4: The Future of Political Parties: Authenticity vs. Discipline

Very handsome.

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsch, and I’m here with my friend Alan Craig for another episode of Red Tory, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And as you can hear, Alan, I not only have a different soundtrack playing as our intro, but I deliberately brought Bob and Doug in, because here’s my concern.

Today’s a test, an appropriate test, given that this is our fourth episode, as to whether the copyright police will strike us down, because I’m actually using the Clash as our intro instead of an AI intro.

Now, I assume you can hear the song.

And do you recognize the song?

I can hear it, but I can’t recognize.

I just hear a little harmonica going there.

So that was Ghetto Defendant by the Clash, One of my favorites.

Kind of talks about heroin within the punk scene.

And it’s very political because it’s all about how the working class has been lost into this addiction and has lost sight of its struggles, its politics.

And I kind of feel that that parallels our current era, except it’s social media, not necessarily heroin as the narcotic.

But I tried to get the AI to do another punk tune, and it was horrific.

The responses I was getting from it were, to your point, a game show or Muzak in an elevator.

So I was like, all right, I’ll throw in the Clash.

We’ll see if we get away with it.

I’m worried about both YouTube and Spotify, but it’s a good experiment.

Well, I used to own a music publishing company, so I’m kind of loath to get around synchronization rights, but that’s interesting.

I wonder if that’s because the AI generative activity just does not mine music as well as it does text and images.

I think you’re correct.

And I think that the key issue is it can’t delineate between early punk and post punk, Right?

It can’t understand the difference between roots reggae and dub reggae.

So it really groups everything into this one big blob of mediocrity.

And when you get stuff that’s churned out to your point, it sounds very commercial, right?

Not even the sense of commercial radio, but the worst kind of commercial music.

Well, and interesting also, because, I mean, a lot of the really acute concern around copyright protection is from the music industry fears that, you know, you could say, right, play a song, like, Celine Dion would do it, and all of a sudden, boom, it is, well, and we can’t get a great theme song.

But this is to be clear, because I’m not paying for it, right?

This is Me using demos and trials.

If I was, you know, who would it be now?

Warner Music.

If I was a big label that had rights to a lot of songs, I could create an AI that was more focused, like a punk AI or an alternative AI.

I don’t use your music library.

Yes.

As the basis for that.

Yes.

Yes.

And you could weight the way in which the machine learns.

You could weight the model training in a different manner.

But I’m not convinced you still wouldn’t end up with shit.

And.

And it might be like, movie soundtrack acceptable shit, but.

But not.

You know, if you look at.

I’ve been meeting actually to write an episode about Dochi, the.

The.

The female rapper who won a bunch of Grammys a week ago.

Because she’s a really interesting artist, and for someone who’s popular and winning Grammys, she’s still kind of flying below the radar.

It’s because, like Kendrick Lamar, you cannot compare their work to algorithms.

It is so raw, it is so explicit, it is so pushing the edge of what is acceptable.

And in Kendrick Lamar’s sense, his layered metaphors, again, they’re outpacing AI.

And so it’s interesting when we think about where the music industry is going, that the most talented artists are still doing what great artists do, which is push the boundaries.

But the other point you’re making is that AI is almost by definition retroactive.

Yeah.

Because it’s relying on what exists.

Yeah.

I mean, unfortunately, nostalgia is still a huge market, as you’ve reminded us repeatedly, with the top touring acts or the top grossing acts.

So maybe there’s a give and take there.

I do want to say, before we get into it, that we’ve got some great guests booked coming up.

And I think one of the shout outs I have to give today, because we’ve mentioned him every single episode, is David Fingertoot.

Because David Fingert, as a loyal listener, sent me Margaret Atwood’s agent’s email.

So I’ve sent an email, David.

I don’t know if it’ll lead anywhere, but we try.

So thanks to the listeners who, when we say a random idea, they’re like, okay, I’ll get on it.

I’ll find a contact info.

With that said, Alan, I like throwing to you in terms of starting us off, what have you been paying attention to the last couple of days?

Well, again, close to home here, we’ve got an Ontario election that I continue to follow as well.

Well as federally, the federal leadership there.

And then again, the chaos out of White House.

And again, one of the Questions I wanted to ask you throw it right back because I don’t understand what’s going on is that Elon Musk and his so called little rats, you know, gaining access to all of these databases and it’s the nature of information that they seem to be scouring and the actual agencies that they’re looking at that makes me completely lost.

I just don’t know what, what they’re, what they’re looking for at this point.

Particular juncture, insights on that.

Sure.

But are there particular agencies that you’re like, what’s this doing in this list?

Well, Department of Health for, for example, Department of Labor.

I mean I understand what they’re trying to do in terms of, you know, issuing directives that say, you know, quit now or we’ll be after you, fire you.

What they’re trying to do there and obviously alarmed at a lot of the things that they’re trying to do that are overstepping the bounds of Congress, that arguably are illegal in terms of what they’re doing.

