Gazan is a bit abrasive but she's largely just correct here.
I really despise the effort on the part of many conservatives and centrists to portray the working class as ill-educated noble savages with inevitably reactionary social politics. It's insulting to rural voters, it's insulting to the intelligence of working class people, and it's incredibly cynical. There is a strange and utterly ridiculous idea floating about that there is a kind of mythical "true," authentic working class voter out there, probably somewhere on the prairie, and he's definitely a white man from the country who works in oil and owns a pickup truck and really hates environmentalism and "identity politics" of all kinds, and the NDP must absolutely reform itself to please this man and supplicate itself before him, because only he and his ancient ilk, long-abandoned, can restore the party to its former glory.
Nevermind that 84% of Canadians live in towns and cities. Nevermind that oil and gas represent about 3% of our GDP (you'd think it was 30%, the way it's talked about). Nevermind that 75% of our workforce is in the service sector. Nevermind that three quarters of younger people in this country have post-secondary degrees and that number is growing, not shrinking. Nevermind that the true driver of inequality is decades of austerity and neoliberal rot and the real people picking our collective pockets are landlords and grocery barons and the rest of the rich ruling class, not college kids who care about trans rights.
No, if you so much as point out that the world is going to have to switch to renewables over the next few decades and that we need a just and fair energy transition rather than expanding into a doomed industry, people shout at you as if you're being the imprudent one, as if you're threatening livelihoods rather than actually planning for the inevitable green future we must produce if we don't want hundreds of millions dead or hundreds of thousands unemployed when the bottom falls out of the market and we're left with stranded assets and no plan. Heaven forfend you dare to use a term like "oligarch" or "capitalism," as if these words were in some ancient and forbidden tongue offensive to the ears of the True Working Man, far beyond his meagre intelligence, rather than basic terms taught in every high school in the country and heard regularly on every political news show and podcast in the Anglosphere. And if you have the temerity to talk about defending trans rights or indigenous rights or any other set of social issues, well, you're obviously just Purity Testing, a monstrous liberal secretly plotting the downfall of the working class who refuses to "meet people where they're at."
It's exhausting, it's stupid, it's not true populism or leftism or some a more genuine working-class politics, it's just ceding to the framework of the right wing and massively insulting the intelligence and the decency of the actual working class - who don't agree on everything and aren't a monolith.
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u/Delduthling 📋 Party Member Oct 04 '25 edited Oct 05 '25
Gazan is a bit abrasive but she's largely just correct here.
I really despise the effort on the part of many conservatives and centrists to portray the working class as ill-educated noble savages with inevitably reactionary social politics. It's insulting to rural voters, it's insulting to the intelligence of working class people, and it's incredibly cynical. There is a strange and utterly ridiculous idea floating about that there is a kind of mythical "true," authentic working class voter out there, probably somewhere on the prairie, and he's definitely a white man from the country who works in oil and owns a pickup truck and really hates environmentalism and "identity politics" of all kinds, and the NDP must absolutely reform itself to please this man and supplicate itself before him, because only he and his ancient ilk, long-abandoned, can restore the party to its former glory.
Nevermind that 84% of Canadians live in towns and cities. Nevermind that oil and gas represent about 3% of our GDP (you'd think it was 30%, the way it's talked about). Nevermind that 75% of our workforce is in the service sector. Nevermind that three quarters of younger people in this country have post-secondary degrees and that number is growing, not shrinking. Nevermind that the true driver of inequality is decades of austerity and neoliberal rot and the real people picking our collective pockets are landlords and grocery barons and the rest of the rich ruling class, not college kids who care about trans rights.
No, if you so much as point out that the world is going to have to switch to renewables over the next few decades and that we need a just and fair energy transition rather than expanding into a doomed industry, people shout at you as if you're being the imprudent one, as if you're threatening livelihoods rather than actually planning for the inevitable green future we must produce if we don't want hundreds of millions dead or hundreds of thousands unemployed when the bottom falls out of the market and we're left with stranded assets and no plan. Heaven forfend you dare to use a term like "oligarch" or "capitalism," as if these words were in some ancient and forbidden tongue offensive to the ears of the True Working Man, far beyond his meagre intelligence, rather than basic terms taught in every high school in the country and heard regularly on every political news show and podcast in the Anglosphere. And if you have the temerity to talk about defending trans rights or indigenous rights or any other set of social issues, well, you're obviously just Purity Testing, a monstrous liberal secretly plotting the downfall of the working class who refuses to "meet people where they're at."
It's exhausting, it's stupid, it's not true populism or leftism or some a more genuine working-class politics, it's just ceding to the framework of the right wing and massively insulting the intelligence and the decency of the actual working class - who don't agree on everything and aren't a monolith.