‘Oh my god, what have I done? What was I thinking?’

Converting Mamet

A playwright’s progress

by Andrew Ferguson   -  May 23, 2011, 

Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “ ‘F— you’ —David Mamet.” 
Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.

Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads.

The Worst of the Worst

A continent away from Kyrgyzstan, Africans like myself cheered this spring as a coalition of opposition groups ousted the country's dictator, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. "One coconut down, 39 more to harvest!" we shouted. There are at least 40 dictators around the world today, and approximately 1.9 billion people live under the grip of the 23 autocrats on this list alone. There are plenty of coconuts to go around.

The cost of all that despotism has been stultifying. Millions of lives have been lost, economies have collapsed, and whole states have failed under brutal repression. And what has made it worse is that the world is in denial. The end of the Cold War was also supposed to be the "End of History" -- when democracy swept the world and repression went the way of the dinosaurs. Instead, Freedom House reports that only 60 percent of the world's countries are democratic -- far more than the 28 percent in 1950, but still not much more than a majority. And many of those aren't real democracies at all, ruled instead by despots in disguise while the world takes their freedom for granted. As for the rest, they're just left to languish.

Although all dictators are bad in their own way, there's one insidious aspect of despotism that is most infuriating and galling to me: the disturbing frequency with which many despots, as in Kyrgyzstan, began their careers as erstwhile "freedom fighters" who were supposed to have liberated their people. Back in 2005, Bakiyev rode the crest of the so-called Tulip Revolution to oust the previous dictator. So familiar are Africans with this phenomenon that we have another saying: "We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power, and the next rat comes to do the same thing. Haba!" Darn!

I call these revolutionaries-turned-tyrants "crocodile liberators," joining the ranks of other fine specimens: the Swiss bank socialists who force the people to pay for economic losses while stashing personal gains abroad, the quack revolutionaries who betray the ideals that brought them to power, and the briefcase bandits who simply pillage and steal. Here's my list of the world's worst dictators. I have ranked them based on ignoble qualities of perfidy, cultural betrayal, and economic devastation. If this account of their evils makes you cringe, just imagine living under their rule.

1. KIM JONG IL of North Korea: A personality-cult-cultivating isolationist with a taste for fine French cognac, Kim has pauperized his people, allowed famine to run rampant, and thrown hundreds of thousands in prison camps (where as many as 200,000 languish today) -- all while spending his country's precious few resources on a nuclear program.
Years in power: 16

2. ROBERT MUGABE of Zimbabwe: A liberation "hero" in the struggle for independence who has since transformed himself into a murderous despot, Mugabe has arrested and tortured the opposition, squeezed his economy into astounding negative growth and billion-percent inflation, and funneled off a juicy cut for himself using currency manipulation and offshore accounts.
Years in power: 30

It's going to be very ugly before reaching equilibrium

The Arab spring unleashes Islamists on Egyptian Christians.

Screaming “With our blood and soul, we will defend you, Islam,” jihadists stormed the Virgin Mary Church in northwest Cairo last weekend. They torched the Coptic Christian house of worship, burned the nearby homes of two Copt families to the ground, attacked a residential complex, killed a dozen people, and wounded more than 200: just another day in this spontaneous democratic uprising by Muslim hearts yearning for freedom.

In the delusional vocabulary of the “Arab Spring,” this particular episode is known as a sectarian “clash.” That was the Washington Post’s take. Its headline reads “12 dead in Egypt as Christians and Muslims clash” — in the same way, one supposes, that a mugger’s fist can be said to “clash” with his victim’s face. The story goes on, in nauseating “cycle of violence” style, to describe “clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians” that “left” 12 dead, dozens more wounded, “and a church charred” — as if it were not crystal clear who were the clashers and who were the clashees, as if the church were somehow combusted into a flaming heap without some readily identifiable actors having done the charring.

The thugs in question were Egyptian Muslims. Were they representative of all Egyptian Muslims? No, but it would be more accurate to portray them as such than to suggest, as the Pollyanna narrative holds, that Egypt (and Tunisia, and Yemen, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Algeria, and …) is teeming with legions of Gamal al-Madisons.

