REGIME STUMBLING IN THE DARK

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ARTIFICIAL NEGATIVITY?

In my last post, I explored the dimensions of an informal governance structure of the ruling faction of the managerial class in Canada, examining how they clandestinely redirected tax dollars into the colonization of civil society, creating advocacy groups that petitioned for managerial class values and positions that might not have been achievable if pursued through the legislative institutions, with their higher bars of transparency and accountability. This began with the “social animation” of groups that directly petitioned the administrative state itself and then, following the patriation of the constitution in 1982, with the embedding of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, pivoted to generating “Charter groups,” that aimed to change the legal and constitutional regime of the country through making innovative legal arguments in front of the supreme court.

I also in that last post reviewed the ideas of Paul Piccone, along the lines that the managerial class’s administrative state could offset its natural inclination toward bureaucratic sclerosis by directly funding opposition groups, so that the ruling class continued to get genuine signals around the attitudes and actions of its organic opposition. He called this process artificial negativity. Piccone argued though that the social engineering imperative of the managerial class meant that the administrative state was always in danger of undermining its own artificial negativity. A bit like the old story of the scorpion taking the frog across the river. It’s just its nature to bureaucratize and engineer social formations.

I then raised the question of whether this “social animation” in Canada had ever been anything other than failed artificial negativity. However that is, given its complete colonization by the administrative state, the question naturally arose as to whether this subsuming of artificial negativity by social animation resulted in Piccone’s predicted political rudderlessness, rendering the ruling managerial class incapable of anticipating or monitoring organic political currents within Canadian civil society, including those of explicit political dissidence?

In fact, I’ll make two arguments here: one based upon a short term monitoring and analysis failure, and another that has had a longer pedigree — predating the current Trudeau puppet show. To best understand the situations I’ll be discussing here, it would be beneficial to know a little more Canadian history than probably the overwhelming majority of non-Canadians know. Though, frankly, I expect much of what I’ll address isn’t even familiar to the majority of Canadians. Unlike the Americans, British, French, etc., Canadians are weirdly oblivious to their own history. There’s an interesting discussion as to why that may be, but this isn’t the occasion for that discussion. Plus, I’m well aware that this historical Canadian background may be too much of a diversion for many readers, so I’ve relegated it to the very end of this post, kind of like an appendix: for those who’d like to know more.

So, first, let’s look at the short term monitoring failure argument. While I clearly cannot read minds, and without being able to it’s hard to be certain, it did look like the Canadian federal government, particularly the Trudeau puppet show at its centre, was entirely caught off guard by the rise and size of the trucker convoy resistance to their administrative biopolitics. This was evident in the early efforts to first ignore the convoy then to dismiss it with the now infamous “fringe minority” characterization. Further, the apparent assumption that the convoy and the related protest movement could be quickly disarmed and dispatched with, through a few well placed ad hominem slurs, suggests that they had no idea of the scale of what they were dealing with, nor how deeply rooted it was in popular Canadian sentiment. But these observations are just the low hanging fruit.

As I’ve discussed at length on this substack, the Canadian administrative state and its political brain trust in the PMO (aka the Trudeau puppet show), was time and again outflanked by the truckers and their informal leadership, on both strategy and messaging (see here), and they were oblivious to the prospect that the truckers movement may well constitute a new kind of class alliance for which the regime was entirely unprepared (see here). In any event, clearly when the Trudeau puppet show and its administrative state made their move to suppress their political opposition, they were completely taken aback to discover that this trucker movement had maneuvered to drive a wedge into the assumed consensus of managerial class rule (see here). All of this was such a blow to the regime that they had to take a severe face-losing about face, completely reversing their initial hawkishness. Indeed, this capitulation was so humiliating, that it’s possible that it was only the world’s diversion of attention to the Russian invasion that saved Trudeau’s job (see here).

That the feds seemed to be so completely taken off guard by the trucker’s movement does suggest that Piccone was right. The ruling faction of the managerial class, through their administrative state, so completely censored organic opposition, putting all their eggs in the baskets of their own administratively generated “opposition” — those who represented the causes that advanced the interests of managerial liberalism — that when an organic, grassroots protest movement arose out of Canadian civil society, they were blindsided and dumbfounded.

The response of the federal government to the truckers was perceived around the world as an extraordinarily heavy handed exercise of brute force. This is not how the managerial class wants its rule to appear. It’s much happier playing the part of the wily ventriloquist. This is the kind of international image that starts drawing attention to a regime’s systemic mistreatment of its people. Too much of that sort of thing and you start looking like the Soviet Union — precisely the sort of image that managerial liberalism is supposed to avoid.

As I mentioned above, though, while the ruling managerial class’s inadequate preparation for, or response to, the trucker convoy provides an example of an acute failure of the managerial class and its administrative state to effectively monitor popular political sentiments in Canada, there’s also evidence that this may be in fact just a more dramatic illustration of a chronic failure along these line. Consider these facts.

Five of Canada's last seven federal elections have resulted in minority governments. For those unfamiliar with parliamentary systems: these are governments which lack sufficient popular support for the governing party to win enough seats in parliament to hold off, on its own, votes that would defeat the government and require new elections. (Though, in some instances, other parties might be invited to form governments, if they can.) Thus, the governing party has to compromise to win the support of another party (or more) on any of its legislation. The lifespan of such governments are usually far shorter than majority governments — often lasting less than a year.

