Nor should tried-and-true common sense be entirely dismissed as an invention of the left. For the ironic alternative extremes are right there to engage with. Do the ultra-xenophobia of the new Swedish nationalist government, for example, really reflect the grounds for condemning the dynamics of the global economy in favour of some older, idealised, and increasingly untenable world of nation-states? Or is it simply the latest cry of those unfortunate ex-pats who are still unable to find the wherewithal to thrive in the very world of new breakthroughs that they have otherwise so successfully insulated themselves from?
No, tried-and-true common sense really is being taken to new extremes in this new affiliate-phenomenon, where the scope of perspectives available broadens to the point of overwhelming you with yet more variety, and yet more extremes. Engaging with it all requires first taking your eye off the moorings of the age. It means checking out some of those perspectives to make sure the sight is still not deceiving you in the investments you are prepared to make.
To appreciate the full stakes of the question consider the citizen: naturalization is essentially membership in a political community, not an expression of permanent party preference or turnout record, or even of lifelong obligation to reward the government that granted citizenship. All of these can certainly change, and indeed sometimes do. Nor does it matter much to the citizen whether the weight of political storytelling on a particular voting preference or set of groups is convenient or disastrous; it is the latter only for understanding.
But the kind of attribution that seems plausible in a comparison, when justifying a voting preference, becomes much less certain when the question is who would have been on the winning side but for support from the group. For not only do we not know how other eligible people would have voted, or how the group’s participation today has affected their behavior; we do not even know how their support for the parties might have been affected.
Once you’ve been through all the work of scrutinizing the results of a close election, the temptation to avoid diving back in and actually doing something may be strong. Which is too bad: what’s really most challenging about narrow-margin elections is the urge to declare a single cause of the result. People are reluctant to accept that so many things might have been different — from the weather to the mood — which, in retrospect, can make all the difference. Voting patterns are endlessly complex, and small changes can shift results in big ways. New people might have voted, or older campaigns might have failed, or a million factors could have combined.
All of which makes the complaints about new Canadians voting for the Conservative Party so futile. There’s no inherent reason to assume a relationship between the two activities, nor to think that any such relationship reflects poorly on the naturalization process. It’s simply an expectation that, once a government is elected, it ought to receive a measure of electoral gratitude from those that it has welcomed as Canadians.
In his latest column, Andrew Coyne responds to spurious accusations of disloyalty to a party long since out of power. Of all the things you might say about the Conservative party’s woeful citizenship policy, the one thing you can’t say is that it’s an admission of failure to convince New Canadians of its conservative message.
That presumes competing for our votes is a matter of persuasion. Losing our votes is done to you. And it’s up to the party that was losing, to figure out why, and how to change. An obligation to re-examine its message to see how it can resonate more broadly, in other words.
If Andrew’s right, Can it be quantifiably shown that new citizens– workers, parents, entrepreneurs, future taxpayers– are classed not as an asset, but as a potential loss to be written off and lumped in the opposition? I would love to read it.
This harder argument can be put in terms of the change that membership will mean for the institutions we have. If there are not too many considerations of this kind to take into account when assessing our present institutions and how they work, the question of eligibility makes the whole assessment very much more complicated. This is especially true if immigration has to be assessed in terms of who it would allow us to vote for in future. Everything about the eligibility rules is now bound up with the administrative capacity we possess, how easily people can be integrated into our way of life, and how confident we can be that the rules will be enforced. The more complicated our rules become for electoral reasons (how legitimate soever), the more difficult these other issues are likely to become.
Of course it is a serious question whether any such last consideration should influence our immigration policies; it is quite another matter to believe that it should.
Empathizing with our fellow citizens and seeing them as allies in a common struggle is much harder when one views them as the members of rival demographic teams.
To put it in slightly different terms, demographic determinism may tell you a lot about the arithmetic of the future of our political parties — and it would definitely make a lot of data points about voters’ attitudes very easy to interpret — but it comes with a heavy analytical cost, since it implies that parties will never need to adapt their messages or priorities, their supporters will never grow disillusioned or disappointed, and their children will never reject their political loyalties.
This doesn’t mean that prediction will be more difficult without a version of demographic inevitability. In fact, it makes things pretty easy: If the only future we could imagine was one of voting populations growing older and better or worse proportioned by attributes, but otherwise set in its pattern of behavior, we really could just treat citizens as unchanging demographic data points.
