I hope that I'm the first...

to offer the claim that the new Starbucks offer merges the theory of instrumentally rational voting and the theory of expressovist voting.

Hither and yon

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?", Thursday, October 23, 2008, 4:30 p.m., Dodds Auditorium, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.

Panel discussion with:

Eric Alterman, Professor of English, Brooklyn College of CUNY, columnist, The Nation

Jacob T. Levy *99, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University

Brink Lindsey '84, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute

Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values. Director, University Center for Human Values

Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Paul E. Starr, Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School. Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Will Wilkinson, Research Fellow and Managing Editor, Cato Unbound.

More on the Quebec election

at LGM from Scott Lemieux here and here, from Matt Yglesias, from John at his home blog and chez Ezra.

Update: and still more from pithlord. For what it's worth, I'm not and never have been in any sympathy with the Rosa Luxemburg's view of cultural particularism. (See, well, nearly every scholarly thing I've ever written.) The ties of cultural particularism are among the strongest in modern politics, and any political analysis that fails to understand this, or any political movement that's committed to ignoring it, will fail. And that's... ok. It's not something I have any urge to celebrate, but it's part of the crooked timber and all that; it's what we're like.

I share pithlord's hunch that the PQ is in real trouble. Even though the margins were small, third place is a bad place to be in a FPP system; and the PQ was greying anyway. Now PQ voters can be told the "don't waste your vote on something that's not going to happen, you have to choose between the two parties that are concerned with governing here and now" story, and it's going to have pull. The PQ has gotten a lot of traction out of its ability to be the only opposition to the Liberals; they've lost that, and will increasingly become the electoral home of the die-hard bitter-ender secessionists only. That's not a tiny group; but it's not a plurality either.

And I also want to echo pithlord's and Scott's comments that my American progressive friends shouldn't be quick to project their homegrown views about left-right economics onto Quebec. I suspect that most of my American progressive friends, if they were to pick out their ideal policy mix of taxation, spending, regulation, market flexibility, elite control, and openness would pick a spot that is so pro-market and low-tax compared to the Quebec status quo as to be off the political radar screen here. (See the critique of the Quebec model in the Quebec lucide manifesto, by a group that most prominently includes the longtime naionalist leader Lucien Bouchard.)

One more update: A few times before the election I blogged about the ADQ and Dumont as representatives of a pretty standard democratic phenomenon: the rural and/or working class populist rejection of elite urban consensus between the extant parties. I mentioned that this basically predictable phenomenon always seems to shock the elites. I'm typically on the side of the urban elites (pro-gay, pro-immigrant, multiculturalist, free trade, etc) in these disputes, but I think I've learned not to be surprised by the phenomenon. (I could hardly be a faithful reader of Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat or Russell Arben Fox and not have learned that by now.)

One thing I forgot to mention, and that we're now seeing in the French Montreal press, is that the voters get psychopathologized for their action. The question "what political preferences of large voter constituencies weren't getting met in the status quo?" gets turned into "why are the voters such scary crazy people?" One famous, and infamous, instance was Peter Jennings' on-air commentary about the 1994 American election that brought Republican majorities to the House and Senate:

"Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It's clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It's the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week....Parenting and governing don't have to be dirty words: the nation can't be run by an angry two-year-old."

Another variant of this is the "cynicism" story: voters who opt for change are characterized as cynical, nihilistic, insufficiently idealistic, because they seemed to believe the worst about us and people like us in whom they should have faith. Both the crazy-angry and the cynical tropes are starting to show up in post-mortems now.

As I think I've made clear in my Herouxville blogging, I think some of the policy prferences of the ADQ's rural base are extremely undesirable. But, given those preferences, there was nothing crazy or cynical or temper-tantrumish about them seeking out a party that would reflect them, and rejecting the partisan status quo.

Whew.

Well, that was fun.

Let's not do it again real soon now.

I note that the two parties of the extreme-marginal left, Quebec Solidaire and the Greens, had a combined vote greater than the PQ winner in my riding-- which is the PQ's core heartland. (The PQ gets dismissed as "Plateau elites"-- the Plateau is my neighborhood.)

Once it was clear there'd be no PQ government, this was a night of serious political junkie fun-- a wild and weird election. As a Montreal multiculturalist I can't like the ADQ, an dI expect to spend a lot of time denouncing their positions on the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities, but I won't mind if they force the liberals to the right on fiscal questions, and really won't mind if they replace the PQ as the Liberals' primary rivals in the province. And there is something kind of fun about seeing a populist revolt in action, a promise-breaking premier lose his own seat, and so on.

