The Politics of the Psalms

Perhaps it has something to do with my first name, but I have always been fascinated by the biblical book of the Psalms. I grew up singing from a hymn book in which the Psalms set to meter were given a prominent place. The liturgical practice of singing the Psalms has ancient roots going back to temple and synagogue worship, finding its way also into Christian churches. It is thus not surprising that, until the end of the 18^th century, the majority of Protestants sang from metrical psalters containing all 150 Psalms. Most Protestants since then have abandoned this practice, but many in the Reformed tradition have held to it, glorifying God, as it is often said, in his own words.

Read more here.

Government's divine mandate

I am not a fan of most politically-oriented sermons, especially when they undertake to pronounce on the specifics of public policy. However, a week ago our pastor, the Rev. Dr. W. J. Clyde Ervine, gave us all an excellent example of the right way to preach a political sermon. The title was King Solomon's Charge, based on I Kings 2. This is part of an ongoing lectio continua series on Solomon's reign. The Old Testament lesson recounted the circumstances that brought Solomon to the throne, including the execution of his father David's chief of staff, Joab, and his own half-brother Adonijah.

The episode raises a difficult issue: "is Solomon to be morally excused for killing the enemies who might have wanted to kill him?" Ervine admits that not everything scripture recounts does it necessarily approve. Yet he raises another possibility that ought not to be glossed over:

David is king and head of government, giving a charge not so much to a son, but to the incoming head of government. What he says is this: “Solomon, as king, you must deal with the State’s internal as well as external enemies. You may not want to, but you must confront those who mount treasonous attacks against the kingdom”. David mentions Joab as an example, while Solomon will later place Adonijah in the same category. Put like that, the issue isn’t whether or not Solomon was brutal, but whether the State may legitimately use force against its enemies. That’s the issue I Kings 2 poses; its answer is affirmative. I Kings 2 wants readers to conclude that Solomon was justified in hunting down State criminals, and further suggests that Solomon’s punishment of those criminals was endorsed by God. At verse 22, we’re told that as Solomon contemplates the punishment he believes Adonijah deserves, he says: “So may God do to me, and more also, for Adonijah has devised this scheme at the risk of his life! Now therefore as the Lord lives, who has established me and placed me on the throne...Adonijah shall be put to death”.The text presents Solomon’s blood-letting, not as the violence of a private thug but as the legal action of the head of state.

This, of course, raises the larger question of whether the state legitimately uses force, even to the extent of taking life. Although there is a long and honourable pacifist tradition within Christianity, we must nevertheless take seriously those biblical texts assigning the power of the sword to government.

Having been present as Dr. Ervine delivered this sermon (which can be heard here), I can testify that the congregation was unusually quiet throughout, perhaps wondering where he would be going next in his argument. It somehow felt like a controversial sermon, although his conclusion is entirely biblical and falls squarely in the centre of the larger Reformed tradition.

A powerful preacher, Dr. Ervine's sermons are worth listening to. If you are ever in the neighbourhood, please do come to Central Presbyterian Church, Hamilton, Ontario, at 10.30 sunday morning.

From Wellhausen to 'God's politics'?

Several years ago my friend and former colleague Paul Marshall wrote a review of Jim Wallis' God's Politics for The Review of Faith & International Affairs: Jim Wallis’ Politics — or Lack Thereof. Marshall's paragraph below is worth rereading:

Obviously, no popular book should be weighed down with ponderous theological reflection, but it should show some sign of having considered such reflection. For example, Wallis writes, “The place to begin to understand God is with the prophets.” There is no wisp of an argument justifying this unusual contention. He never asks why the Bible does not begin with the prophets, but with Genesis. He never mentions that the majority of Christian reflection on politics has begun with Genesis. He never carefully relates what the prophets say to the Torah, hence acknowledging that they challenge their rulers on the basis of God’s law, not on their own feelings of injustice. Maybe most of the church has been wrong for two millennia on how it addresses politics; it has certainly been wrong on other things. But Wallis never says why. He simply asserts a novel doctrine as indubitable fact.

