Toxic Wasteland: Is a prominent panel about toxic politics about to devolve into toxic politics?
Former United States Ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman put out one doozy of a provocative tweet last night. What point will it serve to prove?
The "Hanged Man", in esoteric imagery, is said to represent willfully undertaking a change in one's perspective. In the image, an upside down man is depicted with a serene countenance, dangling from a tree by one leg with the other calmly crossed behind it. As if to say, "Ah. I put myself in this position to see things differently, and now I do. Cool. Let me chill out here for a minute and process how best to proceed."
That frame came to mind as I was preparing for a panel that I'm speaking on this afternoon entitled, "Is our politics getting toxic?". My angle essentially is that there's a big time deficit of "Hanged Man" perspective in the world right now, and the world is rapidly destabilizing because of it. We each are being disincentivized, by a variety of factors, to consider the relevance of someone else's viewpoint as opposed to using personal attacks and torqued grievances to gaslight civil discourse and gain points within our own rigidly siloed cohorts. To fix the blight in politics, we each have a responsibility to pause and consider things from others viewpoints, even as we present our own points of view. That sort of thing.
Enter Bruce Heyman, who briefly served as Ambassador to Canada under former American President Barack Obama - who shot all of my prep work to hell.
Heyman, also appearing on this panel, put out a provocative tweet last night, stating that he intended to use the opportunity to dish the tea on former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper - suggesting that his government was uncivil and undiplomatic. For those unacquainted with the finer nuances of diplomacy, this is a big no no. The language is vague, and appears to be inflammatory. It could easily be interpreted as being designed to gaslight, get people’s back up and engage in tribal style verbal warfare.
For that reason, I suspect a ruse. I paused for a moment this morning and asked myself, why would he do this?
I am pretty sure that Heyman - a prominent former diplomat - put that out into the Twitterverse to illustrate a point about how social media contributes to the removal of nuance from politics, divides us into warring camps, and encourages toxicity. If this was his plan, boy did it ever work.
As I write this, the responses to his tweet are a flaming pile of dog waste. Given this, I half expect him to pull out an example where Stephen Harper used a blunt approach in a positive way to show that civility isn’t always the best approach, for example, when Harper told Putin to get out of Ukraine - and say, “GOTCHA! Now let’s fix this.”
But let's assume for a moment that this is not what Heyman’s plan is, and that he actually intends to use the panel to launch into a full throated dump on Harper's record. That approach only proves my point - that things are so bad that even a panel set up expressly to discuss toxicity in politics will devolve into toxic politics, because of a broader unwillingness to consider alternative points of view before getting into the mud.
This is because for the past decade, in both the United States and Canada, we have seen class divides widen, particularly across regional boundaries and demographics. This occurred at the exact same time that social media and channel based communications like Telegram intensified the sorting of people into silos where there is little exposure to other worldviews, and little incentive to even present them at all.
Politicians tapped into this too. Rather than having to build consensus on policy to get elected, it became easy to simply burn or dunk on political opponents and their supporters with personal attacks or flat out lies and get votes. Think former American Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” moment, or any of former President Donald Trump’s long list of bombastic proclamations. It’s happening in Canada too, a good example being when Prime Minister’s Justin Trudeau’s abandoned sunny ways in the 2021 general and implied that vaccine hesitant persons were “racist” and “misogynist”. I’ve even felt myself falling into this trap before too.
However, what that has resulted in is an angry, highly polarized electorate that doesn’t feel heard by leaders. I think about someone like my stepdaughter, who grew up in a rural community in a flyover state in the United States. She is passionate about gender equality and human rights, but needed to contract with the United States Army, work another near full time job at minimum wage, have our support and take out tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to even have a chance at affording college. If she voices her dismay over the state of the discussion around gender equality policy, she’s apt to be sorted as a radical leftist by her peers. If she talks about how the left is out of touch and has failed to show any real path to education or affordability for her generation she probably will be labeled a facist. She can’t win. However, it is a great source of pride that she maintains a questioning, optimistic and positive approach to politics (even with me as her stepmom, heh).
The same scenario plays out across Canada too. As an Albertan Member of Parliament, I once published a discussion paper that attempted to lay out the causes of Western alienation and ways to fix it. The shitstorm that followed is something I would love to write about in detail some day, but frankly I’m just trying to understand why the current governing party of Canada feels it can effectively dismiss and vilify the concerns that many people in one region of our country and not face an angry, divided electorate.
It begs the question, has our country permanently lost the ability to constructively offer or criticize potential solutions to a problem, even if we don't agree on the parameters of the problem to begin with? I sure hope not.
Going forward, we need solutions to our collective inability (or lack of desire) to pause, tilt our perspective and try to understand the concerns. Only those who hate democracy and our way of life benefit from our failure to take this issue seriously.
On that note, to Bruce - if you’re reading this - I remind you of the words of Ben Franklin, “we must all hang together, or most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”
See you on stage.