NDP: Replace Jagmeet, Or The Party's Dead

On The NDP's Crisis

Why did Andrea Horwath go on TV in August 2021 arguing against banning unvaccinated teachers and nurses from working?

It’s not because she’s crazy or stupid or incompetent or anything – even if you think she is those things, that wasn’t why she did it. She did it because one half of her base constituency, the unions, care more about the economic well-being of unvaccinated teachers above all else, and she was protecting workers’ rights above all else. The reason she walked it back is that the other half of her base are social liberals in city downtowns who, at that point, basically viewed the unvaccinated as subhuman scum, and didn’t want to have their kids in the same room as any unvaccinated people ever.

The thing that people miss when they describe the NDP as a left wing party is that means two very different things in different places – in downtown Toronto, their “left-wing”-ness is that they’re extremely insufferable rich people who vote NDP to feel better about themselves and students who won’t shut up about how oppressed they are while they attend some of the best schools in the world on their parents’ dimes. In Timmins and Skeena and Powell River, their “left-wing”-ness is about those communities needing better services – be in hospitals and schools – because of their status as small towns and cities away from the big cities and provincial capitals.

To be a NDPer in Northern Ontario or the non-Lower Mainland/Victoria parts of BC is to argue for state capacity, and frankly more substantial state capacity than population alone merits. To be an NDPer in Toronto or Ottawa or Montreal is to be a preening, self-indulgent wanker who unironically finds bad opinions too triggering to deal with. One is about economic survival and ensuring basic services are met in areas that are too often overlooked by urban, big city politicians, and the other is about, let’s be very clear, ephemeral issues of comfort.

What people – and yes, especially people who live in the same progressive online spaces as I inhabit – miss about this is that a decent chunk of the NDP’s voter base – and a ton of their current 25 seats – are the former kind of left-wing, but their leadership is focused on the latter. And Pierre Poilievre’s going to eat their lunches.

So many people cannot reconcile the idea of NDP-CPC swing voters, but not only do they exist, they make complete sense. The NDP’s traditions have always been in unions and collective economic action – and frequently, with people of very different social class and ideals coming together for a collective push, be it better wages or conditions. And the thing is, collective action requires the entire collective, and that inherently means collective action for everyone, whether they have “good” views on women’s rights or gay marriage or whatever else.

The inner city urban NDP finds that compromise unacceptable, because to them, having bad views on abortion or gay marriage or whatever is disqualifying, because that makes someone a Bad Person, and that matters above all else. This is why so many of these people are New Democrats – because the Liberals are Bad, and voting for someone who is Bad is unacceptable, even if the Liberals are much less Bad than the Conservatives. For many, the appeal of the NDP is the purity.

The problem is, the NDP is stuck between two viewpoints – the Charlie Angus wing of the party holds that the most important thing is economics, and basically that the party should represent economic liberalism above all else, and the view of the rest of the party is that the NDP is the home of those who care about social justice, whatever that means to the person talking.

Why is this such an existential crisis for the party? Because the former is the people the latter hate, above all – the urban social liberals have built their politics around the idea that anyone who holds “wrong” views on social issues is worthy of contempt. And at some point those two views become unreconcilable.

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What we have seen globally is that the advances of the Right in the last decade has come with voters, and in places, like Timmins and Skeena – places where voters may have economically left-wing values but who have moved right because of social values. Go to any of these places, whether here in Canada or globally, and have honest conversations with those voters about abortion, race, and homosexuality, and their answers won’t be much indistinguishable from that of the average religious zealot. It might not manifest in the same way, but the views – that abortion is unpleasant, that homosexuality is in some indescribable way weird and unwelcome, that the current approach to Indigenous issues amounts to coddling native communities because of guilt over what people did 100 years ago – are that of people with culturally conservative positions.

Those views are commonplace amongst these voters, but they’re decidedly outside the NDP mainstream at this point – which is why the voters who hold these views are running to the right. Jagmeet, for whatever his supposed talents are, is not a leader for these voters, because he also believes that this sort of politics is most important. That’s a fine moral view to hold, but it’s one that holds no electoral advantage.

If the NDP keeps Jagmeet as leader, they will continue to bleed votes amongst those who viewed the NDP as their only logical home for so long as Poilievre comes for them with a full throated defence of their rights to not be condemned for holding supposedly unacceptable views, and as the culture wars keep ramping up. He will not be able to stop the tide, because his leadership has always been about how the NDP are the people who are moral and just against the evil bastards of the Liberals and Tories, and the thing is, that makes a lot of people who would otherwise vote NDP blanche at the idea that thinking Poilievre might make some sense on COVID lockdowns or whatever makes them bad or evil.

The NDP’s base of seats is almost evenly split between places where the social liberalism above all is helpful – their seats in Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg and southern Vancouver Island are aided by this, as those are seats where without the NDP the Liberals would be on the march. Go to Comox or Powell River or Skeena or Northern Ontario, and those are all places where the NDP’s social justice focus goes down about as well as a bucket of warm piss.

What the NDP needs to do to keep their seats in Windsor and London and Timmins and Comox is not more pandering to the worst excesses of student politics and bad aping of American culture war bullshit, but an honest reframing of what the party is for – protection and expansion of workers rights. There’s a reason working class white voters used to vote NDP and are moving away – it’s that the NDP seem preoccupied with the truly stupidest fights about irrelevant bullshit. The NDP was built around advancing left wing economics, and now it’s a clearing house for how being slightly inconvenienced is trauma.

If the NDP keeps Jagmeet, we know the result of the next election already – Poilievre will do better across their regional seats and probably win a bunch of them, while they won’t gain anything in the urban centres, because if you think Justin Trudeau is insufficiently socially liberal your head is up your ass. The reason the NDP are fucked is because they’re running a strategy whose implicit premise is trading Timmins for Toronto, but they don’t win anything in Toronto and bleed votes in Timmins – oh, and by the by, winning seats that the Conservatives are targeting is better than winning safe Liberal seats, just as a note.

If the NDP run Jagmeet, they’re admitting that they would rather lose while feeling morally superior instead of prioritizing winning, and while the purity of opposition might be self-satisfying, it won’t do fuck all for the people they claim to care about. Only a party willing to have an honest conversation about where they are will find success – but the fact that Jagmeet is still leader is a sign they’ve so far been unwilling to do it.

Get willing, or get fucked at the next election. Your choice, not mine.