C'mon. You have to admit that some days, the evidence is undeniable that we are a nation of morons. Despite the rousing fellow feeling generated by our gold medals and the return of the Crosby puck from farthest Finland (the white gloves! the close-up photos!), we often display signs that, as a country, we may not be the tightest nut on the bolt.
Maybe it has something to do with watching too much hockey, a sport that finally, this week, almost managed to ban the act of crushing an unsuspecting player's head into the boards from his blind side. The NHL had just about agreed on a mid-season rule change when – oooooh! – the initiative hit the post, and seems to have bounced over the glass to next season. Maybe years of abjectly denying that concussions are an issue has given us a national concussion.
But the most recent, jarring evidence of our collective idiocy is an Ekos poll released this week that reports Canadians prefer the "macho, emotional image" of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the intellectual image of Michael Ignatieff. We also insist – and when I saw we, I mean the majority of voters in the country, the majority of whom are men between the ages of 45 and 65 – that we like to leave emotion out of politics. We think, therefore We. Are. Canadian.
Our national delusion is that we are somehow steadier-headed than the rest of the world. On a planet beset by complications, we prefer a leader who pretends there are none. As a matching crock to the impression Mr. Harper gives that he's never wrong, 86 per cent of Canadians believe their political decisions are based entirely on reason. "Men over 45 seem to think we live on Vulcan, that we're all like Spock," Frank Graves, the Ekos pollster, told me. "And there's a bit of Klingon, too, because we think courage is the most important trait in a politician."
Alas, this bombastic lack of self-awareness has produced the debased political swamp in which we all now dwell. The country is at war and aging baby boomers seek out paternalistic politicians who claim no doubts as to the course we must take. But we don't have to lie to ourselves and pretend our politics are rational.
Because they aren't. The crime rate in Canada has been declining for 10 years. The bulk of the federal government's legislative agenda revolves around getting tough on crime. Is that rational? No.
Is it rational that Ottawa decided to take on the issue of women's health in developing countries but refused (until forced to back down) to address contraception, when uncontrolled childbirth is the decisive factor in women's well-being globally? No, again.
But those are the irrational policies of the leader preferred by a majority of Canadians, who make political choices on an entirely rational basis. One wants to call the logic Kafkaesque, but Jerry-Lewis-like seems more appropriate.
Of course, Mr. Harper and his band of doubt-free ministers design those policies, cynically but rationally, to appeal to their aging base of voters. The median age in Canada is 41. It was 21 back in 1967, the last time young people here voted in any meaningful number. People under the age of 25 are motivated to vote by their passions, which their parents dismiss as too emotional. But the goals the oldsters are pursuing – security, happiness – are emotional ones, too.
In fact, to think anyone makes rational political choices is simply delusional, as a growing body of research has shown in the past 20 years. At Princeton, psychologist Alexander Todorov demonstrated that people make lasting judgments about political candidates based on 38 milliseconds of exposure to the candidate's face. Yes. It's sometimes known as the "Warren Harding effect," after the inexperienced, incompetent and corrupt Harding won office because he "looked like a president."
