During the 2015 election campaign prior to his first term in office, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau indicated that First Nations communities would be granted the right to veto the development of natural resource projects on Indigenous territory. He was also heralded as a beacon of environmentalism, promising that he would overhaul the environmental assessment process with the National Energy Board to consider the impact of energy initiatives like pipelines.
In a town hall meeting in 2016, Trudeau was asked whether "no means no" if Indigenous communities did not give consent for a pipeline project. Trudeau replied, “Absolutely.” Yet, within two years, he said, “No, they don’t have a veto,” when faced with opposition from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations against the Kinder Morgan pipeline, now known as the Trans Mountain pipeline.
In May 2018, he approved a proposal to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion, and expand its range, despite fierce Indigenous opposition to a pipeline that cuts through their land and threatens their self-sustaining way of life. The project will triple the number of oil shipments and place increased stress on the marine environment, while also raising the possibility of an oil spill.
Trudeau has also approved the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, supported the Keystone XL pipeline, and sanctioned an LNG plant that will indulge in hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking'.
Similarly, former US president Barack Obama was touted as a savior for illegal immigrants after a July 2008 campaign promise of “crack[ing] down on employers abusing undocumented immigrants” and bringing "those 12 million people out of the shadows".
Admittedly, the failure of his proposed Dream Act–which laid out a path for citizenship for illegal immigrants who “attend college or serve in the military"–was due to political roadblocks in the Senate. Ultimately, he passed the watered-down Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows some illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children to have their deportation deferred and make them eligible for a work permit.
Yet, over 3 million people were deported under his regime. In fact, he deported more immigrants than any president in American history. He even set up "temporary housing" along the southern border when faced with a migrant crisis in 2014, in which over 60,000 unaccompanied children were detained, similar to what the incumbent president Donald Trump has done and has been lambasted for.
Obama also pledged to end US engagement in two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, at the time of his departure, the US was still involved in both and had added Syria to the list. American relations with its traditional allies in the area–Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt–were all considerably worse by the end of his tenure. He also used ten times more air strikes than George Bush, largely targeting Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It is estimated that his 563 sanctioned strikes killed between 384 and 807 civilians.
Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister from 2004 to 2014, was advertised as a man of integrity, incorruptibility, and honesty. However, his administration was plagued with corruption. In 2011, WikiLeaks released a US state department cable detailing how his government had bribed two opposition members of parliament to vote in his party's favor on the India-US nuclear deal in 2008. Suresh Kalmadi, the organizing committee chief of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, was arrested for conspiring to sign a contract with a Swiss firm while ignoring "reasonable" bids from other firms. Also in 2010, Telecommunications Minister Andimuthu Raja resigned after it was discovered that he had allocated the rights to India's 2G mobile phone spectrum to nine companies in an “irregular” manner. While Singh doubled-up as the nation’s Prime Minister and Coal Minister from 2005 to 2009, mining rights were curiously given to certain private companies without a proper bidding process. While some point to the fact that he was merely a figurehead leader working at the behest of more powerful party officials, his complicity cannot be denied.
All three leaders are commonly associated with the political left. The inability of leaders to live up to their bold promises is not a novel phenomenon. Politicians regularly overshoot financial predictions to drum up support for their campaigns. However, it is interesting that these left-leaning politicians so often work in direct opposition to their campaign rhetoric. Justin Trudeau is a self-professed champion of Indigenous rights and environmentalism, yet has reneged on both commitments. Barack Obama portrayed himself as the guardian of illegal immigrants and the harbinger of American retreat from the Middle East, yet he earned the moniker of ‘deporter in chief’ and further cemented the US’ steadfast dedication to its ‘War on Terror’. And, regardless of the looming presence of puppeteer Sonia Gandhi, one cannot entirely dismiss the agency of Manmohan Singh in his government’s endless trysts with corruption.
This leads into the argument that leftist democratic politicians frequently mis-advertise themselves. The question is: why?
Is it because they are unaware of what the seat of power entails and therefore pitch unrealistic policies?
Or, is it because they try to pander to a more left-leaning voter base knowing full well that they will not be able to implement the changes that they propose?
Thus, are their campaign promises overambitious naïveté or willful misrepresentation?
Conversely, right-wing democratic leaders rarely seem to mis-advertise themselves. What you see is what you get.
That isn’t to say that right-wing democratic politicians don’t knowingly deceive the public. Trump proudly claimed that he would build a wall along the southern border to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the USA, and that Mexico would pay for it. Yet, in December 2019, the House of Representatives approved $5 billion for wall expenditures. On January 9, a Federal appeals court approved the diversion of $3.6 billion in military funds towards the construction of the wall. And on January 13, it was reported that Trump plans to divert an additional $7.2 billion from the military towards the wall.