But what they are looking for is not clear to me.

So shout out to the New York Times, cuz they have done some really interesting reporting on this.

It’s more than just the six kids that the media has been focusing on.

He’s actually got a team that’s upwards of about three dozen and growing.

And I think if I were to be hyperbolic as I love to be, this is the start of a kind of gestapo.

This is the start of a political enforcement team who are closely liaising with the White House to enforce the executive orders.

An example of that is the anti DEI policy where they are basically sending out.

They’ve declared that any diversity equity inclusivity initiative is illegal.

They’re even now telling any government contractor that they cannot have DEI initiatives.

The big tech companies have already started removing theirs.

So part of what they’re using, this access to the databases are, is compliance is trying to understand the internal hierarchy to our conversation last time of the kind of public civil service.

And where the New York Times is actually in conflict with Wired magazine and other reporting is the administration has only responded to the New York Times on the record as to whether this is read access or read write access, which gets into whether they’re able to make changes.

And at this point the general consensus is you can’t trust Elon Musk.

He would obtain the write access on his own even if it was not officially given to him.

But to fundamentally answer your question, I think there’s two things going on.

One is mapping.

They’re just trying to get a sense of who the civil service is, where the money’s being spent, who are the budgetary authorities, who are the people who are in charge, who can make those decisions.

The second, knowing Elon Musk, is that they’re looking at automation, right?

How much of the civil Service can be automated?

What are we spending on?

What is the function of that service?

Can it be replaced by software?

And some of the people.

It was interesting that the extent to which the New York Times has identified more than just the kids who are on, because this is doge, this is what it is.

It used to be the U.S.

digital Service.

That’s how they’ve gotten around how only Congress can create a department.

But they’ve repurposed what used to be the U.S.

digital Service, which has a mandate to work with any federal agency to deal with its digital infrastructure.

That’s where automation becomes an excellent Trojan horse.

Because under this mandate, they can look at any agency, like the Department of Health and say, how much of this could be automated?

How many of these people’s tasks can be replaced by software?

I would say that we are seeing a transformation of what used to be the US Digital Service that will now be a much more political agency designed at enforcing executive orders, while also, one assumes, liaising with these new cabinet ministers like RFK Jr.

To stick with the Department of Health example, because he will face a lot of resistance from members of the Department of Health.

But if he has this nerd squad which can see through all the data and understand everything that’s happening, and then feed that political intelligence back to the secretary, back to RFK Jr.

That allows the White House to really exert a lot of power and a lot of strength.

Wouldn’t that kind of surveillance require massive resources far beyond 30 little rats?

That’s an excellent question.

I’ll try to get a guest book for us who does kind of AI intelligence and AI analytics.

Cause if you look at Palantir, right, Palantir is Peter Thiel’s company that a huge part of law enforcement, defense intelligence community uses.

You could absolutely deploy that software in this instance, whether on, like, the opm, the Office of Personnel Management, or whether, like, there is AI software that will find those needles in the haystack.

To your point about the 30 people, you still need to know the right questions.

You still need to know how to navigate and search these systems.

And that’s where they may be at a disadvantage, unless they’re able to convert.

Because again, the whole reason they would look through the system is find allies.

Because knowing Musk and Trump for sure, they’re correlating this with publicly available social media data.

Like, if he owns X and he can correlate X with all the government data to see who is pillaring Trump, but also more importantly, who is celebrating Trump.

Because that’s the other key data that researchers have found is these young people who they’ve identified.

They all have a track record of retweeting Elon Musk.

Like, they’re all people who have already demonstrated their sycophancy on social media to the regime.

So you have to wonder if they are gonna be so petty as to use this social media data to correlate and find out who amongst management, who amongst the senior leadership, they can go, hey, we’ll give you a raise if you help us automate your department and help us figure out what parts of the function here can be replaced by software.

Well, let’s monitor that a little bit closely because, I mean, we talk about all these initiatives being without precinct.

That’s really without precinct.

Never heard a quasi outside agency having access to computer data files.

I knew the DEI thing and I knew that they were taking it down a lot of websites.

And there’s also kind of parallel allegations that they’re losing databases as a consequence, not just related to dei, but much larger databases that are very, very important in terms of providing the analytics necessary to figure out how much affordable housing we need or whatever, other kinds of.

Even more than analytics program data that enables the programs to be delivered.

This is also, to your point, an act of sabotage which doesn’t necessarily require the read write access.

You just need to delete the whole system.

Yeah, and, and this is where, to your point of we should follow this, it does seem like the legal apparatus, both of the Democratic Party and of the United States, is finally waking up and responding.

I am starting to see both lawyers and congressional staffers, you know, organizing and calling for information and saying that they’re going to start filing lawsuits.

Obviously, the legal process works in a snail’s pace, but this is something we should definitely keep an eye on for sure.

So you mentioned the Ontario election.

And I don’t want to get too deeply into it because I kind of want to use that as a segue to talk about America, Canadian relations.

