Hard Question, No Answers
- Details
- Published on Sunday, 18 November 2018 19:46
- Written by editor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1707 ... November 19, 2018
_____________________________________________________________
Hard Question, No Answers
Jeff Noonan
I knew it would be coming: an essay in The Bullet trumpeting the "breakthrough" of Québec Solidaire (QS) in the recent Québec election. I agree: it was a breakthrough. QS increased its seat totals from 3 to 10, and won 16 per cent of the popular vote (over 600,000 votes). Unfortunately, their right-wing rivals, the Coalition Avenir Québec, won 7 times as many seats and almost three times as many votes. Québec thus joins Ontario in having dumped a Liberal for a right-wing populist party. The two largest Canadian provinces join the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia in electing parties with openly anti-immigrant platforms.
The question that the QS results... pose for me is: if 600,000 Quebecois can recognize the superiority of the QS platform, why not all of them? What explains the current division, replicating itself across North America and Europe at least, between a smaller minority of people embracing anti-austerity, social democratic (with gusts toward democratic socialist) solutions to capitalist problems, and larger minorities embracing right-wing anti-immigrant populist pseudo-solutions? I do not have a conclusive answer, but perhaps by raising questions about some standard explanations, the way toward a better answer will be cleared.