This critique seemed obviously right to me when I read it. Of course the prophets were calling the people of Israel back to obey God's law. How could anyone doubt it?

Since reading this review, however, I've come to wonder whether there might be something else behind Wallis' "unusual contention" — one related to some of the more contestable assumptions of modern biblical scholarship. Since Julius Wellhausen and others articulated the Documentary Hypothesis on the origin of the Pentateuch more than a hundred years ago, it has generally been thought that the first five books of the Bible were written long after Moses. Indeed there are indications of later authorship embedded in the text itself (e.g., Genesis 36:31–43, Deuteronomy 34:5–10), as Spinoza pointed out already in the 17th century.



The Documentary Hypothesis ascribes the bulk of the Torah's legal code to the priestly source (or P), who ostensibly wrote around 500 BC during the Babylonian exile. Deuteronomy is similarly thought to have been written around the time of King Josiah, who is assumed to have instructed Hilkiah to "find" this in the temple to justify his reforms (2 Kings 22). These late dates are crucial because they imply that the law, so extolled in Psalm 119, was written well after such prophets as Isaiah and Amos had railed against the wickedness and injustices committed by the peoples of Israel and Judah. If so, then perhaps there was no actual law at that time to which the prophets could refer their hearers. Yet the prophets managed to demand forcefully that the people do justice, especially to the widow, the orphan and the sojourner — something that came to resonate with the people who codified these precepts a century or two later.

It is entirely possible that I am off base here, but I do wonder whether the Documentary Hypothesis might in part account for Wallis' "novel" approach of beginning his discussion with the prophets. If, on the other hand, one accepts the tradition that the bulk of the material in the Pentateuch is Mosaic in origin, one is more likely to start one's reflections on "God's politics" where the Bible itself starts: with Genesis.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

Propaganda warfare and global gullibility

Even before 9/11 there was little doubt that winning the propaganda war can turn the tide in a real war. This should be kept in mind as we assess the recent Israeli attack on the Gaza aid flotilla. An excellent place to start is by reading George Friedman’s Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion, published by Stratfor Global Intelligence. The Turkish NGO that organized the aid flotilla was apparently doing more than to assist innocent Palestinians suffering from an unjust blockade. Its leaders sought to provoke an Israeli over-reaction that would bring down the world’s condemnation, damage Turkish-Israeli relations, alienate the United States from Israel, and possibly provoke an internal political crisis in Israel itself. In so doing, the flotilla’s organizers were borrowing a strategy employed by Zionists against the British in the late 1940s in the run-up to Israeli independence.

The current Israeli government has played along with this strategy, seemingly falling into the trap set for it and willingly suffering the consequences hoped for by its enemies. I will not leap to Israel’s defence here. Given that virtually all my Cypriot relatives lost their homes in 1974, I have considerable sympathy for the plight of Palestinian refugees. At the same time, the complexities of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian standoff should rule out any rush to judgement against Israel. A functioning Palestinian state could have got off the ground long ago, if Palestinians had been better served by their own leadership.

How have North American Christians responded to the events of a week ago? As indicated on the National Council of Churches website, the major protestant denominations and the World Council of Churches have condemned the Israeli attack. On the surface it is difficult to disagree with these assessments. Israel’s blockade has caused hardship for the innocent residents of Gaza, and it has had next to no impact in loosening Hamas’ hold on that troubled territory. The principles of the just war do not countenance a military strategy aimed at civilians.

That said, Hamas and similar groups do not shrink from hiding amongst civilians to achieve their goal of antagonizing Israel. When Israel strikes back as expected, and when civilians die, virtually the entire world blames Israel and not the cowardly terrorists who initially provoked that country into its action and, in effect, used innocent Palestinians as hostages. The churches chime in along with these others, offering no distinctive insight that might flow from their commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I am not particularly enamoured of churches as institutions pronouncing on complex issues of public policy and international relations, at least partly because of their tendency to assume that all such issues can be viewed as cosmic struggles between a good side and an evil side, the line between which can be easily identified. However, real-life politics does not admit of such facile categorizations. Few political issues see an obvious division between justice and injustice, oppressor and oppressed. One is far more likely to see conflict between two different conceptions of justice — between two groups pursuing competing but plausible visions of the public good.

