Why the NDP can’t emulate Conservative strategy and tactics
Apparently, people close to Jack Layton and Olivia Chow are being told to read Paul Wells’ book Right Side Up and Tom Flanagan’s book Harper’s Team, because the senior NDP leadership–Layton, Chow, and Chief of Staff Bob Gallagher–admire the Conservatives’ intelligence and want to emulate them. This won’t work for any number of reasons. One is that you can’t emulate Tom Flanagan through a shallow encounter like the mass-market book he’s written. If you want to get into his head, you need to read the books he reads, understand his way of thinking, and have an aptitude for that way of thinking. That means knowing more about the man and what he knows than they’ll get from Harper’s Team.
Two, the NDP doesn’t have the talent that Harper’s team has. Harper’s senior team is certainly very smart, with a diversity of skills each of which contributes to a successful electoral team. Flanagan, Harper, and Chief of Staff Ian Brodie all have a ruthless, calculating sensibility disciplined by study of economics and politics through the lens of social choice theory and game theory. They have an appreciation for what William Riker calls the art of heresthetic; they study and learn from successful strategies of the past. (Heresthetic: “the activities by which a person frames, primes, or otherwise sets the agenda and provides the context and interpretation for a subsequent decision.”) Patrick Muttart is a brilliant marketer and campaign tactician, with a fine psychological sense, and an encyclopedic knowledge of electoral campaigns in English-speaking countries. Doug Finlay is a top-notch campaigner. There is no one on the NDP team of this calibre, and little chance that there will be. This comes down to another vital difference.
One way of expressing this difference is in terms of self-calibration. The Conservatives are better self-calibrators and better calibrators of others than the NDP. The senior leadership of the NDP, especially Layton, Chow, and Gallagher, fancy themselves as smarter than smart but they’re not half as smart as they think they are, and they’re certainly not as smart as Harper and team. As I wrote yesterday, in any strategic encounter, the accuracy of your self-assessment and your assessment of others is decisive, all other things being equal.
The NDP team suffers from emotional flaws that are easy to exploit: not only the belief in their own smartness, but the need to believe they are smart; in the case of Layton, the need to always feel liked, and always feel on the up-and-up; in the case of Chow, an utter intolerance of criticism, and a vengeful, grudging spirit. Another weakness: Layton can’t and won’t ever fire Chow from his central leadership team, which might be the single best HR decision he could make. This compounds his team’s collective weakness. Not that Harper doesn’t have his own flaws, but all of the Layton team’s flaws are easily exploited, and it’s obvious to any shrewd observer that the Conservatives enjoy playing Jack Layton.
Another way of thinking about the disparity in self-calibration is in terms of propensity to groupthink. After the Conservatives’ 2004 election showing, Patrick Muttart wrote a savage criticism of the campaign. Harper rewarded Muttart by making him a central part of the ruthless debrief that followed, and eventually promoting him to a senior position in the PMO, responsible for strategy. Layton, Chow, and Gallagher respond to ruthless criticism with hygiene, isolating the critics and preserving the groupthink that has always been endemic in NDP inner circles.
Not that Harper and team are all-knowing or all-powerful. The lesson of Karl Rove’s demise is that even great strategists can be overwhelmed by history or the mistakes they make in one domain (in Rove’s case, policy) that eventually cost them in their field of strength (in Rove’s case, elections). Events are unpredictable, fortunes change, incompetence can be rewarded, and competence thwarted. But Harper’s team has many of the qualities a good strategic team needs, and Layton’s team doesn’t.
Lost in all of this, though, is that a serious force for left-wing ideas can’t achieve them through the ruthless gamesmanship of the sort employed by Harper’s team. On the left, the agenda and how it is achieved are inseparable. At this point, Marxism 101 is instructive. The state in capitalist society exists to manage and preserve capitalist economic relations, through the rule of law, protection of property rights, and so on. The state has relative autonomy to broker compromises which might diminish profits or threaten narrow sectoral interests, in the interest of preserving the system as a whole. By and large, though, the state and its ancillary estates, including the media, reflect the dominant consensus, and this reflects the various interests and power of capital. No serious left-wing agenda can be achieved through parliamentary means without a fundamental relation to social forces that create power outside the state and challenge the power of capital. All major progressive reforms have been achieved in circumstances where the “left” had some kind of external leverage on the state and capital to force concessions. No parliamentary gamesmanship can deliver this. From which it follows that the current leadership of the NDP are either naive, or insincere, or both. At any rate, they don’t represent a serious force for progressive change.
The short version is: it’s a rare person who gets their head in the game while keeping their principles and their strategic goals pure.
Tags: Canadian politics, Conservatives, groupthink, left-wing strategy, NDP, self-calibration, state theory
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