2024-07-22

With the Democratic National Convention just a month away, it felt like the right time to finally read Lawrence O’Donnell’s compelling book, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (2017).

They’re back in Chicago, after all (though, not for the first time since 1968). History doesn’t repeat—it rarely, if ever, rhymes—but, it sure can get weird. Here are three relevant anecdotes from the book that should help ground things going in.

The first, and my favourite, not least for its brevity, is not something that I can recall having heard before, but is certainly something we ought to adopt as one of those immutable laws of political physics: “The establishment is always the last to know it is wrong.”

The second is that, while the 1968 convention led to significant reform in the party’s nomination process, we forget that primaries are a both a relatively recent, and previously inconsistent, convention (no pun intended):

In 1968, fewer than a third of U.S. states held presidential primary elections. That's not because the primary system was new. It was in decline. Primaries began as the idea of the early twentieth-century political reformers. Wisconsin held the first primary election in 1905. By 1920, about half of the states were holding primaries. Before that, party bosses got together in the fabled smoke-filled rooms to select nominees based on considerations kept hidden from the electorate. Because the nominees weren't democratically selected, reformers asked, how could presidents be said to be democratically elected? Hence primaries. State delegates would still choose the nominee at conventions, but primary elections would guide, and sometimes bind, delegates in that choice.

The third is that, where the sharp exchanges between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal are now legend, what I hadn’t realized is that they’d set the template for televised punditry that endures today and, more amazingly, the reason that came to be in the first place:

Every angry political argument you've seen on television since [1968], every conservative trying to shout over every liberal and vice versa, owes its origin to the simple budgetary fact that ABC couldn't afford major-league convention coverage.

We appreciate WTF with Marc Maron as one of the original podcasts, but I am not sure we’ve properly acknowledged it’s service to history. Marc’s reposted both of his podcast chats with Bob Newhart, on the occasion of his passing. Thank you, Marc. Farewell, Mr. Newhart.

2024-07-15

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are right to admonish Canada for failing to meet the minimum defence expenditure required of NATO members. This shouldn’t be about the money, or even the military, but about pulling our weight and being able to support others—both of which are foundational Canadian values.

The failure of our imagination on this question is perhaps most disappointing. I see an opportunity to address a number of problems at once: put graduates to work by challenging them to design and patent versatile hardware (as useful in combat as, say, fighting forest fires), bring manufacturing to economically marginalized areas, all while diversifying the economy with new trade potential. That’s innovation, job-creation, investing in future business leaders, and military spending that isn’t limited to crates of arms piled in a warehouse. We’ll need those, too, but we needn’t be so literal about meeting our obligation here. We could lead.

The three best things that I read last week about—uh, let’s call it “the decision”—were David Frum’s (post-press conference) lament in the Atlantic, Stephen M. Walt’s rather reassuring review of the logical extension of the current problem in Foreign Policy (I didn’t know the anecdote about Nixon!), and the Economist’s gentle attempt to best-case the worst-case, at least on the economy.

Speaking of economic analyses, but back home, let’s appreciate Tony Keller’s review of “all-government budget deficit (the combined budgets of federal, provincial and local governments)” in the Globe and Mail, for rising above the idle catastrophizing we’ve been force-fed these past few months with actual facts—and, also, because it includes this devastating line about current leadership trends:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford this week rolled out an online tool to help people quickly find a place to buy booze. No word on an app to find a family doctor for the millions of Canadians without one.

Here’s a passage from Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses (2021), which is perhaps the most precise summary of her subject’s enduring legacy:

Orwell stood apart from his peers in his capacity to critique the sector of the left that had drifted toward authoritarianism and dishonesty without joining other leftists who became conservatives tolerating other forms of brutality and deception. Doing so meant charting his own path across the uneven ground of midcentury politics, and it made him after his death a totemic figure claimed by people across the political spectrum.

2024-07-08

The United Kingdom has a new prime minister following an orderly general election. Let’s commend the outgoing one for honouring the peaceful transition of power and for playing a bad hand mostly well. Delaying the inevitable would have only invited another “spill” (leadership change via caucus revolt, as the Australians have it) and prolonged the stale status quo. Holding 121 seats is humbling but hardly a wipeout, à la Canada’s 1993 general election, the spectre of which more than a few on both sides of the pond invoked during the campaign. Besides, the outcome has had the added benefit of pruning the list of potential leadership candidates and that will be the key to renewal.

