The virus of power

Clifford Lincoln is a retired politician who used to be a well-known minister of the environment, at first (1985-1989) in the provincial (Québécois) Liberal government of Robert Bourassa, and then again (1993-1996) in the federal (Canadian) Liberal government of Jean Chrétien. At the ripe old age of 92, he has just written an article published in “The Montréal Gazette” (April 21, 2020): “What COVID-19 teaches about governance: Our leaders need to do better at planning and addressing long-term challenges”. He started out by describing the panicked reaction of governments and institutions all over the world, most of them responding to the current coronavirus crisis like the proverbial emperor without any clothes, “afraid, unsafe and unsure”.

Then he went on to underline that “the challenges we face as a collectivity are increasingly long-term ones”, challenges like the population explosion, the constant desecration of nature, huge social and regional disparities, incessant conflicts over ethnicity and faith, much larger numbers of environmental and geopolitical refugees all over the world, as well as multiple epidemics, some of them turning into exceptionally murderous pandemics. His main message being that governments and institutions in every part of today’s world desperately need to get beyond short-term, crowd-pleasing strategies in order to concentrate on adopting “long-term anticipatory, preventive and reformative planning”.

On that point, I could not agree with him more, as anyone capturing the gist of my blog postings over the past seven years can attest. Unfortunately, I was not overly impressed as a citizen with the legacy of Mr. Lincoln’s tenure as an environment minister, surrounded as he was by much more pragmatic politicians like Bourassa and Chrétien, who certainly did not share his own apparent commitment to “compassionate liberalism”. Those folks, like most of the other politicians in power, in Canada and in Québec, participated after all in the worldwide neoliberal onslaught of total governmental subordination to giant corporations, that began back in the early 1980s. At the federal level, the most intensive period of helping big business focus exclusively on short-term profit maximization took place during the Steven Harper government, when the Conservative Party reigned uninterrupted between 2006 and 2015.

But in Canada, just like in dozens of other countries all over the world, it would not be appropriate to put all the blame on such intentionally elitist organizations as the Conservative Party of Canada, or the much larger Conservative Party in the UK, or even the fake-populist Republican Party in the USA. Donald Trump’s occasional attempts to portray himself as a friend of the people, or as an economic nationalist, are completely bogus and ineffectual, especially because of his enormous tax-cuts for ultra-rich corporations and humungous individual fortunes.

The neoliberal, “soak-the-poor” approach was also perfectly represented by several Liberal parties as well, in various different countries. Not only the Liberal Party of Canada, during Jean Chrétien’s reign (1993-2003) and Paul Martin’s reign (2003-2006), but also the Liberal Party of Québec, which became even less government-interventionist than before during the tenures of Jean Charest (2003-2012) and Philippe Couillard (2014-2018). Both of those premiers were also involved in encouraging, rather than fighting against, the corruption of various provincial and municipal institutions by a particularly sleazy group of organized “entrepreneurs”.

As if that were not bad enough, the federal Liberal regime of Justin Trudeau (2015 to the present) also harbours more than a few short-sighted, elitist friends of big business, such as Transport Minister Marc Garneau. While Garneau does not seem to be quite as reactionary as some of his Conservative predecessors, he has nevertheless done everything in his power, at least prior to the arrival of the virus, to make sure that giant corporations like the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian National Railway and Air Canada can always get away with being as unsafe and as rate-gouging as they want to be. In order to present a truly honest picture of the situation, therefore, Clifford Lincoln should have also lambasted many of his fellow Liberals for having deliberately rejected any kind of long-term planning, aimed at ensuring a better future for everyone, rather than for just a tiny, select, group of upper-class cronies.

I also did not agree with the decision that most people in Québec think about whenever they remember Clifford Lincoln nowadays. Namely, his decision to leave the Bourassa government back in 1989, in protest against his boss’s attempt to preserve the integrity of the French Language Charter in Québec from the assaults launched against it by the Supreme Court of Canada. In my “right-honourable” opinion, one of the most important things that all government leaders, in all countries and at all levels, should also be doing, in addition to long-term anti-elitist planning, is to refuse to simultaneously promote imperialist attitudes toward less-powerful jurisdictions. That means not only making sure that mid-sized empires like (English) Canada do not succeed in dominating and mistreating smaller jurisdictions like francophone Québec, but also in making sure that middle powers like Canada (including Québec, for the time being) are not simultaneously being dominated by much larger, world-dominating empires, such as the one in the USA (located right next door), but also including the “People’s” Republic of China.

