Jen Gerson: A few thoughts on leadership

Trigger Warning: This one's gonna be preachy.

By: Jen Gerson

If there's one rule I've gleaned from writing about politics over the past decade, it's this: you get ate by the dragon you ride in on. Left, right, up, down, it doesn't matter. Pandering to reactionary or revolutionary elements is mistaking a foundation of sand for stone. You can win by tapping this energy for a while.

But you can't actually govern people who won’t be satisfied, regardless of how legitimate their grievances may be. If your coalition of power leans too heavily on groups who harbour unrealistic expectations of change grounded in conspiracy theories or anger, sooner or later, you're going to have to disappoint your people. Or you will become them.

I don't want to re-hash the active conversations now taking place about the pending Republic of Alberta; I'll save the conversation about the merits of an independence referendum for another day. Needless to say, if you’re hard pro-Alberta independence, this column isn’t for you, and I’d advise you not to read it. Right now, I want to talk about something more basic. I want to talk about the duties and the responsibilities of power, and what we expect of the institutions and individuals to whom we grant the legitimacy to lead us.

My husband asked me a pointed rhetorical question several months ago, and it stuck with me so well that I've mentioned it a few times in recent podcasts: "How do you identify a leader?"

The question tends to inspire a lot of flowery language, but the real answer is pretty simple.

"A leader is someone who has followers."

To be a leader doesn't mean following others. It doesn't mean just listening to people, or empathizing with them. It certainly doesn't mean reflecting their basest emotions back at them. Being a leader means standing up for a set of positions. It requires the ability to persuade people about the rightness of those positions, to demonstrate competency and moral clarity. It requires the discernment to know the difference giving vent to well-founded outrage and becoming enslaved by it. And there's a duty that comes with those gifts — a duty that comes with holding real power.

And I had to marvel by how much of these qualities were absolutely not on display when Danielle Smith gave her address to Albertans last week; when she followed the angriest members of her own party into promising an independence referendum if the separatists among us meet a threshold to trigger a Citizens Initiative referendum — a threshold she intends to lower.

"Regardless of what each of us believes about this issue, or what path we think is best, we, as Albertans, must be able to respectfully debate and discuss these issues with our friends, family members, and neighbours," she said.

I could not help but be taken aback by how utterly weak and equivocal that statement sounded.

It's one thing to run a hypothetical debate on any subject when you're hosting a gabfest on X, or shooting the shit on a YouTube essay, or holding forth on the AM dial. But to hold real power over peoples' lives and livelihoods is to accept a different set of responsibilities, a higher standard of conduct.

We entrust our leaders to lead us because we have invested certain values in them — values like good judgement. And with those traits, they have a duty to, among other things, set the terms of our shared debates in ways that are constructive.

One of the major failings of modern conservatism (if we can even call it that anymore) is that it consistently declines to accept this minimum duty of care to its own constituents. It puts its faith in the notion that we live in a marketplace of ideas. That all things can and should be debated because — of course — good ideas will win out in the long run and bad ideas will be out-debated.

That's mostly correct, but not fully. Because good ideas don't always win — or, rather, they don’t always win quickly enough to prevent the irreparable damage that bad ideas can do to societies and the people who live in them. Humans are creatures of emotion and tribal affiliation, not rationality and restraint. Mobs will rule, if they are permitted. And the compulsion to do monstrous things, to intellectually justify evil emotions, is encoded into our deepest natures.

An ideology built around a Pollyannaish fantasy about the marketplace of ideas therefore contains a bone-deep flaw. One that can only be guarded against with the aid of strong institutions, taboos, moral norms, and, yes, authority. Leadership, if you will.

Conservatives used to understand this better than most. Conservatives used to be the champions of institutions and incrementalism on this very understanding.

There is a point at which "just asking questions" ceases to be a healthy and robust intellectual exercise and instead starts to become an abdication of moral responsibility.

I'll refer any readers who are not yet familiar to the concept of the Tyranny of the Minority, or as thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it in a famous essay, the Dictatorship of the Small Minority. Briefly, this concept points out that a small, committed minority can hold entire institutions hostage if the leaders of those institutions lose their moral bearings and fail to assert norms and guardrails.

Obviously, I’m discussing this problem in the context of the Alberta separation situation, but a discussion about the tyranny of the minority is equally applicable to the federal Conservatives, the Liberals, the NDP, the Republicans, the Democrats. Only the specifics of the issues change. The dynamics are basically the same regardless of ideological position. This is a human problem.

In recent years, we saw left-leaning institutions largely fail to hold the line against the more corrosive and illiberal elements of progressive identitarian activism. Now, an even more destructive phenomenon is occurring on the right, as reactionary elements seek their revenge on cultural and political institutions that have ignored, reviled, and exiled them.

One extreme hypothetical example of this phenomenon to illustrate the dynamics at play: let’s say a handful of committed partisan activists demanded a mainstream political party debate the "Jewish Problem" at the next political convention. "What, it's just a debate! If we don't debate it here, respectfully, our members will debate it elsewhere; better to get it all out into the open. If there is no Jewish Problem, the debate will fail because the best ideas win, right! What, you think you can't defend yourself against the proposition? Well, that tells us everything we need to know, now doesn't it?" And so on, and so on.

If the lukewarm majority and their institutional gatekeepers lack the moral clarity to say: "No, conspiratorial anti-Semitism runs contrary to our values as a party and we're not going to humour that debate," then what you've got is a mainstream party that is now debating the "Jewish Problem." That's the Dictatorship of the Small Minority in action. That's a failure of leadership.