This is not to say that Christians should not be involved in the political process. They should indeed, but not as representatives of church institutions, which have their own God-given task in his world. Christians should organize as members of the corpus Christi, a global community manifest in every walk of life. They should, moreover, do so politically and not as moralistic preachers. This calls for acquiring a deep knowledge of real-life political practice and refraining from building ideal cities-in-speech, along the lines of Plato’s famous republic. To work for justice is not to try to construct the “just society,” as the late Pierre Trudeau put it. It is rather to listen to the day-to-day appeals for justice issuing from all quarters; to weigh them carefully in the balance; to recognize, where present, the legitimacy of the competing claims; and to assess these claims fairly.

I will not pretend to point the way to a resolution of the long Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, which has eluded three generations of foreign policy officials in many countries. That said, one-sided condemnations do nothing to advance justice and are far more likely to play into the hands of those who have an interest in obstructing reconciliation. Well-meaning churches should not put themselves in the position of being used by terrorist groups for their own purposes.

Chesterton on checks and balances

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924.

Speaking of which . . .

. . . it seems that our cousins south of the border are faced with deciding which team prevaricates less than the other. Check out this site if you don't believe that falsehoods are being deliberately disseminated in the current presidential race: FactCheck.org. For shame!

Choose your poison

With a federal election looming next month, is the choice with which we are presented one "between an intelligent unprincipled cynic, and a relatively honest fool"? That's the conclusion of David Warren, easily Canada's most curmudgeonly journalist: Stephen & Stéphane.

God and caesar

Robert Kraynak celebrates the life of a great man: Solzhenitsyn and the Battle for the Human Soul. However, in the course of his eulogy, he manages to misinterpret a key gospel teaching (Matthew 22:15-22, Mark 12:13-17 and Luke 20:20-26) concerning the place of government in God's world:

If we listen carefully to [Solzhenitsyn's] statements, they are based on the Gospel’s distinction between God’s realm and Caesar’s realm and the insistence that each realm has its proper role. Surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn uses the distinction of two realms in order to lower people’s expectations about the role of the state (Caesar’s realm) in people’s lives and to allow the higher, spiritual realm of God and the soul to flourish in conditions of political freedom.

Although there is no doubt that the commands of God and the demands of human beings come into conflict in the real world (Acts 4:19; 5:29), Jesus could hardly have intended to imply that God and caesar possess two distinct and parallel realms, each with its proper role, since that would contradict the universal sovereignty of God. In fact, the realm of government also belongs to God, as affirmed dramatically in Psalm 82. Leon Morris has it right: "The obligation to God covers all of life; we must serve Caesar in a way that is honoring to God."

Authority and servanthood, II

Young people typically experiment with their own identities, trying on different personae and worldviews to see how well they make sense of the new experiences they are confronting on a daily basis. The university undergraduate years see this sort of quest occurring at a high level of intensity, hopefully under the guidance of older mentors capable of bringing some order to this search. My own undergraduate years were a time of tremendous intellectual and spiritual growth.

To begin with, though I entered university a music major, intending to focus on vocal performance and composition, two related events pushed me towards a focussed study of politics: Watergate and the Cyprus crisis of 1974, the latter of which made refugees of my close relatives. Though the church of my youth (for all its considerable virtues) had given me little guidance on how to relate my faith in Jesus Christ to the great political events of the day, assuming that concern for politics might deflect one from the ostensibly higher calling of evangelizing the lost, I was becoming aware that there was a long tradition of Christian reflection on social and political life. Indeed there was more than one such tradition. The first of these was a variant of the Anabaptist vision, which was the initial influence on me around 19 years of age.