Not to forget that any anti-imperialist strategy like this one would also have to include making sure that all countries, including Canada and Québec, are also not dominating and mistreating even smaller ethnic and linguistic nations, particularly indigenous peoples like the Innu (Montagnais) population, in northeastern Québec and in the neighbouring Labrador section of Newfoundland. In other words, nothing that any government anywhere does to develop the kind of long-term, all-inclusive planning that Clifford Lincoln is suggesting should be contributing to any strategy that is not truly all-inclusive. Inclusive, that is, not in the sense of every group of people having to put up with whatever neofascist crap that every other group of people wishes to throw at them, but in the sense of trying to collectively develop some kind of worldwide, multifaceted, social-democratic, “cooperative commonwealth federation”. (An expression borrowed from the 1932-1961 “CCF” party, that first introduced Canada’s currently mismanaged public-health system.) Doing all of those things simultaneously, while still surviving the current corona crisis, is, to say the least, a very tall order indeed.

A major reason why everyone ought to be as anti-imperialist as possible is that in order to overcome any massive threat on a worldwide scale like the COVID-19 invasion, international cooperation is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, as we are finding out once again at the present time, making world cooperation work is extremely difficult, when practically every country, and practically every region of every country, refuses to trust every other jurisdiction (representing a separate people). All that mistrust is, however, entirely justified, because of all the incredibly self-centred jockeying for power among rival big-time financiers and their close friends in politics and organized crime, from every part of the world, that has always gone on in the past, especially in the recent past. While there is no doubt that China made a monstrous mistake by failing to completely shut down its wild-animal meat-markets (and/or by letting that particular animal virus escape from a nearby laboratory), there is also no doubt that the worst possible way to react to that horrible error was when the USA’s dumb-ass president cut off the most important source of funding to the World Heath Organization (WHO).

In spite of all its very numerous shortcomings, the WHO is a necessary part of preventing the world’s poorest countries from suffering even more immensely from the virus than any of the world’s richer nations. And also thereby at least trying to make sure that no matter what any reasonably well-off jurisdiction manages to accomplish in controlling the onslaught of the disease, will not then be completely undone by its subsequent re-importation from any one of a large number of much poorer, much more afflicted, regions. To be sure, it is always possible that some of the more anti-democratic leaders of the poorer countries could just keep all that help from the WHO for themselves, and refuse to share any of it with the poor people under their respective jurisdictions. Nevertheless, we still have to at least try internationally to do the right thing, because we are all in this together, regardless of how many ultra-individualistic profiteers, and confinement-busting egomaniacs, any particular country, rich or poor, may harbour in its midst.

I also have to underline a fundamental fact that did not show up anywhere in Clifford Lincoln’s article. That is the very important concept according to which all the different crises that he mentioned are constantly intersecting with, and negatively influencing each other all the time. One of the most devastating ways in which this happens is the constant expansion of human habitats, caused by combining an ever-increasing human population with short-term profit maximization, practised by an ever-expanding number of private and state-capitalist firms, all over the world. Thereby taking over more and more regions, or ecosystems, that used to be inhabited only by plants and wild animals, and bringing ever-increasing numbers of human beings into direct contact with animal pathogens that none of us ever had to face before.

We should also never forget that the vast majority of all the popularly elected regimes in the world, as well as the vast majority of all the factions ruling the world’s authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, are equally guilty of having adopted quite similar, short-term, crowd-pleasing strategies. Almost all of them combining varying doses of elitist neoliberalism and ultra-right-wing populism (otherwise known as neofascism), in one way or another. Which means that in a country like the USA, for example, it is abundantly insufficient to promote the election of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal Joe Biden as a “decent” alternative to the more neofascist Republican Party’s Donald Trump. Like the well-known Canadian cartoonist, Terry Mosher, did in “The Montreal Gazette” on April 16, 2020, when he depicted Biden wearing a cap reading “Make America decent again”, in an obvious parody of Trump’s own “Make America great again” cap.

The problem with supporting someone like Biden comes from the fact that neoliberalism is not just a strategy popularized back in the 1980s by right-wing populist politicians like the UK’s Margaret Thatcher and the USA’s Ronald Reagan. It has in fact been supported over the past forty years by every successive US regime (and many other regimes in many other countries), including the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017), when Joe Biden was the vice-president. To be sure, the “Obama-care” program in the health sector, although wholly inadequate to deal with the problem that it was addressing, was at least a small step in the right direction. The USA is obviously even more under the control of neoliberalism nowadays than it was under Obama, and not just because of the Republican Party’s total rejection of Obama-care. In reality, Donald Trump’s obsessive-compulsive fixation on pretending that he does not also belong to the “liberal establishment”, is totally fictional.

