Well that was a mighty lump of undemocratic coal the B.C. referendum on electoral reform delivered on the eve of Christmas Eve. For the third time since 2005, B.C. voters rejected a more democratic system in favour of sticking with the odious and still champion First Past the Post.

At least the original rejection, in ’05, involved a veritable victory, denied only due to an arbitrary requirement for 60 per cent yesses in order to count. This time it wasn’t even a fake win for antidemocracy. The noble side got 39 per cent, the ugly status quo aced it with 61 per cent.

So who’s the Grinch here? Who you gonna blame?

1. The stupid system chosen by B.C.’s NDP government for this vote. It was an all-mail (vs. all-male) approach. This may’ve been the worst time in history for that. Canada Post was on strike and a rising demographic rarely use mail at all. Their mailboxes aren’t a central feature of their lives while the ritual of addressing an envelope and affixing a stamp is alien. You were automatically registered if you’d voted before and not if you hadn’t. In other words the disenfranchised were even more so. Basically, those who’d always voted — generally old and change averse — were specially empowered.

OTOH, the Swiss hold more referenda than anyone and do it by mail without giving up in despair. OTOOH, most Swiss referenda lose. In fact, generally referendums tilt toward ‘No.’

What may’ve been more fateful was the lack of a democratic process setting up the process for voting on a more democratic process. In 2005 B.C. ran an exemplary citizens’ assembly, which formulated the terms of the vote on voting. It was like a blast of ancient Athens. Something similar happened in Ontario’s 2007 vote. Those amazing labs for citizen participation inadvertently suggested that voting itself may be inferior to something more direct.

2. Why change? Since the rise of Chartism in the 1830s, political reform in countries with formal democracies has been built on electoral expansions: first toward universal (meaning male) suffrage; then the vote for women in the early 1900s; then minorities, as in the U.S. voting rights bill of 1965.

What prevailed in all those cases was disgust at the injustice of excluding palpably equal humans from political participation. What presented in B.C., it seems to me, wasn’t disgust over injustice but rather a sense of entitlement in certain quarters, like the Green Party and NDP, who felt they deserved better. Theoretically they do, but that will not fuel outrage the way gross injustice can.

Sealing the deal is the fact that all parties, including putatively “left” ones, have surrendered to neo-liberalism as their program over the past 25 years. So-called “third way’s,” like Tony Blair’s Labour in the U.K., or in Mulcair’s NDP, are simply cover for moving rightward.

Green has become anyone’s guess. So why offer electoral improvements to these non-alternative alternatives? The only “left” parties that have surged in support are those that explicitly disowned neolib policies, like Bernie’s Democrats in the U.S. and Corbyn’s Labour in the U.K.

3. The exhaustion of politics. This results from those neutered parties, which the political system relied on for fibre and bulk. The Yellow Vests, who started in France but have spread globally, are pertinent here.

Journalist Adam Nossiter says that they aren’t a party yet are highly significant politically. They reject existing parties, including those that try to incorporate them. They don’t focus on race or immigration, though those appear among their grievances, nor do they have a high-profile leader. They’re “more occupy than Orban.”

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Why has the right failed to co-opt them? Because the right, once in power, has no answers, not even a plan. At least the fascists of the 1930s had a plan: militarize the economy and justify that by endless war against inferior races or civilizations. That won’t work in countries that aren’t homogeneous and in an era where major wars would end swiftly, leading to mutual annihilation.

In short it’s a stalemate. I’d like to think, where there are no clear answers, victory will go to those with better questions, which was always, IMHO, the left. But that may be my own lack of confidence talking. We’re on uncertain ground.

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