Accordingly, I flirted with the brand of Anabaptism associated with the Sojourners community, whose flagship periodical was then known as the Post-American. This is because, first, it resonated strongly with my burgeoning commitment to social justice, especially as manifested in public efforts to alleviate poverty. Second, at 19 I considered myself a pacifist and was briefly persuaded that Christians ought not to fight in wars — for any reason.

Founded by Jim Wallis and others, Sojourners grew out of the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam was the issue of the day, and many young people were disillusioned by the foreign and defence policies of the US government. The Christians among them were especially cynical about the role of churches in supporting these policies. Seeing evangelist Billy Graham fraternizing with the discredited President Richard Nixon in the White House was a continuing irritant. As a youthful baby-boomer with a developing social conscience, Sojourners touched a chord with me.

Nevertheless, it didn't take me long to run up against the limitations of their approach. In particular it seemed unable to envision a positive role for the state as a truly political community called by God to do public justice in his world. The ultimate solution to the power of sin on earth was to be found in the church as an alternative community, while earthly communities such as state and government belonged only to the order of providence. This order of providence was, to be sure, under God’s control, but it could never be a suitable venue for living the Christian life in an actively obedient way.

The Sojourners community had been influenced by the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, who would later come to influence the theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. (Both of them were at Notre Dame in the early 1980s, while I was a graduate student there.) Yoder in turn had been a student of Karl Barth at Basel.

Yoder is perhaps best known for his book, The Politics of Jesus, which I read and reviewed for a course I was taking in the autumn of 1975. My undertaking of this project turned out to be a watershed experience for me, as it planted doubts in my mind as to the validity of his approach. Here are two typical passages from Yoder’s book:

God can in his own way, in his sovereign permissive providence, “use” idolatrous Assyria (Isa. 10) or Rome. This takes place, however, without his declaring that such action which he thus uses is morally good or that participation in it is incumbent upon his covenant people (1st ed., p. 199).

God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in order, sovereignly to tell them where they belong, what is their place. It is not as if there was a time when there was no government and then God made government through a new creative intervention; there has been hierarchy and authority and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin has existed. Nor is it that in his ordering of it he specifically, morally approves of what government does. The sergeant does not produce the soldiers he drills, the librarian does not create nor approve of the book he catalogs and shelves. Likewise God does not take the responsibility for the existence of the rebellious “powers that be” or for their shape or identity; they already are. What the text says is that he orders them, brings them into line, that by his permissive government he lines them up with his purpose (p. 203).

What then is the political task of the Christian? Can the believing Christian, faithful to the gospel and obedient to the will of God, ever become a civil magistrate, seeking to do justice within the context of political community? Here is Yoder's answer, which comes in the midst of a discussion of the relationship between the 12th and 13th chapters of Romans:

There is a most specific dialectical interplay around the concepts of vengeance and wrath. Christians are told (12:19) never to exercise vengeance but to leave it to God and to wrath. Then the authorities are recognized (13:4) as executing the particular function which the Christian was to leave to God. It is inconceivable that these two verses, using such similar language, should be meant to be read independently of one another. This makes it clear that the function exercised by government is not the function to be exercised by Christians (p. 199, emphasis mine).

This, it seemed to me, failed to do justice to St. Paul's reference in Romans 13 to political authority as precisely God's servant. In the course of writing my review, I discovered that the Greek word the Apostle uses for servant, viz., διάκονος, is the same one used for a deacon in the church community. Romans 12:19 was thus not a prohibition against taking up the office of civil magistrate; it was rather a warning not to take personal vengeance.

This suggested to me that political authority, normatively speaking, is in principle more than an inadvertent doer of God’s will, along the lines of the Persian King Cyrus, but is called, like David and Solomon and their successors, to respond actively to God’s summons to do justice. A king now converted to faith in Christ does not cease to be a king; rather he now rules justly according to God's commands. He exercises the responsibilities of his office as an active doer of God's will. After making this discovery, I could no longer call myself an Anabaptist in any meaningful sense and began to look increasingly to the Reformed tradition in which I had been raised.

