Carney’s Liberals Are Governing like Conservatives—Just More Politely | The Walrus (thewalrus.ca)

submitted 1 week ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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For all of my adult life, I’ve been a Liberal believing in the defence of rights, the constraining of power, an equitable society, and an independent foreign policy. It’s been a narrative that many Canadians have strongly believed and supported.

Since 1982, the Charter gave us a core liberal centre that wasn’t really about party; it was about courts that could check governments, refugee protection as something we owed people, reconciliation as a shared obligation, gender equality, tackling poverty international law, building an activist role to counter Realpolitik.

These weren’t just policies. They were identity. That story is being rewritten.

The language hasn’t changed. Ministers still invoke the Charter, the “rules-based order,” Canada’s role as a constructive middle power. But watch what’s actually happening, and a different picture emerges: human rights moving steadily from the centre of public policy toward its edges, increasingly; poverty and homelessness being ignored.

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[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 1 points 1 week ago

I didn't say any of that was good or bad, actually.

Definitionally, everybody averages around the centre.

[-] patatas@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

That's neither true in a political sense (ideologies are based in values, not metrics; this isn't something that can be mapped to a bell curve or even quantified) nor in a mathematical sense (distributions can be anything).

[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

They're relative terms.

Ideologies are many-faceted, region and time-specific and contain all kinds of different ideas in fairly arbitrary combinations. For whatever reason, the popular ones in a time and place always seem to organise along a line, and since the French revolution it's been customary to call the ends of it "left" or "right".

nor in a mathematical sense (distributions can be anything).

What is an average if not the centre? I didn't specify mean or median here, even. Median is probably better for this, and definitionally there's always a half of the probability to it's sides.

[-] patatas@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Let's try an example, because it's one thing to speak in the abstract, but quite another thing to look at specifics.

What is the "centre" between the statements "white people are a superior race" and "race is a social construct and racism must be opposed"?

My position is that there is no "middle ground" on this issue. One either supports racism or supports anti-racism.

[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's not just specific, though, it's charged. You'll get an answer, but in a moment so nobody is misunderstood.

If what you're getting at is something like "further left is always better", well, which left wing? Again, they're highly specific to a time and place.

An example: The laissez faire free market was considered a left-wing policy from the appearance of liberalism, until socialism really got going. That's over a century, and it's the opposite today. Partisan labels are just labels; they have at most a vague correlation with morality or well-conception of the policies inside.

If what you're getting at is that middle-of-the-road kind of policies aren't always or even usually the best, then nobody is disagreeing.

What is the “centre” between the statements “white people are a superior race” and “race is a social construct and racism must be opposed”?

Sure, there's middle ground. The whole "separate but equal" thing was a lie in practice, but on paper it's logically self-consistent. (Obviously, it's not a centre any of us approve of)

Also, that's the British spelling of centre, if it looks wrong to you.

[-] patatas@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

"Obviously, it’s not a centre any of us approve of"

exactly - so what kind of "average" is that?

[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

True, it's actually a far right position here and now. There's two things going on and it was my mistake to conflate them. There's a middle ground and the political centre, and they aren't necessarily the same.

[-] patatas@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

This is straying from the point of the example, which was to demonstrate that a so-called "centre", by virtue of the fact that it can not only compromise but can also even run counter to one's values, is not by definition a winning strategy.

People on the left don't owe a capitalist centrist party their vote simply because there's no other major party advancing a socialist platform. Because socialism is opposed to capitalism on principle. Does that make sense?

[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 1 points 1 day ago

Sure, and looking back on this exchange, there's no suggestion anyone should vote one way or another.

That was the basic gist of the reply back to OP at the beginning of this thread, too. OOP was a purely statistical/strategic kind of statement, but the internet is full of opinions, so I guess it comes across as a moral suggestion anyway.