The Possibilities of Artifice
Furey, Trump, and the vacuity of our times
Andrew Furey: Our country faces an existential crisis.
Also Andrew Furey: I am quitting because I am bored, so replace me as Premier with this completely unqualified guy my Dad and I picked to do the job, just because he’s really loyal (to me and Dad) and he looks good in pictures.
Politics was the art of the possible.
Andrew Furey shows us that today politics is about the possibilities of artifice.
Artifice.
Something intended to deceive, to cause people to believe something that isn’t true.
Reality is true. Authentic. Sincere.
An image may genuinely reproduce something as it is is or was.
But an image may also be an illusion.
Something that is not real.
These ideas are as ancient as humans and since politics is the second oldest profession, the idea that what we see in politics and what is reality has been around for a very long time. Niccolo Machiavelli told his readers 500 years ago that a successful political leader must have a public face and a private face, an understanding that there is a difference between the public morality and ideals and what one needs in reality to be not only personally successful but to protect and advance the state’s interests and goals. Walter Lippman wrote about these ideas in the 1920s when the media consisted of print and radio, as did Marshall McLuhan when television was king and we still see people pretending that these ideas are new in the age of the Internet and smart phones.
Like all fiction, the political kind is also rooted in fact. Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s men told us of a fictitious populist politician in a southern American state, based on the real life Huey Long, The Kingfish governor of Louisiana. The book became a popular movie in 1949, starring Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark - the fictional Long - and again in 2006 starring Sean Penn. The Candidate (1972), another landmark political film among political folk, pits an idealist Bill McKay, played by Robert Redford, against three term senator Crocker Jarmon, with political consultant Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) helping McKay deal with the clash of ideals and image with the reality of what politics and political success are. While McKay and Jarmon are fiction, the book’s author was a political consultant who drew from his real-life experiences.
The notions of image and reality, and its cousins authenticity, and sincerity are central to story as they are in Primary Colors, the parody of the Clintons in the 1990s. Political journalist Joe Klein wrote the book under a false name. It later became a movie that again, while popular among political types, did not do well at the box office. The ultimate movie that pits reality and fiction against each other is Wag the dog.
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Authenticity.
If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
My oldest and dearest friend, Simon Lono, gone from us now these six years, was fond of ending our great many talks about politics and communications with that wonderful joke. Sometimes, he’d replace authenticity with sincerity and get the same impact. Lono had learned about those two incredibly important political ideas - authenticity and sincerity - the only way to genuinely learn the lesson, which is by being involved in politics from his time in university in Rhode Island to national, provincial, and municipal politics as both a campaigner worker and as a candidate in Canada.
Simon was no idealist. He knew politics was about power. There were only two types of people: winners and losers. But he also understood that in a democracy, politicians needed to win the voters’ trust. They could disagree with you. They could even dislike you. But they would need to trust you were working for the right reasons, which is to say with the voters’ best interests at heart. You could an election with lies, as Simon watched so many do, but lose everything else. To win everything, a politician needs to earn and maintain the public’s trust and confidence. There’d be no place for deceit and dishonesty then.
Sincerity and authenticity are crucial n democratic politics because they are crucial to public discourse, the heart of democracy. Dialogue. People sharing their views on public issues and out of that exchange of ideas and sometimes the clash of opinions, we find solutions we can agree on or at the very least accept. “The critical action in relation to healthy public discourse is finding some bridge between one's private thoughts and [taking part in public life. That bridge is] authenticity,” the Irish writer and think Fintan O’Toole told an audience at the Einstein Forum last fall.
“What makes it okay for me to express myself,express my [private] rational process in public discourse is the idea that I am authentically expressing myself…. ” At the same time, “we want on the one side in public discourse to believe that the person who is speaking to me actually feels what they're saying. This is particularly the case, of course, in politics. We like to think that someone who is asking for our vote, is asking to be our representative, fundamentally has a kind of authenticity in their belief that they do really think this is for the public good and that therefore their motivations are private motivations for their public acts.”
“Authenticity in and of itself has no value in the content of public discourse,” O’Toole said at that part in his talk. After all, there are authentic racists and fascists in politics these days and people accept that. Well, let’s disagree with O’Toole on this, if only because he reasons himself through to the right spot shortly after.
The problem is not that authentic Nazis exist in politics if they are authentic Nazis. When things are out in the open you can deal with them. The problem comes when, as O’Toole points out when we come to a time when truth is no longer something we can agree on but - as in the insanity Jody Wilson-Rayboult defence - someone can claim that there is something called “my truth” or as with Donald Trump, there are alternates, which are simply false.
“The power of any statement [these days] lies in the force of belief that lies behind it rather than in any objective way of measuring it and the concept of authenticity has therefore shifted,” O’Toole told his audience. Absolutely true, someone in Newfoundland and Labrador will chime in. We crossed into that very modern, very unhappy world after 2003. This is the time of Danny Williams, the OA, the Original Artifice, and the legions of his fan club enablers who insisted that on any given issue Williams was right because he was popular and popular because he was right.
No one paid attention until after he was gone to the fact Williams and his team manipulated public opinion polls and news in order to manipulate public opinion and set up that circular logical defenced of whatever Williams did. Few paid attention to how often he withheld important information from the public or flat-out lied about anything from what he did with his public paycheque to why he expropriated hydro-electric power plants on the island in 2008 or what he was doing with Labrador hydro power from 2003 onward. This is now normal.