It has to be frequently repeated that neoliberalism was not just set up from the beginning in order to help private capitalism reassert control over some of the world’s richest countries, that had supposedly drifted too far away from old-fashioned, nineteenth-century laissez-faire (based on short-term profit maximization), under the influence of various left-wing nationalist, communist and social-democratic parties, all over the world. Neoliberalism also surreptitiously reintroduced a new form of fascism (or ultra right-wing populism) into the more or less democratically-elected part of the world, by ensuring that the most vulnerable people in every country would have to pay for the revival of neoliberal “shareholders’ rights”. In other words, today’s astronomical gap between the world’s very few richest people and the world’s very numerous poorest people did not just happen. It was deliberately amplified and distended over the past forty years, to an extent never before witnessed on this planet. A remarkable sort of “social distancing”, after all, although not exactly the same kind as the one now being used against the coronavirus!

The incredible error that some people are making, about not treating neoliberalism as an antechamber of neofascism, became very obvious to me when I was reading the book, “Hamilton: The Revolution”, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, about the hugely successful musical first performed in New York City in 2015, during the Obama administration. One of the most important aspects of that musical was the frequent use of black actors and singers to portray several of the most important figures in the life of one of the USA’s “founding fathers”, Alexander Hamilton, including such lily-white characters as the first US president, “Indian” fighter and unrepentant slaveowner, George Washington. A kind of reverse “cultural appropriation” that became immensely popular, at least in theoretically “compassionate liberal” circles, when Barack Obama was president.

The dominant, mainstream, wing in the Democratic Party, currently being led by Joe Biden, would have everyone believe that they represent a more progressive kind of capitalism than the kind favoured by Donald Trump and his ultra-conservative minions. Unlike their isolationist Republican adversaries, they claim to be fervently anti-racist and anti-sexist, as well as being less elitist, less militarist and even less imperialist than those other jerks. Which sounds like it could be true, at least to a certain extent, whenever Donald Trump starts sounding off, as he is constantly doing, about how wonderful he thinks all the white supremacists in the USA really are, or about how good it is to go around grabbing women by the pussy, or about how what a great guy Vladimir Putin really is, or about how pro-Chinese the WHO leaders unfortunately are, or about how we should be injecting people nowadays with disinfectants, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

The problem with those Democratic Party pretensions is that the kind of neoliberal policies that have often been promoted in the past by leaders like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, cooperating in a “bipartisan” way with the Republicans by agreeing to cut back on various social-welfare programs, is completely unacceptable. The underprivileged people in the USA have had their backs against the wall with extreme poverty of neoliberal origin for the past forty years, and it does not help them in the slightest for elitist Democrats to “occasionally” side with even more elitist Republicans, just in order to “make it possible to cooperate on running the country in these polarized times”.

In reality, neoliberalism is nothing but “fascism with a human face”, falsely anti-elitist, falsely anti-racist and falsely anti-sexist. In the USA as in so many other countries, the people at the bottom of the heap are constantly having to put up with even more difficult living and working conditions nowadays than they already had back when neoliberalism was first introduced. This has been obvious from the very beginning for people with a democratic socialist point of view, and has become ten times more obvious for everyone during the current pandemic, which unfortunately includes the extremely negative, economic and social consequences of such old-fashioned, but still absolutely necessary, virus-control policies as the “social distancing” mentioned above.

What some people refer to nowadays as “racialized” populations, like the USA’s black and Latino minorities, not to mention the “native American” population, are suffering much more intensely from neoliberalism, and from the corona crisis, than are people belonging to the white majority. Although, as usual in such discussions, it must also never be forgotten that poor whites are also suffering in even greater numbers, if not to the same degree, simply because there are so many more millions of them than there are millions of people belonging to specific minority populations. Women are also suffering much more intensely than men, all over the world, for the simple reason that they too tend to be much more often situated at the bottom of the heap, working in excessively difficult, less well-paid jobs more frequently than most men do. Particularly when it comes to taking care of most of the world’s children, and also taking care of older, handicapped people, many of whom are now living in chronically under-staffed care homes.

