As a federal election looms here in Canada, I have been thinking lately about how voting for liberals – small ‘l’ or large – is never going to save us.
Mainstream political life in lots of countries in the 21st century takes the shape of an electoral choice between the hard right or the far right on the one hand, and some sort of party or collection of parties of the centre on the other hand, encompassing liberals, the centre-right, and the centre-left. These centrist parties are more or less supportive of how things currently work, sometimes with a rhetorical or even real commitment to minor improvements, but solidly within the existing elite consensus. For the most part, these parties compete electorally by promising as little as they can get away with to their base and mostly running on the very real fact that their hard right or far right competitors will make things actively terrible for lots of people.
Very soon, we will be having a federal election with that shape here in Canada. The combination of Trump’s existential threats to Canada and the hard-right, Trump-loving politics of the current iteration of the federal Conservatives mean that the Liberals are competitive in an election that two months ago they were set to lose spectacularly. However, the Liberals seem to be running on a platform that is pro-austerity and pro-militarism, and that is likely to respond to the economic threats from the US by worshipping at the altar of economic growth in ways that will harm workers, the environment, communities, and Indigenous rights.
Now, I’m generally not in the business of telling people how to vote. If you live in a suburban or rural riding and voting Liberal seems to you to be the most plausible way to fend off the much greater harm that a Conservative victory would bring, well, okay, it’s not a choice I have to make, given where I live, but I can appreciate the logic. But what I want to do in this video is push back against the idea that narrowly avoiding the worst outcome is somehow good enough. The Liberals winning would no doubt be preferable to the Conservatives, but it is not going to save us.
I say this for a number of reasons. I say it partly because in our electoral system, it is inevitable that sometimes the worse evil will win. The Liberals may or may not eke out a victory this time, but just by the way the system works, eventually the Conservatives will have their turn, and we can’t pin all of our hopes on stopping that from ever happening. If the only action we take is electoral, the underlying logic of the situation will remain the same, and whether it’s this time or next time, the worst will happen.
I say it as well because, as I’ve already mentioned, the Liberals themselves are quite open that they’re going to do harmful things if they win this election, and we can’t just accept that.
And I say it because the Liberal Party of Canada, and all of those other pro-establishment parties around the world that position themselves as the safe and respectable option against the hard-right and far-right threat are themselves part of the reason the hard-right and far-right threat exists. Now, of course, the first place to lay blame for a thing is with the people actually doing the thing – part of why that threat exists is because there are people, prominently including people with very right-wing politics and a great deal of money, who have worked very hard to make it exist. But another crucial part of why this challenge from the hard-right and far-right to how things are has gained ground in the last 20 years is because of how things are. It’s because of the status quo that parties like the Liberal Party of Canada have created and defended and refused to improve. It’s because all of those parties have been complicit in the neoliberal destruction of the still limited but more substantive possibility for material reforms that used to exist. And it’s because of the tendency of these liberal and centre and centre-left parties to either actively legitimize, or to oppose rhetorically but do little of substance to materially challenge, the kinds of oppressive politics that the hard-right and far-right thrive on – things like the embrace of anti-migrant politics by the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, which the Liberals in Canada have been moving towards in the last year.
So. If the Liberals win, 1) there’s a good chance they won’t next time, and focusing exclusively on electing non-hard-right people won’t prepare us for that, 2) the Liberals will themselves cause harm, and 3) the Liberals will continue to create the conditions that feed the rising right.
None of this is to say who you should or shouldn’t vote for. I’d rather the Liberals win than the Conservatives too. But any chance of reaching a world not defined by this bind and by the rising threat of the hard right and far right will require expanding our political imaginations to include ongoing grassroots action that goes way beyond voting.