False Power
I’ve only written one post about the Norwegian elections this year. I think I’m allowed one more.
Election day was yesterday. I voted Liberal, and the election was disastrous for the Liberal Party. The Liberals’ leader of many years, who almost single-handedly brought the party — the oldest political party in Norway — back out of obscurity, resigned on live tv. They lost eight of their ten seats in parliament. And the socialist government got another majority, which means they’ll continue to govern for the next four years.
Watching the American election, the basic way it was framed always felt weird and unnatural. It hadn’t occurred to me that the framing of our own political debate must seem equally unnatural, if not worse. There are two major power blocs: one is called, and calls itself unashamedly the Socialist parties, and the other bloc is called — I love this — the Bourgeois parties. Of course, we should be very careful with analyzing politics through linguistics, but let’s just say that the terminology of the debate is very much framed in the language of worker’s rights or, more extremely, communism, unlike certain other countries, where the political vocabulary leans more heavily on classical liberalism and capitalism.
Back to the results: Norway is closer to proportional representation than the US, but it’s still not quite proportional. The Bourgeois parties had a slight majority of the votes, but are in the minority in parliament. This is chiefly due to an election threshold: there are 169 seats in parliament, and 150 of these are divided between the 19 counties and open to all. The 19 last seats are divided between parties above the threshold. The threshold is 4 percent. The Liberals got 3.9 and therefore lost 6-8 seats on 0.1 percentage points of the vote.
This may be due to their principled stand against supporting a government led by the right-wing Progress Party. This party, which got 22.9 percent of the vote, is characterized by reckless spending, shameless populism (cheaper booze, higher speed limits, and so on), nationalism, xenophobia and perpetual opposition (they’ve never been in government). That almost a fourth of the country agrees with this party scares me. The Progress party invited the three other Bourgeois parties to participate in a coalition. The Conservatives said yes, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats said no. Most of the Liberals’ campaign boiled down to “No, we will not support the Progress Party.” They never got a chance to discuss their own politics.
Now, here’s the problem: people are saying that if the Liberals had agreed to cooperate, there would be a Bourgeois government and they would have power. The first may well be true, but the second is utterly false.
Cooperating with the Progress Party would mean compromising core values. It’s false power. This is a general point, applicable to politics everywhere: if you have to start compromising on your core values to get into power, you’re not in power. If the Liberals had compromised on their core values, they would turn into a different party. There’s no way Liberal values are going to get implemented by shedding all the core Liberal values. If you’re powerless to implement your own values and instead forced to implement values you’re strongly against, how is that power? Power for a political party is all about the ability to transfer that party’s values into practice; if the party has to turn into another party in order to gain power, the original party has neither a clean conscience nor political power. Now, at least, the party has a clean conscience. It’s like telling a woman who wants to enter a field full of sexism that she has every right to compete on equal terms in this field, if only she has a sex change. That’s not power: if a woman can’t be herself and still have power, she is effectively barred from power. If you have to metamorphose into someone else in order to gain X, you cannot gain X. This isn’t Kafka, it’s real life.
Lars Sponheim, the Liberals’ leader, took full responsibility for the poor election for his party and resigned. But he didn’t repent. He said, essentially, “I stood for my own values, that’s all that counts, and I don’t give a crap about the sacrifices I had to make to do so.” He’s lost his seat in parliament, his position in the party, and his life’s work seems to be for nought as the party he spent his political career rebuilding has been reduced to insignificance, at least for the next four years. Yet he has a clean conscience. It was the most honest moment I’ve ever seen in politics. It was beautiful. It almost made me want to get into politics myself. (Who am I kidding? There’s no fucking way I’m going into politics. But I might join the Liberal party.)
False power is worse than useless. It’s negative power: it bolsters your enemies, while fooling you into believing you actually have power.
While we’re on the topic of elections you might want to be aware of: the Japanese held a general election recently, in which the Democratic Party of Japan defeated a coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed for 50 years (I don’t know what that means in practice; ask someone Japanese). The Germans are having one in a couple of weeks; according to the commenters I’ve read, the differences between the viable coalitions are small and shrinking. Oh, and there’s Greece. There are probably more I don’t know about.