Mainstream Democrats in the USA, and people like them in every other country in the world, may still want to argue that their “fascism with a human face” is still preferable to the “fascism with an ape face” being supported by almost everyone in the Republican Party, and other parties like it, all over the world. And it is nice, after all, for world leaders everywhere to at least pretend not to support such disgusting ideologies as racism and sexism, like most of the leaders of the USA used to do when the “Hamilton” musical was first performed five years ago. But the fact remains that neoliberal/neofascist elitism automatically begets racism, sexism, militarism, imperialism and all the other rotten political attitudes. Which means that merely having black people play the roles of white revolutionaries from the past is not really such a good idea after all.

Especially when the revolutionaries being portrayed were only opposed to direct control of their fortunes by the British monarchy and its empire. Those (temporary) American anti-imperialists included people like Alexander Hamilton who advocated for economic nationalism (the infant industry argument) in order to escape from indirect British economic control, but also people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated for the much more dangerous attitude of economic liberalism (laissez-faire). None of those revolutionaries, however, had the slightest intention of setting up a nation that would be entirely free from racism, sexism, or elitism in general, nor, for that matter, free from militarism or free from post-revolutionary, expansionist imperialism.

Getting back to our own period of history, the neoliberal/neofascist virus has infected practically all the world’s political organizations, not just most of those operating in the USA, and not just the ones belonging to the traditional, conservative or liberal spectrums. The world’s remaining “communist” parties, or at least those still in power, have also long since abandoned any pretensions that they may have had when they first started out, about being genuinely in favour of worker-peasant control over their countries. The ruling party in China being the most important example of an organization still officially using the word “communist” in its title while practising a curious combination of “red-billionaire” neoliberalism and neofascism instead. Another fascinating example of retaining one’s initial title while still doing exactly the opposite also applies to almost every (formerly) social-democratic organization on this planet, particularly those also retaining power, or any large degree of popular support in any particular country.

Right here in Québec, we are also living through a very horrendous period of history, particularly because of the tens of thousands of seniors already living with numerous kinds of severe health problems, prior to the arrival of the even more murderous coronavirus, and now dying off like flies in government-run, as well as in private-capitalist, care homes. Just like in the rest of the Western world, the vast majority of those now dying from COVID-19 come from those disgusting places euphemistically called “care” centres. Particularly since the provincial government made the initial mistake of concentrating all of its anti-viral strategy on the hospitals, postponing “non-essential” treatment of non-viral diseases for a later date, rather than on the considerably more dangerous care centres. Before coming up with the even more irrational idea of trying to convince hundreds of other people, including medical specialists who are currently under-employed in the hospitals, into helping the extremely overworked nurses and orderlies still toiling away, and also sometimes dying on the job, in those antediluvian care centres.

Where the under-staffing remains so severe that most of Québec’s disabled seniors are nevertheless still being treated like garbage in both the public and the private sections of that network, which have been denounced for decades as the most horrible institutions in Québec for anyone having to work there, let alone for anyone having to live there. This is the worst possible example of neoliberalism morphing into neofascism that currently exists in Québec, as well as underlining perfectly well Clifford Lincoln’s point about short-term political strategies. Simply because everyone in power in the entire world knew at least since the 1980s that a significant percentage of the hundreds of millions of pre-baby-boomers (born before 1945), and the baby-boomers themselves (born between 1945 and 1965), would need urgent medical help right now, forty years after neoliberalism began. To be sure, the majority of the world’s seniors, those living alongside their younger relatives in poorer countries (or poorer regions) where very few people of any age have access to modern medical care, are not necessarily better off.

Once again, in Québec just like everywhere else, the politicians responsible for this sorry state of affairs do not just come from the officially conservative, or officially liberal, parties mentioned above. They also came from governments run in the past by the Parti Québécois, a mildly left-wing nationalist party that has now been reduced to a tiny shadow of its former self. The PQ was originally founded in 1968, and started out promoting a program combining the long-term goals of Québec independence and social-democracy. It managed to get itself elected to provincial power, under various different leaders, from 1976 to 1985, as well as from 1994 to 2003 and, most recently, from 2012 to 2014.

From the very beginning, however, the PQ’s devotion to both of its original principles constantly wavered, under the ongoing barrage of pro-federalist and pro-business lobbies, that not only controlled anti-PQ parties like the Québec Liberal Party but also influenced several indecisive PQ leaders as well. I was also briefly involved with the PQ from 1981, when I served as an unsuccessful electoral candidate, until 1983, when I left the party to protest against its anti-labour stance, adopted during the worldwide recession caused by the central bankers’ monetarist “war on inflation”.

