Waiting for Democracy
A Citizen's Journal
Salutin, Rick
Publisher: Viking
Year Published: 1989
Pages: 300pp ISBN: ISBN 0-670-82284-1
Resource Type: Book
Cx Number: CX3751
Rick Salutin's account of the pivotal 1988 "free trade" election. Waiting for Democracy makes a strong case that our political system is anything but democratic, though it offers little hope of changing it.
Abstract:
Waiting for Democracy is about the free-trade election of 1988 but it is also much more than that: it's a well-written, gripping examination of what democracy is -- or should be -- all about. Rick Salutin travelled all across the country during the 1988 election, but rather than concentrating on the non-events staged by the political parties for the benefit of the media, he spent most of his time talking to ordinary people about what they thought about politics, elections, and free trade.
Salutin is passionately against free trade, and he is full of anger at the way this crucial issue was dealt with in the 'political process'. Everywhere he went in Canada, he says, free trade was the only issue on people's minds, and people on both sides of the issue (as well as the many who were undecided) felt that the media and the political parties were letting them down by failing to provide them with enough real information on it.
Salutin is devastating on the flagrant bias exhibited by the media in covering free trade -- not surprising, given that most of the media are owned by the corporate sector which favours free trade. Even the CBC failed to provide impartial coverage, with The Journal's Barbara Frum, for example, going out of her way to show where her sympathies lay, by aiming hostile questions at free trade opponents and sympathetic ones at supporters.
Salutin is particularly scathing on the NDP's performance in the election, reporting, for example, on how NDP canvassers were instructed not to talk about free trade because the issue was controversial, and how Ed Broadbent didn't even mention free trade at his press conference kicking off the election campaign. Even after it was forced to start talking about the issue, the NDP devoted most of its energies to attacking the Liberals, a tactic that Salutin thinks may have won the Conservatives the election.
Waiting for Democracy makes a strong case that our political system is anything but democratic, though it offers little hope of changing it.
[Abstract by Ulli Diemer]
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Life before Voting
The Election of 1998
Week One
Week Two
Week Three
Week Four
Week Five
Week Six
Week Seven
An Interesting Blip
Excerpts:
Hannah Arendt wrote that, according to the Greeks, "a life spent in the privacy of 'one's own' (idion), outside the world of the common, is 'idiotic' by definition."
And yet, if politics is so central to what we are, why does it often seem so peripheral in people's lives? Because for most of us, politics means casting a vote every few years for a representative, or the leader of a party and not much else. That is not how politics looked, for example, in ancient Athens.
We went to an election, and politics kept breaking out. This book is about the difference between elections and politics, but it is also about the connections between them.
The emergence of the national popular movement of opposition to the free trade deal went nearly unreported in the Canadian press and media. When particular events were covered, they were not put in the contest of a developing pattern. In fact, within weeks of the deal being signed in October 1987, reporters were talking about "free-trade fatigue," as if this was a problem for ordinary citizens, rather than journalists. They tended to describe the debate in simplistic dualities, like overheated nationalist emotion versus cool economic logic, or big business versus big labour.
The Toronto Star ... also failed to report the emergence of coalitions and popular opposition. The media were apparently incapable of dealing with a political and economic story occurring outside the framework of conventional parliamentary and electoral politics.
Free trade became the Canadian way of asking the fundamental question of Greek political philosophy: What is the good society? This drove the political pros crazy. It was simply not reducible to the kinds of issues they could poll on in order to plan a typical party campaign.
"I figure if you can pay your own way in life, you should. That's just normal." You could call this classical socialism -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs -- but Merri doesn't see it that way. In fact, socialism to her is about people trying to take advantage of others and looking for a free ride.
It's the psychological approach to political matters: How are we feeling about nuclear war or getting into that big American marketplace -- confident? insecure? It tends to forget that there is a real world out there, with effects and consequences for people's lives, regardless of how anyone feels about it.
Perhaps then, in the dark ages of politics, when Robert Stanfield led the Tories, campaign events still existed in their own right as attempts to meet and sway voters. The press would come along to record them. Now we have landed on the moon: campaign events are not simply recorded by the press, they are fabricated for the press, who pass them along to the TV audience
Once, at an airport in Topeka, U.S. secret service agents killed two dogs copulating on a runway near the one the president's plane was using. No one knows why they did it. You just extinguish any signs of normal life and reality in the vicinity of The Leader.
So many people -- left, right and other shadings too -- express shame and embarrassment when you talk to them about public issues. It's as if they feel that by being largely uninvolved in public life, they are betraying a part of themselves.
Between them, these two men contain a deep secret of electoral politics. One is informed, experienced, mature and thoughtful, and the other is not. Yet their votes count the same, and both will almost certainly use them. So as long as the ruling elites can keep large numbers of citizens both uninformed and voting, they can feel secure in their control. In a more genuinely democratic system, where people didn't merely vote, but got together and discussed things beforehand, it would be different, because the electrician's viewpoint would outweigh that of the future heavy equipment operator -- in the minds of everyone present, the equipment operator included. But our voting process -- minus any opportunity for exchange and discussion -- levels them out.
TV debate: What I find jarring is the centrality of the panel of journalists. Not the figures who are running the country -- but the ones who pose the questions to them and therefore determine the course of these crucial encounters.... They don't just intrude during the process, they try to control the outcome as well.
One real test of democracy is whether it's confined to electoral politics or thrives also in intermediate institutions that occupy our lives more directly than official politics: schools, cultural bodies, community organizations, religious groups, workplaces.
You turn to history not to find out who you are, but to learn how you got that way.
Subject Headings