But you wrote an interesting piece for the Toronto Star that I’d love you to sort of give the gist of, because it opens up, I think, a real thread for kind of the future of Canada, or we could anticipate different possibilities within the future of Canada, giving some, some of these impending threats.

Yeah, I mean, it starts from, you know, an old maxim in politics that one of the best strategies you can ever deploy is one, find an opponent who, two, is less popular than you and three, isn’t on the ballot.

Prairie politicians, especially Alberta politicians, have employed this strategy successfully for over a century, basically running against Ottawa.

Ontario never does because Ontario’s always had a centrist kind of point of view.

Running against Ottawa has never been part of the political culture of that province.

But Doug Ford clearly decided over a year ago that he wanted to get his election, notwithstanding what his term was his election in before the feds had theirs, because he was.

Not only did he like the fact that Justin Trudeau was wildly unpopular and the liberal brand was, you know, being scorched by current, current events, but he did not want to run against Pierre Poliev should he become the leader who without doubt would become less popular the day after he was elected than the day he was elected.

So his strategy, let’s get an early election call.

And he does all of these cynical sorts of things in order to make that happen, in terms of giving the population affordability rebate, so saying you don’t have to pay for your license plates any, anymore, bringing in beer and wine into the grocery stores early, all at massive expense to the taxpayer, by the way.

And then Trudeau resigns, and so he loses his foil, his opponent, someone who’s an opponent not on, not on the ballot, less popular than, than, than, than, than he is.

But then his good fortunes.

Donald Trump arrives with a threat for tariffs, and now Trudeau’s resignation isn’t a liability, it’s actually an asset because here, now you have a leadership vacuum federally who puts on I won’t sell Canada baseball cap and dons his captain Canada Cape, Doug Ford.

Now, this again is a great strategy because first he’s running 20 points behind his opponents, in which instance, you know, most politics, your strategy there is get a good jingle and, you know, dance the voters to the polls.

I mean, ignore your opponents because don’t give them the elevation to your status to raise their profile, raise their favorability ratings, because both of the individuals are virtually unknown as, as, as, as well.

And so this just looks really smart and it looks like a foregone conclusion.

But then, you know, in the article I asked, I said, look, if his basic posture is, I am best able to defend the interests of Ontario, then he has to be seen defending the interests of Ontario.

And what if those interests run contrary to the interests of other regions of the country.

If, for example, as I say in the note, what if he decides to either put a tariff or an export tax on electricity?

What does that say to Quebec Hydro, for example, next door, or to Alberta with crude to, to, to the, the Midwest?

So while it might be cynical and a smart political strategy, it’s also a dangerous one for federalism.

I mean, we need Ontario to be centrist, to hold the country together in, in part, but also at this particular point in time because of that threat from the United States.

And so, you know, we don’t need the provinces fighting with, with one another.

And he runs the risk of setting that table quite precisely.

So, anyway, that was the basic piece I wrote.

Well, and it, I think, brings up a very likely number of scenarios in which the, the country is put into peril.

The obvious being Donald Trump doing that on his own.

Right.

And the extent to which he, he doesn’t seem to be shying away from this rhetoric.

And there was a bit of a news moment right before we started recording where Trudeau, who is in Toronto today for a big summit, he was recorded by the media off a hot mic saying that Trump is very serious, that this isn’t gonna go away, that this isn’t just about rhetoric, and that he.

Wants critical minerals in specific.

And I assume that’s just the start.

I think critical minerals are a huge part of it.

But one assumes that there are other interests whispering in Trump’s ear in terms of, well, if we’re going for that, let’s get this.

Because Mr.

Let’s make a Deal, I’m sure, is trying to understand all the pain points and all the leveraging points.

But your point about Ontario cutting off electricity, I think is right on the mark.

Because every time I’ve seen Doug use that kind of bully’s pulpit, there’s a glint in his eye where it makes me think of the old adage that power corrupts an absolute power absolutely.

And I’m curious on two points here.

One, do you think Doug Ford appearing on cnn, semi regularly appearing on Fox News, puts little ideas in his head about a greater political future?

Because it would to anyone.

I’m not saying anything about his character.

It would for me.

And then the other, Daniel Smith, and where she sort of plays in all this because she was quick to go to Mar a Lago.

You know, she’s buddy buddy with Jordan Peterson, who just put out an op ed on his YouTube channel, basically saying, don’t fuck with Alberta, which was clearly, again, her using him as a way to change the spin.

I mean, this doesn’t seem like a united Canada.

If anything, this seems like a lot of opportunists getting ready to play a big game.

No, I mean, you’ve got a lot going on there in that question there.

But, I mean, Ford, whether he’s got aspirations beyond the province, I don’t know.

But what would he.

What he does by going on cnn, what he does by making those kind of threats is playing to exactly the mindset that we were talking about the other day, which is also tremendously his advantage.

You know, faced with uncontrollable uncertainty that, you know, I don’t have a sense of helplessness.

What do you want?

