Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by: Michael Ignatieff
209pp.:Random House Canada, 2013
Reviewed by Patrick Keeney
Since Plato, the dream of the philosopher-king has animated western politics. However, qualities that make a first-rate political or social theorist rarely make a successful politician or statesman. Despite notable exceptions such as Cicero, Machiavelli, and Burke, more typical is the fate of Plato himself. He narrowly escaped with his life after the King of Syracuse decided that philosophers were best kept apart from the practical realities of running the state. Michael Ignatieff’s new memoir, Fire and Ashes, provides some clues as to why the scholar-thinker rarely makes a successful transition into the rough and tumble world of politics.
Michael Ignatieff is justifiably considered to be among the first rank of contemporary political theorists. An early book of his, The Needs of Strangers, is a profound meditation on contemporary politics. His biography of Isaiah Berlin – the great British public intellectual and defender of political pluralism – stands as a model of what an intellectual biography should be.
Fire and Ashes displays the exemplary trademarks of Ignatieff’s writing: crystalline prose combined with a lightly worn erudition and a penetrating wit. Insofar as one can call any political memoir a page-turner, this is it. In telling his personal story, he manages to convey some of the visceral excitement of politics, as well as the mundane, grinding business of speechifying and politicking in church basements, high school gymnasiums, and Rotary clubs. However, what shines through most of all is the author’s basic civility and decency. Whatever his failings as a politician, Ignatieff strikes the reader as a decent and principled man, one who was sincere in his efforts to serve his country.
Many of the author’s observations about the precarious state of Canadian democracy resonate across party lines. He warns about the consolidation of power in the bureaucracy, the courts, and especially in the Prime Minister’s Office, along with the corresponding hollowing out of parliament. This shifting of power away from elected representatives is hardly unique to Canada, but it bodes ill for the future of democratic politics, and Ignatieff is astute in pointing out what is at stake. He speaks passionately of the need for young people to shed their apathy and enter the political arena. Throughout the text is his clarion call for civility, and the need to end the acrimony and rancor which in recent years has so corroded the political conversation.
Yet for all of Ignatieff’s theoretical acumen and brilliance, he seems to have been oddly naïve about the everyday truths of being a Canadian politician in the first decade of the 21st Century. Ignatieff’s reflections on entering the political fray brought to mind de Tocqueville’s travels through America in the 19th Century. Both men were thrust into circumstances which for them were novel and exciting. Yet it becomes obvious to the reader that, like de Tocqueville, Ignatieff too was a stranger in a strange land: a very odd place to be for a middle-aged man who aims to become Prime Minister. For example, the author seems surprised to discover that in practical politics, politicians need to measure their words more carefully than, say, a professor in a seminar room. This is indisputably true, but that this should be a revelation to the author speaks to an unbecoming naiveté.
Another intellectual disconnect was his obliviousness to the fact that his cosmopolitanism was not universally viewed as a political virtue. When he decided to enter politics, lured back from Harvard by what he calls “the men in black”, he had been away from Canada for over thirty years. He had taught at the elite universities of the English-speaking world, had written acclaimed treatises, and had produced an award-winning documentary film. By any yardstick, he was a successful scholar, writer, and broadcaster. But how had this prepared him for the office of Prime Minister? What, exactly, did he know about running a country?
He had spent the majority of his working life outside of Canada, primarily in the U.K. and in the United States. At one point in the text, he acknowledges the old saw that “all politics is local”, yet he is seemingly purblind to its corollary: that many Canadians viewed Ignatieff’s thirty year absence as an unusual way to prove his knowledge and love of the local, let alone establish his bona fides for the office of Prime Minister. This included his old friend Bob Rae, who reportedly exploded in a rage when Ignatieff told him of his plan to return to Canada, and seek the leadership of the Liberal Party. As we now know, Rae’s response was shared by many voters.
Yet the author stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that such a long absence raised legitimate questions about his suitability to be Prime Minister. Despite his protestations to the contrary, no one ever suggested that Canadians disqualify themselves for political office if they choose to live and work abroad. But surely the duration of absence is a relevant consideration when adjudicating a candidate’s fitness for the highest office in the land. I think most Canadians would consider an absence of 5, 10 or even 20 years as one thing; staying away for over three decades is qualitatively different.
When the Conservatives launched an ad campaign during the 2011 election, announcing that Mr. Ignatieff was “just visiting,” they were neither questioning his Canadian citizenship, let alone “attacking anyone who had ever gone out then come back home.” Rather, these ads were merely articulating a view held by Canadians of every political stripe, including, of course, many in the Liberal party itself. Mr. Ignatieff tells us that the negative ads were devastating, ultimately denying him a standing among voters. Perhaps; but I think a more compelling explanation is that it was Mr. Ignatieff’s thirty-year absence from Canada which ultimately denied him a standing.
The 2011 campaign was about more than a personal rejection of Mr. Ignatieff. Under his guidance, the Liberals had put together a big-government platform, one that too many observers seemed like a throwback to a Trudeau-era belief that government could solve all social ills and engineer the just society. When Lysiane Gagnon, the columnist for La Presse, protested, “But Mr. Ignatieff, politics is not social work”, she reflected the salient truth that during Mr. Ignatieff’s absence, Canadians had revised their estimation of what governments could do. What the Liberals were offering the Canadian electorate were ideas from another time and place: a political ideal trapped in amber.
Pierre Trudeau once quipped that “In politics, timing is everything, and timing is largely a matter of luck.” Ultimately, Mr. Ignatieff’s decision to enter Canadian politics was poorly timed: the Liberal Party was in a state of squalid disrepair; many Canadians viewed the Liberals as a pit of corruption and sleaze; and the Canadian political calculus had been forever altered by Stephen Harper. These were some of the political realities when Mr. Ignatieff decided to enter politics. Perhaps these home truths were less obvious from the vantage point of Harvard University.
