Nutroots=CPC….you decide
To Walsh and other journalists, the relevant metric is true versus untrue. To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful.
There is a term for this sort of political discourse: propaganda. The word has a bad odor, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Propaganda is often true, and it can be deployed on behalf of a worthy cause (say, the fight against Nazism in World War II). Still, propaganda should not be confused with intellectual inquiry. Propagandists do not follow their logic wherever it may lead them; they are not interested in originality. Propaganda is an attempt to marshal arguments in order to create a specific real-world result–to win a political war. jonathan chait, The New Republic
Chait is writing about the emergence of the netroots as a political force in the American Democratic Party but the above has a direct relevance to the intellectual collapse of the CPC which we are witnessing here in Canada.
One would think that for a politician in government the metric would be “true versus untrue” but to the activists whose only motivation is the creation of a majority CPC government, “the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful”. Which, goes a long distance to explaining the truly wacky approach the CPC is taking to global warming. Doesn’t matter a damn if the measures proposed deal with a real problem in a cost effective way; what matters is that they are seen by an awfully stupid electorate as doing “something”.
Update: Greg Staples has new polling numbers and this comment:
all this morphing into Canada’s New Liberal Party isn’t getting them into magical majority terrority, it’s getting them defeated. political staples
Yup.
Written by jay on May 2nd, 2007 with
2 comments.
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#1. May 2nd, 2007, at 11:47 AM.
“what matters is that they are seen by an awfully stupid electorate as doing “something”.”
Not even the whole electorate - just the targeted groups. Hows that for policy and program development?
Billions of dollars worth of programs, regulations, trading schemes and useless bans developed to target the key swing votes required to achieve a majority.