COMMENT: The enemy is...us

By Adrian Barnes

 While reading Murray Dobbin's recent column in these pages on the fallout of the G8/G20 fiasco, I found myself saying, 'yes, this is exactly what a nascent police state looks like'. It sounds extreme, but it's not. Mr. Dobbin puts it well: when there's a vacuum in civil society, something will fill it. When democracy is as weak as it is in self and media-obsessed 21st century North America, it's almost understandable when a control freak like Harper (or Bush, or Obama, for that matter) is drawn in to fill the gap. 

We can't blame them; we have to blame ourselves. That's the core of democracy, the tough part we don't want to deal with: each and every individual citizen is responsible for their own liberty or lack thereof. When we watch the news and passively decry the abuses of power we see, we are at that moment supporters of the police state through our own inaction.

When I was a teenager, I remember my father pointing to growing government debt and saying, "Mark my words. They'll drive up the debt and later use that as an excuse to cut the social programs that help the poor." Back then, I thought he was paranoid. But no longer. Was he wrong? We'll likely find out in the next year or two. The avalanche of debt that began in 1981 with the 'conservative' Ronald Reagan and his 'Trickle Down' economics is now reaching its fruition. We are now all but buried.

The grand political trick of the last century was the way 'conservatives' have flummoxed the average working person into thinking that tax cuts benefit them and their families. Somehow taxation is seen as 'elitist' even though tax dollars benefit the average person and tax cuts benefit the rich.

Reagan was the first to sell this insane, illogical idea and Harper and his ilk are still selling it. And because the people are so easily fooled into supporting policies that directly oppose their own welfare, we have all watched as underfunded governments have taken on more and more and more debt while corporations have paid less and less. And the Trickle Down effect? Never happened. The rich took their tax cuts and invested the money offshore, in sweatshops, while ravaging the industrial landscape of North America.

The problem is this: the average Canadian or American doesn't like to think of themselves as average or working class any more. That's not sexy. Instead, they prefer to fantasize about themselves as 'happening', 'lifestyle' people. Subculture and sports affiliations are hallucinations fed into our brains by corporate media as, very slowly, the gains of the average person made since the Great Depression are stripped away. In other words, enjoy your dreadlocks and heavily-financed SUV while you can.

In Germany, all it took was an economic collapse and a 'strong' leader who offered a way forward to bring a nation to the brink of chaos. The question is, as Mr. Dobbin states, if we suffer a full economic collapse in the near future, is our democracy strong enough to survive it or will we merely sob into our empty Starbucks cups and look to the first strongman who offers to fix the mess for us? 

The answer is pretty clearly going to be the latter unless something major changes pretty soon. We are now spectators who watch as a pretend democracy plays itself out on our screens. The choice of leaders we are offered is beyond pathetic: I wouldn't trust one of those people to re-shingle my roof, let alone run a large nation.

And every time we let it slide, every time we let the RCMP taser another Robert Dziekanski or arrest another protester for...protesting...we come one step closer to the end of democracy and the social welfare state.

What to do? Why ask me? Run for office. Protest. Demand reform. You know – what people do in democracies.

The tools are at our fingertips. We just aren't using them.