Even more striking than the five out of seven number, though, is to put those elections into historical context; extending over a period of 18 years, they totaled 1/3 of all the minority governments that Canada has ever had in its 155 year history. That averages to a minority government every 2.57 years in the 18 years, since 2004. In comparison there was a minority government every 13.7 years in the 137 years prior to 2004. It seems that in the 21st century there has been a major dis-alignment between the Canadian people and the political parties. Either the parties don't know how to capture and marshal this new politics, or maybe the new politics entails a pervasive lost of trust in the parties — or even the governing institutions themselves. Or all of the above?

In any case, it appears that the ruling managerial class, so swaggeringly confident in their political ventriloquism, for close to a generation, now, have found themselves unable to orchestrate sufficient political legitimacy to establish sustainable parliamentary power. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this new era of political dis-alignment begins about a generation after the constitutionalizing of the Charter: with all the manipulative social animation to leverage the managerial liberalist agenda through the supreme court, as part of the clandestine governance ploy discussed in the last post. If we chronologically follow the growth of such “Charter groups,” promoting such “Charter values,” 2004 seems a pretty likely timeline for the impact of an eroding political consensus, occasioning a concomitant political dis-alignment with institutional organs of power.

Correlation, of course, doesn’t equal causation. The correlation though, given the proximity of events in Canada to the expectations resulting from Piccone’s theoretical analysis, is intriguing. It certainly invites the application of such analysis in other national contexts.

It is worth noting, in closing, though, that there may be something even more specific at work in all of this. The managerial liberalist agenda only works through artificial negativity if the opposition being underwritten serves the purpose of providing further fodder for the mill of bureaucratic paternalism and social engineering. If the real opposition is in fact opposed to managerial liberalism itself, particularly in this case, opposed to the biopolitics of its medical administrative state, can they really underwrite such opposition? Wouldn’t that be regime suicide? That does seem to be the logic of Piccone’s analysis. This is something that we’ll have to explore more closely in the future.

So, if you’re not yet, please do…

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KIND OF LIKE AN APPENDIX

What many (including lots of Canadians), especially Americans, don’t appreciate about official Canada is that it was founded as anti-revolutionary societies. The English of Upper Canada were largely United Empire Loyalists, who fled to British territory in response to the American Revolution. While the French, insulated by the then formidable obstacle of the Atlantic Ocean, and having a huge Catholic influence, due to passing of the Quebec Act, largely defined itself as Ultramontane, in opposition to the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. So, an anti-revolutionary ethos pervaded the origins of Canada.

However, when I say Canada, it’s also important to understand what Canada is — in fact, not just in myth. Canada is Ontario and Quebec. They have constituted Canada in name and fact going back to the 18th century. There’s a reason the expansion of 1867 was officially named the Dominion of Canada. (Though, apparently the original intention was to call it the Kingdom of Canada.) The expansion over the next few years, east and west, extended the neo-colonial reach of the original English/French polity and society called Canada, which remained the dominant force, by deliberate design, demographically and institutionally.

Those demographic and institutional biases toward what today people prosaically call “central” Canada — a term that really is more institutional than geographic — continues to this day. These historical forces have resulted in two anomalies. First, when people (in “Canada” and elsewhere) see or think of Canadian culture (say, the CBC or the National Film Board), what they’re seeing is the official culture of the “centre” — the actual, original Canada. They are the institutions of indoctrination of the hinterland neo-colonies into the ideology of the Dominion.

Second, plenty of people living in those hinterlands, east and west, have figured out — from 1867 to the present — that this Dominion wasn’t constituted in their interest: that the game was rigged against them from the start. For example, for over 150 years, repeated efforts to establish a regionally representative senate in the upper house have been refused and frustrated — in some cases explicitly referring to the desire to maintain demographic voting power of the “centre.”

When Americans and others look at Canadian political culture and see a people who seem politically conformist and defensive, what they’re seeing is that anti-revolutionary culture of the “centre.” What they’re missing — because the information regime of the “centre” (and the ruling faction of the managerial class) either avoids or besmirches — is that long tradition of resistance and protest which has historically percolated, to some degree in the east, but profoundly in the west.

So, if the truckers’ convoy came as a surprise to many we only need note where it came from. Of course the protest had its supporters in Ontario, Quebec, and the east, but it was mainly hatched, nurtured, and exploded upon the popular consciousness in the west. It generated its iconic early images from truckers rolling across the western prairies. And notable early organizers had learned their basic organizational skills in western rights and separatist parties and movements: parties and movements that traced their political lineage right back to the founding of the prairie provinces — that, from the start, resisted their designated role as neo-colonies within Canada’s expanded Dominion.

For anyone who knew this history, the rise of the truckers convoy was less surprising than it was for those who didn’t. And where it began was the least surprising part of all. So it appears we should add historical ignorance to technocratic obtuseness as failings of the ruling managerial class regime, particularly as currently manifest in the ever buffoonish Justin Trudeau puppet show government.