An intellectual lives in truth, or in the pursuit of it; a politician lives in truth's shadows while pursuing power.
A person can be intelligent in politics, but cannot be an intellectual, because an intellectual, if true to world of ideas, must be fearless, whereas a politician usually lives in fear of defeat for himself, party or government.
Intellectuals who move into politics must begin to make compromises with the truth, to move around its edges, to forget the core of what it means to try to live in truth and to settle instead for a world of rationalizations.
It is fascinating, therefore, to observe the transition of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff from a fine public intellectual to a politician, and in particular the playing at the edges with truth of the kind he would deplore were he not in public life.
A small matter, really, but a revealing one occurred the other day when, having said the country should “wait and see” how he, as prime minister, would deal with the deficit, Mr. Ignatieff referred to his party's record of ending deficits under prime minister Jean Chrétien and finance minister Paul Martin. “We dug the country out of it without raising taxes,” he declared. “We did it before. We'll do it again.”
Alas, this was not so. In the famous 1995 budget that put Canada on the road to eliminating the deficit and set the stage for more than a decade of balanced budgets and prosperity, Mr. Martin raised taxes on corporations, financial institutions, tobacco and gasoline, and made other corporate tax changes and alterations to retirement plans that added about $1.5-billion to Ottawa's coffers each year.
True, most of the deficit-reduction work came in cutting spending on federal programs and transfers to provinces, but the Chrétien-Martin Liberals did raise taxes, Mr. Ignatieff's proclamation to the contrary.
His error was one of those rhetorical flourishes that characterize all politicians who know that not all their statements are checked by the media. If checked, the statements are usually reviewed by other political parties whose own record for veracity is so potted as not to be taken seriously.
An intellectual makes no promises, because he does not know where his inquiries will lead, whereas a politician must make promises, because he seeks power and must purvey hope for a better future to get it.
Political promises, of course, are often broken – as Mr. Ignatieff's pledge to go to China one day and his cancellation of the trip the next – because circumstances change, the promise was dumb at conception, the promise costs too much, whatever.
Even that Chrétien-Martin budget of 1995 broke a promise, in a good sense, since it set the Liberals toward a balanced budget, whereas Mr. Chrétien had campaigned on merely reducing it to 3 per cent of gross domestic product.
Other promises are dumb but get fulfilled, so that later governments have to undo them, as some prime minister will by undoing the Harper government's two-point all-politics-all-the-time cut to the goods and services tax.
It is fear that drives many political calculations – fear that the electorate will not understand or will react badly or is very stupid or very self-interested. This fear paralyzes politicians from talking seriously, as in the case of Mr. Ignatieff and all politicians these days, about the country's fiscal deficit, which can be reduced in a short period of time, say within five years, only by a combination of resumed economic growth, spending reductions and tax increases.
Politicians, living in fear while purveying hopes, fear the electoral consequence of living in truth if they outlined what kind of spending cuts and tax increases will do the trick of achieving the surpluses Canada will need.
It is easier to live in the shadows of truth, or to play around its edges, as all the politicians are now doing, by saying growth alone will do the trick, or referring misleadingly to successes of previous governments, or accusing the other side of mismanagement.
Get ready, therefore, for an election campaign sought only by the political class, in which leaders, politicians all, will play around truth's edges, fearing the voters' reaction to serious measures, and counting instead on the seduction of illusion and the crafting of image.
