Chrystia Freeland is the federal member of parliament for Toronto Centre and the author of Plutocrats: the Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

Every age has its fight between the cynics and the true believers, the pessimists and the optimists, the naysayers and the cheerleaders. In its latest incarnation, thanks to a witty Gawker post on the virtues of the no-bullshit approach of calling things as you see them, we begin the year with a war between “snark” and “smarm”—and the deck would seem to be pretty heavily stacked in favor of the snarkers.

Who wants to be Thumper, Bambi’s ever-optimistic bunny pal and the mascot of the smarmers, when you could be Gawker’s cool creator, Nick Denton or, if your tastes skew a little more Beltway and feminine, Maureen Dowd? This is particularly true if you have ever been a writer, wanted to be one or even enjoyed great writing.


I plead guilty on all three counts, but I am also a native of Canada, a country inhabited—at least in the American imagination and before the apotheosis of our boorish, crack-smoking Toronto Mayor Rob Ford—entirely by Thumpers. Moreover, after more than 20 years as a reporter and writer, I am, as of Nov. 25, also an elected politician. I’ve moved from the trade that invented snark, and the city, New York, that prides itself on its snarkiness, to the land of smarm and the ranks of professional smarmers as a member of the Canadian federal parliament. Our national motto up here is peace, order and good government—a phrase no snarker could utter with a straight face, but one I couldn’t be prouder to stand for. So I guess I am playing true to type in coming out in defense of smarm.

First, let me try for a little smarmy conciliation. Part of the debate is false, because it rests on category confusion. If you are a professional critic—a prosecutor, an investigative reporter, a short-only investor, an opposition politician doing battle in Question Period—you need to be a snarker. Your tone is a matter of personal style; you may choose to dress your iron fist in a velvet glove. But your central purpose is negative, critical, to find fault and to deliver judgment—in short, to snark.

If your job is to build something, however—if you are an entrepreneur, a mayor, an architect—you need to be a cheerleader, a believer, a seeker of consensus, rather than a finder of fault. Personal style aside, your guiding imperative is to be creative, constructive, to find a way to make things work, rather than to look for reasons they can’t—in short, to smarm. No wonder the snarkers and the smarmers are naturally at odds.

At least that’s my Canadian-politician-consensus-seeking effort at finding some middle ground in the snark vs. smarm debate. But I recognize it’s not the whole story. Even though snark and smarm each have their necessary place, the debate about which is better has attracted so much comment because there really is a cultural, social, political and even moral choice we need to make together about what kind of public arena we want to have.

And on this one, I’m with the smarmers. A society whose dominant tone is snark is ultimately one that is politically disengaged. A culture that is mostly about pointing out how vile, venal, stupid and hypocritical political leaders are, and how ineffective if not downright harmful government is, is a culture in which people will conclude that there is no point in being politically involved, even with as slight a commitment as voting.

I learned what low regard we have for our elected representatives partly through the shocked reaction of some of my friends when I made the leap from journalism to politics. My 8-year-old daughter was the gentlest, waiting until after I had been elected to tell me that she and her older sister had been worried about my decision because “we thought all politicians were bad people—until you became one, of course!” One of the New York editors I admire most was horrified, warning me that if I entered politics I would never again be able to tell the truth—and that even if I tried, people wouldn’t listen to me, on the grounds that I was a politician, and therefore a liar.

My daughters are certainly in tune with the zeitgeist. Late last month, a Guardian /ICM poll looking for the causes of the voter disconnect in Britain found that 47 percent were “angry” with their politicians, and just 16 percent respected them. The Guardian mostly attributed this to the politicians’ failings—64 percent of voters surveyed complained politicians don’t keep their promises, and 46 percent complained they are on the take. Commenting on the results, Guardian assistant editor Michael White declared that “politics is a mug’s game for addictive masochists,” a sentiment whose echoes I heard in the remarks of many of my Canadian friends, who have been thanking me, in funereal tones, for my “sacrifice.”

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But is it that our politicians have become worse, or that our attitude toward them has become more dyspeptic? It isn’t hard to imagine what our era of snark would have made of past heroes like John F. Kennedy or Winston Churchill. Elected politicians in Western democracies are subject to more scrutiny and tighter ethical restrictions than ever before. They are certainly a lot less corrupt than a century ago—think Tammany Hall or Britain’s rotten boroughs. Yet we have less respect for their ethics and their efficacy than ever.

