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.

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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.