What if they threw an election and all the assholes voted? 

Well, we have our answer, in the form of last week’s Alberta provincial election.

Please don’t misunderstand—I’m not saying that “Conservative” and “asshole” are synonymous, just that the overlap in this province is overwhelming. A more accurate synonym for “asshole” in the political sense in which I use it here is “populist,” and populists can sometimes be left-wing. There would be no NDP had populists not built it.

Asshole voters believe that the threat does not come from within us, from our own choices and actions. The peril comes from enemies without, and for Albertans that usually means easterners, whether they be bankers or Liberals. As long as the leader of our tribe stands ready to defend us, little else matters. But he needs our help to do it, in the form of votes against the eastern bastards’ local fifth column, also known as the provincial opposition parties.

Asshole voters believe in quick fixes, in protests against real (or more frequently imagined) conspiratorial elites, and in “people power.” When they vote, they want to teach someone a lesson and cut them down to size—i.e., screw them hard. That’s why assholes vote for populists, who promise to put the enemies of assholes in their place. 

The federal NDP used to grab a big share of the asshole vote in the days before Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Voting NDP was a way to draw attention to local and regional dissatisfaction and punish the larger parties for their arrogance and neglect. It should have come as no surprise when a lot of NDP support, particularly in the rural West, moved to Reform. Those voters were never ideological leftists; they were populists, and Reform expressed their rage against establishment elites in more familiar terms, and without the taint of unpopular social causes: think “Reagan Democrats.”

Next door to us, the Saskatchewan Party has done the same thing at the provincial level, copying the earlier example of Grant Devine’s Conservatives. The Tories raised their party from the dead based on support from populist former NDP supporters who voted for the Saskatchewan New Democrats when their main opposition was the Liberal Party. They couldn’t bear to mark ballots for something calling itself Liberal, but they felt perfectly at home with the populist PCs. 

Here in Alberta, the NDP made inroads into the asshole vote in the 1980s when the Tories were led by Don Getty. It was no coincidence that some of the last places to turf Social Credit were among the first to go NDP, like Lac La Biche in the north and the Calgary constituencies of Forest Lawn and Mountain View. But when the populist Ralph Klein became premier, the Calgary and small-town NDP ridings swung sharply to the PCs. Let’s not forget that Ed Stelmach unseated a New Democrat, Derek Fox, to take Vegreville back in 1993.

What does this mean for us now? Well, for one thing, it means that what we just went through was far more a populist victory than a vote for conservative ideology. Had it been the latter, Paul Hinman’s Wildrose Alliance wouldn’t have been shut out of the Legislature and seen its share of the vote decline. And had it been primarily a repudiation of non-conservatives, the Greens wouldn’t have made significant strides in conservative bastions like Drayton Valley and Lacombe. 

What it also means is that an NDP-Liberal merger, as some have inevitably proposed in the wake of last week’s rout, is pointless. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that a lot of New Democrats hate Liberals more than they do Conservatives, and the problem that the provincial NDP is constitutionally a part of the federal party. Whatever populist credibility the Alberta NDP has left would be wrecked by a Liberal marriage, while non-populist centrist swing voters who might consider voting Liberal don’t much care for the New Democrats. Besides, even if one simply adds the two parties’ votes together, they barely account for 35 per cent of the vote, their lowest collective vote share since 1982.

Ed Stelmach and his Tories have a lock on the asshole vote, at least for now, and will only be dislodged by other populists. Populists voted in droves for Eddie last week, and a lot of those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him also couldn’t bring themselves to vote against him, staying home instead. Inertia, tribalism (particularly here in the north), and populism all militated against a switch to the opposition.

If the Liberals, the only remaining opposition party with official status in the Legislature, want to grow again, they must make sweeping changes. They need a new leader and a new name. Kevin Taft is a good guy with a lot of ideas, but he comes off cold and distant. And the Liberal brand name, which Laurence Decore revived, is suffering again from guilt by association with an unpopular federal party. 

The new party must choose its battles carefully, being especially cautious not to challenge the popular Albertan view that there are eastern barbarians at the gates. They must accept this as a given and focus on hammering home the fact that we will be stronger—and better able to defend ourselves—by not pissing away our bounty of natural resources here at home the way the provincial Conservatives do.

inexileeverywhere@gmail.com