In that sense, you could say that a version of demographic inevitability that took active politics out of the equation would only apply to people who are not yet citizens. We could regard established voters as being the country, and treat newer citizens only as a force acting upon it, acknowledging their legal inclusion while insisting on their exclusion.
Broadly speaking, any argument for the durability of partisan advantage that fails to state its assumptions clearly is best understood as one that relies on preference persistence, participation, and responsiveness, and simply hopes that these assumptions will be met in practice, rather than ones that are laid down at the start as premises of a more sophisticated argument. After all, arithmetic cannot rescue an unstated premise.
The unstated assumptions in the case of the narrative of nationalist momentum are similar, but less surprising: they are that resentment of demographic change will cause pressure for stricter policy, and that the demands of resentment will be less vital in deciding who will govern and what measures are passed than how well the institutions constrain their response. The tension with these assumption in the other argument — that nationalist parties are facing permanent exclusion from electoral competition — has gone unremarked upon so far. Either it is an oversight, or else it is itself an argument that the continued dominance of nationalism in the future will be unaffected by the exclusion of nationalists from government. The last point, however, requires that some mechanism be laid out.
Europe needs an alternative explanation; a Swedish interpretation, enlarged into a credible continental argument, needs to consider countries in which the proposed mechanism fails. At some level, one more facet of nationalism that doesn’t need a label is undoubtedly risk-friendly; if the market goes up after a nationalist victory, anyone who has put their money elsewhere will be motivated to put the blame on the frustration that is feeding the trend. Any influence that opponents of the trend can have in persuading its supporters to adopt even stricter policies is drowned out by the sound of money being made — and lost. There’s no end to debates about the meaning of trends and what they will lead to, unless you either tire of them or come to accept all the possible outcomes as no worse than long-term exhaustion.
If you’ve spotted an investment story behind the political-intensity-of-markets theme, you’re thinking like an analyst in a discipline that embraces all the concepts we’re discussing — nationalism and its variants — but sets investment intensity and urgency in the context of each specific commercial case.
Unless you have a way to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between one specific type of spending and greater national security, policy decisions regarding the budget generally run the risk of being fuzzy at best. Who calls the shots, and what decisions are made based on their priorities? As a starting point, ignore for now the ways in which all sorts of political and economic factors affect the budget and spending priorities. Consider simply that the funds devoted to defense could be used for any number of projects that would contribute to greater national security — procurement or implementation strategies for some, recipients or choices for others. Although the pitch sounds good and correlation surely exists, it’s hardly a perfect one. The same is true for an investment thesis: you could endorse greater national security and still have no particular reason to believe one particular business will perform better because of it. Which business might be better for surveillance, or cybersecurity? Or a variety of physical infrastructure projects? All stand up to their own arguments, but placed side by side under a concept privileged by political heading, they will have no guarantee of being correlated on the purchasing decision.
So consumer preference for domestic manufacturing has wide-ranging implications. But there are so many practical questions to work out. Which firms will be beneficiaries? What exactly will they be expected to deliver? And what obligations does public support create? If you assume protection, you can make a political case. But you can’t own the political situation. In budgeting for a prospect of disappointment, you also can’t own the investment case. You can’t accurately forecast the political situation until you finish developing the investment case, just as you can’t finalize a commercial inquiry without knowing the price of the transaction and the expectations imbeded in it. You can’t assume any case will go through without at least some disappointment; to make such an assumption, you need to know what has to go right first — and have a question of ownership of the analysis.
Investors should think about timing issues. It should be clear by now that when there is a political theme in play it may be difficult to make the decisions required to support a particular investment because of the timing of things. Sometimes an election may come along, or a policy announcement, that creates an executable commercial opportunity but not manages the timing of the decision well. We have noticed in some countries a bit of a backlash against nationalism that appears to be inconsistent with the legitimacy of the purpose. A government that puts national autonomy ahead of returns for outside investors, for example, may be right to support a business out of domestic capacity or the promise of future employment, but it may both be at odds with that business’ objectives and give the business a pretty good excuse for thinking that their political alignment looks pretty good. Political alignment is, in principle, a pretty good thing, but it requires a good deal of specific examination as to exactly what is meant by alignment, and what conditions are required for the alignment to hold.
The shareholder will be most impressed by the factory and will look for a chance to sign the invoice. The minister of finance may admire the same building, but his objective is entirely different - he would like to see a sharp disagreement between the two over who pays the invoice. There are few choices of investment thesis that are as easy to identify and, therefore, any number of choices for those who are willing to do some real research in find out which businesses are most likely to meet the proposed policy.
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