You want dad, which first helps a male candidate over female candidate, unfortunately, but that’s the first part.

But you want someone who is tough, someone who is definitive, someone who is simplistic like dad.

And that’s the exact role that Doug Ford wants to play in this election because it marginalizes his opponents and it goes to that collective desire and mindset right now.

Well, and sorry, Danielle Smith is a whole other.

I mean, she also was very quick to say, right on the heels of Doug Ford opining before the election was called, that he might put a tariff or export tax on electricity, that she just said she wanted nothing to do with that whatsoever.

The other interesting thing again, for me, and you can just see this in the news coverage over the last week, really, is, and again, I don’t like the story about the kid who comes down the stairs on Christmas morning and sees horseshit under the Christmas tree and goes, yes, we got a pony.

But people, people seem to be trying to find, you know, the, the bright side of some of these stories that for all these threats, it’s really caused some conversations, like about abandoning interprovincial trade barriers, you know, addressing productivity.

You know, maybe we.

The fact that half of Canada has imported oil and gas and gas is egregious.

It’s crazy because we have not been able to build a pipeline across our own nation.

And these things are now all of a sudden being discussed in a way that, you know, whether they’ll come to any fruition or not is hard to tell.

But they’re certainly taken as serious conversations now as opposed to political mind traps which no one wanted to touch previously.

So I want to come back to Doug Ford’s spending promises, because you mentioned that, and he’s made a few as part of the election that I think are kind of ludicrous.

But I followed closely recently the whole inter provincial barrier, trade barrier issue.

And I read into kind of why it’s there and what it would take to remove it.

And it’s essentially a byproduct of provincial regulations that because provinces in many cases have the ability to set their own standards, to set their own rules.

It’s not that these trade barriers were set up kind of as a desire the way tariffs are.

So therefore the solution would be a much more powerful federal government because you’re uploading all these regulations to harmonize it.

So my question is, do you think provinces would go for that?

Well, they haven’t for decades and decades.

This is not a new, a new issue.

I mean, and not only are they a product of, you know, provincial regulation, they’re Byzantine.

This is an example of how they work.

In Alberta they say if you have a truck full of lumber, it must be loaded in this way, must be 6ft high, 8ft wide, 20ft long, whatever.

In British Columbia it says if you have a truck that is loaded with lumber, it must be loaded this way.

5ft high, 15ft wide, 22 line.

So if you’re driving a truck with lumber from Alberta to bc, you have to reload the truck when you cross the border.

Guess what happens that I’m not driving across that border and reloading my truck.

So there’s no goddamn lumber trade between Alberta and bc.

It’s just an example.

And, and this goes on and on and on and on.

A guy bought some beer, six beers in Quebec and deliberately drove them across the border in New Brunswick and told them he had done that.

He got charged, he went to the Supreme Court and was upheld as something.

That he could not do because provinces have their rights.

Absolutely.

So this is where on the one hand, while it’s easy to say that people want that type of, you know, ease of trade within the country, it seems far more likely that the self interest of the provinces would over would outwind that, that especially Alberta, let alone Quebec’s desire to have their own autonomy when it comes to setting these regulations.

Yeah, Quebec is always problematic in these sorts of things.

But having said that, the western provinces actually have been working towards this.

And you know, while the example might seem a little trivial, you know, and Alberta and B.C.

aren’t that wedded to how you load numbered trucks, that if they saw that it really was an impediment.

I mean, the economists have said if we could get rid of interprovincial trade barriers, it would increase our gross domestic product by 6%.

These are the same people who are saying that if we get a 25% tariff imposed upon us, it would reduce our GDP by 2.6%.

So that’s significantly less than we could gain if we address the interprovincial trade bears.

But I say at least it’s interesting that it’s causing us to focus on some of these issues because it’s not like they’ve never come up before.

I mean, a pipeline across Canada has been debated and stopped in its heels by the province of Quebec for that very reason.

And the largest refinery is in New Brunswick.

Well, and I think we are in unprecedented times.

So I suspect what used to be something you couldn’t touch will now potentially be on the table.

And I want to come back to kind of the, the United States side of this.

But before we do, the other interesting thing I thought you had in the Toronto Star column was the amount of money Doug Ford is spending.

And that doesn’t include some of the promises he’s made recently, like, you know, removing all tolls on the 407, you know, creating a tunnel under the 401.

And he, he made a promise yesterday or maybe even today, which I actually really liked, which he calls Go 2.0, which is a massive, massive upgrade of the gorail network, 24 hour service, a midtown line through Toronto.

Like this is an actual commuter rail system, that Toronto deserves the price tag on it, like whatever he says it costs, it’s gonna at least be twice that, if not three times that.

And metrolinx right now does not have a stellar record when it comes to delivering projects on time.

But I’m comparing this to the other two parties who are not even coming close to promising anything nearly as grand, nearly as large.

And I suspect it’s because they are actually able to do math versus he seems to be able to basically say whatever he wants because it’s not as bad as Trump.