For all the post-election punditry, Robert Tombs’s retrospective on the past fourteen years of Conservative rule, in the Spectator, stands out as perhaps the most immediately thoughtful epilogue to the era.

Should he stay or should he go? Stuart Stevens makes a compelling case for staying the course in the Atlantic. On the other hand, as Lionel Shriver writes in the Spectator, that’s well beside the point (and you know it) and also deeply hypocritical. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has gone ahead and answered everyone’s questions about the vice-president, in a podcast discussion with the last journalist to do a serious profile of her. Perhaps the most sobering commentary comes from a USA Today interview with Allan Lichtman “the historian who has correctly forecast the results of nine out of the 10 most recent presidential elections” using a set of key historical factors.

Overall, the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessy reminds us that, whatever happens, we would do well to be less dramatic about the health of democracy. Ceding ground before it’s contested is a sign of weakness, just not institutional one.

Lastly, I remain suspicious about the “polarization thesis” and so it was a joy to read Karl Vick’s article in Time pulling at the threads of the consensus view:

So, yes, American politics has grown more divided—but largely among people who live and breathe politics. And these people exaggerate their own polarity to win the approval of other people who also live and breathe politics.

This is good news. Our political institutions are not broken. More, we’re at the movies, caught between talkers and shushers, trying to follow an increasingly complicated plot, with our already algorithmically-sapped attention span.

2024-07-01

Happy Canada Day. There are more Canadians than ever, and that’s something to celebrate, even though a recent policy shift has stressed the limit of our capacity to accomodate. Make sure your holiday reading list includes Stephen Maher’s excellent feature in Maclean’s on that very subject.

The presumption that the result of last week’s federal by-election in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s is some bellwether for the forthcoming general election is a case study in the intellectual laziness of our chattering classes. First, the Conservatives flipped the seat by only 633 votes. Second, the vote took place the day before the government’s signature budget measure, a capital gains tax increase, in a riding that includes one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the country. We’re supposed to believe fewer than a thousand votes is a referendum on that policy and captures the mood of the land more generally? Come off it.

Many people are saying the quiet part louder and louder after the first presidential debate last week. Over in the Atlantic, Peter Wehner says it kindly and clearly.

We focus far too much on what leaders say they will do, and less so on what they’ve already done or how they make decisions in general—which is why it was nice to read a profile in the Economist from precisely that perspective regarding the presumptive next prime minister of the UK.

The world will be less funny without Martin Mull. Revisit his WTF with Marc Maron appearance from 2018.

2024-06-24

“Maybe Don’t Spray-Paint Stonehenge,” writes Tyler Austin Harper in the Atlantic, in response to “yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.”

Like Harper, I was also moved by the selflessness of a “…bystander who ran toward the protesters and tried to stop them, not knowing whether the canisters loosing orange haze were filled with something innocuous or sinister.”

It’s a blunt metaphor for what ails us more generally: the bystander is the middle, trying to hold the line, while extremists monopolize the conversation.

I can’t see the appeal of acting out. Legislation remains the means of change in our civilization, and the key to that is getting the votes—which, of course, requires presenting the middle with a clear and compelling call to action, preying on their own obvious self-interest. Ironically, while acting out might feel like the best way to preserve the fragile balance of life on this planet, the most effective means might just be building a better business.

Don’t take my word for it, consider this summary from the essay on solar power in the latest edition of the Economist:

According to the International Solar Energy Society, solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032. In an IEA scenario which provides net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, solar energy becomes humankind's largest source of primary energy-not just electricity-by the 2040s.

The third season of Hacks (2021-present) was wonderful. May I recommend Hannah Einbinder’s comedy special, Everything Must Go (2024), as a delightful chaser. It is an absolute joy to watch people get better at what they do.

