Last Tuesday, William Watson had a good column about a presentation he'd seen given at the annual meeting of the Canadian Economics Association by University of Toronto labour economist Michael Baker. The presentation was about the evidence used to justify government funding of early childhood education such as daycare. The point of the presentation and the column was that, this evidence doesn't actually tell us what it is reported to tell us.
What the evidence does tell us is that early childhood education is highly effective when targeted at kids who are risk. Give these kids daycare and their chances of growing up to be convicted of crimes or dependent on drugs go down significantly.
What the evidence does not tell us is that universal daycare would have much benefit. To the contrary, and as most people could have correctly guessed, most parents are very good at identifying and correcting social pathologies in their children.
And yet, here in Canada, Liberals are very determined to provide universal daycare. How did this happen? How does a series of inputs that clearly justifies targeted assistance for kids at risk go into the policy-developing machine on one end and a universal program that is not justified by the evidence comes out the other end?
I mean that as a serious question. The Liberal party is full of intelligent people and I believe there is an intelligent reason for this. (Taking it that being smart doesn't make you right; that intelligent does not necessarily mean correct.) And I think that intelligent thinking is part of the explanation of what has started to go wrong for big centrists parties such as the Liberal Party here, The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in many European countries. Labour in Britain and the Netherlands, and the Socialists in Spain and France.
For while the support of universal daycare is puzzling as I put it above, it isn't puzzling at all if you know anything at all about the Liberal Party of Canada. Why? Because support for universal social programs is one of the defining aspects of the party. If you asked ten different liberals the reason why a particular universal social program was justified, however, you'd get ten different answers, some of which would directly contradict one another.
And the big centrist parties now in decline all have this in common. They are parties that have a solid, well-defined positions on policy while they are flexible on ideology. They tell voters, you don't have to be scared of us because we don't have an ideology.
The parties that are now defeating them at elections are the opposite. These parties have well-defined ideological positions but tend to be flexible on policy. They tell voters you don't have to be scared of us because, even though we have an ideology, we're willing to be flexible on policy.
Both parties acknowledge that voters are likely to be frightened by a party that with firm ideological convictions they do not share but they then go on to reassure voters in different ways.
Okay, but why is this a problem for the big centrist parties? It's a problem because they do have an ideology. It's not an accident that the Canadian Liberals always come out in support of universal programs. But the ideology they have is an ideology in the sense that they have a set of ideas that are characteristic of a certain group. What they don't have is a consciously thought through political philosophy.
They are quite proud of this. When Liberals attack other parties for being ideologically driven, what they really mean is that these other parties do have consciously thought through political philosophies. Corner a Liberal about this and they will insist that they don't need such a thing because their views are driven by common sense and basic decency.
Now I could say a lot about that but I want to zero in on two.
The first is that historically this was not the case. When the party was in deep trouble after a shattering defeat in 1958, they rethought and changed their basic political philosophy and, as a consequence, changed the policies they supported. If they had clung to the ideology of the previous era and insisted that it was just common sense and basic decency, they would have never regained power.
Today's Liberal party will not do what the Pearson Liberals were willing to do. They are willing to have meetings where people talk about ideas but those ideas will only be acceptable to the extent that they support the already existing policy positions of the party. Not surprisingly, the attempts to discuss ideas have fizzled.
The second is that any political position that claims to based on common sense and basic decency will necessarily have to argue that their opponents views are not. Think of Jon Stewart's march to restore sanity. If I honestly believe my position is based on common sense and basic decency and Joe disagrees with me, then I can have only three possible explanations of Joe's behaviour:
- Joe is stupid
- Joe is evil
- Joe is both stupid and evil
Now it has to be admitted that this sort of anger-driven attack can be very effective. But only for a while. Eventually people will figure out that the sky isn't falling; they will figure out that I and Joe are both politicians seeking power and of equal intelligence and moral stature.
At the same time, this anger-driven style of politics makes it even harder for the centrist parties to reconsider their own ideas and policies.
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