Of all the PQ leaders who came to power between 1976 and 2014, the least social-democratic (as well as the least nationalist) may very well have been premier Lucien Bouchard (1996-2001), who helped set up the system of partly public and partly private care homes for handicapped seniors that is currently responsible for almost all the COVID-19 deaths in Québec. Bouchard’s initial “contribution” to today’s care-home tragedy, as well as that of more recent PQ governments, however, was completely overshadowed by the much more bureaucratic machinations of the Québec Liberal Party’s health and social services ministers, particularly during Dr. Gaétan Barrette’s period of office (2014-2018).

But many of the other PQ leaders over the years also wavered from their original leftwing nationalist points of view, such as premier Bernard Landry (2001-2003), who was an enthusiastic supporter of the 1988 Canada-US (neoliberal) free-trade deal that eventually became NAFTA when Mexico joined (in 1994). Québec’s current premier since 2018, François Legault, was also a former PQ health minister (2002-2003), before quitting the PQ and founding his own political party, the Coalition Action Québec (CAQ), in 2011. The CAQ does not officially support either Québec independence or social-democracy as such, although it does not seem to be quite as firmly opposed to those two ideas as is the number one party in the official opposition, the aforementioned Québec Liberal Party, at least not until recently.

The PQ and the CAQ also belong to the same set of non-traditional political parties in the electoral part of the world that I was mentioning earlier, that are not part of the traditional set of parties possessing official titles like “Liberal” or “Conservative”, or titles often associated with such other old-fashioned, elitist-sounding words as “Republican”. Active politicians nowadays like François Legault therefore also seem to belong to the set of somewhat less fanatic allies of private or state capitalism, such as the Democratic Party’s main leaders, who do not seem to be quite as neoliberal, or as neofascist, as professional goofballs like Donald Trump.

Be that as it may, it would be just another mistake to conclude this blogpost on any kind of positive note, like those constantly being proposed by all the world’s eternal optimists. Who are always suggesting that we should be profiting from the current pandemic in order to do everything completely differently, “after the crisis is over”. Things like dumping neoliberalism and neofascism into the garbage once and for all, making sure that the health system is functioning properly and not just for rich people, as well as the education system and all the other social services. Getting rid of short-term electioneering and short-term profit maximization forever, and replacing all of that with the kind of “anticipatory, preventive and reformative planning” that Clifford Lincoln was talking about. And just basically behaving in a completely different way from that of the ultra-right-wing protester in front of the legislature in Albany, New York, last week, who held up an utterly pathetic poster accusing Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo of being a “communist”, because he too may have used the word “planning” in one of his speeches about the virus attack.

Of course I agree with Lincoln and all those other optimistic people that we should be using the crisis in order to do all those things. But social change of a fundamental nature can never be brought about simply by wishing that it were so. Personally, I am not aware of anything going on right now that could convince me that most human beings nowadays are truly ready to agitate in a really major way, for any or all of the things that we most definitely ought to be doing in the coming months, years and decades. In order to get rid of the legacy of the garbage policies that most of the world’s private and state capitalists have been following for the past forty years.

It seems to me that most of the people running the world nowadays are either complete and total reactionaries, or almost complete and total reactionaries. The people at the top, or near the top, do not seem to be willing to give up their numerous economic, political, social and/or cultural privileges so that the people on the bottom, or near the bottom, will be able to live decent lives again, in some cases, or to live decent lives for the first time ever, in many other cases. Most of the people possessing much more money, much more power and much more influence than everyone else, really and truly enjoy the current situation of facing a fake opposition, rather than the true and honest opponents that they used to face fifty or a hundred years ago. Way back when most of the communists really were communists, the social-democrats really were socialists, the left-wing nationalists really were left-wing nationalists and most of the union leaders really acted like union leaders. Rather than nowadays when most of those people have given up on all of those things, or do not truly believe in any of them any more.

Why help out the really old people, the really sick or handicapped people, the really poor people, the really oppressed people, the poorly educated people (aside from those who manage to get elected to office anyway), the people who never get to eat much, the people out of work for for the past several decades, the people constantly working compulsory overtime, the people getting murdered or beat up or shoved onto the ground all the time, the people who never receive adequate quantities of protective medical equipment, or sufficient quantities of any other useful kind of equipment no matter what they do—when no one is forcing folks on the top, or near the top, to do any of those things? In other words, the coronavirus is just another consequence of the virus of power.