A previous May 2, 2011 article distinguished between Mr. Harper's win and Mr Layton's victory. Pïerre de Coubertin's well-worn reserve in his London speech of July 24, 1908, phrases it best : "... l'essentiel [c'est le combat] ce n'est pas d'avoir vaincu mais de s'être bien battu" ('the essential thing is [..the contest] not to have won but to have fought well.').
The purpose was not to indulge in an affectation or pander pedantry. There is good reason to distinguish between the political results. The same article commented on both results. The evident matter is the result of government; opaque is the matter of how the country will be represented in the Government.
Mr. Harper's win commends because it was masterfully planned and executed; it falls short because it was both a no-brainer and a no-contest. To his credit, hindsight tests him perfectly on both counts.
For those gamers who enjoy dabbling, consider the following. Mr. Harper recognized the features of this election's zero-sum game; democratic party politics do not configure a nonzero-sum game. There were only two bona fide players or opponents in this federal election: Mr. Harper and the Others. The Harper tradeoff was an option for/against a parliamentary majority. It was a non-ambivalent, unambiguous platform, for many outright outrageous- to other electors and some analysts, it even reaped of political suicide, until the last few weeks when it dawned on the more enlightened of the pundit class that Harper had foreseen the unravelling of the singular, most machiavellian scheme in Canadian political history. And I do not intend machiavellian as a demonic and caricatural fashion after the skewed readings of the Tudors, Elizabethans or french Renaissance, but to that observer of human polities who neither conceived nor framed the machiavellian moment now associated to his name, to one of history's most brilliant political analysts, and "the founder and master of policy," who professed that political success is determined by courageous insight and calculated foresight-the combination of which are exceptional modes of great leadership or as Machiavelli contextually coins it "virtu".
Mr. Harper's prerequisite for a win was that the conservative electorate base would show up at the polls.The only way Mr. Harper could not win is if this original premise was overly presumptuous! Unfortunately for the Others, it wasn't. His assumption was valid, the probability that large regional contingents of conservative sympathizers would show up at the polls on election day was validated, and the game was played out with the non-conservative base divided between three parties and ending up in two routs: the Liberal Party and the Bloc Quebecois. A vote against Harper, was a split-vote, in other words, a half-vote! Well, math confirms that it takes twice the amount of non-conservative half-votes to supplant a whole conservative vote, and there weren't that many non-conservatives showing up, although there was a record turnout at the polls.
In this context, Mr. Harper's unwilling machiavellianism is more reminiscent of the rational deliberation depicting a Von Neumann-Morgenstern lottery. It is inconceivable to imagine anyone else in Ottawa in the same company as Machiavelli and Von Neumann with the exception of Conrad Black. Unfortunately the latter is not in Ottawa. Mr. Harper, on the other hand, is in Ottawa. He does have a challenge in living up to that pedigree and fortunately, he is confronted by the optimally classical moment.
The results of history will validate the rest. Whether Mr. Harper can rise above the storms that will characterize his term will depend on his leadership, because storms are already brewing on the horizon. Whether Mr. Harper can appease the expectations of Quebec that defined its fortune with the Others, will demand virtu...something that many pundits and dilettantes refuse to recognize he possesses in great quantity.
But then pundits, political dilettantes and staffers, not only those in Canada, do not recall what fortuna and virtu denote and connote. Most recall, if at all, that Machiavelli wrote the Prince and claimed that the end justifies the means. There is a cultural tendency to predicate gratuitously and incorrectly the machiavellian moment to a world of intrigue, deceit and ruthlessness. Virtu is that responsibility and skill of leadership to improvise a novel vision in the face of fortune-a set of unforeseen novel events and circumstances. In Mr. Harper's case, fortune has presented the Federal Government with a Canadian dominion in which apparently, Quebec's constitutional dilemma is shelved and its traditional bloc voices are cloistered. Is Mr. Harper experiencing the last breath before the great plunge- an hyperbole to Tolkien's. Is this Quebec's tacit warning that if this doesn't work, then the Rubicon. What a Pyrrhic victory Election Canada 2011 would have been for Mr. Harper.
Personally, I think Mr. Harper is a stricter Machiavellian than the English and French Renaissance diminuitive traditions have transmitted, and as such, much more politically integral and constructive than anyone will expect. Mr. Harper is certainly, a reader of the Discourses, not of the Prince.
No comments:
Post a Comment