We tend to think that governments are shaped by ideology, and that’s true, but what does that really mean, and how much does political ideology really matter? The forces shaping how a government behaves go much further than being liberal or conservative, but it’s still beliefs all the way down: conventions, norms, ideologies and values, and even laws are all conceptual, and their power derives from how much we believe in them. This is why who forms the government, i.e., which politicians we elect, is often almost irrelevant…but sometimes means everything.
Bear with me. Let’s look at this in a Canadian context, and then shift to a view of the US for a counterpoint.
The Law
Governments are shaped first and foremost by a constitution, a document laying out the basis for the law of the land. The law is at least ostensibly rooted in core values, which should be laid out in the constitution, and all other laws that come thereafter are interpreted in light of the constitution, so there should be continuity of those values throughout society and through time. But a good constitution like ours is also general enough to provide a foundation for other ideals and values to build on, without being too restrictive. So a country like Canada is united in core values and basic rights associated with those values, but still has significant variation in how those are applied from one province to the next.
Laws are enforceable, in the sense that there are penalties that can help to deter some crimes (though deterrence is usually far less effective than we hope or claim). But most laws are truly enforced by belief: I don’t obey the speed limit because I’m afraid of the ticket, and I don’t refrain from stealing or killing because I’m afraid of jail time. Rather, I believe in the law, and the idea that the government has the right to enforce it. If I truly reject the government’s authority to enforce a particular law, the government can’t truly compel me to do any particular thing, they can only punish me for not doing so. This is the case for conscientious objectors, who broke the law by refusing to submit to the draft and fight in a war they didn’t believe in; they were jailed, but they couldn’t be forced to fight. Likewise, the practice of civil disobedience is an exercise in believing that justice is greater than any particular law: someone engaging in civil disobedience will deliberately break a law that they believe is unjust, and then submit to the power of the government as a way of highlighting that injustice without rejecting the concept of government authority itself. Rather than being lawless, people who engage in civil disobedience show a more profound belief in the concepts of law and justice.
Laws are the basis of the actual work of the government: public service staff are not required to believe in any ideology in particular in order to do their jobs, and ideally will do their best to keep out of the political side of government, keeping to the requirements of the laws the politicians create. No matter who is in charge of the government at any given moment, those folks continue to work away.
Institutions
So if they don’t work on the basis of the governing ideology of the day, why do they work? Beyond the paycheque, political staff work for the government because they believe in the institution of government itself. If they believed that the government was an illegitimate institution, it would break down pretty quickly. Sometimes that happens: governments which fail to fulfill their own values and uphold their own laws lose the confidence of their own people, often including their staff, and fall to revolution or get conquered by a neighbour. All of the work of government, then, depends on the basic belief in and support for the institution of government itself.
Whether a political party is liberal or conservative or socialist, they’re all “liberal” in the sense that “Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law” (Wikipedia). These beliefs are not laws, but ideologies; and yet without them, without the belief in the concept of law itself, none of our laws and the institutions that create and uphold them could exist.
Ideologies
In Canada we sometimes name our political parties after their dominant ideologies. This is unfortunate, because those parties often end up holding political positions and making decisions that don’t actually align with their supposed ideology very well; and most of us (myself included) don’t know nearly as much about those ideologies as we ought to.
The definition of liberalism above has plenty of room for interpretation, but forms the basis of the “liberal order” that undergirds almost every country in the world. Our country would not function without the rule of law and the consent of the governed, and no Conservative would deny that, no matter how much they rail against the Liberals. And the fact that liberalism is the core ideology that we all assume might explain why it’s sometimes hard to think about what the Liberal Party really stands for; liberalism is already the water we swim in, something we largely take for granted, which is why they often seem pretty vanilla by comparison to other parties. It’s also why they like to be called our “natural ruling party,” because we’re all at least a little liberal.
Conservatism is a little harder to nail down, not least because it also largely assumes the core tenets of liberalism but just interprets them through another lens. Conservative values and principles usually include tradition, property rights, and the idea that there’s a natural order to the world that we need to follow, whether that order is divine or a matter of human nature, and therefore that we should have social hierarchies and strong authorities. Some scholars refer to it as an attitude or orientation to the world, a commitment to tradition and the status quo, an attempt to hold back change and human brokenness. At its heart is the idea that human beings need constraint to save us from ourselves, so governments should be strong enough to overpower us (e.g., “tough on crime” approaches to criminal law and support for a strong military) but small enough to not get caught up in spending too much money. Insofar as we all agree that governments should have the authority to enforce the laws they write, and that it’s prudent to save some money for a rainy day, we’re all a little conservative too.