Amazing. Our betters are only human (or worst)

I.M.F. Head Is Arrested and Accused of Sexual Attack

By AL BAKER

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken in custody on Saturday, minutes before he was to fly to Paris from John F. Kennedy International Airport, the authorities said.

He was accused of a sex attack on a maid earlier in the day at a Times Square hotel, the authorities said.  

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a candidate for president of France, was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and turned over to Manhattan detectives, according to a Port Authority spokesman. He was expected to be taken to the offices of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit at P.S.A. 5 in Manhattan, another official said.

It was about 4:45 p.m. when plainclothes detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey suddenly boarded the plane, Air France Flight 23, as it idled on the tarmac at the airport 10 minutes before it was scheduled to take off and took Mr. Strauss-Kahn into custody, according to an agency official.

The Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal attack of a woman employee at the hotel Sofitel New York, at 45 West 44th Street, in the heart of the city’s theater district.

The tyranny of science

by Tim Black 

More and more scientists fancy themselves as gods, with a duty to enlighten those who are ‘deluded to the point of perversity’.

It seems that certain men of science, like their hymn-sakes the Christian soldiers, are on the march. For these faithless crusaders, science is not simply a method by which we gain understanding and mastery of the physical world. No, it has become a weapon of enlightenment, a cudgel to be wielded against the ‘ignorant’ multitudes, ‘deluded to the point of perversity’ (to quote high priest of The Science, Richard Dawkins) by religious metaphysics and philosophical myth. For these Darwin-obsessed, unblinkingly deterministic culture-warmongers, science has become more than a method. It has become a mission.

Joining Richard Dawkins at the front line in the war against People With Wrong Beliefs, whether Christian or German Idealist, is Peter Atkins, former professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford and author of On Being – A scientist’s exploration of the great questions of existence. It’s an unabashed attempt to show why the scientific method will come closer to answering the big ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions than – to sling Atkins’ mud –  all the theological fantasists, political storytellers and philosophical shysters put together. And to be fair to the scientistic Atkins, he certainly knows his onions, albeit from the sub-atomic level upwards.

Spontaneous Order

by John Stossel 

You are our Ruler. An entrepreneur tells you he wants to create something he calls a “skating rink.” Young and old will strap blades to their feet and speed through an oval arena, weaving patterns as moods strike them.

You’d probably say, “We need regulation—skating stoplights, speed limits, turn signals—and a rink director to police the skaters. You can’t expect skaters to navigate the rink on their own.”

And yet they do. They spontaneously create their own order.

At last January’s State of the Union, President Obama said America needs more passenger trains. How does he know? For years, politicians have promised that more of us will want to commute by train, but it doesn’t happen. People like their cars. Some subsidized trains cost so much per commuter that it would be cheaper to buy them taxi rides.

The grand schemes of the politicians fail and fail again.

By contrast, the private sector, despite harassment from government, gives us better stuff for less money—without central planning. It’s called a spontaneous order.

Lawrence Reed, president of FEE, explains it this way:

“Spontaneous order is what happens when you leave people alone—when entrepreneurs . . . see the desires of people . . . and then provide for them.

“They respond to market signals, to prices. Prices tell them what’s needed and how urgently and where. And it’s infinitely better and more productive than relying on a handful of elites in some distant bureaucracy.”

This idea is not intuitive. Good things will happen if we leave people alone? Some of us are stupid—Obama and his advisers are smart. It’s intuitive to think they should make decisions for the wider group.

“No,” Reed responded. “In a market society, the bits of information that are needed to make things work—to result in the production of things that people want—are interspersed throughout the economy. What brings them together are forces of supply and demand, of changing prices.”

The personal-computer revolution is a great example of spontaneous order.

“No politician, no bureaucrat, no central planner, no academic sat behind a desk before that happened, before Silicon Valley emerged and planned it,” Reed added. “It happened because of private entrepreneurs responding to market opportunities. And one of the great virtues of that is if they don’t get it right, they lose their shirts. The market sends a signal to do something else. When politicians get it wrong, you and I pay the price.