I will note, here, that I'm talking about leadership, not censorship. There are lots of places where odious people can debate odious things in this day and age. What I'm talking about is what institutions are willing to tolerate and accept in their own home; I’m talking about the responsibilities that come with both moral and legal authority. It's an argument for accepting that civic society does have a role to play in marginalizing dumb, destructive, and dangerous ideas. That's what being a leader is actually about — persuading your followers toward ends that serve the greater good, not pandering to their basest emotions in order to maintain a hold on power for power's sake.

There are those among my readers who believe that Danielle Smith is deftly playing a game of political chicken at the moment. That she’s merely venting separatist sentiments while accruing leverage for negotiations with Ottawa.

That view, in my opinion, is not compatible with her actions. She’s introduced legislation to make it easier for separatists to "force" her hand to hold an independence referendum through watered-down petition criteria. There’s no reason for her to do this unless she’s willing to go through with that referendum, and all the risks and uncertainty such a vote entails.

I think the truth is far more elemental. I think her motivations are exactly as she's admitted: I think she's doing this because she fears that if she doesn't humour the large minority of separatists in her base, the UCP will split on the issue. She will fend off the Bloc Albequois by — becoming the Bloc Albequois. Insert Galaxy Brain meme here.

If the premier of Alberta has to legislate to an idea that she knows will be destructive to the province and the nation because she fears she won't be able to govern her party otherwise, then she's not a leader.

Whether she knows it or not, what she's admitting is that she, personally, lacks the moral authority and the persuasive capacity to manage her own party. (And if she actually is a closet separatist, she lacks the requisite judgement.)

If Smith's best argument for her actions is some variation of: "we need to humour destructive policies to placate our most vocal and angry minority" then what she's actually arguing is that her party is governed by a vocal and angry minority. They have her hostage, not the other way around. She's confessing that she lacks the moral clarity required to stand up to the tyranny of the minority. She's arguing that the mantle and responsibilities of leadership rightly belong elsewhere. Either with another leader, or with another party that can properly manage itself.

I think what makes me most angry about all of this is that Smith talks a grandiose game about the glories of direct democracy through a referendum, but her commitment to these ideals, to referenda, and to debate, is hypocritical and selective.

She dropped plans for a referendum on an Alberta Pension Plan right quick when it became clear that such a vote would tank. She has totally ignored rural municipalities’ demands for a referendum on implementing a provincial police force.

Why is Smith fine with a vote on full independence, but too chickenshit to offer the same voice on policies that are even lightly sovereigntist-adjacent? While the fantasy of being independent in the abstract enjoys some support in this province, the specific policies required of an independent Alberta are, emphatically, not popular. Firewall Manifestos and Fair Deal Panels have been noodling ways to wrest more sovereignty away from Ottawa for decades: they’ve proposed a provincial pension plan, a police force, Alberta tax collection, etc. Yet, as it turns out, when the specifics are weighed out and considered, there’s no real appetite for any of these proposals.

And for all the talk about the purity of direct democracy, I have to note that Smith didn't get elected to run an independence referendum. UCP voters did not consent to be put through this ringer when they dropped that X in the box. During the 2023 election, she ran a campaign that stayed laser-focused on corporate taxes, health-care reform and other entirely mainstream concerns; more contentious ideas like the Sovereignty Act, RCMP reform, or the aforementioned pension plan were consciously and conspicuously sidelined.

Smith did not earn a democratic mandate to subject us all to the whims of her separatist minority. As far as I can tell, she didn't even mention the words "independence referendum" during the last election campaign — and I know why. Because if Smith had run the last election on what she's doing right now, she'd have been thrown out of an airlock, electorally.

If a critic accused her of pandering to separatists in 2023, she would have accused that person of being hysterical, before leaning into an extended diatribe about how Conservatives are persecuted and mistreated with absurd and bad faith mischaracterizations about their views and aims.

But that was two years ago, and before Mark Carney was elected, so democratic mandates only matter when UCP party unity isn’t on the line, I guess. That’s clearly what matters most, here.

Likewise, Alberta's separatists don't even have the decency to follow in the path of the Bloc Québécois. The Quebec separatists actually had the balls to start a real party; they presented their case and built an organization over years, electing themselves to the federal Parliament, and to Quebec's legislature. Only after the Parti Québécois won a majority of seats were they able to entertain referenda.

There was no bait-and-switch with those guys. Those who elected them knew what they were getting. The PQ didn't ascend to power talking about building bridges and fixing potholes only to then foist an existential vote on the populace two years later.

So, if Smith fears a one-issue separation party has the charisma and clout to split the conservative movement, my advice to her is — let it. Let the separatists build the real democratic legitimacy required to hold a vote like this. If they were willing to do the work required to gain party status, then I'd still think this was a bad idea, but I'd be less viscerally angry about the prospect of an independence referendum, and the "respectful debate" that would inevitably ensue.

I doubt the separatists will, though, because I don't think these people have what that takes. Fringe figures are fringe not because they're evil, but because they can't command the qualities of leadership. That's why they need to parasitize others to be taken seriously, other more credible parties, institutions, and leaders.

There is a reason the separatists are skipping steps; there is a reason they are gunning for a comparatively quick and easy one-hit vote ginned up on dubious promises and outrage. There's a reason they're forgoing any attempt to build real and lasting democratic support through an enduring and stable party.

They're hoping for a quick door-to-door sale on a shoddy vacuum with no warranty in a messy room. They'll be long gone before the buyer's remorse sets in.

These people know how to give vent to anger, but they don't have the skills or patience to build the successful and enduring institutions that would persuade people to their cause over time. Smith's duty is to protect us from “solutions” like this, not leave the door unlocked and lay out the mat.

If the premier can't be the version of herself that a plurality of Albertans elected, if she can't persuade her own followers that the saner bet is the better bet, then she and her party are unfit for purpose. She's not a leader.

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