Further Adventures in the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

(Editorial note: American content below the fold)

If you’ve been paying attention to the prorogation of the Canadian Parliament — and I’m having a hard time paying attention to much else — you’ll know that a common talking point for those who support the decision is that “average Canadians” don’t care that much about the two week hiatus.  As Graham Fox who was on Power and Politics noted yesterday,

I don’t think that Canadians who are out there in the country getting their kids from school, doing their shopping, getting to hockey and all of those things really care about prorogation. And I think in this case that it is a very run-of-the-mill story. I don’t know that many Canadians know that in the last twenty years Parliament was prorogued fourteen times, which puts the average session of Parliament to a year and a quarter. So this is quite an ordinary thing and I think when people start looking at it, they’re not going to care. They’re going to turn on the hockey and care about that instead.

The more I hear that line — that “average Canadians” don’t care about this issue –  the angrier I get. It’s not that I think that Fox and others who are offering this line of thought intend to demean the people about whom they’re talking, but that is, to my mind, what they wind up doing. It’s a sort of subliminal line that goes as much to what trend-setters and decision-makers think the public ought to care about as it does to describing what the public in fact does care about.

And in so doing, I think it winds up feeding people a line about what the scope of interest, understanding, and engagement of the “average Canadian” happens to be that, in selling individuals fall short of a robust sense of citizenship and civic engagement, seems to me to be a clear if subtle example of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Looking at Fox’s comment from a slightly different angle, here is what I hear him basically saying,

You Canadians out there in the country, you’re busy getting your kids from school, doing your shopping, getting to hockey and all those things that define your lives and your identities. You don’t really need to care about all this prorogation business. This is a very run-of-the-mill story and, after all, Parliament has been “prorogued” — whatever that means, am I right?, am I right? — fourteen times over the last twenty years! This is really a very ordinary thing, nothing with which you need to concern yourselves. You should go turn on the hockey game, now there’s something you can get into. Go Leafs!

The twin ideas that “average Canadians” couldn’t possibly care about the procedural and democratic ongoings of their government — indeed, shouldn’t really be concerned with them — and that those people who do care — like the now more than 66,000 strong Facebook group against prorogation — couldn’t possibly be “average Canadians” is just wholesale offensive to me. It smacks of the kind of defeatist and dismissive attitude that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives have been charged with maudlining Canadians and Canadian democracy in their governance. So while offensive, it’s not much of a surprise that this would be their line of defense vis-a-vis the decision to prorogue Parliament and avoid being held publicly accountable.

This is, in fact, a beef I have with conservatives in general in terms of their appeals to the “average person” be they Canadian or American.

As much as I may not jive with Andrew Sullivan’s harsh treatment of Sarah Palin, her “Joe Six-Pack” and “Hockey Mom” lines throughout the election drove me absolutely bonkers precisely because they so smacked of just this kind of soft bigotry. Neo-populists like Sarah Palin connected with millions of Americans and conservatives/Republicans, generally, lash out at liberals/Democrats regularly by these appeals to the “common person”. And yet, they insist on defining the common person using the lowest common denominators available. I just don’t buy that any American can be adequately summed up by their beer preference or the sports events they attend because of their children’s participation and to so, even casually as a rhetorical tool, strikes me as both counter productive and deeply cynical.

Rod Dreher summed it up nicely back in October 2008 saying,

So I was on Larry King Live last night for one segment, talking about my doubts about Palin. Opposite me was the radio talker Lars Larson, who kept robotically repeating the line that he trusts Palin’s “judgment,” and that she talks in ways that the “East Coast media elites” hate, but that normal people understand. I should have pointed out that that’s an insult to the people Larson thinks he’s defending; if expecting a politician running for vice president of the United States to give clear, lucid answers to basic questions having to do with running the country is somehow elitist, and rattling off discombobulated talking points is how normal non-elitist people talk, I fail to see how that’s an argument in favor of the masses.

One step further, it just seems insulting to suggest that somehow “average Americans” wouldn’t want to be educated, have fulfilling and challenging careers, be materially prosperous, expose themselves to different experience and cultures, and the like — and that, by definition, to want such things is to not be an “average American”. This is especially so given that many of the folks who spit out such lines often revel in precisely those quality of life benefits, rendering their political and cultural analysis starkly disingenuous and hypocritical.

These are old waters, I know, but it never ceases to amaze me just how ubiquitous this kind of bigotry of the “masses” is, how often it is used to provide a surreptitiously brow-beaten impression and suggestion of who “average people” are and ought to be,  and I think there is value in calling it out whenever encountered.

Tagged as: average Canadians, conservatives, proroguing Parliament, sarah palin, soft bigotry of low expectations, Stephen Harper