In fact, according to the Fact Checker database, Trump made 15,413 "false or misleading claims" during his first 1,055 days in office, which amounts to roughly 15 times a day.
Similarly, there is a website called ‘Modi Lies’ dedicated to cataloging each and every false or misleading statement made by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
However, once in office, both have largely maintained an allegiance to the rhetoric they espoused prior to and during their campaign trails in a way that their left-wing counterparts did not. Whether or not they met their campaign promises to the letter is irrelevant to their voters as the principles guiding those promises is very much evident in their governance.
This explains why, from January to December 2019, Trump’s approval rating went from 37% to 45%, and his disapproval ratings fell from 59% to 51%. Likewise, approval of his impeachment fell from 53% to 46%, while disapproval of his impeachment rose from 45% to 51%. This illustrates how fairly inoculated he is from criticism from his loyal supporter base since he has stayed true to the rhetoric of his campaign promises, even if the minutiae of his pledges were not met. Modi supporters, too, often termed bhakts, have forcefully saffronized the nation in his image, with unquestioning loyalty to his Hindutva policies.
Trump hasn’t built the wall or made Mexico pay for it. He even has a lower deportation rate than Obama. However, anti-immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric remains one of the pillars of his governance. Immigrants live in fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raiding their homes, offices, and schools. He has expanded the operations of the border detention centers along the southern border, with many children being separated from their parents and being forced to live in squalid conditions. And he implemented a Muslim ban in 2017, whereby he restricted the movement of citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen to the USA.
In 2002, while Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a train carrying 60 Hindu pilgrims was set on fire. Enraged, Modi told senior police officers that Hindus should be allowed to "vent their anger". What followed was essentially mass genocide, with official estimates stating that over 1,000 people were killed; independent sources suggest figures in excess of 2,000. The vast majority of those killed were Muslim. While his degree of culpability and complicity can be argued ad nauseum, the fact remains that this Hindutva ideology was one of the core features of his governance even before he became Prime Minister in 2014. After taking office, he has stayed true to his ideology, and among other things, passed the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) and proposed changes to the National Citizen Register (NRC). The CAA offers citizenship to refugees escaping religious persecution from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh; however, it excludes Muslims. The NRC places stricter requirements on Muslim residents to prove their citizenship and avoid deportation. Concurrently, he has expanded the construction of detention centers for illegal immigrants.
In 1998, current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said, “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” in his capacity as an army captain at the time. In 2015, he said, “The Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture.” In 2016, he said he would “rip up" Indigenous territory once he was in office and “give all the ranchers guns”. In 2017, he said, “If I become President there will not be a centimeter more of Indigenous land.” In 2018, he corrected himself to say he meant “not one millimeter”. Once he became president in January 2019, he did not skirt on his previous proclamations. He has since claimed that the Indigenous people are like “animals in zoos” and “prehistoric men”. In the first year of his rule, Amazon deforestation rose by 29% to an 11 year high, severely threatening both the environment and the 900,000 Indigenous peoples of Brazil. In response, he said deforestation is part of the “cultural” fabric of Brazil and will “never stop”.
Therefore, there is a general trend of right-wing democratic politicians being more likely to stay true to their ideological leanings. Regardless of whether or not they implement the finer details of their policy proposals, the sentiments guiding their rhetoric–be it Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, or anti-Indigenous–are largely untouched. On the other hand, left-wing democratic politicians often implement policies that are diametrically opposed to the rhetoric they embraced prior to taking office.
The reasons for this are unclear, but there is a strong argument to be made for the fact that most politicians, even those who are commonly associated with the left, are in truth centrist or center-right. Keeping that in mind, leftist policies are more revolutionary and harder to implement, as they have to reach much further across the political aisle to gain the support of the majority of politicians who are positioned at the center and the center-right.
If Trudeau, Obama, and the like are truly leftist politicians, then perhaps they are just naive about the machinations of power and how difficult it is to implement their policy proposals. What seems more likely, however, is that, regardless of whether or not they believe in their liberal rhetoric, they are cognizant of the challenges they will face once in office, but mis-advertise themselves as leftists in order to gain more votes. While leftist leaders are quick to abandon their campaign rhetoric once in office, right-wing leaders tend to lean on theirs. Thus, there is a wider disparity between the campaign and in-office rhetoric of left-wing democratic leaders than their right-wing counterparts, who tend to provide a much more accurate representation of the kind of leader they will be and the values they will defend.
Are Right-Wing Democratic Politicians More Transparent Than Their Left-Wing Counterparts?
For better or worse, right-wing democratic leaders rarely mis-advertise themselves.
January 18, 2020
IMAGE SOURCE: T NARAYAN / GETTY IMAGESIndian PM Narendra Modi