“We have this ingrained habit of thinking that if somebody plans it, if somebody lays down the law and writes the rules, order will follow,” he continued.

“And the absence of those things will somehow lead to chaos. But what you often get when you try to enforce mandates and restrictions from a distant bureaucracy is planned chaos, as the great economist Ludwig on Mises once said. We have to rely more upon what emerges spontaneously because it represents individuals’ personal tastes and choices, not those of distant politicians.”

The criminalization of the Link

by Mark Steyn

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the "hyperlink"- that's to say, if you include a link to a site "where hate material is posted", you could go to jail for two years.

I don't recall this figuring as a policy proposal during the election campaign. I would imagine that almost no Tory voter is in favour of the proposal: The vast majority would be either opposed or indifferent, or bewildered as to why it's happening at all. After all, at the last Conservative conference, the vote to scrap Section 13 was unanimous.

That last one - why's it happening? - is easy to answer. It's happening because it's the kind of remorseless incremental annexation of individual liberty to which the permanent bureaucracy has become addicted. And, as I always say, the lesson of the post-Second World War west is that you don't need a presidency-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. It's an outrageous law, poorly written. For example, you might link to a harmless bit of fluff at blandpap.com, but two years later somebody might have posted some "hate material" in a far corner of that site that you've never read and have never linked to. Tough. As the typically crappily drawn law currently stands, you're guilty of a crime. Richard Warman, Canada's leading Internet Nazi, has pronounced SteynOnline a "hate site" (and sued Blazing Cat Fur for linking to it). Suppose you're some harmless little jazz site and you link to one of my Song of the Week columns. Too bad. You might have thought you were linking to something about George Shearing or Johnny Mercer, but deep within the site is "hateful material" about Richard Warman's Nazi activities or Warren Kinsella's Sinophobic jokes. So you're looking at two years in the slammer.

Who'll determine what's "hateful material"? Three types of people: Weird self-aggrandizing creeps like Warman; ambitious social engineers like the BCHRT judges who just fined a stand-up comic 15 grand for putting down a heckler homophobically; and just plain stupid bureaucrats, like Shirlene McGovern, who "investigated" Ezra Levant at Alberta taxpayers' expense for years and couldn't be bothered to learn the differences between the real Mohammed cartoons and the fake ones. None of these people is qualified to tell you how to live - or whom to link to. Yet they will. Because to them it's entirely natural to do so, regardless of which party is in power. And, on those rare occasions when a nominally right-of-centre party finds itself with a parliamentary majority, enough of its members are inclined to string along. There's so much of this stuff around it's barely "ideological": it's just the zeitgeist, the air we breathe, isn't it?

At the tail end of the Cold War, I used to meet charming, intelligent eastern Europeans and wonder how they could live as they did. How could an educated citizenry not chafe under daily tyranny? I remember one of them - an amusing Hungarian cynic - explaining it to me: For most people, "rights" are theoretical. After all, how many rights do you actively need to avail yourself of to get through the day? To do your job, buy some dinner, watch a little TV. Maybe "free speech" is a big deal if you want to be a poet or a playwright, but for the rest of us, not so much so. And he gave a Mitteleuropean shrug.

I was aghast. But I wouldn't be today. Why not criminalize the hyperlink? After all, as that Hungarian might have said, how many hyperlinks does the average Canadian need to get through the day? What does one more concession to statism really matter?

No government, least of all one that purports to be "conservative", should pass this legislation. The presence of Geert Wilders on Canadian soil and the pitiful airbrushing of even mildly approving pieces about him remind us of the increasingly cowed state of our public discourse. We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment. In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn't be more explicit in its contempt for you

E=mc2 (m=mass of the universe)

Environmentalists Were For Fracking Before They Were Against It

by Ronald Bailey 

The world’s projected natural gas supplies jumped 40 percent last year. How is such a thing possible? Until a decade ago, experts believed that it would be technically infeasible to exploit the potential resource base of natural gas locked in 48 shale basins in 32 countries around the world. Then horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, was perfected. The shale gas rush was on, and last year the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issued an analysis revising its estimates of available natural gas dramatically upward.

