Maybe the 2019 ballot question should be about politics itself

If you weren’t aware before last week that Canada’s federal politicians are now in election-countdown mode, the event that greeted MPs returning to the House of Commons after the summer of killer heat waves (or the “summer of failure,” depending on what you spent your vacation tweeting about) will have instantly acclimatized you to our hyper-politicized, pre-2019 environment. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, in an apparent triumph of thirst for tactical compensation over the ability to Google "Eve Adams," pulled Liberal defector Leona Alleslev out of his hat, sparking hours of people Googling “Leona Alleslev.” In what may have been a case of Scheer projecting his own sense of betrayal over former leadership rival Maxime Bernier’s recent bolting to launch what may or may not morph into the Canadian version of the nationalist-nativist Austrian, Danish, or Spanish People’s Parties, he framed Alleslev's desertion as the product of "misplaced trust,” like a bad break-up. With 390 days to go until the 2019 election, Scheer performed the inadvertent civic duty of preparing us for what, in a political era defined by the siege of our cognitive bandwidth by Trumpian Twitter theatrics, will likely fill our content coffee spoons for the next year: drama. Forget about the hijacking of democracy by Austin Powers villains; forget about the hijacking of NAFTA by a man whose own staff had to hide its death warrant to keep him from signing it. To master the political version of a comic-book “Pow!” bubble these days you need to hijack as many brains as possible. And that takes not just drama but melodrama. There’s only so much room in anyone’s Twitter intake. Since all politics is now global, Canadian politicians are competing not just with each other but with the King of Melodrama in the White House, the Brexit melodrama, the Kardashians, The Bachelor, kittens being rescued from trees, BuzzFeed listicles, and the genuine, unconscionable human suffering of Rohingya refugees, Uyghur re-education camp prisoners, millions of destitute Venezuelans, and other casualties worldwide of both natural disasters and the worst kinds of avoidable melodrama politics can generate. The tacticians who now define political victory not in terms of what gets done to improve the lives of people or even of vanquishing an electoral opponent but of who “wins the day” by dominating the content deluge have determined that the key to this contest is emotional manipulation, or what bestselling author Daniel Goleman calls "amygdala hijack." Certain emotions, especially fear, anger, outrage, and disgust, activate our threat response and therefore register more powerfully than, say, joy or sadness, which don’t trigger an adrenaline rush. Bernier proved his skill in the tactics of Trumpian amygdala hijacking in August, when he dropped a series of anger-inducing tweets about immigration, followed—after 10 days of speculation about what he would do next—by his day-winning, deluge-dominating announcement that he was leaving the Conservative Party. There is already talk about what the ballot question of the 2019 election will be. Usually, it’s a choice between “time for a change” and “stay the course.” The two strongest arguments on either side of that choice tend to be economic management and general competence. All other logistical elements being equal—in a healthy democracy that isn’t being hacked or corrupted—the opposition attempts to degrade the government’s record, sell itself as the alternative, or both. Sometimes, elections are about values. Maybe it’s time for that to go meta and include the question of how a candidate approaches politics itself, and what that says about their respect for the intelligence of voters. Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and was a Washington and New York-based editor at UPI, AP, and ABC. She writes a weekly column for The Hill Times. The Hill Times

Maybe the 2019 ballot question should be about politics itself

Social media has supplanted the news cycle with the drama cycle and divided politicians into those who feed it and those who don’t.

Health misinformation is hurting patients and undermining trust. Let’s do something about it.

News

Get free news updates

Opinion

Submit a guest opinion article

resources

Follow us

Advertise

subscribe

get help

Get free news updates

Submit a guest opinion article

Maybe the 2019 ballot question should be about politics itself

Social media has supplanted the news cycle with the drama cycle and divided politicians into those who feed it and those who don’t.

Become a Political Insider