Dispatch from the Front Line: We need an antidote, not more poison in a blue bottle

Good commentary from the Line (Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney). If you haven’t subscribed already, you may wish to consider doing so given the relevance and overall balance in their discussion of various issues:

No politician should need to be told this to have a bone-deep understanding of it. A politician’s personal feelings about any of these groups or events is irrelevant; they understand that once elected, they represent more than just themselves. These rituals are necessary to social cohesion. 

Likewise, no politician should need to be told the symbolism of not showing up for one of these groups. Of cleaving one religious minority from the herd. 

We cannot remove one without damaging the polity as a whole. This politician doesn’t show up for the Jews; the next one won’t show up for the Muslims. The one after that makes a public stink about Pride; the fourth scores points with his base by abstaining from Christian events, and so on. And so on. When politicians shirk their duty to represent the polity as whole, they instead become instruments of power for specific groups within that polity. 

Where does that lead us? 

When we lose a shared national identity that recognizes us primarily as individuals and citizens, what’s left is democratic tribalism. We revert to more ancient forms of identity — race and religion. Democracy becomes a matter of managing the interests of competing power blocs built on immutable characteristics like skin colour and on irresolvable sectarian divides. Absent a shared identity, it’s all just will to power, and the crass use of violence, bureaucracy, and capital to dominate other sub-groups. 

This is the outcome that white nationalists openly seek. They’ve done the math, and they believe that if white people understand themselves primarily as White People, then this majority tribe will begin to operate in the interests of a narrow ethnic identity rather than a shared national one. 

Ironically, this is also the outcome sought by many identitarian leftists as well, who seem to believe that will to power is an accurate reflection of our democracy right now. We at The Line disagree; friends, our politics gets so much worse if we continue down this path. This will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we allow it to be. 

Both the extreme right and the extreme left understand that cleaving Jews from the polity is an effective way to shatter the experiment of postmodern nationhood. Of course it’s the Jews. It’s always the Jews. A perpetual religious minority in all nations on earth save one, the Jews have served as scapegoats for internal grievance for centuries. 

This is why growing antisemitism is such an alarming signal of trouble historically. It’s a sign of a society that has fallen into a state of deep spiritual and moral confusion. That red warning light is blinking bright and fast on the Canadian dashboard right now. 

This is not the outcome that your Line editors want for ourselves or our children. We believe in liberal democracy; we believe in the story of Canada, and the ability of this concept of a nation to bind disparate peoples. You know us mostly through our work, but if you knew us personally as well, you’d know that we love and are loved by people of different ethnicities and faiths — something that may not have been possible a few generations ago, and for which we are deeply grateful is possible today. If we backslide, we might lose those gains, and our kids may have a harder time enjoying the kind of lives we both grew up thinking were normal.

It’s not too late to pull ourselves from this brink, as long as enough of us understand that we’re upon it. 

Source: Dispatch from the Front Line: We need an antidote, not more poison in a blue bottle