Because at least this particular strain of Anabaptism lacks a normative conception of political authority within God's world, it is difficult to find good reason for mounting a trenchant critique of the various secular ideologies that have infused its exercise over the past two to three centuries. If politics falls at best within the realm of God's providential sovereignty, and if one should focus one's redemptive efforts only on building up the institutional church, then the need for discerning the spirits (which was the title I had originally chosen for my first book) within the political realm becomes less significant.

This does not mean that Anabaptists will then become enthusiasts for, say, liberalism or socialism. Instead, following Yoder, Hendrik Berkhof, and ultimately Barth himself, there is a tendency to lump state authorities as such together with various spiritual forces into the catch-all category of "principalities and powers." There is, in other words, a tendency to conflate creational structure with spiritual direction. The net result is a tendency to truncate the full scope of Christ's redemption, which now involves breaking the sovereignty of the powers but not reclaiming them as such by reorienting their foundational religious direction.

Next: Authority and power.

More on Obama's pastor

The Acton Institute's Anthony B. Bradley analyzes The Marxist Roots of Black Liberation Theology, as espoused by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. While I largely share Bradley's concerns, it seems to me that one must first recognize that a past experience of genuine oppression is precisely what makes the marxist vision appear plausible. Black Americans have really faced concrete acts of discrimination and still do in countless small ways. Yet, as Bradley correctly notes, it is by no means empowering to keep harping on this. If past progress is denied or belittled, then it becomes difficult to hope for a better future. If a community persists in defining itself as victim, it will effectively incapacitate itself in attempting to meet the challenges of the future. Furthermore, it will tend to blame all its problems on its presumed oppressors. This is hardly liberating.

As for Barack Obama's inspiring speech, delivered in the aftermath of the controversy over Wright, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is rather less than inspired, believing that it unduly demeans the very black American community he claims as his own: The Strange Ways of Black Folk.

Obama's pastor

After visiting the website of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ last year, I figured it was only a matter of time before the media caught on to its controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his embrace of what he calls the "Black Value System." Trinity is, of course, the home congregation of presidential aspirant Barack Obama. The inevitable has finally happened:



The Obama campaign has posted this clarification below by a United Church of Christ minister:



Will this end the controversy? Probably not.

'Albertocracy' reaffirmed

The votes are in and, surprise, Premier Ed Stelmach's Progressive Conservatives were re-elected, the 11th Conservative government in a row. This comes as no surprise in a province that has known only three changes of government since 1905. What is surprising is that anyone should wonder why only 41 percent of eligible voters bothered to turn out in such a noncompetitive political environment. There has to be a better way.

Colson on Williams

Chuck Colson, who should know better, is too facilely accepting the scaremongering of the media in his response to the Archbishop of Canterbury: The Archbishop and Sharia: What Empty Churches Are Made of. Colson, or rather his writers, would do well to dig beneath the surface and read Goddard and Chaplin on the subject.

A plurality of laws, II

My friend Jonathan Chaplin himself has now weighed in on Rowan Williams' address in an analysis very much worth reading and pondering: Law, Faith and Freedom: a critical appreciation of Archbishop Williams’s lecture. According to Chaplin,

granting ‘legal accommodations’ like this to religious convictions is not at all a breach of the mantra, invoked frequently in responses to the lecture, that there should be ‘one law for all’. That is an affirmation of the principle of equality before the law, and the Archbishop not only affirmed that principle but went further and hinted that it actually had religious origins. Granting legal accommodations to religious conviction is not a departure from the principle of equality before the law, but rather a specification of how it might apply to a diverse citizenry with intensely-held religious loyalties. Legal equality has never meant that every individual must be treated in identical ways by every legal rule, but rather that whatever laws exist should apply to all whom they intend to regulate and that there should be no arbitrary discrimination in the application of the law. The Archbishop himself alludes to this theme in proposing that the point of a regime of universal rights is to ‘underpin’ not to ‘supersede’ our plural identities.