Socialism is an ideology that, while still upholding property rights, believes that social ownership of the “means of production” (i.e., the infrastructure of our economy) is better for society than private ownership. While some socialists disagree with the concept of property rights altogether, and would seek to replace market economies with centralized, planned economies, no major political party in Canada holds to that view. The NDP is our largest socialist party, and the Green Party has some socialist tendencies, but neither is interested in non-market economies or having the government take over private corporations en masse. Socialists in Canada believe in things like worker-owned co-operatives, where workplaces are organized on democratic principles and practices rather than whatever hierarchy a private owner decides, and where profits are shared more equally among the people doing the actual work rather than largely going to outside investors and executives who make hundreds of times the wage of the workers. At its heart, socialism is about believing that we can do more when we share more, and the recognition that many of the evils that conservatives would attribute to human nature that must be constrained are actually rooted in the many social inequities in society: poverty, racism, patriarchy, etc. Socialists also try to track the ways that these social ills are embedded in both the law and the economy: laws that help maximize profits for corporations also often increase poverty for workers. And like we’re all small-L liberal, and we’re all a little conservative too, insofar as we all agree that essential programs like healthcare should be available to everyone equally and that core infrastructure should be owned by the government rather than privately, we’re all a little socialist.
So no matter how much the political parties try to differentiate themselves from one another, the amount we have in common is much, much greater than what distinguishes us from each other. Which means that we shouldn’t expect massive change from one election to the next, when it comes to actual governance. Not least because there are other common beliefs that guide politicians too.
Norms and Conventions
A norm is what we expect, so a political norm is what we expect of politics or politicians. We expect our politicians to wear suits and ties (except when we take off our jackets and roll up our sleeves, to show we’re going to get things done); and to smile and be polite and friendly; and to affiliate with a party of some sort (at least at the federal and provincial levels); to speak carefully, lest they be misquoted or offend anyone; etc. A politician who bucks these cosmetic norms can seem refreshing to some, and erratic to others: Pierre Poilievre’s open rudeness to people made him very unpopular among some Canadians in the last election, and very popular among others.
Sometimes we also expect our politicians to be untrustworthy, to make deals in back rooms, to enrich themselves from their position, etc. Sadly, there are enough examples of this to provide a basis for these expectations, and often the politicians involved maintain power and only very rarely see any criminal charges. If political corruption becomes a norm, it can undermine an entire society. (I don’t think we’re there in Canada, but we’re never far off.)
Conventions are not just what we expect, but the way that we do things. We tend to talk about convention when we can’t think of a real reason why we do things the way that we do them; it’s just the way we do it, sometimes the way we’ve always done it. Political parties are a great example: they’re not even mentioned in our constitution, and yet they are a central aspect of Canadian governance. They were assumed from the beginning. But because they are a convention, they’re not really subject to law: there is no rule or law that says we need to have parties at all, and few laws dictating how they are organized or governed internally. The best we have are laws limiting how they can raise and spend money. So if the leader of a party determines that they should control the votes of every one of their party members (a “whipped vote”), they can do so; and if a member of that party believes that their leader has that right, they’ll go along with it, and in the process be transformed into a resource for the leader rather than a representative of their constituents.
That’s an example of the way that conventions can change over time, or sometimes quite rapidly. I’m currently reading Andrew Coyne’s latest book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, which includes an excellent view of the way that conventions have shifted in Canadian politics over the years. A common feature is that a government will break convention for what they insist is a very good reason and they’ll only do it once, using their power in ways nobody has dared before; then the opposition will lambaste them for their overreach in power, and run an election campaign promising to never do the same thing, and then promptly do the same thing as soon as they’re in power. The “way we do things” are often a set of shifting goal posts, and without someone like Coyne to keep track, we often don’t remember how things were even a few terms ago. If someone gets away with it once, the next person feels license to try it; if they get away with it too, it becomes a norm to do it; and once everyone does it, it’s just another convention.
Governance Beyond Belief
Of all of the beliefs listed above, only laws are actually enforceable, and yet laws are often the least powerful of these. Our governments are shaped by whichever politicians are in charge at the moment, yes; but those politicians almost always share belief in the institutions, norms, conventions, and values that undergird our laws and programs. They’re all mostly liberal, at least a little conservative, and at least a little socialist, varying only in how much of each they embody in their policies. So even though they spend most of their time saying how different they are, no matter who gets elected we usually get mostly the same kind of government. Sometimes that can feel frustrating for people who want change. Me too.
