behind the scenes count on some flacks — certainly not all, I swear, but some — viciously maligning all their competitors.

There are three federal leadership races now being waged in Canada, plus the blood-curdling spectacle of the Republican presidential contest. Looking at them as a whole, I’d say there’s little reason so far to think that traditional patterns will fail to materialize. Is there an alternative? Sure — you could just have the leader anoint his own successor.

This article was first published in The Globe and Mail.

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Gerry Caplan

Gerald Caplan has an MA in Canadian history and a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is an author, teacher, media commentator,...