As I write this, an election in my home province of Ontario in Canada is over. The Liberal Party won, and unseated the Conservative government.

Rather than go into the usual I’m-still-a-good- person rag, which is usually a prelude to a fuss of one type or another, it seems best to discuss how to get over such a loss.

The most obvious choice is to take a vacation from politics. For the pundit type, this is of course impossible to do, but for the plain citizen it is an option. In fact, it qualifies as “the road less traveled” in today’s politics- saturated age.

The buzz-phrase “everything is political” is really based upon Nietzschean reasoning and the observation that power in a democracy is sought through the electoral process, rather than by other means such as: mastery of a skill; seeking power through personal performance; or something as supposedly simple as weight lifting. All of these are means to gain power; politics is only one of them. That phrase should really be confined to interpretative matters – used in a way similar to “survival of the fittest” – to explain the behavior of people by focusing on a narrow slice of their activities. You can easily convince yourself of the vacuity of that phrase as an explanatory principle by substituting nine others that are just as impossible to criticize directly, such as: “everything is social”; “everything is economic”; “everything revolves around reproduction”; etc. Each of these are as much proof against criticism as the one at the top of the paragraph; except for the specific sphere of human behavior, they are all semantically equivalent. Put together, they multiple count.

So you don’t need to take the above seriously as an objection to you “dropping out” of the political process for a time. There’s a lot to be said for pulling out: it reduces your psychological dependency on politics.

People that are overdependant do tend to cultivate an abusive side out of self-defense. Why join them?

Another way, for those who prefer to stay in the game of politics, and for those who want to jump in after a duck-out, is to become a critic of the new majority party. Politics has been sufficiently deviancy-downed to the point where there are more than a few people who would see the above as a license to “git ‘em!” Such people tend to live on a bluff, and the pose they assume is that of a thug.

There’s no need to mix yourself in with that kind of loutishness for the sake of future victory. Politics will always attract the bullyish mentality, but tolerating this and accepting it are two different things. If you see a quest for revenge as the only way to be a critic, then this to-do list will help you cultivate a better way to be oppositional:

1. Every party has both principles and people. As long as living people are bound to ideational principles, there is bound to be some hypocrisy and laxness with regards to some of them. An effective critic might find lots of happiness in holding the newly-elected party to all of them.
2. This is usually done in relation to campaign promises, but the history of politics for at least as long as I’ve been watching has shown that this approach is ineffective; you just get dismissed out of hand or get congratulated as a good mouth by your side. Concentrating on the party’s basic “mission statement” rather than specific planks might be a better choice. Example: the Democratic party has long held to equality of opportunity as an ideal. This standard can be applied as a stick to any Democratic program that has a distinctly Toryish cast to it.
3. As an application of the above, the confinement of yourself to the big issues, as opposed to nit-picking, should lead to more efficacy on your part. Bringing up a spending program which puts $10 million in the hands of “zeppelin producers” will certainly bring you popularity in the trivia world, and get you kudos for careful reading if you find such a program that hasn’t already been passed from reporter to reporter to reporter, but few others will care. If you find happiness showing off your scrupulosity, more power and friendship to you, but social popularity and political efficacy overlap far less than you might think.
4. Don’t dream of the “killer blow.” Such successes in the past just call forth candidates that are more slippery and thus harder to put on the defensive. Tackling the slickster as if they were self-righteous just get you pegged as either pugnacious or as yesterday’s man. (Once again: if throwing those barbs is consistent with maintaining your social life, have a blast, but remember that the proviso in #3 still applies.)

The above are for the party stalwarts. For those more philosophical, there is a grander scheme to undertake, one that I myself have advocated for Ontarians:

Become a partisan of the legislative/democratic style of government.

This might sound a little loopy, but it does make sense when you consider why legislatures were put on this earth to begin with. It wasn’t a simple matter of division of labor; there was actually a moral purpose behind it: “those that doeth evil hateth the light.”

The light that that snippet from the Bible (John 3:20) refers to is the light of God, but it has been adapted in a democracy to: no government action without public scrutiny. The bulk of historical events have shown a firm, if not 100%, correlation between secrecy and corruption.

This may sound like old-style liberal talk, but I don’t really believe I’ll court any controversy by saying that conservatives know when this principle stops. Those that take it as a license to go Ramparts are not really the type that can call themselves conservatives with much accuracy.

The reason why this is associated with the Left is that the Left has a penchant for occupying the moral high ground and then using that “squatter’s right” as a club to beat the other parties with. I’m not advocating this as a proclamatory measure, but as a principle to be quietly followed. One way of doing so – which works when the good-guy act is proclaimed by the new leader – is to tell off his or her gravy boys with the added kicker that they can ask for “help” through the legislature, through C- SPAN.

In otherwords: “put it in writing” as adapted for politics. Fill in those forms, pal, and kindly leave your name for the FOI officer.

Of course, if this approach seems too good- governmentish for some of you, there’s always that vacation, the taking up of a different hobby. Leaving the political whirl behind.

“Êtes-vous vous connaissez les raisons pour le grêve-social récent par le Gauche dans la France?...”

(Awright, so political voyeurism is harder to give up than I implied above. But at least you can displace it for a time.)