If He's Right, Does It Matter Whom We Vote For?

 

A lot of the posts on this blog over the past 15 years have dealt with two themes: the looming threats facing our civilization and the declining will or ability of our governments to respond to them effectively. Dangers rise, responses fade. If you think about it you'll know that's true. Sometimes the fault lies with the global community of nations but in many cases it's our own governments to blame.

In an op-ed in yesterday's Globe, author, professor and newspaper editor, Andrew Potter, summed up our predicament very neatly.

One of the more alarming features of our current moment is how a lot of serious things seem to be going wrong at the same time. Just as it looked like the COVID-19 pandemic had been brought under control, the Delta variant arrived. In Afghanistan, the continuing peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban fell apart this summer as the U.S. skulked out of the country – and with the withdrawal of foreign forces complete, the Taliban have retaken the country with astonishing speed. And this comes on the heels of the latest IPCC climate report, which suggested that we have already reached a position where many of the more dangerous aspects of climate change, such as deadly heat waves and powerful hurricanes, are close to being irreversible.

What these and other looming crises have in common is that they are marked by a failure of some combination of political conviction, state capacity and collective action. We have lost the ability to solve big problems and meet big challenges, and there is every reason to think this is only going to get worse, thanks to the effects of a number of long-standing trends. These include the economic and technological stagnation that has been in place since at least the 1970s, the rise of highly polarized and tribalistic politics, and the high decadence of the internet-fuelled culture wars.

...The way Western governments struggled to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic has been basically one long case study in seeing all of these trends at work. From the earliest days of the pandemic, there has been a sharp divide between the incredible scientific work that was done – identifying the virus, developing tests and treatments, and ultimately a vaccine – on the one hand, and the lethargic and largely ineffectual political and bureaucratic effort that went into making use of that work. But even when governments were moved to action, they found themselves hamstrung by a population riven by tribalistic responses (such as to mask mandates) and magical thinking (such as with anti-vax beliefs). We are, increasingly, a society unable to confront and rationally address the problems we face.

...instead of progress, things are actually going backwards – including in many of the places where we thought it was most deeply entrenched, in particular the United States. Is it any wonder then that the world is such a mess? Civilization advances through the resolution of increasingly large and complex collective-action problems, and that was the chief function of many of the global institutions that were built after the Second World War. Military alliances, trade deals, transnational regulatory bodies – these were all the building blocks of the stability and prosperity of the postwar era.

It is looking like we have reached the limits of our capacity for global collective action. The fiasco in Afghanistan has revealed the UN and NATO as highly ineffective organizations. Free trade has been discredited, geopolitical tensions are rising, and the world is retreating into protectionism and mercantilism. It’s been nearly 30 years since the Earth Summit in Rio led to a groundbreaking climate convention, but we are no closer today to taking meaningful action on climate change.

All of this is almost certainly a sign of what is to come. For the past 200 years or so, the relentless pace of innovation and discovery has made us rich and comfortable in ways that our ancestors would find miraculous. To them, our age would look like one giant and seemingly endless party.

Except all the evidence points to the party coming to an end. This doesn’t mean the apocalypse is nigh, but it does mean as an increasing number of major problems go unresolved, life will get more and more difficult every year. At some point in the future, we may look back upon this time and recognize that this is when we started to realize we were in decline.

Our own country is looking like the Canada of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, not the Canada of great leaders such as Pierre Trudeau and Lester Pearson. There's a chasm that divides past from present and at least part of the divide has a name: neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism breeds hesitant, even feckless governance. Our current government exhibits these traits. The Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline to tidewater demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to rise to the worsening crisis of our day, the worst in the history of Canada.

I don't for a minute believe Canada would fare better under a Conservative government. Hardly. Jagmeet? I'm unconvinced. The Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats all talk a good game but it's electioneering, bunk.  All three parties may be capable of real change but not until it's too late to matter. All three of them are still in "not just yet" mode.  For now they're much too busy navigating the shoals of tribalism and cultural divides to even mention the sort of bold steps needed to achieve a soft landing. 

If Andrew Potter is right and there's a mountain of evidence that he is, Canada needs to steer a new course, one less influenced by the corporate sector and international bodies of declining utility.  When it comes to the great existential threat of our time, climate change, every nation has been dealt a hand of cards, no two hands the same.  When a nation's fate may rest more on proximity to the equator than anything else, we are not all in the same boat.

For me, at least, there's so little to vote "for" this year that I'll probably opt for the "none of the above" option of spoiling my ballot.