2024-06-17

Our dependency on opinion-polling is a poor and reckless substitute for actual democracy, but that did not stop me from enjoying Tristin Hopper’s exceptional summary of “What Canada's 'silent majority' believes” in the Thursday edition of his First Reading National Post newsletter. The middle is quiet but sensible, as ever.

“In the end,” writes Justin Ling in the Toronto Star about the foreign interference crisis, “the only institution that can fix these problems is Parliament.” He’s right, and he gets bonus points for a very subtle Arrested Development reference.

Anne Applebaum joined Slate’s Political Gabfest to talk about the recent European Parliament elections and offered a very sensible take that’s a better use of your time than all that other catastrophizing punditry.

2024-06-10

This past Thursday marked the eightieth anniversary of D-Day—what we have since come to know as the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe but, at the time, far from a foregone conclusion. Remember, it is possible to reflect on that sacrifice, and the world we’ve been able to make for it, without also being a hawk or even having an interest in military history.

To repeat: Do not let your boss make a potentially career-ending announcement alone in the pouring raining—and, definitely do not let him leave the Normandy anniversary service early. There will be no coming back from that “he left them on the beaches” campaign advert.

Wesley Wark is right to call the recent allegations about Canadian politicians what they are. The problem now, aside from affirming the validity of the intelligence (never a given) and the subsequent prosecution of any crimes committed, is for parliament to safeguard its own institutional integrity.

The more I think about it, the only comprehensive and conclusive way to do that is this: the government must resign, form a unity coalition with all parties, exclude any member named in the report, investigate fully and transparently, formally expel any member eligible for prosecution, establish a bipartisan framework for the next parliament to manage such issues effectively, and then call a general election.

It’ll never happen but it’s the right thing to do.

Farewell to astronaut Bill Anders, he of the eternally humbling 1968 “earthrise” photograph.

2024-06-03

We would benefit from something of a Hippocratic Oath for institutional reform—that is, where one may freely prescribe a remedy, one should not do so at the risk of damaging the faith in, or function of, any given institution.

Consider this recent example, from the Globe and Mail, about potential conflict between the Senate of Canada and the next presumptive government:

There is simply no basis in a democratic society for a group of 53 or more senators to be substituting their views for that of elected MPs, and the millions of Canadians they represent. It’s wrong when Liberals do it to Conservative governments, and it’s wrong when Conservatives do it to Liberals. It may be legal, but it is not legitimate.

Senators draw their legitimacy, apart from the chamber’s general role in regional representation, from appointment on the advice of the prime minister—a similarly unelected position which, in turn, draws its own legitimacy from the House of Commons. Our institutional framework is functional and quite elegant, even if it does not lend well to expedient punditry.

We can openly debate the merits of populating the Senate by other means, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of questioning the validity of the institution itself. Let me invoke the national past-time to make my point: if we grew frustrated with the way that certain hockey players behaved, or the way that the league enforced the rules, would we address those issues accordingly and specifically, or would we question whether the game itself had merit and was worth our time?

There’s a deeper issue here we should also consider. The so-called “Marvel Method” holds that because any given comic could be someone’s first, it should therefore organize itself around conveying essential principles first and foremost. Similarly, since any given political conversation could be someone’s first, and therefore a bridge to participation and developing an interest in our traditions, we ought to strive for decorum over cynicism.

While we’re on the subject, let me also observe a fundamental law of Canadian political punditry: any critique of the Senate, however well-intentioned, is almost always indicative of conversational bankruptcy or exhaustion. Welcome to summer.

I recently finished Lydia Millet’s “anti-memoir” (so sayeth the marketing copy on the dust jacket), We Loved It All (2024). I have always admired her sense of economy, but seeing her usual voice at home in non-fiction made me appreciate just how much it persists in commanding attention, and with ease, in a world where such spans continue to decline. Here’s an example that will haunt you:

Wisdom is harder to define than knowledge is—more qualitative, less quantitative—but broadly might be seen as consistency, over time, of sound judgement. Informed by morality, spirituality, and aesthetics. In the case study of nuclear weapons, for instance, it’s fair to say that, while it was the shared knowledge and industry of a massive group of scientists that brought us the most destructive munitions ever made, it’s only wisdom, along with some fear and some luck, that has kept us—so far—from the annihilation of a nuclear exchange. But luck, like hope, is not a plan.

