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rfmcdonaldWhile it's always worthwhile to be skeptical of the National Post's take on Canadian politics--I say this as someone who leans left of centre, probably; your mileage will certainly vary--I can say that Jordan Michael Smith's essay "The rise and fall of Michael Ignatieff", criticizing Michael Ignatieff's missteps as Liberal Party leader, is reasonably accurate in its argument that Michael Ignatieff failed as a politician because of his style as an intellectual.
I do think that Smith overstretches his argument a bit. Intellectualism as such isn't obviously a problem. Let's not consider Stephen Harper's own history as a public intellectual of sorts. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the man whose mantle Ignatieff was to take on, was himself very much a cosmopolitan free thnker and intellectual entrepreneur, if one who had the good sense to actually live in Canada for an extended period of time before his election, Even if we don't go to Trudeau, however, we can still look at Ignatieff's predecessor, the unjustly displaced Stéphane Dion. Dion's an intellectual par excellence, developing the Chrétien government's response to Québec separatism, for instance. but as a politician, Dion lacks charisma. Critically for a Canadian politician, he lacks an easy fluency in the English language. And yet despite this, back in December 2008 Dion nearly became prime minister in a Liberal-NDP coalition government. (Note that this coalition government would have had the Liberals in top position, not the other way around as would be the case now if circumstances permitted.) His initiative was stymied by, among other things, the importation of Ignatieff as the Liberal Party's golden boy by the backroom elite that ran the party.
It turns out that an ill-tempered Facebook post by Dion's wife in 2009 complaining that Ignatieff had failed to connect--that Liberal support fell from 26% under her husband to 23% under Ignatieff--if anything understated the problem. In May's election, Dion kept his riding since 1996, Montréal riding of Saint-Laurent--Cartierville, winning this time by a plurality only because he too lost vote to the NDP wave that overturned the established political order across Québec, one of the few Liberals to keep his seat. How did Ignatieff do? In his Etobicoke--Lakeshore, a riding in Toronto with a Liberal history of comparable depth to that of Saint-Laurent--Cartierville, he lost to the Conservative candidate, his status as party leader doing nothing to keep the Liberal share of the vote from plummeting just over 11%.
Dion has had much less of a history of being a public intellectual, in print and on television, than Ignatieff. Dion, however, has been a more successful politician than Ignatieff, his goals and projects being undermined by the party itself not by the hostility of the electorate. Why? My guess is that intellectual though he may be, Dion is perceived as someone much more real than Ignatieff, someone who actually cultivates a connection with his electorate. Ignatieff's failure to actually live in his riding is emblematic of his failures, of his performance as an intellectual who couldn't engage convincingly with people. Dion, at least, was human enough to seem the bumbling professor. I'd heard Ignatieff compared to an unusually unexpressive android. Even a stiff Harper came off as more relatable. Ignatieff very nearly convinced me not to bother voting. (I ended up voting NDP instead, since the NDP included personalities who presented ideas in an engaging manner.)
What does all this mean? Apart from providing a necessary post-mortem for the Liberal Party of Canada if it's to escape third-party status, it's important for Canadians to know that intellectuals as such aren't political liabilities in the Canadian political system, that anti-intellectualism should be seen as a non-starter. Any number of intellectuals have succeeded as federal party leaders and as prime ministers. It's just a matter of intellectuals who aspire to be politicians being genuine, personable even.
After Ignatieff became Liberal leader, the intellect and eloquence that had catapulted him to this pinnacle would also produce his political undoing. The nakedness of his ambition, the sheer audaciousness and presumption involved, was off-putting to Canadians. In addition, stringent campaign finance laws resulted in major advantages for the Conservatives: The Tories, maintaining a superior grassroots funding initiative, were able to tap into vast reserves of cash unavailable to Ignatieff and company. The result was an endless barrage of unanswered ads targeting Ignatieff personally as a carpetbagger.
[. . .]
