Neither the media nor the public belong in politicians’ bedrooms
The age of surveillance politics is bad for society
Earlier this month, Canadians couldn’t stop talking about Mayor John Tory after he admitted to an inappropriate relationship with a 31-year old former staffer from his office.
Much ink has been spilled over the nuances of this development.
Didn’t he criticize the late Rob Ford about his perceived personal shortcomings and how that affected his leadership? Didn’t he indirectly contribute to the 24-hour news cycle during his time as CEO and president of Rogers Communications in the mid-1990s? Is this a classic case of old, male, and stale entitlement that runs rampant throughout our society?
While these questions surely make for interesting stories, they strike me as insignificant when determining whether politicians ought to be accountable to the public for every private decision they make.
The widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations– surveillance capitalism–gets a lot of attention in the public square, as it should.
However, surveillance politics is equally worrisome.
Surveillance politics is a form of public entitlement; a belief that politics robs individuals of their right to privacy. It is an assumption that every single personality flaw, skeleton, mistake, or bad habit is relevant in evaluating a politician’s job performance.
Surveillance politics is dangerous because character can be curated; because politicians are human beings; because morality is subjective, and because innocent bystanders suffer the most.
Allow me to explain.
The private lives of politicians should be off-limits because characters can be curated. Some may argue that private decisions of political figures provide voters with relevant data points about their character, the essence of who they are as a human being and therefore, as a politician.
Perhaps insight into what kind of friend, partner, or parent someone is indicates what kind of politician they are.
However, “character” has become an elusive term. At the risk of being overly cynical: in political arenas, character is often synonymous for persona, and personas can be curated.
A persona has almost nothing to do with who someone is, and everything to do with what people think someone is. In 2023, we’re often evaluating the strategic communications capabilities and loyalties of political staff rather than the politicians themselves.
The private lives of politicians should be off-limits because politicians are human beings. Work around politics for long enough, and you’ll become acutely aware of the fact that politicians are severely normal people.
No elected official with the purest of intentions makes perfect choices all of the time. They are human beings. They are fallible. They are not supernatural.
Human beings that don’t get weekends, or vacations, or uninterrupted time with family, or alone time, or sleep, or who work in an environment where they don’t know who they can trust, who are are incessantly criticized, and who don’t have job security, and don’t have the time or resources to accomplish their goals might not have a perfect decision-making track record in politics or in their private lives.
Can you blame them?
I’m not suggesting we should approve of, condone, or endorse the irreverent private passtimes of politicians, but let’s at least acknowledge that after they are sworn in, they don’t turn into a robot, so why are we surprised when they disappoint us?
The private lives of politicians should be off-limits because character is subjective. In so many areas of civil society, we have accepted that we do not have the right to judge others for their personal decisions. We recognize that morality is subjective, elusive, and inconsistent, and sometimes even reinforces the very power dynamics we seek to dismantle.
When it comes to matters of morality that don’t break any laws–conflicts of interest or otherwise, the public does not have a right to know and is not owed an explanation.
The private lives of politicians should be off-limits because innocent bystanders suffer the most. Politicians and their families make massive sacrifices for public life. In demanding complete transparency on private matters, we inadvertently subject family members to judgements they didn’t sign-up for, which has nothing to do with improving or strengthening our democracy.
Perhaps an expectation of transparency on personal matters would be warranted if such an expectation acted as a deterrent. In reality, clickbait headlines of untoward behaviour continue to rob our democracy with no sign of replenishing what has been lost. The threat or act of making private truths public does not appear to curb poor behaviour, it merely drives it underground.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Therefore: neither the media, nor the public belong in politicians’ bedrooms.
Surveillance politics doesn’t appear to be improving the quality of our democracy, therefore we must question what place it has in society.
Life is complicated; politics even more so. We must hold our politicians to a high standard, though not to an impossible one.
Some clickbait stories are simply better left unpublished.