Note further that the principle of equality before the law is not at all compromised by recognising the independent jurisdictions (i.e. spheres of authority) of non-governmental institutions, such as churches, universities, trades unions, etc. Each of these institutions possesses a sphere of internal ‘law-making’ (in the case of bodies like universities and trades unions this is called ‘rule-making’) which is not within the purview of the state. It is an essential feature of a free society that there should be many such self-governing institutions able to resist the tendency of states to exceed their mandate. Of course, the state may and does regulate these institutions where necessary in the public interest but the onus is (or should be) on the state to justify its interventions and not on the institutions themselves to justify their freedom to the state. This is a quite different sense of ‘legal pluralism’ to that mentioned above, and it is not only consistent with the principle of equality before the law but a necessary prop for it. Andrew Goddard is right to observe in the Archbishop’s lecture an ‘anti-statist pluralist social vision’ – one which I think Christians should strongly endorse.

A plurality of laws

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been under a lot of pressure lately, mostly over his handling of the imminent breakup of the Anglican communion. Most recently, however, he has come under fire for suggesting that the coming of Sharia to the United Kingdom is inevitable. However, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Goddard believes that Rowan Williams' remarks have not only been taken out of context, but reduced to a few controversial sound bytes that do not come close to doing justice to his views: Prudence and Jurisprudence: Reflections on the Archbishop's interview and lecture. Though I have not followed this story closely, I find persuasive Goddard's analysis, in which he even cites my friend and colleague, Jonathan Chaplin, as a "leading evangelical political theorist."

Here in Ontario we had a similar controversy in 2005 when Premier Dalton McGuinty ruled out the use of "faith-based arbitrations," proclaiming that "There will be one law for all Ontarians." Yet this is not an adequate account of the plurality of laws governing our lives in their diverse realms. If a child disobeys her parents, the latter do not call the police in to punish the child under the public law of the state. Rather they themselves mete out an appropriate punishment within the context of the particular norms governing that family itself. Similarly, a faculty member is subject to rules internal to the university, while a church institution is governed by canon law or church order. McGuinty must surely recognize this?

To his credit, Williams appears to understand the reality of multiple and overlapping allegiances in a complex, differentiated society better than many of his compatriots, who are echoing McGuinty's somewhat panicked response of two years ago. I understand, of course, that anything having to do with Islam and Sharia in western societies is a touchy subject these days. Yet the full import of Williams' argument is being lost. Here is Williams:

I think at the moment there's a great deal of confusion about this; a lot of what's been written whether it was about the Catholic church adoptions agencies last year, sometimes what's written about Jewish or Muslim communities; a lot of what's written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody; now that principle that there's one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that, so an approach to law which simply said, 'There is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or your allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts'. I think that's a bit of a danger. . . .

It would be a pity if the immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law's function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society.

Of course, there is a difference between what I call the pluriformity of authority and the sort of pluralism rooted in divergent spiritual commitments. Yet these two intersect in so far as one can expect particular religious norms to impact the internal ordering of, say, marriage and family life. To reduce all legality to the public law of the state tends in a totalitarian direction. Fortunately our political leaders, including McGuinty, formulate policies that are better than their expressed commitments might suggest.

While you're reading Goddard's article, you might also read this post by the winsome — and sorely missed — Mr. Brian Dijkema, who alerted me to it.

Choosing a president

Because there is little overlap between my blog readership and my Christian Courier readership, I am taking the liberty of posting below my next column, to appear in the 18 February issue of the latter. This is to follow up yesterday's Super Tuesday elections in the US:

When I was growing up near Chicago, I used to get caught up, along with my fellow citizens, in the excitement of the quadrennial presidential race. The first such campaign I remember was in 1960, when Senator John Kennedy ran against Vice-President Richard Nixon. Although I did not see the first televised presidential debate, Kennedy did score a victory over Nixon by speaking to the American people rather than to his opponent. Thus image seemingly triumphed over substance.

