Letter to the Editor
By Charles Jeanes
Editor, The Rossland Telegraph:
I have disliked the politics of liberals all my active political life as a socialist, yet as people they are most often my friends and the next-best-thing to socialists. Liberals work harmoniously within capitalism but I am far from accepting that attitude.
Liberals have had a dominant position in public discourse for a long time, and in media, liberal perspectives are taken as a norm, a mainstream, rather than as ideological viewpoints. Liberalism has been winning its political and cultural battles in the West for a few centuries.
[read here for one scholarly analysis of how this happens:
https://www.bu.edu/today/2016/stephen-prothero-why-liberals-win-culture-wars/ ]
This week, our prime minister told a European audience that the sense of grievance in people who have not prospered under a globalist agenda of free trade, free movement of capital, deregulated financial sectors and corporatization of national economies, must be heard, and their truth must be addressed. Good for him saying it, but he will not be able to help the people he is hearing. Capitalism creates inequality as surely as it enriches small elites. Liberals have no vision for a fairer economic system.
I want Canada to turn down the tap of immigration that was opened widely by P. M. Mulroney – the same man who gave us Free Trade with the USA (a bad move for us, as Mel Hurtig has shown) – and I will not accept any nonsense that my opinion is racist or Islamophobic. I want Canadians who already live here to have more share of the national wealth. This is about the deadly experiment of Growth economics, the false idea that our economy can grow constantly and absorb new labour from abroad.
Liberals try to win substantive arguments without debate. They do it with adjectives which condemn a person for their opinion before debate. Consider these words: sexist, misogynist, racist, homophobe. If you are labelled this way, your opponent does not have to debate you. You are a person whose opinions are already outside the norm, to wit, liberal opinion. The debate on “islamophobia” in the House of Commons is low politics, the Liberals trying to score easy points against Conservatives with a resolution designed only to cause divisive feelings and accomplish zero meaningful change.
Liberal capitalism and its bourgeois shadow-show of democracy have almost put socialism in its grave. The world is a less-fair place in many documented ways than it was in the 1970's if one looks at the distribution of wealth and the hard grind of making a decent living with secure employment, within humane working hours not subject to competitive anxiety from technology our bosses constantly force upon us (powerful unions with mass membership would be part of that improved work enviroment).
Liberals are so often unaware of their class privileges in the bourgeois layer of society, with their white-collar professional/ intellectual employment and high incomes. I wish more of them would read Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank about the failure of liberals to make a better society by distributing capitalist wealth fairly; professional-class people (liberals) do very well in the status quo. Their share of social wealth has grown large since the 1990's, while so many less-educated people's incomes have stagnated. Higher education comes with a price-tag and debt-load many people rightly fear.
But in social issues of women's and minority rights, inclusion of all sorts of identities and the profusion of human-rights law, the world may seem to be improved. I refer people to the many essays by Charles Eisenstein about the illusion of progress. Identity politics matter less than fighting capitalist injustice.
A socialist Canada would take care of the citizens it already had before liberal measures to allow new immigrant workers whom the ruling class want for its own capitalist uses. I care nothing about the culture, colour, creed, sexuality or any other identity marker of immigrants. I care for social justice, economic justice, for Canadians here already, beginning with the Native peoples, the homeless, and the millions in “precarious employment.” I am a socialist. A few north-European societies are models of what I think Canada could copy.
A socialist Canada would also damage the planet less than capitalist economics have. It could hardly do worse; it would begin by refusing the legitimacy of any arguments based on Growth models, profit margins, and share values. The era when Growth was holy scripture must be terminated at once.
When did Canada have a public debate about immigration before opening our borders more widely? Never. It is simply a tenet of liberalism that Canada must bring in the huddled masses of the many places less-developed and less-democratic than Canada. Things do not improve just by adding population to our nation. There has to be a vision of justice for Canadians, not just for refugees.
The USA has a historic mission to welcome immigration, and the Statue of Liberty proclaims that, but we have just witnessed the anger of Americans about immigration put an extremist in the White House. Liberals bear a large share of responsibility for the reactionary attitudes of Trump supporters.
Charles Jeanes
Nelson