My blogger-friend Simon, who came over from the NDP to support the Trudeau Liberals, has a post today marking the anniversary of the death of NDP firebrand Jack Layton. I've written here a number of times why I don't think the canonization of the man bears merit in the greater context, and that the NDP have been a dangerous group of rabble-rousers well before Layton came on the scene but that his Faustian handshake with Harper was the worst decision a self-declared progressive could have ever made. I nevertheless respect Simon's opinion that he still admires Layton and sees his partnership with Harper as having been a mistake rather than craven politics, but I still think there's more to the story.
I left a short message offering my polite disagreement and further explaining why I believe he was the precursor to our Bernie Sanders, and why that's not a good thing. The longer draft, I'll offer here in a post below. As the old song says, there ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy, there's only you and me and we just disagree.
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It wasn't a "mistake" to usher in Harper's government by bringing down Martin, any more than it was a "mistake" for Bernie Sanders to usher in Trump by attacking Hillary. (I will contend that it was a "mistake" for Martin to flush out Chrétien the way some of Morneau's flacks are apparently going after Trudeau.) The Faustian bargain with Harper was a long-game, horseshoe-politics strategy to destroy their mutual enemies of the LPC, just like Trump/the GOP hate Democrats, period, while Sanders focuses his ire on "establishment centrists" or whatever he calls them on any given day. Layton was Sanders before Sanders was a thing. What he did was an old and dirty hard-left tactic called heightening the contradictions. It worked so well in 1930s Germany that 100 million people died in a war against fascism, and they got the contradiction-heightening government they deserved good and hard, until the wall of totalitarianism came down in 1989.
The NDP of today are so embittered by Trudeau's "stealing the brass ring" in 2015 that some of their supporters have actually gone into full conspiracy theory realm, speculating that he had something to do with Layton's death just like Hillary Clinton "killed" Seth Rich and Vincent Foster. The reason for this is because they cling to the meme that if Layton hadn't died, Trudeau never would have been prime minister, he would. So naturally a cluster rushes to the conclusion that Trudeau employed the "CIA heart attack gun" or "CIA cancer gun," and they just look QAnon levels of ridiculous. When Sanders had bypass surgery during this year's primaries, there were rose fanatics accusing Hillary of trying to bump him off. This particularly hateful cadre at times ends up wishing similar ills upon Hillary and even Trudeau himself. So much for a message of, a new hope. More like "let the hate flow through you."
The fact is, the NDP's grand gamble of "Nach Harper, Uns" didn't pay off because of a quirk of fate, not because of Liberal malfeasance. Trudeau's leftish turn away from blue-Grit Chretien/Martin-ism as a throwback to his father's social-democratic platform has rendered the NDP irrelevant to little more than their hardcore base. Pierre after all, was briefly NDP but made their ideas palatable by joining up to lead the Liberals, because he wanted to win. So all the NDP has in their arsenal is to gripe about Liberals named Trudeau stealing the ball and copying their homework, then climb in the blue-meanie submarine and attack, attack, attack with the same old tired memes about "crony corruption". Should Trudeau fils depart the leadership at some point, they're already prepping their next Hillary-style attack, accusing Chrystia Freeland of being a Nazi red-baiter and a war criminal. Layton, like his strange-bedfellows ally Harper, left his party bereft of ideas and purely a vessel of anti-Liberal animus and rigid purity tests. Singh is merely a symptom of a deeper problem in the same way as Scheer.
The NDP of today are so embittered by Trudeau's "stealing the brass ring" in 2015 that some of their supporters have actually gone into full conspiracy theory realm, speculating that he had something to do with Layton's death just like Hillary Clinton "killed" Seth Rich and Vincent Foster. The reason for this is because they cling to the meme that if Layton hadn't died, Trudeau never would have been prime minister, he would. So naturally a cluster rushes to the conclusion that Trudeau employed the "CIA heart attack gun" or "CIA cancer gun," and they just look QAnon levels of ridiculous. When Sanders had bypass surgery during this year's primaries, there were rose fanatics accusing Hillary of trying to bump him off. This particularly hateful cadre at times ends up wishing similar ills upon Hillary and even Trudeau himself. So much for a message of, a new hope. More like "let the hate flow through you."
The fact is, the NDP's grand gamble of "Nach Harper, Uns" didn't pay off because of a quirk of fate, not because of Liberal malfeasance. Trudeau's leftish turn away from blue-Grit Chretien/Martin-ism as a throwback to his father's social-democratic platform has rendered the NDP irrelevant to little more than their hardcore base. Pierre after all, was briefly NDP but made their ideas palatable by joining up to lead the Liberals, because he wanted to win. So all the NDP has in their arsenal is to gripe about Liberals named Trudeau stealing the ball and copying their homework, then climb in the blue-meanie submarine and attack, attack, attack with the same old tired memes about "crony corruption". Should Trudeau fils depart the leadership at some point, they're already prepping their next Hillary-style attack, accusing Chrystia Freeland of being a Nazi red-baiter and a war criminal. Layton, like his strange-bedfellows ally Harper, left his party bereft of ideas and purely a vessel of anti-Liberal animus and rigid purity tests. Singh is merely a symptom of a deeper problem in the same way as Scheer.
Mind you, I don't wish ill upon his family. That's an NDP thing, as evidenced by Charlie Angus' deplorable smearing of Margaret Trudeau as a gold-digger who rode the coattails of her husband and son's political careers and famous surname. Indeed, this was the toxic, ideological-radical mess that Layton made of his party, doing damage to Canadian politics as a whole. I'm just as grateful that Joe Biden saved the Democrats from purity-populist extremism as I am that Justin Trudeau saved the Liberals from extinction. Bernie Sanders and his "squad" of rose-twitter trolls, cosplay-communist shit disturbers, and antiquated 1960s holdovers would have destroyed the Democrats just the same as Jack Layton did to the NDP.
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And that's the fact, Jack.
