I was a bit surprised this week to see an article in the Globe and Mail about the future of the NDP Party in British Columbia. It's not so much that the article wasn't timely but rather that the NDP's analysis of the their own failings in the campaign seem to me to have missed two central factors of the story: their own history during the 1990s and the new political culture.
The Globe and Mail article spoke about a post-election document that was leaked to the press in which Brian Topp, Dix's campaign director, outlined his thoughts on the failure of the campaign. Among his observations Topp argued that the campaign should have turned negative. The leaked document emerged at a time when Dix himself was asking the party to stay out of the game of negative ads. He said, "We didn't fail because we were too positive. We failed, in part because we couldn't communicate that message in time to people..."
I think Dix is half right. It wasn't that they could not communicate about positive and negative ads but rather that they could not communicate why they are relevant at this time in history.
The fact is that left leaning parties, in Canada and around the world, have had to adjust to a new political reality that makes their "message" very difficult to communicate. Starting in about the 1980s in Britain and the United States we saw the emergence of a new kind of conservative politics that has come to be known as neoliberalism. This ideology has spread, with some up and downs, for about thirty years and has shifted western political culture quite dramatically. Neoliberalism is, and of course the definition is contested, the idea that the state should move aside in favour of freer markets, less restrictive regulation and a reduced welfare state. Neoliberalism has been interpreted and "marketed," if I can use that word, as an ideology that promotes freer individual rights and, in some cases, more democratic or local control of decision making processes. The idea is to "get the government / state out of our lives."
Although it emerged as a conservative idea the tenets of neo-liberalism have spread into other parts of political culture because the "getting the government out of our lives" attitude works well in a society that is generally atomized, which means that individuals are more concerned with their self-interest than with the interest of the collective.
Most will remember the mantra of the 1990s that the "government is too big" and that we need to "cut government." These cries to reduce the size of the state started to feed into the anti-tax campaigns that have come to define contemporary politics. Many individuals assume that "taxes" are bad in and of themselves and as a result we have lost the nuanced discussions about the role of taxes in shaping a virtuous civil society. Dix tried to articulate this message by talking about pre-distributive justice in which the state creates the conditions in which one can succeed: thus his idea of collecting and using taxes to fund more public services like education. Whichever way you "pitch" this however people nowadays hear "government and taxes" in the same breath.
In this context the Left also runs afoul of its own political base. Traditionally labour and social activists are the strongest supporters of New Democratic parties. In this new political culture those two groups may find themselves at odds. And even those who seek to assert their right to work for good wages and working conditions can also feel the pull of the mantra that "we need to get the government out of our lives." The political culture of smaller government and anti-tax sentiment stretches across the political spectrum.
Now some may argue that campaigns are different from party platforms but if it was just the campaign that was a problem why did the usual party faithful not come out to vote? I would argue that that the history of the NDP in British Columbia during the 1990s laid the groundwork for the loss in 2013. The NDP did not lose this year because they failed to send the message that polite politics is a better way to play the game; they lost because they failed to communicate the message that taxation and spending can be part of reconstructing a strong civil society and that they, the BC NDP, are the party to carry that out.