I was similarly enthralled by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces (2023), a vulnerable yet graceful personal navigation in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous “test of a first-rate intelligence” quote. The thought below, alone, has changed how I understand memory and will navigate my own relationship with it in future:

Through the windows of my sandcastle of memory, I can hear the ocean of amnesia, perpetual, invincible.

2024-05-27

The best quote from last week has to belong to the anonymous former minister cited in Katy Balls’s Spectator feature on the UK prime minister’s surprise election call:

How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgement when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?

Do not let your boss make a potentially career-ending announcement alone in the pouring rain—never mind what you think of him. The electorate know an omen when they see one. Over in the Economist, Bagehot reviews the prime minister’s penchant for making similarly, say, unique, decisions.

Keeping with the decision-making theme, but moving back home, Andrew Lawton joined Paul Wells for a podcast chat about the subject of his forthcoming book, the man who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, and it convinced me that this is the only competency we should be focused on going into our own election.

Speaking of lost focus, let us admire Adam Gopnik for his persistent defence of liberalism (here, once again, in his latest New Yorker piece):

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that "share values"—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman's axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently.

When whatever alternative we’re currently flirting with ends in ruin, it will be necessary to reinvent liberalism—less, though, from scratch, for his effort.

2024-05-20

Between product managers and the users that they represent are often a vocal group of independent super-users who formally share their own direct experiences. Ideally, such reviewers value functionality over hype and cannot hide when they dislike something. Last week, Kara Swisher used her personal podcast to bring two of these well-known reviewers together to discuss their shared but solitary art (and meet for the first time): her mentor, Walt Mossberg, and YouTube’s Marques Brownlee.

Perhaps I am betraying the deep degree of my own cynicism in this, our era of algorithmic short-form video, but I was genuinely shocked to see cable news break from their regularly scheduled programming last week to announce the passing of a national writer—especially one synonymous with the short story. I assume literary Canada is taking the time to collect its thoughts because, so far, the only one to offer anything more than perfunctory on the passing of Alice Munro has been Lorrie Moore in the Atlantic.

I am listening to 99% Invisible’s podcast book club of The Power Broker (1974), but have to say that it would be a lot more enjoyable if they made an effort to ensure that every guest had actually finished the book. Counting from episode five, and discounting the author’s appearance on the first episode himself, it’s about half.

2024-05-13

What I admire most about Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation (2024), is that it not only presents a problem, but also spends a significant amount of time recommending a solution. We have let this skill atrophy in our culture. With news as entertainment, engagement comes down to cheering for your side, and we’re typically reduced to complaint. That’s why the kids think everything sucks.

Well, one reason anyway. Here’s another:

Every generation grows up during a disaster or under the threat of an impending disaster, from the Great Depression and World War II through threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt. People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. As I’ll show in later chapters, this is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z.

The Spectator’s latest editorial is about the looming UK election, but this line made me rethink how we understand polarization:

The lack of any serious clash of ideals between the main parties has allowed a lazy consensus to thrive, with inevitable results, including economic stagnation and mounting bills.

That is, if the parties are the same, then our tribalism is trivial, and does not rise from some grand ideological rift that we have to either repair or make peace with. There’s hope in that.

I haven’t seen anyone make this comment about the passing of Rex Murphy yet so I’ll include it here for posterity: It’s not about whether you enjoyed his work, or even agreed with him, it’s that we’ve lost the clear voice of someone who understood the country and could speak to how it ought to better become itself.

2024-05-06

Last week brought us a multi-campus lecture series from those who ought to be more occupied with attending them than giving them, PEN America putting the author in authoritarianism, and the man who wants Canadians to call him prime minister ejected from the body he wants to preside over for petty name-calling.

Let’s all review John Perry Barlow’s “25 Principles of Adult Behaviour,” shall we?

On behalf of product managers everywhere, let me express my gratitude to Apoorva Mishra for her recent article in HBR, “The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager,” in which she takes predatory influencers to task for setting up aspirants for failure and degrading the practice more generally.

