The Teflon Premier
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? … It's, like, incredible." (Donald Trump, January 23, 2016)
He could. He practically did. And yeah, he won.
Fast forward seven years, and shift scene to Alberta. Danielle Smith has claimed that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated-against group in her lifetime. She’s suggested that cancer patients can do more to stop their cancers before they get to Stage 4. She’s had warm things to say about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The latest is a video from November of 2021 in which she suggests that the three-quarters of Albertans who got vaccinated for COVID-19 were the moral equivalent of Germans who stood by as the Nazis committed atrocities.
And, following her standard pattern, Smith releases a statement. Paraphrasing: ‘sorry if it hurt your feelings that I called you a Nazi. It was during the pandemic, and we all went a bit loopy, even me!’ And then we all move along.
I suppose the Trump years prepared us for this. One outrageous statement or action after another, and the chickens never came to roost, at least until the 2020 election. Even then, his political career appears to continue.
How to make sense of Danielle Smith’s remarkable teflon coating?
First, I think we have to accept that there’s a non-trivial portion of the Alberta electorate that agrees with at least some of her statements. She wasn’t alone in the rabbit-hole of misinformation and conspiracy theories where she spent the pandemic, and her convoy friends are delighted to see her lending respectability to them.
Second, for another sizeable group of Alberta voters, conservative partisanship is a form of identity. It will take more than a few outrageous statements from the party leader to convince them to desert the party. The experience of threat to that identity, and the status loss associated with it, only helps bolster the identity. In the Alberta context, the election of an NDP government was the threat. So it’s easy to forgive an imperfect leader when you perceive the alternative to be so very much worse.
Third, there are pocketbook voters, willing to be compared to Nazis if it keeps their taxes low.
For the next three weeks, the videos will keep appearing. Maybe the accumulation will be enough to tip a close contest.
But if we learned anything in 2016, it might not be. It’s, like, incredible.
And not enough is said how truly dispiriting this is. It's like a religion and/or Fox News viewers who simply don't care about anything except the solidarity of their group. To call them "low information" is generous; at this point after all the serious blowback, they're obviously as bad as the perpetrators, except maybe dumber. The banality of evil. I don't think any of us really knew how many stupid people there are out there, I mean stupid enough to not even know to come in out of the rain stupid. Sure as hell doesn't make our education system look good.
So 40 odd years of voting for the SAME party is bad enough; that made Albertans look totally tribal but at least that was the PROGRESSIVE Conservatives. Voting for this new rube UCP version drops us even lower to utterly deranged. It's just mortifying to live here.
And the situation with the Oilers is probably firing them up even more because THAT'S their team too.....I mean, there's no difference....
A large part of the problem, and why so many RWNJ leaders seem to be untouchable, is that the press is institutionally paralyzed. The need to be seen as “non-partisan” has them frozen.
Just look at the top two stories right now. The wildfires and the newest round of Smith’s insane comments. The press goes right from covering the crazy comments to treating her seriously on the fire. Sometimes in the same press conference.
And if they really accept that Smith is a compulsively lying nut job, all that becomes impossible. If you really accept she’s nuts you’re no longer able to ask “neutral” questions about her firefighting response. Or about the thousand other routine campaign announcements.
If the press really took her derangement seriously it obliterates all the routine nature of their job. And they have no idea what to do with that.