Ford Nation stands by its man. No. Matter. What.

[applegrove]

Ford Nation stands by its man. No. Matter. What.

Jeffrey Simpson, the Globe & Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/ford-nation-stands-by-its-man-no-matter-what/article15519571/?utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=The%20Globe%20and%20Mail&utm_type=text&utm_content=TheGlobeandMail&utm_campaign=111009599

"SNIP.................................


The Conservative/conservative core, as we see in the federal government, is resistant to evidence if it conflicts with ideological nostrums. As in Fordworld, federal ministers look facts in the face and deny them, prefer to lecture rather than reason, to posture as the friend of the “people” against undefined but dangerous “elites,” and live in an intellectually self-contained world where curiosity is banished and slogans take the place of deliberation.

Conservatives of years ago saw society as organic, all being part of the whole, and tried to fashion policies that brought people together, whereas the new Conservatives/conservatives, à la Mr. Ford, see society as inherently divided between a mythical sense of the “people” and their foes. And for this attitude, those who fall on their side of this divide reward leaders with loyalty that cannot be shaken.

Toronto has tried for decades to become a “world-class city,” a phrase shopworn from overuse by those hoping that it might some day become just that. Cities that are truly “world class” never have to use the phrase; only those that are not employ it. Just as Somerset Maugham once described himself as sitting in the first row of the world’s second-class writers, Toronto fears that is where it sits among cities, while desperately wishing it was not so.

Now along comes Mayor Ford to wreck even that ambition, a subject of ridicule and parody from Germany and Britain to Mexico and the United States, giving new definition to the old nickname for Toronto within Canada – Hogtown – without his supporters apparently caring a fig.

.................................SNIP"