The Permanent Campaign Has Broken Our Politics

When's the next election? Today. Tomorrow. The next day. And every other day for the rest of your life.

A different kind of captive audience. Source: History in HD on Unsplash.

I first read about the rise of the permanent campaign in the United States during my undergraduate degree and I was immediately captured by the idea – and its deleterious consequences. Even back then it was obvious the phenomenon was bad and likely to get worse. And worse it got.

The concept of a permanent campaign stretches back to at least the 1980s, when Sidney Blumenthal wrote about the shift to non-stop, data-driven, professional-political-and-consultant class political campaigning in which governing and running for re-election were, if not indistinguishable, inextricably linked.

Typically slightly behind the U.S., but never too far out of line, the permanent campaign soon reached Canada. It has been thoroughly documented as it’s become set in an era of fixed-election dates, well-connected political operatives, centralized party apparatuses, never-ending news cycles, and social media “outreach” in spaces where the algorithm makes so many of us into members of a captive audience.

Writing in Policy Options in 2017, political scientist Anna Lennox Esselment wrote that the permanent campaign was now thoroughly entrenched — “deeply entangled” — in Canada. “Every decision, every communication, every event is managed in order to win specific pockets of public approval,” she wrote.

Tracing the origins of the phenomena, she argued there were “several factors” that contributed to its rise, but focused on two: the decline in partisanship, which requires parties to go fishing for supporters on regular basis, and the need to fundraise. These considerations lead to “an insatiable appetite for data,” she suggests. And she’s right Her co-edited volume on the subject, Permanent Campaigning in Canada, is excellent.

The consequences of the permanent have been bad for democracy. In the big data, social media era, the permanent campaign has driven us to a constant search for the lowest common denominator. Parties micro-target supporters and voters, messaging is fine-tuned to be equal parts appealing and meaningless, and policies tend not to stray too far from the boundaries of Acceptable Public Opinion™.

Ostensibly concerned with reaching as many voters as possible, the permanent campaign encourages a top-down politics that disguises itself as firmly in line with the will of the people, whatever that is. To the permanent campaign, grassroots politics is anathema. Instead, we get a carefully managed, expert driven, politics that’s filtered through several layers of approvals and re-approvals and big data analysis such that what may appear to be a concern for the public will is really just a mirror reflection of whatever counts as common sense or common belief that day, whether it’s carefully considered or not (and it’s often not).

Why try to change someone’s mind or take a big swing on policy when the data says you ought to stick close to the line, all the better to win a few thousand votes in a key riding or raise money among a preferred demographic? One wouldn’t want to alienate the donors or risking losing a seat. The permanent campaign is at once patronizing and exclusionary, since if you fall outside its reach, you might as well not exist. It’s an inherently conservative force, so that even notable changes are kept well within the boundaries of politics as usual. The only difference is how the change is sold to a public that’s too busy, tired, or cynical to do much more than eventually throw the bums out and choose new ones with a different paint job.

One problem with campaigning and governing under a veneer of democratic engagement is that the veneer soon wears thin. Too thin. Too thin to sustain a productive, responsive, and yet transformative politics of the sort we ought to have day-to-day but desperately need when the going gets tough, which it’s gotten in recent years. The politics of the thing are too transactional, too modest, too concerned with the next poll and not the next decade, whatever a politician will tell you of their motives.

Another problem is that the permanent campaign requires a central bureaucracy and professional elite class to administer it, which strips power from the broader party, its members, and the public, and leaves the consultant and communications class firmly in charge. Once these two arise, they’re hard to extricate given that they have both influence and interests to protect.

I recently wrote a piece for the Walrus asking whether it’s time for NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to go. There are many reasons to ditch him, just as there are many reasons the party is in trouble. Among them is a commitment to the same old insiders, to the same old playbook, and to an increasingly insipid politics that pretends to reach out to the grassroots but all too often is made by and for the Ottawa bubble — notwithstanding whatever good work the party has done under its supply and confidence agreement with the governing Liberals. That’s the risk of the permanent campaign.

The way things stand, I don’t like our chances at turning things around any time soon. The institutions are settled, the interests and interested are fixed, and the interrelated technologies that enable the permanent campaign — polling, data-collection, social media, artificial intelligence etc. — are self-reinforcing. For the time being, at least, it looks like there’s no going back and little immediate incentive for parties to try to.

Typically, in pieces like this, you’re meant to end on a call to better, a rallying cry of some sort, a way out. But I don’t see one right now. Perhaps a leader or social movement could come along committed to transforming electoral politics and hellbent on changing minds and systems, too. But if anything of the sort is gathering on the horizon in Canada, I haven’t seen it. And, so, we’re left heading for 2025, or whenever the next federal election may be, and more of the same, except probably in blue next time.