Nearly half a century later, I must admit to finding the entire exercise off-putting. Since the “reforms” of 35 years ago, selection of a presidential candidate no longer belongs to party regulars at the convention, but to the people in the series of state party caucuses and primary elections that are increasingly being pushed to the start of the calendar year. Although this appears to be more democratic, it has actually gone a considerable way towards eroding just governance in the US. Why?

First, it has encouraged Americans to view a prospective president as an heroic, napoleonic figure who will sweep into office and shake things up in the stale corridors of political power. The candidate promises “change” without going into too much detail as to what this implies. Because no one person can ever fulfil such exaggerated expectations, the public quickly sours on him or her, waiting for the next candidate to come along making similar promises.

Yet this scenario fails to do justice to the complexities of a real-life political system, where getting things done demands, not a well-intended Jimmy Stuart going to Washington in the style of a Frank Capra film, but genuine teamwork painstakingly cultivated by a president and like-minded members of Congress for the sake of doing public justice. It would be far better to hear from a candidate, not what she will do as president, as if she had no one else to answer to, but how she and like-minded Senators and Representatives would go about meeting the ordinary challenges of governing a country.

Take the Ron Paul phenomenon as an example. Paul has acquired a small but dedicated following, capturing the imaginations of libertarians favouring a restricted reading of the Constitution. Paul favours eliminating the federal income tax, and opposes US participation in the United Nations and even NATO. He advocates abolition of many federal departments and the Federal Reserve Board, the American counterpart to the Bank of Canada. That these positions are out of the mainstream is beside the point. The fact is that Paul does not command even a modest base of support in Congress and thus has next to no chance of accomplishing his goals even if he should become president. Yet this in no way fazes him or his dedicated supporters.

Second, the current process does little in the way to eliminate candidates who are unqualified for the chief executive office. All that is necessary for a would-be candidate to win his or her party’s nomination is to appeal successfully to as many people in as many states as he can, especially the most populous ones. At present there is no means of filtering out incompetents. A party is obligated to go with a candidate who has cultivated the best image in what is essentially a series of beauty contests.

In 1986, for example, in my home state of Illinois two disciples of the political extremist Lyndon Larouche won the Democratic nomination for two state offices, mostly because their names (Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild) sounded safe. Party officials were powerless to remove them from the ballot. One-time presidential candidate Al Smith was wrong when he said in 1933 that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Instead, democracy’s flaws must be addressed by recognizing that it cannot be extended limitlessly.

Given what is at stake, the two American political parties would do well to rectify these defects, principally by giving primary elections an advisory status at most and by encouraging aspirants to the presidency to build a strong base of support in Congress.

Protecting "rights", miscarrying justice

Like the bills of rights of many constitutional democracies, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms claims to protect "freedom of conscience and religion" and "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication." That would seem straightforward enough. However, Canada's human rights tribunals are encroaching on these liberties in the name, ironically, of protecting human rights. Here are a few of the cases:

Three complaints have been filed with the Canadian Human Rights Commission against Ron Gray and the Christian Heritage Party, accusing them of fomenting hatred of and contempt for homosexuals.

A complaint has been made against the journal Catholic Insight on charges similar to those of which Gray and the CHP are accused.

Ezra Levant has been brought before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission for republishing those infamous Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the Western Standard.

The Canadian Islamic Congress has complained to two human rights tribunals that Columnist Mark Steyn and that venerable Canadian institution, Macleans, are guilty of publishing an article that "subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt" and is "islamophobic." The article, The future belongs to Islam, is excerpted from Steyn's controversial book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

Not surprisingly, while the first two cases were largely ignored by the press, the latter two have been given considerable publicity for reasons not too difficult to figure out. Even Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is not pleased with this development. Borovoy has said that he and others helped to create the human rights commissions "to deal with discriminatory deeds ... not discriminatory words. Nobody thought it would be used to censure freedom of expression." Canada's opinion moulders were apparently unwilling to come to the defence of Gray and Catholic Insight, perhaps because they were disseminating opinions that are deemed to be out of the mainstream. But of course the real test for freedom of speech is the toleration and protection of unpopular opinions.