Do you think at some point it’ll catch up to him or can he keep saying this stuff?

As long as it’s not as ludicrous as our friends to the south.

Well, I mean, the provincial purse is much smaller at the province level than it is the federal level because they can basically print money at the federal level.

That said, part of the new reality, and America is the greatest example of this, is that the guardrails around deficits spending seem to have fallen right down, certainly on the promise side, but also on the delivery side.

I mean, you’re, you’re absolutely right.

I mean, just to have this election one year before you wanted to have it is costing about four and a half billion dollars to the taxpayers.

Forget about the other going forward initiatives.

These are things that are already, already happening and already on the book.

So on one hand, you seem to have far less, it’s not really deference, but far less of this kind of adherence to the notion that balanced budgets are inherently good as a philosophy and as a guideline in terms of how you are going to introduce policy on the one end and then this other kind of growing ethos fueled by the Trump illustration that I can promise goddamn anything, and it doesn’t really matter about having to, to deliver at the, at the end of the day.

And if I, you know, do so, and, and all the media is on me, you know, then that’s good news.

I mean, you’ve got right now where Styles, you know, her approval ratings 50, I don’t know.

And crombies is 38, I don’t know.

It’s in his interest to keep that exactly the way it is.

People not knowing there.

So the more he can put that media spotlight on himself, and Trump knows this probably better than any other politician in ever, that if you can just keep everything on you, then you will continue to dominate.

And if you continue to dominate, then you can control the news agenda well.

And, you know, without getting on it too much, because I want to talk about political parties and the kind of substack post that I wrote today.

Do you think the Democratic Party can keep up with all this?

Because it does feel that the awe campaign, the move fast and break things campaign that the Trump administration is playing, that even though the Democrats are now out in the streets and making the stink and mobilizing their constituency, to what extent, on the one hand can they participate in this larger crazy news cycle, but to keep it within the line of our current narrative?

Where do you think the Democrats are gonna fall when it comes to Canada, let alone Greenland, let alone this kind of imperialist rhetoric that’s coming out of the White House?

Because while they’re objecting to the nominations for Cabinet, they’re now starting to focus on musk.

I don’t think I’ve heard a single Democrat say, come on, let’s lay our hands off Canada.

And it does seem like this threat may be more credible than we would like it to be.

Yeah, I mean, if I was running the Democratic Party, I’d avoid the chaos, I’d avoid all the stuff that’s going on, and I would be in a much more reflective mode because they can’t win that fight right now.

Because first they have no allies in the fight and secondly, that they just can’t compete on the, on the news cycle, social media or, or trajectory.

But they have to be sitting down and saying something they said for a long time, not so much how did we lose?

But now saying, how do we get back the blue collar worker?

But more recently saying, what the hell is happening with young Latino and black voters, disproportionately males.

What’s happening with young people?

You know, that is our core constituency.

Blue collar workers, people of color and young people.

That is an existential threat to us.

We lose those three constituencies and we stand for nothing.

We have nothing at all.

I mean, in Canada, just jumping across the border, I mean, I think what you’re going to see after this provincial election and after the federal election, the Conservatives prevail in both.

You’re going to see a very, very serious decision, discussion between the NDP and the Liberals about merging.

Very serious discussion.

And that’s to the Democrats, they just got to say, you know, we have lost our way, we have lost our mission and, and to figure out what they have to do because Greenland, I mean, is not going to be an existential threat to more Canada.

I don’t think they think about Canada.

I remember asking years and years ago, you know, do you approve or disapprove of.

Who’s the guy who couldn’t spell potato?

The Vice President in the States?

Mondale?

No, no, not Mondale.

Bush?

No.

Quail.

Dan Quail.

Yeah.

It’s years and years and years ago in a Canadian sample said you, you approve or disapprove the job that Dan Quail has done as Vice President.

And then in the United States, I asked you approve or disapprove the job that Brian Mulroney has done as Prime Minister of Canada.

And the undecided rate in the Canadian sample talking about quail was about 13%.

And in the American sample talking about the Prime Minister of Canada was about 70% that they didn’t even know that.

So again, I just, you know, I don’t want to be cynical about this, but I don’t think the Democrats have thought about Canada for 10 seconds right now.

Yeah.

Which I think is a mistake given that we may be a voting bloc that is part of their electoral college or some sort and impending future.

That’s what someone said.

If they want to make Canada the 51st state, count on two more Democrats in the Senate and probably about another 30 Congress people in the House of Representatives that are all Democrats.

That’s what Canada would send.

Although this is where I think we should be anticipating these negotiations and saying, no, we want 16 states, we want 32 senators.

Again, we’re not gonna get what we want, but we can ask now.

The substack I put out today was one of my favorite books when I was an undergrad was Robert Mickle’s Political.

Party Seminal, absolutely seminal book.

It just blew my mind.

And I remember at the time I was and at U of T I was taking a couple of courses with Jack McLeod, who was a great professor and he used to bring in all sorts of politicians.

