Ask anyone who marches in the streets for social justice, or who stays in bed on election day, or who votes for a populist leader in permanent anger: there is a serious disconnect between the population and the players in the political game, and this , everywhere in the West. The world is not getting better and better, as some well-to-do optimistic thinkers insist.
Far-right leaders have understood this and are directly addressing this anger and disillusionment. But the leaders of the extreme left do not do otherwise by militarizing any banal discussion into a trial of moral intention. This disconnection, this disenchantment intimately linked to everyone’s life, is not the stupid fact of social networks, as some would have us believe through a simplistic and superficial analysis of the current world. We cannot understand our world based on “a mode of communication”, Gérard Boismenu decided on the phone.
After half an hour, I would thank him for an interview that felt like a luminous private lesson in political science. You can feel it when reading, talking to him: Mr. Boismenu is an exceptional teacher. One of those professors you meet during your university career (for those who are lucky enough to go there, he would no doubt add), who always listens to other points of view that nourish him.
A teacher with feet firmly planted on the ground, but whose head does not struggle to make us hover a little higher.
Professor Boismenu has long worked on the Glorious Thirties, this prosperous post-war period when social ties in the West seemed solid, politicians did not know the meaning of the word “austerity” and the mobility of the social elevator seemed oiled like a rolling bearing. His most recent book, however, is by no means an exercise in nostalgia for this period. The goal is rather to show how the sources of current political extremism and disengagement are primarily social and economic. The erosion of this society of the 1950s and 1960s, in the wake of globalization, has led to the hardening of current positions, in the culmination of a heavy trend. “These are not anecdotal facts. »
The break
Twice in his book, the author evokes the famous gig economy, where the current young generation evolves. Embraced as much by the youth of the right as by that of the left, this type of “career”, if the term still applies, where one piles up temporary odd jobs, would show, according to Boismenu, to what extent neoliberalism has seized hearts and minds of all, often unwittingly. I recognized myself deeply in his words. Like many of my contemporaries, I have internalized this idea that success depends on as few stable professional ties as possible, in chain investment in oneself, in the famous gigsand in an eternal renewal of the impression of somewhat artificial freedom, because purely individual.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Gérard Boismenu, author and professor of political science at the University of Montreal
All of this undeniably feeds a break in what once made the link between the individual and his incarnation in the great political play of his time. A union, a stable job, a certain predictability in the course of one’s life, not only gives time to engage politically, but it also gives the financial means, whereas a more individual or corporatist political entrenchment, although course also legitimate, undeniably feeds a certain wider social division.
By reading the preceding paragraph, some will see in Boismenu, and in myself, a thought of the left. Far from it. It is simply that those who are “at the bottom” of the social and economic ladder will only find it natural, in the absence of traditional trade union gatherings, to want to come together in other ways, whether by the right or by the left, and it will take the form of ideological tensions, these days, because it will come naturally through discourses based on identity, which are by definition divisive.
It has become a truism in Quebec, the left is quite lost as to its representation in government.
In the United States, had it not been for the anti-abortion stupidity of the Supreme Court, we could have witnessed a similar rout in the midterm elections a few weeks ago. This is because a fundamental reversal has occurred in recent years. While North American right-wing parties have traditionally appealed to wealthier and more educated people, left-wing parties have been doing so lately, particularly when it comes to education. This inversion, which makes all left-wing parties in America and Europe predominantly urban parties, has set the stage for the social division that is the substance of this book’s subject.
“And yet, society exists,” Boismenu writes towards the end of the book, throwing a point at Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that went in the opposite direction, while elegantly evoking Galileo’s witticism against his detractors. Yes, the Earth is moving, because contrary to all the cries from the punk heart that resonate so much about the absence of a future, the institutions remain, and demand to be reinvested by everyone. They are patient, these institutions, while a pandemic that marked, according to some pseudothinkers, the end of I don’t know what, rather simply put the world on hold, on call, with valiant hearts.
A disenchanted world
Gerard Boismenu
The Presses of the University of Montreal
240 pages