GREAT POLITICS, REALLY great politics, must be guided by an invisible hand: the spontaneous intersection of instinct and character—caught in a moment’s creative impulse.
That’s the trick Michael Ignatieff has been trying to master, with mixed results, ever since he returned to the country where he simmered up, which he now wants to lead. Following his Odyssey—which was far longer than Homer’s original tale—he arrived home in style, like a rock pitched through a stained-glass window.
Exactly forty months after he had incarnated as a stranger in a familiar landscape that he had abandoned three decades earlier, the count staged a political masterstroke that, in almost any other jurisdiction, would have been categorized as a coup d’état. It was, in fact, the most stunning act of immaculate conception in the country’s political history. From what had been a standing political start, the genius savant emerged as the interim leader of the Liberal party and thus Canada’s alternate prime minister. Paradoxically, his bold manoeuvre ranked as the second prize. Bizarre circumstances had simultaneously placed him in the lead position of a parliamentary coalition preparing to grasp power and ensconce the itinerant intellectual as Canada’s twenty-third prime minister.
That didn’t happen, but the alchemy with which Ignatieff intended to lead the lost tribe of Grits back into contention did work its initial magic. Universally recognized as one of the most effective public intellectuals of his generation, but new and untried in the black arts of Canadian politics, Ignatieff managed to keep Stephen Harper, his shrewd and formidable opponent, at bay—stranded in the uncomfortable purgatory of minority status.
Having been a suave professor, a daring human rights activist, the author of seventeen controversial books and the most desirable sex crumpet on the BBC’s late-night television panels, Ignatieff volunteered for the Mission Impossible task of rescuing Canada’s Liberals from themselves. In power longer than any other political movement, including the Russian Communist party, the once mighty Grits had morphed from their comfortable pew as Canada’s Natural Governors into a warring rump of something under fifty thousand bitchy party members, aching to be restored to their accustomed glory.
THE MOST PERVASIVE influence on Michael Ignatieff’s storybook life and turbulent times was his father, George, who became one of Canada’s most distinguished diplomats and very nearly our governor general. He was as much of a hero figure as any to be found in Greek mythology: all-powerful, all-wise—and distant beyond belief. Having lost all in the cauldron of the Russian Revolution, his family came to Canada, virtually penniless and tongue-tied. After a private school education, mostly on scholarships, Michael sailed through Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the École des Hautes Études in Paris. On his own as an academic and literary entrepreneur, he reached the pinnacle of his professions (all of them) and was rewarded with the esteem of his adopted countries (most of them).
Now he was back home, and it was payoff time.
HOW DID HIS story go again? Let’s see—in all the great odysseys, from Homer to Joyce, the hero ends up … at the beginning. The Hero Comes Home Again. Five words that sum up most of Western literature of the past 2,500 years. It was archetypal, because one of the great life lessons is that we venture outward to journey inward; we seek new continents to discover ourselves.
Michael arrived, eager to prove himself, even if he had to shoot tin cans off fence posts. A brainy hunk whose heart was pure, his early political gambits were as amateurish as those of a one-album country singer stuck with “If Your Phone Don’t Ring, You’ll Know It’s Me” as his biggest hit. Despite his determination not to treat Canadian politics as the blood sport it had become, he ought to have been prepared to deal with the worst of human nature. After all, when he found his true calling, it turned out to be bearing witness to ethnic slaughter on three continents and writing up the haunting realities of the carnage. He discovered first hand that the world can be a horrific place. That there are some assumptions, certain “necessary illusions,” that require unquestioning allegiance—like personal survival, for instance, or keeping your lines open to that Master of the American Universe, the mental midget who inhabited the White House at the time.
Michael’s dance card was always full. The mythologies that piled up about his career helped expand his audience and minimized his risk, though being frightened was not part of his repertoire. He revelled in the internal screenplays we all believe ourselves to be living through and turned them into full-fledged film festivals—the respectful dividends of a well-spent life. He was always running, between jobs, lectures, book deadlines, continents, distinguished sinecures, reputations—and wives who taught him that love is given, not earned.
Having arrived back in his original playpen, he was still running, but now he was running to, not away. He was running home.
WELL, NOT REALLY. Ever since he’d reclaimed his native land, Ignatieff had been running for the country’s highest political office. His qualifications were superb on paper, but his quest was hampered by a basic fallacy. The Emperor-has-no-clothes storyline unravelled because it wasn’t logical. Academics, journalists and philosophers hunt for truth, or at least the ring of truth; politicians seek power.
The twain don’t meet.
Having the mentality of a writer and the aspirations of a politician meant that Ignatieff had to turn himself into an actor. Having written several plays and movie scripts in which he’d acted, Michael Ignatieff knew the different between acting and politics, even if he couldn’t always bridge the gap. It all comes down to theme and variations. Theme from the Greek themis, meaning “laid down,” like a railroad track or a harmony. When a theme is harmonious, musicians and writers can play infinite variations off it; in books, the grace of cadence illuminates every page. When it doesn’t compute, there is discord, no matter how skilful the presenter.