And I would ask all these really pointed, aggressive questions based on Robert Mickle’s analysis.

And it was remarkable some of the frank answers I got.

So for people who haven’t read it or who didn’t read the substack today, it basically talks about how in political parties, and I think this is actually true in all organizations, you have an inherent pull towards the status quo, that the people in power want to stay in power and the organizational culture and structure reflects that.

And this was partly Inspired by Russell McCorman.

Medevue subscriber posted a comment saying it feels like all political parties, especially the ndp, especially the Liberals, and I would say even triply so, the Democratic Party, they’re more like corporations than they are political parties.

They’re more like brand exercises rather than policy experiments or attempts to find talent and leadership and inspire mobilization across the country.

And that’s why when you heard Alan describing how the Democratic Party has lost parts of their base and elements of their constituency which for decades were not only assumed, but vibrant engines of their get out the vote of their mobilization, I think it’s because the party has become static, it’s become atrophied.

It doesn’t have the ability to, for example, have conversations about Palestine, let alone have conversations on say, universal basic income or the impact of AI on the public service, these things all happen outside of the left wing parties, but in right wing parties they happen on the inside.

In right wing parties they still to a certain extent have those policy arguments, although I still think that they’re structured like corporations and no longer have the vestiges of what we at least naively used to think political parties were.

So I’m curious for your thoughts both on the article and more broadly, how you think Robert Mickle’s work kind of applies to our contemporary moment.

Well, it’s very interesting because again, it’s something that is happening and no one else is talking about.

Typical Jesse Hirsch.

He kind of sees something that no one else sees.

So that’s always interesting.

Again, having worked for political parties for virtually all my life, it’s very interesting for me to watch how things have changed and where we are right now.

Apropos your piece.

Way before Robert McKelvie McAll’s Michelle’s part of party politics.

Walter Baggott, who wrote the both the British constitution called political parties grand aggregators.

Robert Stanfield called them the crucible of consensus.

You had a political party because what you wanted to do is you wanted to have an organization that superseded tribe.

And the brokerage function was that, you know, if you’re in tribe A and I’m in tribe B, but we both believe that we should be going down road, why then the political party finds us how it figures out how to get on, on road Y, even though we come from very, very different tribes, road Y becomes more important than tribe A or, or, or, or tribe B.

And you think about it is that political parties, you know, throughout history had these really bizarre diverse coalitions of voters within them.

Democrats at one point in time was northern liberals, you know, this is a southern segregationists and you know, black people, you know, what did these three constituency have in, in common?

Nothing at all, except they were all Democrats.

And the other thing that was running in parallel to this and you still see some vestiges of this in Canada, not so much in the United States.

We can talk about the difference if you want is that political parties not that long ago were a hundred percent volunteer driven.

Yeah, 100%.

I mean everyone I worked on campaigns with, they had another job.

They’re a real estate developer, they were lawyers, whatever, and they would take two months off and they’d run, run the campaign party headquarters consisted of a national director and six old ladies who ran the printing machine that put out the newsletter.

There was no professional staff, no professionalism at all.

And when you went to a party convention, they were all volunteers from the local level, elected at the local level and non paying jobs.

So the notion that these parties could actually do anything substantive, in fact they just kind of went away once the campaign started.

But they were grassroots mobilizers and someone too, and also supporters of local, local, local campaigns over the years and especially in the United States is you’ve seen a real professionalization of parties.

You know, you go into the Republican national headquarters and there are thousands of, of people there.

They got in house polling capabilities, got in house social media, they’ve got in house fundraising, they’ve got, you know, in house policy people, they’ve got congress relations people.

So they have.

What you identified now is an increasing corporatization and with that corporatization comes certain standards.

You know that you do do branding, you do do messaging, you do do risk analysis, you do all of those things that corporations do and in doing so probably take away from those more fundamental roles that the people who originally defended parties and established parties for.

So good stuff.

Well, and to bring it back to the Liberals and the ndp, my dad, David Ryan, who at some point I think we’re going to have to bring him on as a guest to the show because his feelings will be hurt otherwise.

He has been adamant about them merging.

Right.

Because he sees the threat on the right and he’s a left wing voter.

He’s voted NDP his entire life.

Although Christopher Freeland is his MP and he’s in love with her.

He thinks she’s the bee’s knees.

But I’m not convinced and I say this to come back to our kind of talk on the culture of political parties.

The NDP in particular is a very tight knit group, right.

And they have a lot of power municipally in Toronto, which gives them a lot of organizational structure.

The same is true in Hamilton.

And I would never ever see them wanting to merge with the Liberals even if they could all agree on the exact same policies.

I think fundamentally on a personality level, on a culture level, I don’t know if that’s true federally, but very much true provincially.

And the example here, and I want to frame this in the form of a question, I don’t know if you followed Sarah Jama and her story very closely.

She was a really smart, really radical MPP from Hamilton, got elected with the NDP but got kicked out of caucus maybe within a month or two after being elected in the last provincial election.

