Performative Politics Is a Dead End
Canada’s New Democratic Party once rallied workers around a bold social democratic vision. The leadership contest now unfolding shows a center left so busy virtue signaling it forgets how to build power.
The Canadian left needs more labor actions like the Air Canada strike, not the performative gymnastics of the New Democratic Party’s leadership rules. (Andrej Ivanov / AFP via Getty Images)
After losing his seat in Canada’s spring election, where his party collapsed in the polls and failed to achieve official party status, former leader Jagmeet Singh stepped aside as head of the New Democratic Party (NDP). Now, Canada’s nominally social democratic party has launched a leadership race. Contest rules released two weeks ago include a stipulation for signature collection that doubled as a rage-baiting giveaway to right-wing culture warriors and enjoyed the dubious distinction of turning the NDP into a lightning rod on social media for a day or two.
Leadership candidates will require five hundred signatures for their nomination, with at least half coming from individuals who do not identify as “cisgendered men.” Moreover, at least one hundred signatures must come from equity-seeking groups. That rule caught a lot of attention and headlines, obscuring the fact that candidates must raise $100,000 to run, considerably more than the 2017 contest’s $30,000 requirement.
For a social democratic movement to be both successful and just, it must be broad and inclusive. It ought to be taken as an article of faith that where individual and collective rights are under assault from the state, the free market, or others who’d oppress any person or category of persons based on their class, gender, race, sexuality or ability, the Left should show up to fight for them, right up to the hilt. The pursuit of democratic control over work and an equitable and fair distribution of power and resources should not be divorced from other rights protections, especially minority rights. In short, we shouldn’t be willing or ready to sell out anyone in the fight for justice.
That fight, however, is made harder when parties adopt arbitrary, performative, low-bar rules without any obvious connection to political success. Where is the evidence that requiring two hundred fifty signatures from non-cis men leads to stronger leadership? To a higher seat count? To better laws? To a fairer economic system or, even, a more representative political system? And even if there was such evidence, what are the odds that the bar to achieving these outcomes will be met with a few hundred signatures from regions throughout Canada? Very, very low.
Lowered Expectations
A properly social democratic platform, one that speaks to the needs of working-class people as a whole, ought to attract support from marginalized and minority communities without the need for tokenistic thresholds that it should be able to meet as a matter of course. If a leadership contender cannot win that kind of backing on the strength of their program, it is less a problem of signature quotas than a sign of deeper political or organizational weakness.
The fact that the party is requiring candidates to raise at least $100,000 to run is a proper challenge for contenders and one that serves as an actual substantive barrier infinitely more notable and important than the distribution of types of signatures. But that’s not the story that’s getting attention.
Canada’s social democratic party, heir to the radical, socialist roots of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, has gone from delivering health care, collective bargaining rights, and pension indexing to performative gestures that have no obvious connection to better outcomes for anyone, including the groups these rules ostensibly exist to benefit. By leading with its chin, the party has allowed the right-wing press and culture warriors to land a blow that risks further alienating those who view the Left as flighty, unserious, and oblivious to core economic and, indeed, social problems endemic to the Global North.
Politics as Box-Checking
The signature rules also risk turning broader movement building into box-checking exercises, as if grabbing a name, a number, and address counts as doing politics — including reckoning with the deep divisions within and among groups that often find themselves at home within left movements.
Historian Ian McKay has written of the NDP’s “partially-realized radical possibility” and recently spoke to The Breach of the party’s shift from Tommy Douglas to telemarketing, as it has professionalized, centralized, and de-radicalized. The result is a party that has gone “soft on neoliberalism” and lost its capacity to really talk to and for ordinary people.
“The Left has lost its capacity to talk to ordinary people,” McKay told the Breach. “It has to regain that. And I’m not meaning that in this kind of dumbed-down way of NDP propaganda — ‘people matter more,’ ‘standing up for you,’ etc. I would call them all brain-dead formulations. I mean, actually understanding where working people are these days, really grasping it and not talking down to them.”
McKay is right. I’d add that rebuilding a capacity to talk to ordinary people also requires a studied refusal to hand the Right opportunities to caricature the Left, which begins by not caricaturing itself. It doesn’t take a performative, nominal signature threshold to make radical rights-and-recognition-seeking politics possible; and it certainly doesn’t take that to run campaigns centered on broad class solidarity. It takes movement building and mass politics, at scale. The party should go back to the deep well it drew upon during its earlier years and leave the perfunctory displays of piety to the dustbin of history.