Michael Ignatieff is neither arrogant nor particularly demanding. But after ingesting his millionth rubber chicken dinner, he surely must have felt that he’d earned the respect of a grateful nation. After all, he could have remained on the family farm in rural Quebec and cultivated apples or sold tractors, had a few forgotten affairs and grown a valiant moustache. But no. He had a fierce, burning need to control his destiny, borne of not having known Unconditional Love but having experienced Conditional Surrender. He had an agenda. We all do, even if we’re not brave enough to admit it. His agenda had much to do with service to the neglected country of his dreams.
Canada is a dangerous place for patriots. I remember being on Rafe Mair’s call-in radio show in Vancouver and saying something as innocuous as “I love Canada. I physically love this country.” This innocent exchange prompted two reactions. The most immediate was an angry woman from Burnaby who yodelled into the radio station’s open line, “Why are you being so darn anti-American, Mr. Smarty Pants?” (The second was in Frank, the satirical magazine, which reprinted my quip about physically loving Canada and wryly commented: “We’d give a nickel to see that.”)
IGNATIEFF'S NEED to serve the nation he so long neglected was almost physical in its intensity and may be his most fascinating trait. Perhaps it flows from guilt for having been away and missed all those Canadian winters. Still, he genuinely believes that it is his destiny to fashion the country in his own image—its good aspect, not the metaphorical country singer part. Having decided to grab the bull by the tail, he has no wish to be a passive player asking for his readopted land to grant him political asylum. He set out to make his Canada the sort of place you could trust—a liberal Canada, a tolerant Canada, an independent Canada—in other words, a Canada where Michael could feel valued and be valuable.
His internal compass has never been set to ideology. He isn’t drawn to liberalism or conservatism per se. The regional battles of a quixotic Canada mean as little to him as the squabbles of the Flemish and the Walloons. They were merely there to be studied and mastered but did not claim his loyalty. What he was after was power. Period. He had as much influence as it is possible to garner and still not levitate. But he never had power. He had written and thought so much about the tragic, powerless inhabitants of the Third World that he realized the value of being, as Lord Russell once noted, “in charge of the production of intended effects.” That’s a valid definition of wielding power, and Ignatieff wanted to grab some of it for himself.
THE LIBERAL PARTY he inherited had yet to pass through the invisible membrane that would allow it to be in touch with contemporary realities, moving beyond its historically successful stance, which allowed its elitist apparatchiks to exercise power more or less benignly on the people’s behalf.
In private, Ignatieff conceded that he was the Liberals’ riskiest choice for leader but insisted there was an upside because he was plugged into the future. His gospel ran on a simple track: that if it’s absurd to believe you can change things—reform the party and plug into the urgent priorities of the country’s current needs—it was much more absurd not to try.
Entranced journalists remained eager to record his latest acrobatic reversal of the previous day’s pronouncements. These faux pas were always newsworthy, and for a while they were daily events—except on slow-news days, when there might be more than a single blooper. Those few, ink-stained wretches who actually read most of his fourteen non-fiction books realized that Ignatieff is a great reporter and a master of evocative prose. The even rarer claque who went on to peruse one or more of his novels recognized him as having a talent that exceeded their own, which in the upside-down ethics of Canadian journalism amounted to a cardinal sin.
HE MAY WELL BE OUR FIRST POSTMODERN LEADER and, as such, ought to be forgiven the worst of his inner contradictions. They are genuine, the life source of any accredited postmodern savant. If indeed he cares more about ideas than people, that’s his loss but also his privilege. He recognizes that the essential issues will always remain insoluble, but for all that, remain susceptible to creative improvisation and that greatest of Canada’s gifts to the perpetuation of the democratic paradigm: the ability to muddle through.
Ignatieff’s prime gift as a leader is his attentive gravity. He is a great listener. His diagnostic eyes give nothing away. It is his eyebrows that signal his passions, hooding his eyes in moments of concentration, huddling together in V-formation on his forehead to emphasize a point. As an intuitive television commentator, he knows that cameras register the most subtle flickers of emotion through their subjects’ eyes. That’s why they remain hidden.
Like most public speakers, he plays with the ingredients of his increasingly effective stage presence. Great performances are cumulative. You build a speech from moment to moment, metaphor to metaphor, until it finds its own cadence and then becomes a kind of karaoke that serenades a thousand expectant, upturned faces.
Humour remains a foreign country, but his convictions sound genuine, even if the chill of intellectual arrogance has only barely subsided. There are still too many gaps between what he says and what he thinks, so that he has constantly had to keep contradicting himself. His worst gaffe, shortly after his arrival, was to pledge a renewal of the constitutional wars that had drained the country’s vitality during the Mulroney years. That was the first time the political cost of his lengthy absence really counted. Had he been here, he would have known that however benign or creative constitutional initiatives might be, their implementation inevitably leads to a quagmire that turns into quicksand.
So many problems. But when you are no stranger to the daily agonies faced by other countries, it is clear that Canada retains a mandate from heaven. still, to shrug your shoulders and smile is sometimes the only sane response to the preposterous incongruities of human existence.
There is nothing Michael Ignatieff has set out to accomplish that he has not achieved. Till now. The jury is still out on how his ultimate beau geste will play itself out.
— 2010