The ability to produce clean burning natural gas from shale could transform the global energy economy. Right now we burn about 7 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas to generate about 24 percent of the electricity used in the United States. The U.S. burns a total of 23 tcf annually to heat homes and to supply industrial processes as well produce electricity. Burning coal produces about 45 percent of U.S. electricity.

A rough calculation suggests that 100 percent of coal-powered electricity generation could be replaced by burning an additional 14 tcf of natural gas, boosting overall consumption to 37 tcf per year. The EIA estimates total U.S. natural gas reserves at 2,543 tcf. This suggests that the U.S. has enough natural gas to last about 70 years if it entirely replaced the current level of coal-powered electricity generation. 

Similarly, it would be notionally possible to replace the entire current U.S. gasoline consumption with about 17 tcf of natural gas per year. So replacing coal and gasoline immediately would require burning 54 tcf annually, implying a nearly 50 year supply of natural gas. 

What about the greenhouse gas implications? The EIA estimates that the U.S. emitted 5.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2009 (the last year for which figures are available). Burning coal emitted 1.75 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Similarly, burning petroleum in the transportation sector emitted 1.7 billion metric tons of CO2, of which about two-thirds came from consuming gasoline. By comparison, the natural gas burned to generate electricity emitted 373 million metric tons of CO2. A rough calculation suggests that replacing coal and gasoline with natural gas would reduce overall U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by about 25 percent.

In the Heart of Freedom, in Chains

Elite hypocrisy, gangsta culture, and failure in black America
by Myron Magnet

Two April days threw a clarifying light on the state of race in America. On the 11th, North Carolina’s attorney general exonerated three white Duke students of the rape charges that a black stripper had lodged with much press fanfare a year earlier. The next day, CBS fired shock jock Don Imus for calling black Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos.” Between them, these events suggest an explanation for America’s most vexed social question: in a country whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?

The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.

What was going on in the mid-sixties that could explain such a startling development? Political scientist Charles Murray gave the first answer to that question: welfare benefits sharply rose just at that moment. Offering more purchasing power than a minimum-wage job, the dole, he argued, provided an economic incentive for women to have out-of-wedlock babies and for their boyfriends to live off

Rediscovering Congo

Two decades in, the world wakes up to a tragedy. So what are we going to do about it?

BY JASON STEARNS

These are strange, exhilarating times to be working on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For the first time since full-fledged war broke out in the central African country in 1996, the American public seems to be waking up to the brutality of the conflict there. Over the past year, there has been a flurry of activity inside and outside the Beltway -- in congressional hearings, Oprah shows, and Broadway theater. The country's ongoing rape epidemic is finally getting front-page treatment. Congress passed a bill specifically on the Congo, and lawmakers and corporate boards in California, Pittsburgh, and universities around the country may soon follow suit.

For those of us who have been writing about or working in Congo for over a decade, this attention is anachronistic. Past is the height of the war, when nine African countries slugged it out through the country's jungles, savannahs, and highlands, splitting the country into half a dozen fiefdoms. Since 2003, the country has been unified; troops from Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Angola have (largely) withdrawn. Elections were held in 2006, confirming Joseph Kabila -- who had taken over after his father's assassination in 2001 -- as president.

Despite the peace deal, violence has escalated in recent years in the eastern Kivus region -- along the border with Rwanda and Burundi -- as the government has tried to root out remaining armed groups through brutal counterinsurgency campaigns. While conflict has become confined to a smaller area and is less regional, it is still incredibly vicious. A study released this week in a U.S. medical journalconcludes that more than 400,000 women are being raped a year, with between 17 percent to 40 percent of women in the east reporting sexual assault during their lifetime.

But the violence in eastern Congo is sadly not new. So why this sudden flurry of attention? The novelty is the grassroots mobilization around the issue in the United States. For years, the sheer complexity of the conflict -- more than 50 different Congolese armed groups have seen the light of day in the past decade, fighting for a host of reasons -- has been the bane of reporters and activists alike. How can you make someone care about a conflict you can't explain? In 2006, even the New York Times' Nicholas Kristofattempted to justify why he wasn't writing much about the Congo: "I grant that the suffering is greater in Congo. But our compass is also moved by human evil, and that is greater in Darfur." Good guys vs. bad guys make for an easier story. It has always been difficult to reduce the Congolese conflict to such simple binaries.

