Darker days

September tends to make me a bit blue—a bit more anxious. A few decades after it has lost any personal significance there remains the existential sadness that summer is over and it is time to get back to school.

But it isn’t just the calendar that has me worried these days. I worry about worry—I worry about other people worrying. A worried public tends to do rash things. They make mistakes that have consequences for decades. They rush to judgment looking to ease their anxiety. They choose leaders out of fear and loathing rather than inspiration or hope.

The tipping point for my latest bout of handwringing is news from the sparsely populated northeastern German state of Mecklenburg- West Pomerania on the Baltic Sea. There this week we learned that the centrist parties (voters get a smorgasbord of political choices in a proportional representation system) were soundly thumped in state elections on Sunday, giving up significant ground to the fringe parties on the left and right.

The Greens and socialists surged in the vote count, but so did the neo-Nazi SPD party—an organization that doesn’t recognize a border between Germany and Austria, for instance. Leaders on both the left and right suggest the erection of the Berlin wall was “justified” to prevent the exodus of East Germans into West Germany in the decades after the war.

Most commentators view Sunday’s results as a referendum on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s willingness to use German taxpayers’ funds to prevent the Euro fabric from being torn apart—a situation brought about by the profligacy of its neighbours residing on the Mediterranean.

This is certainly an important part of the explanation But across Europe, as the spectre of financial collapse looms larger, voters are fleeing the centre and running toward the wackier messages offered on the left and right fringes. As they become more inward-looking, many have lost confidence in the centrist parties to move decisively enough or quickly enough to ward off disaster.

Worried people tend to make rash judgments.

The same phenomena is at work closer to home. In the U.S. the pattern is seen in the rise of the Tea Party movement—a way of thinking that is founded on the notion that the nation’s right wing party, the Republicans, is too liberal. So polarized have politics become in that country that its leaders narrowly avoided defaulting on its debt earlier this summer.

In May, Canadian voters decimated the most successful party in our history, rewarding the parties on the left and right—giving the Conservatives their first majority in two decades and propelling the NDP to role of official opposition for the first time in their history.

In Ontario, too, voters appear to be responding to fear rather than inspiration. Tracking polls indicate the PC party of Tim Hudak held a comfortable lead over Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals through most of the spring and early summer. As the vote has neared, however, the PC and Liberal partys’ polling numbers have begun to merge.

The worrying bit is that it is the third and fourth parties that have mostly given ground to bolster the Liberals. The dip in NDP and Green support is almost in direct correlation with the Liberal rise.

Ontario voters, as elsewhere, appear ready to vote against what they don’t want rather than support the ideas and leadership they do. Folks who fear another term of the McGuinty government will in many cases hold their nose and vote for Hudak’s PCs. Likewise those who might otherwise vote for the NDP or Greens fear that Hudak and his cronies are Mike Harris 2.0 and are running vigorously into the arms of the Liberals.

Many will decry the lack of leadership and inspiration coming from our leaders—but we simply are not in the mood for inspiration at the moment. We want easy answers and we want them now.

The problem, of course, is that the easy answers tend to be short-term and ultimately bad solutions— and most of these have been tried. We—the western world—have enjoyed decades of growth and consumer indulgence. We have forgotten that nothing in nature grows unabated. The party couldn’t last forever.

I suspect we are in the early stages of a years-, perhaps decades-long, winter season in the world’s economy. We just might forget what growth is by the time it returns.

The open question is whether we will face this winter with grace and determination. Or will we tear up our society once again—looking for others to blame for our troubles? Will we neglect the cries of the poor and oppressed in other lands—fearful of our own circumstances?

Fear is the driving motivator these days and that always spells trouble for society’s marginalized folks.

Maybe it’s just September that has me down.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca