Mirror, Mirror

We have a tendency to think of the two political sides as mirror images. That is, they may have different goals and beliefs, but they go about pursuing those goals in the same way. This belief may come from the way we think of our political opponents: a wise person tries to see things from the other's perspective, whether that's an attempt at humanizing the other side, or a desire to know the enemy, Art Of War style.

But I suspect that a bigger reason we think of the political poles as interchangeable is that we analogize them to sports. Sports teams don't have an inherent way of doing things - a team that's all offence right now could be all defence in a generation, depending on the personnel they end up with. And similarly, we assume that a political party has a personality that's no more than a reflection of who's at the top right now.

But every now and then we get a reminder that the two sides are not the same. Different kinds of people get called to different beliefs and values, and systematically putting people with different ways of thinking on each side will make those sides act differently. We've seen an example of this in Canada over the last generation, as fate has conducted an experiment on us.

First, we had around a decade of government by the Chrétien Liberals. They were fairly popular - as governments go - but their real political strength came from the fact that their political rivals were splitting the vote between two parties: the traditional party that was close to the centre, and a newer, bolder party with more momentum and ideological purity. That was followed by about a decade of the Harper Conservatives. They're fairly popular - as governments go - but their real political strength comes from the fact that their political rivals are splitting the vote between two parties: the traditional party that was close to the centre, and a newer, bolder party with more momentum and ideological purity.

Okay, I admit there are at least a hundred ways the scenarios aren't the same, but as political experiments go, this is a pretty good opportunity to see how each side reacts to the same problem.

This is based purely on my recollections, but it seems to me that the merger talk on the right started much sooner. There was unite the right talk all through the Chrétien era, whether from Reform/Alliance officials, or from conservative pundits and politicians. Yet we're ten years into Harper, and the uncleft the left calls are still just a few voices in the wilderness. The occasional letter to the editor opines that there should be done sort of Liberal-NDP coalition, but not much serious consideration has been given. This election, both parties officially said no to working together, and the fact they at least cared enough about the issue to reject it seemed like progress to those of us who think a meter is a good idea?

So why was the right so much faster to embrace a merger? I'm sure many conservatives will seize upon this as proof they're just smarter, or at least more practical. But the flip side to that is that conservatives were also much faster to gloss over the ideological differences between a centrist party with a long tradition of governing, and a part born out of protest with no governing experience. I'd argue that the difference between the PC's and Reform in 1993 was greater than that between the Mulcair NDP and today's Liberals. Yet conservatives of the time were quite quick to dismiss those differences as long as our got them back in power. It seems that they are more likely to err on the side of having the better strategy than the preferred ideology.