Of course there is another important, indeed constitutionally fundamental sense in which the prime minister’s job is to be popular. Given the frailties of human nature, long and painful experience has taught us the only tolerable kind of polity is one where we the people have a veto on how we are governed, and by whom. Without orderly mechanisms for peacefully retiring leaders who are sufficiently unpopular for sufficiently long, you get Xerxes, Nero, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, etc.
It’s not that the public is always right, of course. Nor is it ever united, however politicians may bloviate about how “Canadians” want this or “deserve” that. As John Locke put it in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” that people differ “in respect of their understandings, I think nobody, who has had any conversation with his neighbours, will question.”
Fair-minded people also realize that some reasonable neighbours persist in rejecting our opinion even after we shout it at them. And others who accept it are appallingly defective in knowledge or reasoning, even prone to conspiracy theories.
The history of free societies, or even perusal of actual party platforms, is often enough to make one weep. (Try digging out an old platform, and wonder what they even thought they were talking about.) Yet the West caroms from blunder to fad and from disaster to catastrophe, generating unparalleled economic and cultural wealth along with much depraved rubbish, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in one war after another from classical Greece onward.
There have also been disasters, to be sure. Rome fell. And some dandies apparently loom. But the record of the rest of the world is almost unbroken, frequently squalid catastrophe. For instance, “re-electing” Vladimir Putin. Or Saddam Hussein.
So the trick is to let men and women of conviction advance proposals boldly, and let voters decide which program to adopt and for how long. Which is also a major reason I favour the “first past the post” electoral system; precisely by exaggerating swings in opinion and encouraging “wedge” politics it lets voters make clear choices and, if they seem mistaken on reflection, try something else. Especially when they get fed up.
It also gives leaders the time they need to be vindicated… or not. So not necessarily popular, but popular if necessary, one might say.
As American philosopher J. Budziszewski once said, people are logical… slowly. And yes, they are also often illogical in haste. But don’t panic. People may be fools, but they are not fools.
So back to Justin Trudeau. I consider him dangerously wrong, as I’ve made clear in these pages, and also unreflective and bellicose. But give him credit: He’s neither amorphous nor inconsistent. He’s relentlessly far left, from fiscal policy to transgenderism to the Middle East. Which beats electing someone “conservative” who then governs from the left, flip-flops, and leaves everything muddled.
Including, I think, neglect of national security, gender radicalism, and sympathy for censorship, including the so-called “Online Harms Bill” C-63, a direct attack on the mechanisms by which democracies blunder from triumph to triumph. But his problem isn’t that he lost a popularity contest. It’s that he deserved to.
It’s how self-government squares the circle. A leader’s job is to be popular because he’s right. And our job is to decide when he’s so persistently and manifestly wrong he must go.