Good question

What Is The Purpose Of The Euro?
by Nathan Lewis

Based on their speeches and actions, I doubt that even the eurozone's leaders could properly answer this question. This confusion could soon lead to some unfortunate results.

The purpose of the euro is to provide a common currency throughout Europe. That is all that it does. There is no need for fiscal integration or any other sort of oversight or control.

Europe's countries are small, and since they are all on the same continent together, they have all been involved in trade with one another for a long time. Greece has a population of only 10 million, less than Los Angeles. Denmark has half of that, at 5.5 million, which is about the same as Miami.

Can you imagine if Los Angeles or Miami had its own currency, which floated independently of the dollar? With its own central bank policy board, interest rate policy target and so forth? This would cause endless difficulties for anyone in Los Angeles who wanted to do business with anyone outside of Los Angeles. Eventually, businessmen might say: Let's dump the Los Angeles peso and just use the dollar, like everyone else.

This would be particularly true if the Los Angeles peso had a poor history of currency decline, and thus the interest rates on L.A. peso-denominated debt was very high, compared to U.S. dollar debt. Businessmen would wonder: Why am I paying 15% on my peso loan, when people in Texas can borrow at 6%?

Thus, Europe's countries have always been drawn toward an arrangement that, at the very least, provides fixed exchange rates between currencies. Most of the time, this was accomplished with a gold standard system. When all the currencies are pegged to gold, then of course their exchange rates with each other are stable and unchanging. Later, this was attempted through various agreements such as the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. But these were rather poor kludges, so they eventually landed on the idea of simply using one currency throughout the continent.

Osama’s Dead—But Are His Ideas?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

When President Obama announced that U.S. special forces had helicoptered into Pakistan, broken into a secret compound an hour from the capital and killed Osama bin Laden, celebrations broke out all across America.

The man who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 of us had at last received his just reward. College students ran to the White House to chant “USA! USA!”

Even if one believes that rejoicing at executions of murderers is unseemly for a Christian people, the demands of justice had been met. The world is a better place without bin Laden, who was developing plans to blow up U.S passenger trains on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Yet, in Pakistan and across the Middle East, even in London, some came out to praise the “martyr” and threaten revenge.

In a way, this is the more interesting phenomenon. Why would people, who must believe themselves righteous and moral, keen and wail at the death of a monster who did what bin Laden had done?

Though Osama’s time was past—only 18 percent of the Arab world held a favorable view of him at his death—he was once among the most admired figures in the Islamic world.

In 2003, in Jordan, 56 percent of the pubic voiced confidence in Osama. In 2005, in Pakistan, 52 percent agreed. In July 2009, after Obama’s Cairo speech to the Muslim world, 22 percent of Palestinians said the U.S. president inspired confidence; 52 percent said Osama bin Laden did.

How to explain this? Do Arabs and Muslims approve of mass murder of innocent civilians? Why did so many find so much to admire in a man who planned the atrocities of 9/11?

In one man’s judgment, Osama was admired because he alone in the Arab world had the astonishing audacity to stand up and smash a fist into the face of the world’s last superpower, which had become one of the most resented powers in the Middle East. He was applauded because he had struck the most savage blow dealt America since British troops burned the Capitol and White House in 1814.

...“anyone who don’t like it…should go back to Europe,”

Fear of an Erudite White

It’s hard to find things to hate about Jared Taylor, and that’s what his enemies seem to hate about him the most.

In a culture where “the racist”—who is always white—has been the most crudely stereotyped stock villain over the past generation, Taylor stubbornly (yet politely) breaks the mold. You can tell he’s a different breed merely by the way he pronounces the word “white”—rather than an illiterate cracker drawl that sounds like “waht,” he ever-so-properly aspirates the “wh” so that it sounds instead like “hwite.”