We Canadians have a reputation for being bland and inoffensive. But we risk tyranny when we permit quasi-judicial tribunals, with few if any constitutional constraints, to enforce with coercive power this blandness and inoffensiveness to the detriment of healthy public debate. It is time to limit the jurisdiction of these tribunals or perhaps to abolish them altogether.

Short of these outcomes, I have another idea. What if Gray, Steyn, Levant, & al., were to file a counter-complaint against the complainants, charging that the latter are attempting to infringe on their human right of free speech under the Charter? Would it go anywhere? If nothing else, it would certainly test the commissions' creativity. It might be worth a try.

Later: You will have to register to see this, but here is Levant's appearance before the Alberta Human Rights Commission. It's quite a performance.

Referendum on Senate?

NDP leader Jack Layton and Conservative Senator Hugh Segal have proposed a national referendum on abolishing Canada's Senate, the unelected upper chamber of Parliament. Now Prime Minister Stephen Harper has indicated that he would support such a referendum if the Senate cannot be reformed. If Harper is serious about this, he could effectively alienate the west, which is a key Conservative stronghold. In general, westerners prefer to see a "Triple E" Senate — elected, equal and effective. By giving each province the same number of Senators, by having them elected for fixed terms and by empowering them to check the Commons, a Triple-E Senate would more closely resemble the American and Australian Senates.

Needless to say, there is no enthusiasm for such a Senate in Ontario and Québec, whose dominance of Parliament as a whole would be curtailed under the new arrangement. They and New Democrats alike would prefer to see the Senate abolished. However, in supporting such a referendum, Harper would take a potentially huge risk. If voters in Ontario and Québec won a victory for abolition through sheer numbers, and if westerners had voted overwhelmingly to oppose such a move on grounds that it would eliminate any possibility of their having a greater voice in Ottawa, it could conceivably exacerbate the regional divisions in this country and in his own party.

Yet Harper has proved himself to be a crafty politician. He must know all this. Which makes me wonder whether he might have something up his sleeve. Stay tuned.

Subverting reform?

The CBC's Don Newman has an interesting take on Stephen Harper's likely ambivalence over the fixed election dates that were part of his package of constitutional reforms: Hard to Get a Date. Prior to adopting this reform, a government could easily time an election by requesting dissolution of Parliament at virtually any moment it deemed favourable to its own electoral fortunes. I myself have favoured fixed election dates because it promised to remove one more of the vast powers of the prime minister.

However, as Newman points out, a clever PM in a minority government may find a way around this. If the principal opposition party is in disarray, as are the Liberals at the moment, and if the opinion polls show the Conservatives in majority territory, the temptation will be great for Harper to engineer the defeat of his own government, as Trudeau did in 1974, in the hopes that he might receive a majority in the ensuing election. That may be what he's doing by proposing legislation he knows will be unpalatable to the opposition. Of course, this could all backfire on Harper if the public perceives him to be subverting his own reform for partisan purposes.

In a multiparty democracy, where coalition rather than minority governments are the norm, a prime minister would not be able to do this on his own, because he would have his coalition partners to answer to. Moreover, if he were leading a coalition government commanding the majority of seats in the lower chamber, the felt need to engage in this tactic would be unlikely to present itself.

This raises once again the issue of electoral reform. Ontario voters just defeated the mixed-member-proportional system (MMP), seemingly indicating that they are satisfied to be ruled by a government most of them opposed. As French political scientist Maurice Duverger demonstrated more than half a century ago, there is a causal connection between electoral and party systems. Proportional representation (PR) tends to produce multiple parties none of which by itself is likely to command a majority of seats in parliament. This forces them to co-operate in coalition governments, as they do in Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, which adopted MMP a decade and a half ago, Thérèse Arseneau, a Canadian expat living amongst the Kiwis, defends the new system against its detractors: MMP still the better option.

Another day off

Newly re-elected Premier Dalton McGuinty is now demonstrating his impeccable pro-family credentials: McGuinty proclaims new holiday.