From today's Globe and Mail:
...
His variant on an old theme is found in his recent discovery that politics is "about people," not "ideology," as if these were mutually exclusive categories. Like many Liberals, Bob Rae creates the undefined straw man, labelled "ideology," to attack. In part this seems intended to deflect our attention away from his own unexceptional ideology, i.e. mainstream liberal democracy. Consider a short list of the things he tells us he is for: a united federal country; economic growth and environmental sustainability; the rule of law; investing in education; free, fair and open trade; and, markets that are neither despised nor worshipped. No Canadian politician would oppose any of these. Only someone capable of describing himself as being part of the "progressive centre," could imply that these are uniquely Liberal ideas. Here in Ottawa, I can hear Stephen Harper laughing half way across town. Pierre Trudeau would have scorned such banalities.
It was in a very brief reference on why he parted company from the NDP that Mr. Rae noted his discovery that politics was not only about people, but also about finding the common ground. The clincher in his personal odyssey was that "more often than not," he found politics is about "finding the middle ground."
No sane politician would disagree that a major element of daily democratic political life consists precisely in finding the common ground, when it's to be found. This is done all the time. Indeed, advanced democracies owe their stability to the fact we agree on 60 per cent to 70 per cent of matters. But to define one's political goal as, in effect, seeking the middle ground is to reveal a deep commitment to the status quo. For many of us, serious politics begins with those issues where there is no middle ground. That's when differing values come into conflict. What's the middle ground between patriating the Constitution and not doing so? Where was the middle ground in Quebec and Manitoba when social democratic governments banned corporate and union money from politics? Where was such ground when Mitch Hepburn's Liberal government tried to stop working people in my home town of Oshawa from forming a union? Was there middle ground in Saskatchewan in 1961 on the principle of public health care? (Again, the opposition was Liberal.) Women activists and some of us members of Parliament fought and won the battle to include women's rights in the Charter. There was no middle ground there. Nor was there in Mississippi for black Americans in the 1950s.
Moreover, the ground breakers in democracy, more often than not, struggle against the status quo middle ground. They are the ones whose ideologies include the principles of equality and justice, and far from excluding "the people," embrace and give them political voice. Such democratic "ideologues" challenge today's status quo on inequality, the environment, global trade agreements that include investors' rights but exclude those of workers, child poverty amidst affluence, and the scourge of HIV-AIDS in Africa.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060427.wxcobroadbent27/BNStory/specialComment/home
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