Evidentia

Alexis de Tocqueville: democracies can be tyrannical

The foundation of parliamentary democracy is the consent of the people. We are in the habit of dividing the people into majorities and minorities, and while Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the tyranny of the majority, it is generally accepted in democracies that more people consenting to, than dissenting from, proposed government actions means that the people tend to support rather than to reject those actions.

But looking at the current Canadian election campaign, this country is now faced with several competing minorities, as if the country were broken down into blocks. There is no clear majority. What would Tocqueville have thought about this? Would he have considered the tyranny of the minority possible? Certainly he would have – after all, he had studied the benefits and ill effects of the French Revolution.

I notice how many times Canadian politicians have actually by-passed the consent of the people, by:

• imposing their will;
• excluding categories of individuals from “the people,” or seeking to disqualify them;
• manufacturing consent pure and simple;
• and manipulating the public (often by presenting the people with false alternatives) to the point that the public gives consent grudgingly, unwillingly or even unwittingly.

Canadian politicians are not alone in doing this.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau looking on as the Queen gives royal assent, 1982

When Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government repatriated the British North America Act from Westminster, in 1981, a key aspect of the reform they were proposing was that it should reside in the consent of the people (although predictably the National Assembly of Quebec did not consent to it) – but then in 1982 the Liberals incorporated an amending formula into the Constitution, making it practically impossible for the people (acting through the federal Parliament and all provincial Legislatures) to give their consent to future amendments.

Yet, one advantage of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms is that it guarantees all adult Canadians the right to vote – one of the main ways in which the people exercise their right to consent. This right took a long time to be recognized. In the 18th and 19th centuries, voting was a privilege, not a right, and depended on property qualifications, which meant most women could not vote. Women only gained full voting rights in federal elections in 1918. My great-grandmother Ellen Walker Tombs had to wait till 1940 – by which time she was 95 – to register for the Quebec provincial vote – the first year women were allowed to vote in the Province of Quebec – although she died before election day. Racial exclusions on ethnic Chinese and Japanese were only lifted in the late 1940s. First Nations people only acquired the unconditional right to vote federally in 1960.

My 95-year-old great-grandmother Ellen Walker Tombs registered to vote in the first provincial election Quebec women were allowed to, but died before election day

But there are ever so many ways for politicians to exclude parts of the electorate, or to disqualify them. I am not suggesting the Parti Québécois is about to promote abolishing universal suffrage in this province, but I do note how often the PQ implies, by its very name, that it is the party of “real Québécois.” Is there a Canadian Party, or American Party, or Parti Français or Deutsche Partei? Of course not. In addition, the PQ pits “real Québécois” against “anglophones, allophones, francisables, francotropes, immigrants, communautés culturelles, autochtones etc.” While creating all sorts of categories of other people, whose attachment to Quebec is somehow made to seem conditional, the Parti Québécois meanders between civic nationalism, based on the idea that anyone living in Quebec is Québécois, and ethnic nationalism, based on the idea that only French Canadians of old (pre-Conquest) stock really belong.

Of course, it will be interesting to see what a future Parti Québécois government eventually proposes in the way of a Quebec Constitution. One obvious dilemma is that the Parti Québécois Constitution would be a minority document imposed on the majority, within Quebec, and as a provincial bill going well beyond current realities, would likely be invalidated by the Supreme Court of Canada, since it would be unconstitutional in federal terms.

The White House released Barack Obama’s birth certificate today

The White House released Barack Obama’s birth certificate today, showing clearly that he was born in Hawaii on August 4th 1961 – in answer to the absurd claims of many Republicans, including billionaire presidential hopeful Donald Trump, that Obama may have been born outside the United States, and may therefore be violating the Constitution by sitting as president of a country where U.S. birth is a requirement. The Republicans are obviously trying to disqualify Obama from office. I suspect race is the real issue. This is a more extreme case of attempted exclusion.

As for manufacturing consent and manipulating the people, I recently read an interesting book by the psychologist Isabelle Nazare-Aga – Les manipulateurs sont parmi nous. Here is a list of 30 tactics used by manipulators. I leave to your imagination how many are used by politicians in Canada, including Quebec!

1. The manipulator blames others in the name of family ties, friendship, love, professional dedication
2. He transfers his own responsibility onto others, or shirks his own duties
3. He does not clearly communicate his demands, needs, feelings and opinions
4. He often responds in a fuzzy way
5. He changes his opinions, attitudes and feelings depending on which people he is speaking to, and which situations he finds himself in
6. He uses logical demonstrations in order to disguise what he is really seeking to obtain
7. He makes others believe they must be perfect, they should never change their minds, they must know everything and they must respond immediately to his requests and questions
8. He questions the qualifications, skills and personality of others: he criticizes without really seeming to, in order to devalue and judge others
9. He gets other people to transmit his messages
10. He creates a state of uproar and suspicion, with a view to first dividing people, then conquering them
11. He knows how to play the complaining victim
12. He ignores other people’s requests, while claiming he is addressing them
13. He uses other people’s moral principles in order to satisfy his own needs
14. He threatens overt or covert blackmail
15. He completely changes the subject during a conversation
16. He avoids or ducks out of conversations, meetings
17. He relies on the ignorance of others and gets people to believe in his superiority
18. He lies
19. He says things that are untrue in order to tease out what is really happening
20. He is egocentric
21. He may be jealous
22. He cannot stand criticism and denies the obvious
23. He does not take into account the rights, needs and desires of others
24. He often waits till the last moment to order something or incite others to act
25. What he says seems logical or coherent, whereas his actions seem illogical and incoherent
26. He flatters to please people, making them gifts, suddenly pampering them
27. He produces a feeling of discomfort or lack of freedom
28. He is very good at achieving his own goals – but at the expense of others
29. He makes people do things they probably would not have done of their own free will
30. People are constantly talking about him – even when he is absent

This list of manipulative tactics is why I put more trust in the people than in politicians… And why I prefer the protection of individual rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to being part of an amorphous mass of undifferentiated people, subject to the whims of the party in power.