Partly because she just wouldn’t tow the party line on Palestine, on everything but Palestine in particular.

Yeah, I remember her.

Yeah.

And this was a part where a part of me kind of understood the party’s attitude, which is they’re not asking for a lot of party discipline but they wanna make sure that they don’t have people speaking out of turn and speaking out of the party.

But they even blocked her nomination this go round and at a certain point the party’s shooting itself in the foot.

Cuz Sarah’s very popular, not just in her writing but online and with a lot of people in the left in Canada.

I could see them saying to Sarah, look here’s our organizational concerns that we want to work with you on, but this is where to form it in a question.

To what extent is party discipline?

And you alluded to this in terms of branding and the larger party apparatus, which I think is part of that.

To what extent is it no longer an asset, but has become a kind of liability when people expect more authenticity and more personality to their politicians?

Well, again, it’s not only a good question, but a hard question because the sine qua non of political parties is party discipline.

Because that was what told people, we’re going down road Y and didn’t allow people to say, well, what about road Z?

No, we’re going down road Y.

This is what we stand for.

Because that was the only way you could offer any coherence to the electorate that would send out a signal as that I’m for you or I’m like you.

But.

But put that aside for a second.

Your point about authenticity is absolutely right.

You know, the other side of cynicism that people don’t really fully appreciate is having decided there’s no great men and women in politics anymore, what are people looking for?

They’re looking for honest men and women, and that could even be liars.

I remember doing focus groups, you know, after, after Rob Ford for the Atkinson foundation, were horrified.

How can Toronto, the center of cultural influence and sophistication, you know, elect a leather lung, no neck retard?

So I know, yes, but saying elect Rob Ford.

We did these focus groups and the people said, this was long before Donald Trump, long before Donald Trump.

He said, yeah, I don’t particularly like him.

He’s kind of a goof.

And, you know, I don’t agree with that much.

He’s saying.

I said, well, why did you vote for me?

Well, at least he’s, I know what I’m getting, you know, and he tells it like it is.

He doesn’t tell me what I think I want to know, I need to know.

And it was just that sheer authenticity.

And at the same time, Nenshi was getting elected in Calgary, Cowtown, you know, hairy ass Cowboyville, a guy in Ismaili Muslim.

And it was exactly the same thing.

At least I know what I’m getting.

So how do you get that authenticity when everything is orchestrated, when everything is manipulated from the back room?

And we talked of this a little bit about, you know, the Republican Congress people in, in the States, you know, how.

Why would they ever want to save a job where they had no say in anything and they’d lost all control of spending, you know, is that the best job you could get?

Really?

A job that you ridiculed and you got nothing to do.

Exactly.

Why would you want to be a member of a political party if you had a really interesting, innovative view that was earth shattering and ran against party discipline?

The answer is you shut up and deal with it inside the caucus.

You know that you don’t go outside.

But it’s, it’s a, as I say, it’s a complex question because runs the notion that there should be no discipline runs contrary to the original purpose of political parties.

The notion that there should be discipline runs completely contrary to voters desire in popular political culture.

So you’ve got kind of a lose lose situation right now.

Well, and that’s where to your I think rather wise hypothesis on a previous episode that we should be watching for new ideologies and try to understand that our frame for ideologies is kind of old industrial and we need to be looking at it in a much more Internet centric way.

Perhaps the same applies to political parties and that doesn’t mean new political parties because it is certainly possible for existing political parties to change.

But maybe what’s happening in the Republican Party under Trump, which is a transformation, maybe we will see the equivalent on the left.

And I say this cuz we have successfully established contact with Avi Lewis who’s passed us on to his scheduler and event coordinator.

So we’re going to have Avi on the show soon because I think we should throw this question to him.

Right.

Because you know, on the one hand he is a very authentic person.

I’ve been watching some of the guy.

Who’S skewed party politics as a consequence of that.

Absolutely.

But now he’s succumbing.

At the same time though, he has a kind of advanced media literacy that very few politicians possess.

That may give him perhaps a little bit of confidence in the way he speaks.

Because I’ve watched some of the talks.

He’s canvassing a lot right now because that is how you win office, often physical contact.

And I’ve been watching some of the talks he’s been given to his canvassers to kind of rev them up before they go out.

And it’s not your usual fare, it’s radical.

And that’s where I kind of want to end today.

We’ve been talking about both kind of leaders in the form of Doug Ford and we’ve been talking about political parties.

What do you think are the necessary ingredients for there to be more radical politics in our policy discussions?

Because we alluded to this in terms of how parties really Try to narrow the options and don’t want to take risks.

But one of our mandates here on Red Tory is to dig up radical ideas.

Well, and you think he goes back also?

We were talking about the Democrats and their challenge.

I mean, who’s radical now?

The right.

Yeah.

I mean, there’s no one who’s more radical than Donald Trump.