2024-04-29

This is the first sensible thing that anyone’s said about Canada’s evident economic rut, largely because it does not reek of ambivalent defeatism: “Canada is not broken,” reads a recent guest editorial in the Toronto Star, it’s just “…failing to live up to it’s potential.”

Here’s a serious question from Bill Maher’s Real Time editorial on Friday, that anyone who consumes a high-volume of short-form video on social media should ask themselves: “…is the most important thing in my life something I hadn’t even heard about six months ago?”

Lastly, and not to be too topical, but I’d like to point out that calling a poet “tortured” is the height of redundancy. It’s like saying “track record” in reference to one’s consistency of achievement that does not literally involve track-and-field.

2024-04-22

This is the first time that I have been directly pandered to in a federal budget, and I must confess, that I can see at long last how one could come to take it for granted.

The counterintuitive truism of good governance, that displeasing everyone is a good indicator of having put the right foot forward, perhaps explains the mixed punditry.

Not to defend the government, I honestly can’t tell most of the time whether they maintain confidence of themselves to say nothing of the House, but I could do with hearing less from those who have been ambivalently navigating us to ruin all these years suddenly deciding take issue with their own complacency now.

If Andrew Cohen was right in While Canada Slept (2003), and I think most would now concede that he was, then those who have been comfortably asleep at the wheel can at least relax: all of this is now someone else’s problem.

We’ll handle it. You can go.

The best thing I heard all week belongs to gentleman historian Jon Meacham from his Friday appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher: “…patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism.”

2024-04-15

While the prospect of the looming US presidential election being anything other than a rematch is remote, and any discussion to the contrary a defeatist fantasy, I can’t help but read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, about LBJ and his legacy (i.e. decision not to run again), in a cheeky “I’ll just leave this here” tone:

One newspaper editorial after another applauded the president’s renunciation. interpreting it as “a magnificent display of patriotism,” “putting principle above personal ambition,” “a stirring, galvanic example of answering JFK’s question: ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and “his most stunning move in a 37-year career in politics.”

2024-04-01

Here’s a throwaway line from Robert Heinlein’s ambitious but runaway novel, Time Enough for Love (1973), that should capture the current mood, as we start a new week, a new month, a new quarter, and a new season:

Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun—and neither can stop the march of events.

2024-03-25

Do read Matt McDonald on TikTok in the Spectator, Molly Fischer’s profile of Quinta Brunson in the New Yorker, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist on the veritable pandora’s box of potential parliamentary power available to the UK’s presumptive government in waiting.

The latter, incidentally, includes the best sentence that I read all week: “The principal check on the Tory government has been its own dysfunction: it has been too divided to put the powers it accumulated to effective use.”

2024-03-18

What if the polarization in our politics were driven not so much by tribalism but by perfectionism crowding out pragmatism? Think about it: when is the last time you heard a political position that focused on an actual problem without recourse to comparison or some ideal?

That is, the apparent solution to any given problem isn’t that we need to take these x-number of steps to achieve such-and-such a target, but that, say, so-and-so should have resigned before we lost the majority, or we wish that particular leader hadn’t won, or that the proposed legislation isn’t a complete and total victory—so forget it.

Is it tribalism what ails us or that we spend too much time wishing things were always otherwise? Here’s a clear and present example from the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols (“It’s Time to End the Election Wishcasting”):

…for months now, many voters, including both Democrats and dissident Republicans, have engaged in childlike wishcasting about how the 2024 election might be different.

To paraphrase an unpopular former defence minister: you have to solve the problems you’ve been handed, as you’ve been handed them, not the problems that you wish you’d been handed.

2024-03-11

I’ve been hoping someone might offer a clear thought about why the blind reverence for failure in tech has always felt so deeply suspicious. Here’s Kara Swisher, from her recent Burn Book (2024), an otherwise excellent personal and industry history:

I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely. Which is why, by nature, they insisted on reframing every failure and mistake they made as an asset—even when it was a failure and, sometimes, a very damaging mistake. Of course, they loved quoting Edison’s quaint trope: “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” But this declaration leaves out a lot about who’s responsible when things go terribly awry and real people get hurt.