The election that swept Canada’s Conservatives out of power earlier this week shows that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of many campaign strategists, optimism still matters in politics, as does tone. Following a well-worn playbook, the Conservatives used attack ads to define Justin Trudeau, the charismatic young leader of the Liberal party, as little more than a haircut and a smile. In televised spots, a thoughtful group of older Canadians pondered his résumé and found him charming, and all that, but worried that he just wasn’t “ready.” The putdown worked, in the end perhaps too well. When Trudeau turned out not to be a complete naïf, he surged in the polls. When he held his own in debates, he looked as plausible as the incumbent. When, finally, he spoke up for a vision of multicultural Canada that didn’t tie itself in knots over the prospect of Muslim women wearing niqabs, the game was over.
Trudeau’s victory, like Barack Obama’s in 2008, shows that voters still prefer to look to the future with hope. Further evidence of the sea-change from the Conservative decade now past, is Trudeau’s Keynesian vision of deficit spending to overhaul Canada’s aging infrastructure and restart its dormant economy. The scale of his victory, unforeseen by most commentators, is also significant for it shows that the politics of hope can still triumph over the idea that the world is a dark and threatening place, a series of cautionary tales and bad things waiting to happen.
In many developed countries a quiet despair about climate change or economic, social and political crises, has become so commonplace that optimism is often mistaken for naiveté. Cynicism, by contrast, can seem very sensible. Every news cycle brings us more evidence of misery and man’s inhumanity to man. Syria’s civil war, an approaching famine in Africa, Europe’s wretched migrants, human trafficking, violence, drugs and corruption in the Americas. This distorted view of the world feeds fear-driven politics and produces leaders who peddle the fantasy of protecting, or isolating, their countries from a strange and threatening world, rather than engaging with it.
One way to understand the importance of seeing the world as ripe for change rather than a never-ending source of gloom is to consider the number 16, 438. In “How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say—And What It Really Means” John Lanchester christens this the “aaaaa” number so that he can place it at the head of his financial lexicon. What does it signify? “The number of children under five who aren’t dying every day compared with the number who were dying in 1990.” That’s correct. Aren’t dying. Lanchester wonders “Why isn’t this a famous fact, a famous success?” And why do so few of us know that the number of child deaths have been declining for the last 50 years? The answer, sadly, is that good news is no news.
“It is the conceit of all contemporaries to think that theirs is a time of particularly momentous changes,” writes Joyce Appleby, a former president of the American Historical Association. She continues: “I decline that option.” Appleby argues that one of the most important uses of historiography is to show us that facts are always being reshaped into narratives and that many of these open up new political and social understandings of the past, present, and future.
If politics is the science of the possible then politicians, at their best, can be thought of as people who widen the range of what we believe we can do. This is not done simply by harping on what is wrong with the world, but by pointing us towards more hopeful outcomes. Keynesian economics — in stark contrast to neoliberalist economics – is grounded in such a view of the future. Genuine optimism requires a political vision that is grounded in history, in the knowledge that during our lifetimes there have been important advances in the world. That our ancestors didn’t live through a golden age which has been in decline ever since. That civil wars, though appalling, are less common than they were. That despite every depressing fact we know about it, in important ways the world is getting better. That we have reduced child poverty, eradicated epidemics and are successfully increasing tolerance of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities.
The art historian Ernest Gombrich once quipped that “where’s there a way there’s a will.” More politicians should remember this, and concentrate on articulating hopeful and intelligent responses to the world, and appealing to the better angels of our nature, rather than pandering to our fears and belittling rivals who seek to do otherwise.