Ignatieff suffered avoidable self-inflicted wounds as well. In prematurely announcing his intention to force an election in September of 2009, he lost a large section of the election-weary Canadian electorate. His book True Patriot Love, released the same year, was a ham-handed attempt to establish his Canadian bona fides. “Loving a country is an act of imagination,” he wrote in the book — a line that caused one reviewer to quip: “I’m not even sure what it means, but you wouldn’t write that if you were really secretly a Harvard professor at heart. Right?”
Ignatieff never overcame the impression he was in the country only insofar as he could profit from it. He suffered from the fact intellectuals do insincerity much more clumsily than “natural” politicians. After making a major push to fight climate change in his leadership run, for instance, he quickly jettisoned the idea in favour of a toothless but more popular Liberal plan devoid of specific targets. “You’ve got to work with the grain of Canadians and not against them,” he declared weakly.
[. . .]
This is a tale with many morals. But one clear takeaway from Michael Ignatieff’s attempt to storm the citadel of power is that makeovers, particularly by intellectuals trying to transform themselves into politicians, have limits. Once Ignatieff established himself as a cosmopolitan free thinker and intellectual entrepreneur, it was difficult for him ever to posture as an ordinary Canadian pol. Most intellectuals looking to enter politics presumably would not hamstring themselves by living outside their native country for nearly three decades and then return only to aim so soon for the top job.
I do think that Smith overstretches his argument a bit. Intellectualism as such isn't obviously a problem. Let's not consider Stephen Harper's own history as a public intellectual of sorts. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the man whose mantle Ignatieff was to take on, was himself very much a cosmopolitan free thnker and intellectual entrepreneur, if one who had the good sense to actually live in Canada for an extended period of time before his election, Even if we don't go to Trudeau, however, we can still look at Ignatieff's predecessor, the unjustly displaced Stéphane Dion. Dion's an intellectual par excellence, developing the Chrétien government's response to Québec separatism, for instance. but as a politician, Dion lacks charisma. Critically for a Canadian politician, he lacks an easy fluency in the English language. And yet despite this, back in December 2008 Dion nearly became prime minister in a Liberal-NDP coalition government. (Note that this coalition government would have had the Liberals in top position, not the other way around as would be the case now if circumstances permitted.) His initiative was stymied by, among other things, the importation of Ignatieff as the Liberal Party's golden boy by the backroom elite that ran the party.
It turns out that an ill-tempered Facebook post by Dion's wife in 2009 complaining that Ignatieff had failed to connect--that Liberal support fell from 26% under her husband to 23% under Ignatieff--if anything understated the problem. In May's election, Dion kept his riding since 1996, Montréal riding of Saint-Laurent--Cartierville, winning this time by a plurality only because he too lost vote to the NDP wave that overturned the established political order across Québec, one of the few Liberals to keep his seat. How did Ignatieff do? In his Etobicoke--Lakeshore, a riding in Toronto with a Liberal history of comparable depth to that of Saint-Laurent--Cartierville, he lost to the Conservative candidate, his status as party leader doing nothing to keep the Liberal share of the vote from plummeting just over 11%.
Dion has had much less of a history of being a public intellectual, in print and on television, than Ignatieff. Dion, however, has been a more successful politician than Ignatieff, his goals and projects being undermined by the party itself not by the hostility of the electorate. Why? My guess is that intellectual though he may be, Dion is perceived as someone much more real than Ignatieff, someone who actually cultivates a connection with his electorate. Ignatieff's failure to actually live in his riding is emblematic of his failures, of his performance as an intellectual who couldn't engage convincingly with people. Dion, at least, was human enough to seem the bumbling professor. I'd heard Ignatieff compared to an unusually unexpressive android. Even a stiff Harper came off as more relatable. Ignatieff very nearly convinced me not to bother voting. (I ended up voting NDP instead, since the NDP included personalities who presented ideas in an engaging manner.)
What does all this mean? Apart from providing a necessary post-mortem for the Liberal Party of Canada if it's to escape third-party status, it's important for Canadians to know that intellectuals as such aren't political liabilities in the Canadian political system, that anti-intellectualism should be seen as a non-starter. Any number of intellectuals have succeeded as federal party leaders and as prime ministers. It's just a matter of intellectuals who aspire to be politicians being genuine, personable even.