I mean, some of the stuff that Doug Ford is, is talking about Pierre Poliev here, forget about what’s happening in Europe on the right yet there’s this fearfulness again, in part you know, modulated by party discipline that, and it’s much more profound on.

The fear is much more profound on the center left side than, than on the right is that I have to be moderate, I have to be reasonable.

And you know, we.

On some.

I don’t think you can be a lunatic.

I don’t.

I think if you’re a Marjorie Taylor Greene, you’re Marjorie Taylor Green, you’re nuts.

But I think there’s a lot more room to put forward radical ideas that would be, that would resonate with, with, with the population, especially young people talk about that too, who say the system doesn’t work for me.

Well, rip the system down, you know, offer an alternative system.

You know, say we’re gonna, we’re gonna cap people’s salaries at a million dollars a year, let them scream bloody murder and see what happens with.

If you turn any heads.

And I bet you would.

Yeah.

And, and again, you know, that’s also the other thing that happens in politics.

Politics, there’s a, there’s a socialization that, that goes on with people who are, who are there.

And I remember I used to sit with, you know, Joe Clark and talk to him before he was, had a speech, and he was funny and insightful and loose and, you know, really easygoing.

And then he’d leave the room and walk up the stairs to the podium and get behind there and he turned into a great big puff guy up, you know, wooden bullshitter.

No, because that was, that was his socialized notion of what a politician was, how they were supposed to behave.

They weren’t supposed to be fun and easygoing and casual and, you know, a little bit off there.

And, and I think a lot of people who get into politics, you know, start trying to play to type rather than being, as you said, their authentic self in fear that their authentic self somehow would be seen as offside with their stereotypes that they believe they have to conform to.

Yeah, absolutely.

It speaks to how even today, newscasters are still emulating Walter Cronkite.

Absolutely right.

When again, I think the authenticity people desire is completely different.

Now I think that’s a good time to end.

Although I am going to flag again, I think we do need to get more into the intergenerational.

And Vasiliki Bednar, who will be joining us in a couple of weeks, is technically a millennial.

So I think that’ll provide us with an opportunity to talk about that.

Because most of the young people I’m seeing react to the same issues we’re describing are really using a generational lens to process it, which I find fascinating, but it’s something I’d like to dig into more.

Well, we shouldn’t.

I mean, if they’re, if the experience of one generation is absolutely not just different, but opposite of the experience of another generation, we should be anticipating their lens is going to be particularly different.

And I guess as long as other generations, their mom and dad, they’re not going to be at war.

But that prospect exists very, very clearly.

Oh, if a generation is standing in my way, and I see that just in the workplace all the time, you know, we take great pride saying, oh, we’re an intergenerational company.

We’ve got an old fart like Alan, you know, 73 years old.

We just hired Billy here, he’s only 22.

Well, Billy’s looking and saying, forget about Alan for a second.

What about that 55 year old?

He’s going to be there for as long as Alan.

He’s gonna be for another 18 years.

I’m gonna be 44 for Christ’s sake.

By, by then, you know, Fox, a 50 year old.

Get him out of here.

You know, or what has happened with that generation is they call, they call it, they call it out and up.

Yes.

The way I’m going to get promoters, I’m going to quit.

Yes.

And in our business, we can’t keep 30 year olds for that very reason.

They come in, they get trained 18 months.

See you later.

Well, and it’s not just you.

I think it’s right across the economy.

And that’s why I think it’s something we should fundamentally try to address.

And Armin Yelnizian is our guest on Monday.

Smart, smart, smart person.

And when I was chatting with her about the show, it made me realize that I think you and I, one of the main differences we have that I often forget is you largely get your news through traditional kind of journalist sources and I largely get my news through Internet sources.

And that I think provides an interesting perspective given that we’re talking about these issues because there should be more cross generational dialogue amongst people who are being exposed to stuff through different mediums.

And I mean, because she’s always worked for alternative policy centers, I mean, I think bring some real good insights into the dilemmas we’ve been talking about about the center left and what they’re going through because she’s lived that experience her entire life and now kind of tasked in no small part is one of the public intellects on the center left of helping them figure that out.

Awesome.

I just got a reply from obvious people so this is a good time to stop so I can firm up that date.

Any final words, Alan?

No.

Again, good talk, Jesse.

Always great.

Yeah, yeah.

So tune us in next episode.

We’re on all the podcast networks on YouTube and we’re now posting clips on both YouTube and TikTok and sometimes Instagram.

And the YouTube clips are getting really interesting traction in comments, so I’ll have to start reporting them back as part of the show.

Yeah, it’s fascinating what does and what doesn’t because it doesn’t meet a lot of tests of kind of rationality or normalcy.

Well, why would they like that?

Well, as empiricists, we’re just going to have to create more data and get a larger sample size.

Absolutely.

And potential do some correlation analysis.

We’ll figure it all out.

Well, I potentially have a guest on who can help us make sense of it.

Right.

In terms of understanding the algorithm.

So thanks again everybody.

We’ll see you soon.

Take care.