The style of politics Williams and his gang helped introduce endures, reaching its highest form thus far under the Liberals after 2015, who continued not only Williams era policy goals but political style as well. Williams ruthlessly suppressed public discourse by a combination of direct threats, inveigling, and secrecy. With those lessons firmly impressed on the public, there’s no need for harshness now. Andrew Furey can contemptuously lie to the public about the most serious issues with near impunity and there's no accountability. Take the private fishing trip with John Risley as merely one example. Contrary to established constitutional practice, many decisions after 2003 have come from the Premier alone instead of from Cabinet as a whole. The House of Assembly is a rubber stamp.
Public silence and ultimately compliance is assured since the opposition parties are neutered. The public learns of decisions only after they are taken. The government makes policy decisions privately consulting only with groups, privately. The government deals with any controversies, including those involving the opposition parties privately, usually with money. The approach is similar to the one in Chavezist Venezuela. Not surprising given that in the 1920s, local elites in Newfoundland supported dictatorial government as a solution to national problems just as in 2015 and after, many members of the elite in modern Newfoundland and Labrador wanted to surrender self-government rather than deal in any way with financial problems they created and which continue under the Liberals far worse than they were before. People wonder about how democracies can become authoritarian and border on fascism. They need only look at Newfoundland and Labrador where Andrew Furey can accuse his political opponents of undermining public discourse while he personally has finished the job of his predecessors back to Danny started of smothering public discourse. This is not merely hypocrisy on Furey's part. It's intentional.
Having seen Andrew Furey up close and at the distance that most of us see him, it is hard to ignore the way that he is never seen without the holographic image projectors on. There are no unguarded moments when he is not controlling his responses to an unnatural degree. His leadership campaign was a contrived presentation, right down to the stock celebrity memoir, the timing of which was interrupted only by COVID and the delay in the Liberal leadership handover from Dwight Ball to the successor carefully chosen in the back room. Not unusual since there hasn’t been a democratically fair, contested party leadership in Newfoundland and Labrador in 25 years.
It’s long been a common thing for people appearing on camera to avoid some colours or patterns in cloth because of how they look. In the 1980s, it became a common thing for men to wear red or blue coloured ties to match their party colours. These days there is party swag and every part of Furey appearance is crafted right down to the items on a shelf. The Liberals after 2015 evolved the egocentric approach of Danny Williams Pea Seas by taking the Big Giant Head on a Bus approach and renaming the party as Team Dwight during the campaign. Furey raised it another notch by renaming the party all the time as Team Furey, soon to be Team Hogan, another successor in a rigged election.
No one outside a handful of people know anything about John Hogan. Having done his very short time as yet another post-2003 Johnny Cab Minister, Hogan will become the first Johnny Cab Premier, just as Andrew Furey has been the holographic doctor. It’s amazing no one has said “Please state the nature of your political emergency.”
The only thing on Hogan's website is a video that introduces him in very general terms as if he were running for office for the first time, not setting up to hold the top job in the province and one of the dozen or so first ministers’ portfolios in Canada. There is no platform, no manifesto, and his own short political career is unremarkable. Aside from being a Furey loyalist, there is nothing to support Siobhan Coady’s scripted claim that he is an “effective, proven negotiator” let alone anything else to support her endorsement. Nor is there anything to backup any of the scripted endorsements most of the Liberal caucus are dropping on Johnny Prem’s behalf. There’s no evidence or facts because evidence and facts do not matter. The decision is already made. The only job for ordinary people is simply to vote as they are told, when the time comes.
No accident what when confronted with accusations of serious wrongdoing, both Andrew Furey in St. John's and Tulsi Gabbard in Washington fell back on the same line. The two political cultures run on the same rules. For Furey it was the idea there were times in the day when he could do as he pleased since he was not “on the clock” as the phrase goes. For Gabbard it was the use of a private cell phone to share propaganda from a country hostile to the United States. Accountability only comes when you believe ordinary people deserve to know, that relationships matter, and authenticity and sincerity matter. Neither Furey nor Gabbard are accountable so they can basically flip the bird to everyone and get away with it.
Nor is it an accident that the propaganda for the Furey give-away to Quebec avoids facts in favour of wild exaggerations of benefits. There is no comparison to the 1969 deal to show how the new deal does not repeat its shortcomings. Instead, the government party opened the House of Assembly for what was supposed to be a four-day launch of its re-election campaign. They ran a carefully scripted show. And when Andrew Furey decided to announced he’d quit politics to spend more time with his family, he gave a list of things that weren’t his accomplishments, some of them obviously false, and then launched into an extend international tour to do nothing except satisfy his own ego. There’s no need of anything that would persuade people. No facts. No evidence. No authenticity or sincerity since none of it matters. Voters don;t matter.
That’s why everything political is made up.
Fabricated.
Fake.
Artificial.
And, as Andrew Furey has shown, the possibilities of artifice in politics are endless.
Postscript:
As if to prove the point that politics these days is egocentric, flatulent, obsessed with trivia, and all about fiction, a puffy looking Andrew Furey appeared on CNN on Monday, for absolutely no good reason. CNN described Furey as a “top Canadian official” who would react to something that hasn’t happened yet.
Furey said nothing new, showed himself impressed by trivia - the President did not call the PM a governor - and mentioned for absolutely no perceivably good reason his daughter was an American citizen and could be President some day. Furey sounded as overly emotional, excitable, and insubstantial as he has been since November, in his own way as counterproductive as Danielle Smith.
Canadian Premiers need to shut up about Canadian-American relations, something Furey said he would do after the fiasco trip to Washington.
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someone once said never trust a man who wears brown shoes with a blue suit