Housefather's Effective Progressivism
On Two Events Alike And Different
Two things happened on Friday that are at first blush unrelated, but actually more similar. The first was Rachel Gilmore tweeting the question she sent to the Conservative press office about Alex Jones’ endorsement of Poilievre, and the second was Anthony Housefather’s statement announcing that he was staying a Liberal. Gilmore’s question was posturing nonsense, and Housefather’s statement was a statement of core belief, and yet, they both were illustrations of a form of activism.
I have not been a fan of Housefather’s conflation of supporting Israel and supporting the Jewish community here in Canada, but he made an effective tradeoff – a cynical one, maybe, but an effective one. His flirtation/dalliance/principled stand/tantrum (delete as you wish) with leaving the Liberals gave him leverage, and he’s now got Prime Ministerial commitments to work on some issues around fighting anti-semitism. Do I love what he did? No, but he’s hopefully going to achieve quite a bit with it.
Gilmore, on the other hand, wrote a sanctimonious question asking whether Alex Jones’ endorsement makes Poilievre reconsider his use of conspiratorial language, and then outraged posted on Twitter that her leading question didn’t get a response. A lot of people got mad at me for saying that I find Gilmore’s stunts to be tiresome and vacuous, but I do for a simple reason – I want the left to be more focused on policy outcomes and how to achieve them than on stunts. Stunts that are designed to make people who already agree with the people who will see it are great for engagement and for growing an audience. But they’re not good when we start to trust people who don’t get they are pulling stunts.
…
You know how I know pulling stunts to get attention work? It’s what I spent 2020 doing. I was writing at least a column a day on how Joe Biden was going to win and win big, how the only way you could doubt this is if you’re an idiot, and that everyone who thought Trump still had a chance was either a dumbass Democrat addicted to dooming or a Republican addicted to copium. And then Joe Biden won by like 6 tenths of a percent in Wisconsin and won Arizona and Georgia by less than a third of a point.
I wrote an immense amount of absolute garbage that was motivated reasoning at its best. I could teach a University course on logical fallacies with some of the arguments that I routinely employed. And it build a following. There is an audience for being told what you want to hear, no matter how intellectually vacuous and bad the arguments are. Hell, I even engaged in it when I wrote that Poilievre was the next failed Tory leader doomed for failure. (I still can’t tell if my Del Duca optimism was actually knowably wrong at the time I wrote it or if it was actually somewhat defensible, but that also ended very badly.)
I am, as much as I don’t enjoy diving deep into these parts of my history, a bit of an expert on building a brand and an identity on telling progressives what they want to hear. It is something I don’t want to do anymore and there’s a reason this site has shifted in recent months. And Rachel Gilmore’s whole leading question routine is the exact kind of engagement farming for performative purposes we need to get away from.
Housefather and Gilmore provide a very interesting rhetorical difference – one engaging in performance that lefties like for self-promotion, the other engaging in performance we didn’t like for the purposes of a better agenda against anti-semitism. One is obviously better than the other – Housefather might actually achieve some progressive outcomes here, whereas Gilmore asked a question the Tories would never answer so she could get progressive RTs. But it feels like we venerate “asking tough questions” more than we do leveraging Justin Trudeau to do some good.
What Gilmore asked was not a tough question because it wasn’t a question at all. I used to think that Jeremy Paxman asking Michael Howard the same question 13 times in a row was the peak of interviewing, and in some ways it was a hard interview. But it was also interview masturbation – it was an excuse for Paxman to make himself the story. If Gilmore didn’t know that that question would go unanswered then she’s an idiot. If she did and asked that anyways, instead of asking a question that might actually get answered, then she’s playing a character and not actually doing journalism.
Right now Democrats have the US Senate because Republican primary voters are idiots. This isn’t some slander on them because they’re all rednecks, it’s the basic truth that if the GOP had run better candidates than Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker with undiagnosed CTE, and fucking weirdo Blake Masters in 2022 they’d have the Senate. They picked those candidates because of the power of Donald Trump’s endorsement and because the average Republican Primary voter believes Joe Biden is an illegitimate President. Listening to things that make you feel good has a cost.
Hell, the Sonia Sotomayor saga – whether she should retire from the US Supreme Court given the likelihood Democrats lose the Senate this year and her health issues – is another example. It is mollifying to tell yourself that it’s racist and sexist to want the first Latina off the Court this year, but we played fast and loose with RBG and then her death cost America Roe.
