“I want to explain how it becomes possible for an otherwise sensible person to turn his life upside down for the sake of a dream, or to put it less charitably, why a person like me succumbed, so helplessly, to hubris.”
Michael Ignatieff is an extremely distinguished academic internationally, having held positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto. He’s won a variety of prizes for his books, including short listing for the Booker prize as well as a variety of non-fiction and academic texts, and also worked as a television and radio broadcaster in the UK. He is also a rather dismal politician.
Fire and Ashes is the story of how Ignatieff took over the leadership of the Canadian Liberal party, traditionally the most powerful party in Canadian politics, and led it to its worst result in history, even losing his own seat. Of course, the vagaries of party politics are hardly attributable to the leader alone, but it suffers in comparison to his professional success elsewhere. Ignatieff attempts to use that experience to draw lessons for those who might come after him, with mixed results.
The book does capture why he struggled as a politician, though perhaps not how he meant it to. Comparing it to Bill Clinton’s autobiography, for example, you can see the difference between someone who thinks deeply about politics, and someone who actually lives as a politician. Ignatieff comes across as wise about politics as an observer, not as a participant.
Ironically, though that may have made him a worse politician, it makes it a better book: one can appreciate his observations without attempting to disentangle political motivations. Perhaps that’s why much good political commentary is written by unsuccessful politicians. A book length reflection on a personal failure is no easy task, however: Ignatieff’s is a mix of astute observations about politics, somewhat bitter discussions of why he didn’t do well that are not as incisive as they needed to be, and some revealing confessions, as when he argues power matters above conscience because without power you can’t do anything (a section I found rather depressing, since if you sacrifice conscience to win power, I’d rather you didn’t). Ignatieff is a smart, analytical man who isn’t meant to be a politician, and his book captures that, both in what he recognizes and what he doesn’t about his performance.
Thanks for the commentary Nick! Without having yet read the book, your post has me pondering how Ignatieff’s lessons might contrast with the commentaries of parliamentarians in “Tragedy of the Commons: Former Members of Parliament speak out about Canada’s failing democracy” (by A. Load and M. MacMillan).
Your/Ignatieff’s reflection on power being more important than conscience is rather disheartening. Has it always been that way or is power more important in the modern social-media dominated era? Also are power and influence synonymous in the political arena? The ability to influence is key in politics but I would argue that power is just one way to influence others… And what does it say about our political system when smart, astute leaders are decimated and replaced with the likes of…well you know who.
Does Ignatieff talk about political incentives? I would be interested in his thoughts on how political incentives could be changed so that they better align with short and long-term social and economic needs.
I haven’t read Tragedy of the Commons: I’ll have to keep an eye out for it.
I think putting power ahead of conscience has always been a possible route to power; the Romans accused their Senators of exactly the same thing, after all. In some ways he may have the order wrong though. One of the challenges of having power is that you often have to make compromises, because there are few black and white choices to make, and you can always justify self-interested decisions as keeping you in power so you can help more people later. It’s why Jack Layton and the NDP can have pure hearts, while the UK Lib Dems, who started off much the same, have gotten tarnished from actually holding power. The NDP have influence, but in the end don’t have power, and so don’t have to make the hard choices. I suspect most MPs start off with ideals and conscience, and it’s having power that affects them, Lord Acton style, rather than sacrificing them to get power. If anything, I think it’s why many Canadian politicians going directly into politics is such a concern: they don’t have any outside references to base moral fibre on.
Ignatieff doesn’t really talk incentives: he just claims a future idealist will go into politics, and targets his book to teaching them from his mistakes. Definitely an interesting question though, how to redesign the system to improve it. What would you suggest?