Democratic idealism tempered by experience

Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics is an extraordinarily graceful and interesting book by the sort of politician I usually would not usually pay much attention to. Michael Ignatieff recounts here his meteoric foray into Canadian Liberal Party politics and his flame out.

Born in Toronto in 1947 into a family of diplomats, he pursued a successful career as a cosmopolitan intellectual, studying and later teaching at Oxford, Cambridge, and eventually that other Cambridge, Harvard in Boston. His areas of study included nationalism and global human rights. Then, rather suddenly, in 2005 he was recruited by political consultants to Canada's Liberal Party to come home, run for election to Parliament, and eventually contest for party leadership. He won that leadership on a second try in 2008 and served as official Leader of the Opposition to the Conservative government of Stephen Harper (a Mitch McConnell-like figure) through 2011. In that year, the party he led lost not only an election to Harper, but also so many seats it was supplanted as the official Opposition by the New Democratic Party. Ignatieff left electoral politics and returned to academia -- and thought hard about what he had learned. This book is the result.

Just for context, if I were a Canadian, I probably wouldn't be a Liberal. I'm closer to the New Democrats, Canada's electorally significant democratic socialist alternative. The Liberals are Canada's version of moderate Democrats, with the very Canadian differences that they tend to a decent respect for human rights and absolute commitment to universal health care for all. Justin Trudeau, Canada's current Prime Minister, leads the Liberal Party. (These people aren't fully equivalent to U.S. Democratic mushy moderates. Trudeau's deputy is Chrystia Freeland, whose 2012 Plutocrats is still one of the most accessible descriptions anywhere of the inequalities of the global economic order.)

Fire and Ashes chronicles Michael Ignatieff's love for both democracy and the practice of politics. I'll let him tell it:

This book is in praise of politics and politicians. I came away from my experience with renewed respect for politicians as a breed and with reinvigorated faith in the good sense of citizens. ... There is so much wrong with democratic politics today ... that it is easy to forget what is right about the democratic ideal: the faith, constantly tested, that ordinary men and women can rightly choose those who govern in their name, and that those they choose can govern with justice and compassion. The challenge of writing about democratic politics is to be unsparing about its reality without abandoning its ideals....

As a practitioner of some of electioneering's dark arts myself, I find much of what he learned rings true.

He discovered early on that to impress constituents he had to be able to answer why he was running with something bigger than the true reasons: ambition and curiosity. Though seeming thoroughly decent, it's not clear he ever found his passionate goal. Other politicians sussed this weakness out; they successfully tagged him as an intellectual dilettante. As a result, he never quite achieved what he calls "standing" or what I'd call "legitimacy" with the people who might have voted for him.

But oh, the truths he saw:

• Voters want to trust that they are heard.

  ... I would rate listening, being able to deeply listen to your fellow citizens, as the most underrated skill in politics. For what people want in a politician, what they have a right to demand, is to be listened to. Often, listening is all you can do.

• You learn to be careful what you say.

  ... politics is a game with words, but it isn't Scrabble. No one who enters the political arena for the first time is ever prepared for its adversarial quality. Every word you utter becomes an opportunity for your opponents to counter attack. Inevitably you take it personally, and that is your first mistake. You have to learn what the lifers, wise with years of experience, have long since understood: it's never personal; it's strictly business. ...In politics, there is no such thing as good or bad faith.

• It is essential to be genuinely interested in people and their lives. His argument almost makes that strange exercise that is the Iowa presidential primary process seem laudable.

  What a good politician comes to know about a country can't be found in a briefing book. What he knows is the way the people shape place and place shapes the people. Few forms of political expertise matter so much as local knowledge: the details of the local political lore, the names of the dignitaries and power brokers, -- mayors, high school coaches, police chiefs, major employers -- who must always be named from the platform. Great politicians have to be masters of the local. ...
  
  As long as democracy demands this local knowledge of a politician, as long as it makes this the criterion of credibility and trust, the country should be all right. As soon as democracy loses its connection to place, as soon as the location of politics is no longer the union hall, the living room, the restaurant and the local bar and becomes only the television screen and the website, we'll be in trouble. We'll be entirely in the hands of image-makers and spin doctors and the fantasies they purvey. Politics will be a spectacle dictated from the metropolis, not a reality lived in small towns and remote communities that are as much part of the country as the big cities. ...

• Figuring out how to appeal to voters taught him how ordinary, apolitical citizens regard politics. From my political work, I completely endorse what he explains:

  ... a good politician has to understand... has to appreciate that outside the halls of Congress or Parliament, most people regard the spectacle of political combat with a mixture of disgust and alarm, fading quickly to indifference. Working with this permanent state of alienation is an important part of the politician's art. Politicians have to negotiate trust agains the back drop of permanent dislike of their own profession. When you represent the people, you actually spend most of your time trying to overcome their suspicion that you have left them behind to join a brutal game that will do them no good.

• Yet for all the faults of our democratic political system, there's a streak of idealism that is what moves citizen participation in elections. Progressive politicians who succeed tap into this. Consultants who reduce campaigns to targeted marketing miss something essential. I have experienced that this is true making hundreds of "get out and vote" pitches to reluctant participants. Sometimes they don't want to vote because they sense voting matters too much to do lightly. Getting to the act feels a leap ...

  ... voters attach a meaning to voting that they do not give to buying a skirt or a pair of pants. To vote is to express your belonging to a political community, to say what you believe in and to join the collective act of choosing a country's direction. Voting is an expression of symbolic allegiance more than an instrumental expression of interests. Most voters know that their individual vote will not make much difference to the outcome, but they still come out to vote because they believe it matters to take part in democracy.

• Ignatieff is reflective about political ethics.

  Many of the voters I met, especially young ones, believed that politics ought to be true to the ethic of ultimate ends. I came to believe that my own conscience mattered, but party unity mattered more if we were to get power. Without power, we could do nothing. But there was a clear limit to what power could demand of you. You couldn't afford to forget what the truth actually was, and if you did, you risked becoming a hack.
  
  I learned that you can't take refuge in moral purity if you want to achieve anything, but equally, if you sacrifice all principle, you lose the reason you went into politics in the first place. ...
  
  ... 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 you ambitions will be redeemed by the good that 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.

When our democracy faces a viral emergency compounded and amplified by an elected leader who is intellectually, emotionally, and morally incapable of leadership, looking back to first principles may seem a luxury. But in such a time, perhaps decent, intelligent reflection is just what we need.