He’s one erudite white. And they hate that. The foot soldiers of egalitarian thought control would rather that all “racists” range from mildly to severely retarded. But to their preciously inviolable little narrative’s detriment, Taylor is a trilingual Yale grad who has written two books, edited several anthologies, and published the monthly newsletter American Renaissance for two decades. What confounds, perplexes, and infuriates his antagonists is that he’s obviously not stupid, yet he stubbornly refuses to see the world as they do.

Bereft of solid arguments against him, they rely on the crutch of false accusations. He’s been consistently mislabeled a “white supremacist,” an odd moniker for someone who once said, “I think Asians are objectively superior to whites by just about any measure that you can come up with in terms of what are the ingredients for a successful society.”

He gets hammered for being a “fascist,” although he insists he favors unhindered freedom of association, which is a less coercive system than what exists even in modern America, not to mention Nazi Germany (although everyone always has to mention Nazi Germany in these sort of discussions, anyway).

Variation on the same theme

Why the poor cast votes for Conservatives

By Carol Goar

They aren’t ready to hear this yet, but the anti-poverty activists who work tirelessly to promote the interests of low-income Canadians need to ask why so many of them voted for Stephen Harper last week.

They won’t like the answers they get. They won’t understand how food bank users and social housing tenants could think the Prime Minister is on their side. They’ll be tempted to interrupt or object.

But their feelings are not the point. There is a serious gap in their knowledge.

Left unaddressed, it will trip them up in next fall’s provincial election campaign, the same way it did in this spring’s federal campaign and last autumn’s municipal race which propelled Rob Ford into the mayor’s chair.

It would be easy for the anti-poverty movement to argue that Harper’s victory was the result of vote-splitting, smear tactics and luck. He did benefit from the “orange wave” that began in Quebec and spilled over into Ontario, dividing the left-wing vote between the New Democrats and Liberals. The Conservatives did saturate the airwaves with attack ads, portraying Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff as an opportunistic outsider. And Harper was publicly endorsed by Toronto’s mayor, in a departure from tradition.

It would also be easy to stay the course, hoping the Conservatives will see the light. Despite the fact that Harper has announced his priorities — which don’t include poverty reduction — anti-poverty groups are busy writing articles and circulating studies that bolster their case.

But neither rationalization nor wilful blindness will get them far in the next electoral showdown. Tim Hudak, who leads the ascendant Ontario Conservatives, uses the same playbook as Harper and Ford.

After being sidelined twice in the past eight months, anti-poverty campaigners need to figure out how right-wing cost-cutters connect with voters — especially low-income voters.

My soundings are limited, but a few themes keep popping up:

 • People in low-income neighbourhoods are the biggest victims of the drug dealers and violent young offenders Harper is promising to lock up. They want relief from the violence they can’t escape. They want to rid their communities of the gangs that lure their children into gun-and-gang culture. Crime crackdowns make sense to them.

 • What Canadians struggling to make ends meet want most is a job; not government benefits, not abstract poverty-reduction plans, certainly not charity. Harper tapped into that yearning, promising to stabilize the economy and create employment. The New Democrats, aiming to beat him at his own game, said they would cut small business taxes.

 • It angers low-income voters to see secure middle-class bureaucrats getting pay hikes. Those trapped in entry-level service jobs seethe when public employees who earn far more than they ever will are rewarded simply for showing up. Those living on public assistance — employment insurance, welfare, old age security — dislike being treated with contempt by government officials. In both cases, cutting the public payroll has a lot of appeal.

 • Canadians fighting to stay afloat often have little regard for the anti-poverty organizers, professors and social planners who profess to speak for them. They don’t appreciate being lumped together and labelled. They don’t want political advice.

 • Like most people, low-income voters mistrust politicians of all stripes. They don’t believe their promises and they don’t pay much attention to their rhetoric. Many don’t cast ballots. Those who do, opt for politicians who speak in plain language about issues that matter to them.

Some of these signals are contradictory. Some are counterintuitive. But they point to an anti-poverty movement that is out of step with its presumed followers. Its leaders owe it to those they claim to serve to take a painfully honest look at themselves and their vision.

These are hard lessons. They will require openness and humility. But the alternative is increasing irrelevance.