But what happens when a politician doesn’t share those beliefs? What happens when they don’t seem to have any beliefs? Let’s take a quick look at the United States under Donald Trump.
One of the main reasons people say they like Donald Trump is because he breaks the established norms of politicians. He said from the beginning that he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman (a different set of norms); but most dramatically, he breaks political norms through his complete lack of “political correctness”, which is to say, he says whatever he wants without worrying about who he will offend. This results in him offending a great many people, but a great many other people are so refreshed by his candour that they’re willing to overlook the horrendous content of his speech, often suggesting that he doesn’t really mean what he says but they love that he feels free to say it. He first ran on a promise to “drain the swamp” of corrupt politicians (promising to break a negative norm), though since being elected he has enriched himself from his office more than any of his predecessors.
One of the things that makes Donald Trump so dangerous is his similar disregard for conventions. I remember when he was inaugurated the second time, Joe and Jill Biden had him and his wife in to the White House for tea, a longstanding tradition that largely symbolizes the peaceful transfer of power. Trump had not done the same for them four years earlier, and in fact had broken the conventions around the peaceful transfer of power altogether, refusing to acknowledge that he had lost the election at all and supporting people who tried to overthrow the government and hang his own vice-president. While there are laws against leading a coup, there’s no law against lying about losing the election; it’s a convention that everyone else has followed, knowing that if the transfer of power is undermined it could lead to civil war.
Another convention he fails to follow is to follow the advice of his many expert advisors. In his first term of office he found all of the generals around him to be annoying, because they didn’t do the things he wanted; he said he needed better generals, more obedient ones, like the ones Hitler had. This term, the seasoned military officers who held the president’s power in check by delivering sound advice are largely gone, replaced by television personalities who never miss an opportunity to ingratiate themselves to the president. There’s no law against stacking the senior staff, or even the supreme court, with incompetent yes-men instead of the best and brightest the country has to offer; if you don’t believe in the convention or the values behind it, you might as well.
Even when Trump breaks the law, as he has done blatantly a great many times, he maintains that he is a victim rather than a perpetrator – even when convicted. This is not the principled stand of civil disobedience or conscientious objection, both of which show a belief in values higher than the law itself; this is a clear belief that the law does not and should not apply to him. And he’s managed to appoint a Supreme Court that has agreed, shielding him from consequences for any of his crimes.
Without a belief in the law and the institutions of government, it cannot be said that Trump is a small-L liberal. What is his ideology? He certainly believes in his own power, and is often called an Authoritarian; and he champions the angst and outrage of many people, and is often called a Populist for that reason. Both are apt descriptions. But the one that I think is most apt, and that I had never heard of before this year, is that Trump is a patrimonialist. Patrimonialism is governance that is based on personal loyalty and patron-client relationships (i.e., you owe me, we made a deal). Not only is patrimonialism a poor form of governance that is prone to corruption and severely weakens the state, it is inherently incompatible with the liberal institutions, norms, and values that the United States was founded on and built around.
Conclusion: Beliefs Matter
What we believe about our nation matters, even (or especially!) when those beliefs are assumptions and unexamined conventions. The things we take for granted about our country are what truly holds it together, and even the strongest of our laws are merely concepts that hold little power if we disregard them.
That’s why we can’t take elections for granted. The people who run in elections matter, not just their party affiliation. The idea that the person doesn’t matter as much as the party is only true if those people all share a commitment to the values, norms, institutions, conventions, and laws that govern us all. Too much variance from that shared belief — or maybe better understood as respect — leads to a nihilistic nation state where narcissistic leaders can shape the norms and conventions however they like. What a candidate believes is critical.
At a municipal level, critical norms and conventions include:
- Respecting the expertise of staff
- Recognizing the distinction between operational (staff) and strategic (council) decisions
- Upholding the decisions of council as a whole (i.e., once council has made a decision I need to support that regardless of whether or not I voted for it)
- Being available to respond to residents with concerns and questions, and directing residents to follow relevant procedures as appropriate
This Thanksgiving I’m tremendously thankful for our current council, which is united in our support for the liberal order (though I suspect we vary quite a bit in political ideology). But our work, and the work of municipal staff, and all of the benefit it provides for our community, is safeguarded by our commitment to our own rules and conventions. May it always be so, and may we never take it for granted.