Take off that monocle: anti-elitism sweeps across North America

Anger at the educated ruling class is a common characteristic of political movements gaining momentum in Canada and the U.S.

From Rob Ford’s Toronto mayoral campaign to the HST recall campaign in British Columbia and the election of outsider Tea Party candidates in the U.S., there’s a striking anti-elitism on the rise in North America. The government’s now picking up the message: Conservative house leader John Baird recently blamed the “Toronto elite” for propping up the gun registry.

Many thought that Barack Obama’s election would lead to a similar shift to the left in Canada, writes the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin, but with the backlash against the Harvard-educated president growing, Stephen Harper’s anti-elite message should play well. It’s ironic that the “PM runs one of the most top-down governments in history,” Martin writes, yet Conservatives “are still viewed as the party of freedom from the claws of governance and may be able to make hay with their fear-mongering charges that Liberals would have bureaucrats at every door checking for guns as well as forms not filled out.”

Dismissing anti-establishment forces like Ford and the Tea Party as angry nutjobs (which their opponents tend to do) misses the point, says the Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran. “Anger without known cause is indeed not a policy prescription or a governing strategy. But this discontent comes with identifiable causes, namely a layer of government that has overtaxed, overspent and overstayed.” Ford and the Tea Party have both campaigned on slashing government spending.

An editorial in the Postmedia papers says anti-elitism isn’t the exclusive purview of the right, and “there's a fair bit of anti-intellectualism on both sides of the ideological divide these days.” Politicians of all stripes seem to be stooping to follow suit. “It all becomes a little absurd. Suddenly, Michael Ignatieff, hitting the summer barbecue circuit, has to pretend that he was never a Harvard professor and that being folksy comes naturally to him.” For democracy to work the populace needs to be informed, not skeptical of knowledge and data, says the editorial. “For politicians and opinion-makers, whether left-wing or right-wing, to pander to the lowest denominator displays contempt for the voting public.”