This is the fourth in a series of opinion columns on the 2022 Ontario provincial election, written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.
Andrew Breitbart, the conservative thought leader who was raised Jewish by adoptive parents, once said that politics was downstream from culture.
What he meant was, to effect change, you had to create a situation external to the political system that elected officials had no choice but to respond to.
But as far as I know, Andrew Breitbart never sat on the phone with a lifelong member of one of Ontario’s socially conservative fringe parties as they underwent the equivalent of a cheshbon hanefesh and decided to support the Progressive Conservatives for the first time ever. If he had, he might have reconsidered his theory.
I’m not sure I did a good enough job of supporting this man’s emotional state as he went through what he certainly wanted me to believe was a harrowing transition. Of course, he might have made up his mind before he made the phone call. I’ll never know.
What I do know, after years of fielding calls like that one, is that Canadians on the right-wing fringe don’t want to change the culture. What they want is for those in power to pander to them—and they’re probably upset that someone other than them has recently been pandered to.
Our beleaguered socially conservative voter had been moved to phone and offer his support after the leadership candidate I was working for had taken some vague stance against the Ontario government’s updating of the sex-ed curriculum. To the campaign organizers, this proved that the provincial Liberals had infuriated parents who had the right to decide whether their children were taught about “gender ideology” or not.
It was smart politics, we were told, to court these voters, who couldn’t tell you much about parties or legislation but knew when the government had overstepped its bounds.
They, the average folks, were the silent majority who knew better than the expensive consultants and “experts” favoured by the Liberals, who were all too willing to use epithets like “homophobic” and “transphobic” to denigrate their critics.
At one time, I halfway believed this narrative. I thought that the issue was that the government treated these people with contempt and wasn’t interested in hearing them out. And while this is undoubtedly true, I know today that it’s only half the story. The half you don’t hear as much about is that these griefers do as much to maintain the status quo as they do to try and change it.
You could start with the absolute insistence that everyone use their terminology. You can’t call them “anti-vaxxers”, even though many of them are opposed to vaccinations. You can’t say their views are extreme, because then the discussion devolves into how many extremists you need for a movement to be extreme. You can’t point out the antisemitism, because they will point to the Jews affiliated with the movement.
Eventually, you get to the point where you realize it’s about scoring points rather than advancing the conversation, which is usually the same time when they decide you’re just as bad as everyone else.
Then there’s the constant infighting between the various factions. What are they fighting about? The same things various Jewish movements constantly fight about- mainly, who has the one true interpretation. They’re all for freedom, but how some of those freedom-seekers are going about achieving that freedom is WRONG.
But the most crucial issue is that if the vaccine mandates went away tomorrow and everything went back to “normal”, they would have to find some other way to get people to listen to them.
And that’s the trouble with culture change: Sometimes, even so-called “extremists” get too attached to the way things are to let it happen.
Josh Lieblein can be reached at [email protected] for your response to Doorstep Postings.