Update: False alarm on that last point. After I went to bed the vote totals changed and Charest kept his own seat after all-- just barely.

Election blogging when there's no news yet

It's certainly surprising to listen to/ read/ watch electionnight coverage in someone else's electoral culture. There are terminological differences that, however well I know them, constantly jar my ear-- "ridings" not "seats" or "districts," for example. The CBC uses "elected" in a very formal way; when American reporters would say that a race "has been called" or "is confirmed" or "is official" or any number of other terms, the CBC always says "no one has yet been elected in that riding," "only one MNA has been elected yet," etc.

Then there are weird terminological similarities. Even though the main race is a tight, complicated three-way race, and even though Canada generally has had man, many more than two important parties for a long time (Liberals, PC, NDP, Bloc, PQ, PLQ) the marginal parties (Greens, Quebec Solidaire) are still referred to as "third" parties.

Red Quebec/ Blue Quebec

I've written a bit, in the context of the Herouxville norms, about the Montreal-vs-rural-regions divide in Quebec politics and in understandings of Quebecois identity. (I've also talked about it in an interview with L'Express that I now fear will feel dated and obvious by the time it sees print.) For the first time, that divide is shaping up as the centerpiece of an election.

But with little more than a week to go before Quebecers choose a government, a new dynamic fuelled by regional resentment and a blurring of the usual dividing lines has emerged, leaving even the most intrepid observer unwilling to attempt to predict the outcome.[...]

What the parties all need are committees to polish their crystal balls. While some ridings are two-way races, others are three-way tussles, and the two-way races don't involve the same parties in every region.

For example, on Montreal Island and in regions like Abitibi, the Outaouais and Saguenay-Lac St. Jean, the fight is principally between the Liberals and the Parti Quebecois. However, in the Chaudiere-Appalaches region south of Quebec City, the Liberals are battling it out with the ADQ, while in the Mauricie the fight is between the PQ and the ADQ.

"In general, we think it is a three-way race, but in reality it is several two-way races," explained pollster Jean-Marc Leger, who says Quebec is likely to end up with a minority government, although he can't say for sure which party is likely to form it.[...]

"I have never seen an election like it," said Lapierre, a veteran political organizer. "I'm astonished how Quebec is full of microclimates. When you look at the polls from a Montreal perspective, you don't get an accurate picture, because there are microclimates in each region of Quebec and the battle is different in each region."[...]

The dynamic is also fuelled by a growing divide between urban and rural Quebec.

Observers and pollsters alike say one factor behind the unexpected rise of Mario Dumont's ADQ is a protest vote by Quebecers outside Montreal, who feel the Liberals and the Parti Quebecois are disconnected from their lives and concerns, and have been taking them for granted.

"In the first place, they are voting against the government," Leger said. "They turned to the PQ but they are dissatisfied with Andre Boisclair's leadership and the possibility of a third referendum. So they have turned to ADQ.

"ADQ is a vote against; that is to say, that ADQ is a vote by the regions against Montreal."

Political scientist Guy Laforest, an ADQ supporter, said Boisclair and Charest are perceived as being too close to Montreal's elites. "Mr. Charest is seen as being part of the Westmount/Outremont/Sherbrooke politico-business elite. ... Mr. Boisclair is more connected to the media/cultural elite of the Plateau Mont Royal. Mr. Dumont appears more like a champion of the regions."[...]

Both Laforest and Leger point to the debate over the reasonable accommodation of ethnic and religious minorities as a turning point of the campaign.

"The debate on reasonable accommodation, that debate permitted Mario Dumont to exist," Leger said. "His positions were tied to the Quebec reality and succeeded in becoming credible."

The condescending attitude of Montrealers in the controversy over Herouxville's code of conduct for immigrants just fed disaffection in the regions, where there is little or no contact with other ethnic groups, he said.

It does seem to turn out that a cosmopolitan or internationalist elite consensus-- say, for free trade, or for the EU, or for immigration, or for multiculturalism-- eventually provokes a populist backlash from voters who, rightly, perceive that their concerns have been shut out of mainstream political discourse. In each case, I'm not on their side, and on a day-by-day basis I'm glad when a society's main parties close ranks around what I take to be the decent position. But the resulting dissatisfaction is the elctoral equivalent of low-hanging fruit or a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk. Someone's going to pick it or pick it up; someone's going to make use of the resource. I wonder whether we can say anything general about the conditions under which that someone will be someone truly scary (e.g. Le Pen, Haider) (because the norms and taboos are so strong that only someone truly scary is willing to challenge them) or the conditions under which it'll be someone tolerably within liberal democratic bounds.