There is an actual cost to engaging with things that make partisans feel good about themselves at the cost of what is smart and logical. It is not always immediately apparent, but there is a cost. For me, that was when Biden ended up getting over the line just barely and all of my arrogant talk about the Blue Wave and a Biden landslide ended up looking like shit. For the broader progressive movement, that outcome could be 60 Liberal seats and a progressive side of the House lucky to hit 80 seats.
As much as some accuse me of a conservative bent these days, I’ve never been more committed to leftwing ideals. I am much more leftwing today than I was in 2015 or whatever, when I was a technocratic centrist who voted for Trudeau but wanted David Cameron to win. Now, I’m a staunch leftwinger espousing views I thought years ago were crank lunacy. I am more committed than ever to progressive solutions and staunchly progressive politics. But that entails advocating for a politics that doesn’t hand the opposition the easiest attack lines of all time.
There is nothing progressive about letting public transport descend into a place where those addicted to drugs use freely and it’s somehow an anti-woke position to say that’s bad. There’s nothing progressive about pretending that everything done in the name of progressive politics is somehow good. There’s nothing progressive in tolerating the level of self-promotion in the name of journalism that many engage in.
If we are to beat back the global populist rise, the left needs to hold itself to account. We need to be better at advocating for our politics than our opposition is. We have to fight not just good fights but the right fights. And at the end of the day, so many people prefer to argue for uselessness like Gilmore’s leading question than actual substance. And if this is what being left wing is construed to mean, then we’re all fucked.
I want the left to win, but at the end of the day I don’t know if others want to win as much as they want to feel sanctimonious. And until that changes, the right are going to destroy us. Please God let us get serious.
hmm. i would've rt'd the hell out of this in 2015, but trump winning changed my world view. this is an unfair comparison, but for illustrative purposes, hillary clinton also thought the "left" (or whatever the fuck her version of that word means) could win through "policy" and "substance" alone.
the unfortunate reality is that most people simply don't give a fuck about good or substantive policy; many of them just want to feel seen and heard, and to use your language, feel sanctimonious about their views.
it's a bit like retail investing in this current environment. yes, eventually fundamentals bear out and getting super hyped on the stock of the day will end poorly, but for increasingly longer and longer periods of time, the flavour of the day is the one to jump on because it is what is at the top of mind for the substantive majority that only pay attention to the surface stories. an election cycle might be about that length of time. real time example - look at the insanity of the DXYZ fund over the last couple days.
polievre "refusing" to "condemn" an alex jones endorsement - for whatever the fuck that means - may sway an otherwise on-the-fence millennial voter who is disillusioned by the liberals and trudeau on housing and inflation and is considering the cpc... but cannot overlook an "alignment" with a rwnj that has been sued for nearly 10 figures as a sandy hook denier. you can question how rachel gilmore phrased the question, but in today's political sphere, it's a valid one IMO.
i'd contrast that to say nobody outside of people who are highly engaged (ie. your readership, in all fairness) will know that anthony housefeather did anything, regardless of the downstream outcomes.
now, the voter that i made up may only represent an insignificant minority, and most swing voters will make up their mind on something else (freedom of association seems to be a hallmark of the post-woke/anti-woke era) - but i certainly don't think gilmore's question and those like it has any chance of backfiring (that voter thinks the leftist media is not substantive enough/focused too much on illegitimate/slanderous connections and it draws them to polievre/the right)
i'll wrap up by saying i think you're 100% spot on for the RBG/sotomayer situation, and that the underlying point has a lot of clear merit. i just don't know that it carries weight in public perception the way that people in politically engaged bubbles/spheres think it does.
I share your frustration. Progressive Canadians are making Poilievre's rise way too easy. But social media might reveal the way most voters actually think; i.e., superficially and emotionally. I'm an experienced political observer and can't remember a time when most people ever understood policy choices, let alone voted on that basis. I do wish, however, that the left would explain how policies affect people on an individual or family level. Translate complexity into personal. Use plain language to help voters understand how partisan choices will affect them directly. Stunts to get clicks in the echo chamber are not useless, but cannot be all. We need to spell it out in terms most people can understand.