That has real consequences. Running for parliament in Canada, which I did this past fall, is a body-contact sport—knocking on doors, meeting voters by “main-streeting” or in small coffee parties or on the sidewalk after Friday prayers at the mosque. I loved it, mostly because I was astonished at how nice everyone was. Nine times out of 10, people thanked me for taking the time to introduce myself. I was often invited in for coffee or tea, and once given a pair of hand-knit mittens. My campaign team refused to record the data from my personal canvasses on the theory—which I am sure is right—that most voters would be too polite to tell me in person they wouldn’t be supporting me.

One time out of 10, though, I’d get a bellow of the same hostility picked up by the Guardian poll. I’m not voting, I would be told, because all politicians are equally rotten, so there’s no point in bothering to choose among them. I’m sure you’ve heard that line before—if you are a journalist, you have probably written it.

But if you stop to think about it, you’ll see that this conventional view is tragic. Our problem isn’t voter ignorance or voter apathy—it’s voter contempt. Contempt is snark’s fraternal twin, and it is paralyzing our electoral democracy.

Contempt for politics and politicians is particularly dangerous for progressives, or, as we still call ourselves up north, liberals. As a literary pose, snark has often been most stylishly practiced by the anti-establishment writers of the left, but when it comes to politics, it is an ideal tool for the neocons. If your goal is to starve the beast of government, a culture that disdains the state and those chosen to lead it suits you very well indeed. But if you believe there are big jobs that government needs to do, snark makes your task much harder.

Teaching citizens that voting is pointless and that government is useless is one of the failures of a culture of snark. Another is how it influences the behavior of the politicians elected by those of us who bother to vote. One of today’s commonplaces about politics is that politicians have become boring, poll-watching, talking point-spouting automatons. This is one of the ironies of the age of snark: Even as we have come to view politicians as immoral degenerates, we hold them to a Mother Theresa standard of personal behavior and denounce as a “gaffe” any comment that seems vaguely original or unscripted. (Very occasionally, a flamboyant iconoclast or downright scoundrel—a Chris Christie or Boris Johnson or even a Rob Ford—is allowed to break these rules, which suggests that, for all our finger-wagging, we are uncomfortable with their consequences.)

The resulting blandness is no fun, but it masks something a lot more corrosive—a political culture whose default mode is negative intent. Negative intent is the opposite of an attitude Indra Nooyi, the CEO of Pepsi, calls “positive intent,” the assumption that your counterparty has benign motives. Positive intent is the dominant culture in entrepreneurial clusters like Silicon Valley. It is the key, Nooyi says, to her professional success. Even behavioral science has deemed it the smartest approach to human interaction.

But thanks to snark, our political arena is ruled by negative intent. Rival parties and their supporters are depicted as enemies and come to see each other that way. The same goes for competing social interest groups. That’s a pity because we live in a time of vast problems that we have a common interest in solving—whether figuring out how to achieve equitable growth, responding to climate change or integrating China into the world economy. Yet to most of us today, mustering the necessary collective will seems impossible. That’s because we are in thrall to the low ambitions of a culture of snark.

Of course, the world can’t run entirely on earnest problem-solving, even if it did work to rebuild Europe after World War II or help to spare us a repeat of the Great Depression after the 2008 financial crisis; we need snark, too, in the political arena and everywhere else. Those same behavioral psychologists who endorse positive intent offer a strong caveat: If your counter- party harms you, you must strike back. And when it comes to some issues—slavery, apartheid, totalitarianism—snark, which is to say total opposition, is the only morally tenable position.

But even the most morally clear-cut fight eventually ends, and that is when it is essential for snark to give way to the softer virtues of smarm. That’s the lesson of the political hero whose death marked the end of 2013. Nelson Mandela was, of course, no smarmy appeaser: He went to prison for his beliefs and, in a chapter many of the Western eulogists preferred to forget, even advocated armed struggle.

Crucially, though, Mandela also understood that snark was the right approach for leading a revolution, but not for leading a government. He fought the South African regime, but after bringing it down, he invited his jailer to his inauguration and his defeated opponents into his cabinet. It was his ability to pivot, to practice the smarmy art of reconciliation, that made him one of the great leaders of our time. In 2014, let’s honor Mandela, by being snarky when we want to tear something down, but remembering that only smarm can create what comes next.