Charles Taylor has complained that we shouldn't call Mario Dumont the Jean-Marie Le Pen of Quebec. OK, fair enough; as far as I can tell Dumont is a fairly ordinary center-right populist, and he's well within the bounds of decent liberal democratic discourse. But the electoral market opening is the same, and for that matter is the same as Ross Perot's anti-trade campaigns: the populist backlash that always comes in response to that kind of bipartisan consensus on such issues, and always but always strikes urban elites as a complete out-of-nowhere surprise.

By the way, this elite-consensus model doesn't only have implications for the multiculturalist/ free trade neoliberals among us. It has implications for all forms of consociationalism and corporatism, too-- implications that are at least as strong, because those two models actualy rely on competing elites working together in one big cooperative venture (the grand coalition government, the union-corporate-ministry meetings to plan the whole economy) that eventually strike the populist imagination like a summit meeting between the Masons and the Trilateral Commission. The target for the backlash is that much more visible.

The attempt to shut out the electoral demand for some given set of policies may be something like the attempt to regulate away a market demand. The demand will find a way to express itself and be met; but the subsequent black-market entrepreneurs who meet it may have some very unappealing characteristics.

The U.S., by the way, has a quirky political culture in which Perots are left with little room to navigate; every presidential election is an overthrow of the elites. Since World War II Americans have only elected two new presidents from directly within the Washington elite, Kennedy and Bush I. Governors are preferred, always vowing to go shake up the stale self-involved ways of Washington. Moreover, Democrats are ostensibly elected to challenge the corporate elite and Republicans to challenge the government-media elite. At least a faux populism runs through the veins of American politics all the time. At the other extreme, France has had a decades-long model of government that is astonishingly elite-centered. French presidential and prime ministerial elections are grudge matches from the 1970s, not easily represented as populist newcomers overthrowing established ways. Next year's presidential election looks different; we'll see.

Right now in Montreal...

it's 11 below, Farenheit-- wind chill down to minus 36.

Puts me in the perfect mood to review the reading for today's class: Part Two of the Second Discourse, in which Rousseau bemoans humanity's foolish vanity in building houses. (Not exactly. But not exactly not, either.)

Not quite Herouxville, but...

Muslim girl ejected from [soccer] tournament for wearing hijab

Five young teams from across Canada walked out of a Quebec soccer tournament Sunday because a young Muslim girl was ejected for wearing a hijab.

Calling the rule banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women racist, four other teams followed Asmahan Mansour's team, the Nepean Selects from Ottawa, after she was thrown out for running afoul of a Quebec Soccer Association rule.

"The referee was staring and pointing. 'She can't play,'" said Asmahan, Asi to her friends. "I was like why? Why can't I play?"

Because of a safety rule, league spokesman Lyes Arfa said. He pointed out that the referee is Muslim himself, and that the ban on hijabs is to protect children from being accidentally strangled.

Ah. Well, that might be unfortunate but I guess I could see hwy there might be a safety issue there, and why a children's sports league would have to prioritize safety. There's a picture at the link, and, yes, I guess I could see the hijab she's wearing getting twisted around her neck.

And the league had told organizers about the rule — "The wearing of the Islamic veil or any other religious item is not permitted" — before the game.

Ah. Never mind.

Unless there's some perfect correlation of which I was previously unaware between "religious items" and "things that could accidentally strangle you," the safety rationale offered was pretextual. It's unrelated to the rule that was actually applied, which singles out religious items and particularly the "veil," which I doubt is being worn by any girls who are running around a soccer field exposing their limbs anyway. It's not a rule against items tied around the neck.

This will no doubt get spun as a "reasonable accommodations" dispute. As I've written before, issues of exemptions and reasonable accommodations arise when a generally neutral rule, such as a safety rule, incidentally impacts on cultural or religious activities. Then one has to figure out the importance of the rule, the importance of the activity, and so on. When the rule directly targets activities on the basis of their religious character, it's not a case calling for exemption; it's a case calling for repeal of an illiberal rule.

In a setting in which one may not wear any hat, or must wear prescribed headgear such as a helmet, the question of whether one may wear a hijab, turban, or yarmulke requires balancing and may but may not require an exemption. But if one is allowed to wear any hat except for a hijab, turba, or yarmulke, then what's at issue is simple discrimination against religion and violation of religious freedom.

Election blogging

My posts at Open University over the last couple days: Referendum Power, Consolidating New England, Bye-bye, If not Gerry's mander, then whose?, The Wrong Target.