Silver Wordsmith: An author's journey |
So help me, I’m making my first “political” post. Forgive me, for I know not what I do, but after reading the most recent musings from Maxime Bernier, I can’t restrain myself.
For my non-Canadian readers, Maxime Bernier is a fairly high-profile federal politician. He ran for the leadership of the Conservative party recently, after the previous leader and former Prime Minister Stephen Harper resigned after the election that saw them pushed out of power after almost ten years. Bernier wouldn’t take his defeat lying down and after make some statements that were at odds with the party he was so close to leading, he left and founded his own party – the People’s Party of Canada. His departure from the Conservatives was ostensibly for reasons that they had lost sight of their core conservative values and his intent to continue to fight for its small-government libertarian values. Since that time, he’s been building up a profile for himself by putting forth allegedly no-nonsense and hard logic justifications for what are essentially right-wing (and I mean that on in the literal political scale, and not in a pejorative sense) ideas. For instance, he argues that Canada should pull out of the Paris Accord, but not because he’s a climate change denier, but because Canada won’t be able to make its commitments so why act like a huge hypocrite? Makes sense, right? Except it was only a couple of weeks ago that he tried to use his hard logic to say that a carbon tax is not a pollution tax, because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant … because it’s a by-product of our breathing. You catch all that? About the same logic as “we need water to live, so an overabundance of water can’t be a natural disaster”. Max splitting hairs so fine here he’s about to go nuclear. So now that his environmental agenda is all wrapped up in a digestible package catered for “moderates” that are chomping at the bit to justify their right wing beliefs, he can move onto something else: feminism. Recently, Bernier declared that he “doesn’t need to be a feminist” because he believes in people. SO there goes another attractive feature for those who wish to see themselves as moderates, who don’t identify with the rabid dog politics of the alt-right and therefore see themselves as the enlightened middle-ground between torch-bearing racists and the identity politic warriors of the left. Bernier instead believes “in people”. Bernier has rejected both “positive” and “negative” discrimination. Humanity is all about people and why should we treat each other any differently based on gender, race or sexual orientation? This is a fantastic attitude to have, which is what makes it so attractive. And the world would be a utopia if we all espoused this belief at the very core of our being. But we don’t. And this is where this approach becomes dangerous. It assumes that we are already where everything should be. But even if Bernier is somehow the single human on the planet who has managed to rise above all pre-conceived notions and manages to treat each individual human as the perfect unique snowflake that they are, that’s not how the rest of the world works. You treating someone identically to someone else does not take into account the journey they have taken to reach you. Take an example from immigration. “Everyone has to immigrate to this country according to our laws and through the proper channels, regardless of sex, race, creed or other circumstances.” On the surface, this looks like an attractive moderate approach, but practice it to a tee, and your descendants will end up apologizing for your destructive obstinacy. But even without having to resort to such drastic examples, one can see how this attitude simply serves to numb any call to action. What Bernier is advocating is a splendid individual-level isolationism. You no longer care about obstacles, advantages or circumstances that may be created for an individual due to their race and gender based on how society treats them, because you supposedly treat them all equally. What this essentially does is tries to move us to the end result while bypassing all of the difficulty of getting there. It assumes that identity politics is created voluntarily and individually, and not as a reaction to a society that repeatedly forces an individual to confront and question their identity. Bernier is trying to pacify the discomfort experienced by those societal demographics that have rarely had to confront what their race and gender identity really mean. To them (to me) this feels knew, but for others, this is what they’ve been living their whole lives, and so have countless generations before them. Bernier is very good at putting a digestible spin on old ideas. He’s not a “breath of fresh air” he’s a spritz of cologne on the same miasma that is refusing to let us move forward from centuries of stagnation. Which is why I believe that his message should be challenged at every turn.
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Michael SerebriakovMichael is a husband, father of three, lawyer, writer, and looking for that first big leap into publishing. All opinions are author's own. StoriesUrsa Major Categories
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