The Most Sincere Liberal Vice

Democratic liberals tend to self-defeat

If I were to boil down liberals’ greatest challenge to a single word, it would be sincerity. Liberals fundamentally believe that simply doing a good job will be noticed and rewarded by electors. Balance the disparate needs of the country, avoid radical controversy, keep the economy afloat, modestly improve the lives of the people, and ta-da: you’ll be there for life!

I don’t (only) mean the Liberal Party of Canada, but rather centre-left parties both federally and provincially within Canada, Democrats in the United States, and many of the numerous members of a little-known organisation outside of political circles known as Liberal International, a loose alliance of liberal-minded parties in democracies around the world.

Biden and his supporters have it bad. There is a hopeful sincerity in everything they do. Biden has a good heart, we hear. He has spent his life doing the right thing, we are told. He might appear to be somewhat over the hill, but he’s gone over the hill for the right reasons, we are reminded. And, given enough time, the American people will realise that Biden is utterly sincere.

Trudeau has a similar problem. He seems to believe that if we just give Canadians another year, they will realise that he is there for all the right reasons, that he means well. He hangs on to the corpse of his leadership, trying to calmly remind everyone how sincere he really is.

In 2012, during Bob Rae’s brief interim leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, then in third place in seat count behind the NDP for the first time ever, his slogan was “we’re listening, we’re changing, we want you back!” It was on billboards and on campaign volunteers’ t-shirts during the Toronto Danforth by-election, a message of tone-deaf sincerity like no other.

I, too, suffered from it when I lost my bid for re-election in 2019. I knew I had done a good job for my riding. I had brought the power and capability of the federal government to bear in a riding that had been told by nearly 30 years of separatist representatives that the federal government could do nothing for them. I believed that having done what I felt to be a fundamentally good job would matter to the voters. I ended up increasing my vote share by less than one percentage point and getting trounced by the very separatists I had spent my time in public life disproving. I had been utterly sincere.

Whenever a progressive makes any kind of mistake, it calls into doubt the sincerity that they project. It casts a shadow upon everything they say and do. Someone who comes from the anti-progress side of politics has no presumption of sincerity; to that way of thinking all politicians are corrupt liars after all, and so the negative impact from a mistake that would destroy a progressive politician doesn’t even register for their conservative adversaries.

This weekend’s assassination attempt on Trump could have been a lot worse — he could have been killed. Had that happened, revenge killings against Democrat leaders across the US would likely have started almost immediately, and civil war would, ever so briefly, appear inevitable. However, an anti-weapon left that is neither equipped nor trained for a fight would probably choose to allow the last vestiges of American democracy to die rather than take up arms. They would believe that the American people would come to their senses and realise what they were doing to the country. That, eventually, the other side would come around. The sincerity would be so overwhelming as to be fatal to both the United States and the many countries in its orbit.

The trouble with all this is that sincerity doesn’t sell, and frankly isn’t very interesting. ‘Nice guys finish last’ applies to electoral politics as much as it does to business and dating. And being sincere and empathetic does not necessarily allow a person to understand and internalise the challenges and motivations of others.

Liberals do not generally understand voters outside of major urban centres. Public infrastructure, valuable in urban areas, is virtually non-existent outside of them. We have allowed, for example, first passenger rail and then interurban bus service across small towns to be virtually wiped out over the past two generations. Internet and cell phone access in rural areas is still a generation or more behind urban, and the migration of industrial employment to overseas markets has driven rural and small town income to levels vastly below those of their urban counterparts.

The growing disparity opens the door for the increasingly unhinged right to present ever more radical candidates with ever more reformist agendas for voters not in the core group of urban liberal supporters. Electors in these areas know that society does not work for them, and want something — anything — new. Liberals who believe that an increasing GDP and rising stock market is good for the people — many of whom can’t afford basic essential supplies and can’t begin to dream of owning shares in the stock market (and are looking for someone to blame) — demonstrates a lack of understanding, not a lack of caring.

By not truly understanding and addressing the real issues, the sincerity comes across as elitism and condescension, not honesty. This liberal tone-deafness allows anyone who says anything against the status quo to waltz in and clean up these votes. The more boisterous and outlandish, the better.

It is important to be sincere, but it is an awful lot more important to understand and act on the genuine needs of everyone, not only the constituency you understand. And for that, we can sincerely say there’s a lot of catching up to do.