El hijo de la izquierda: Avi Lewis y el alma del NDP canadiense

Tommy Douglas.

I mean, for anyone who doesn't know that name, he was the premier of Saskatchewan, NDP predecessor, and he's consistently voted the greatest Canadian in history in polls.

He built the universal healthcare system.

And he was Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather, which is a fun piece of trivia that has nothing to do with anything.

Bueno, el punto es que el NDP tiene una historia de influencia desproporcionada a su tamaño.

The point is that the NDP has a history of influence disproportionate to its size.

No han gobernado, pero han conseguido que los liberales adoptaran sus políticas a cambio de apoyo parlamentario.

They haven't governed, but they've managed to get the Liberals to adopt their policies in exchange for parliamentary support.

Es un patrón que se ha repetido varias veces en la historia canadiense y que volvió a ocurrir con Jagmeet Singh.

It's a pattern that has repeated itself several times in Canadian history and that happened again with Jagmeet Singh.

Right, so Jagmeet Singh.

He led the NDP from 2017 until recently, and he was in many ways a historic figure.

First leader of a major Canadian federal party who was a visible minority, a Sikh man with a turban.

Very charismatic, very good on social media.

But his time ended in a way that I think damaged the party more than people admit.

La verdad es que la historia del pacto de Singh con los liberales de Trudeau es muy reveladora.

The story of Singh's pact with Trudeau's Liberals is very revealing.

En 2022, el NDP firmó un acuerdo de confianza y suministro con el gobierno liberal: prometieron no derribar al gobierno a cambio de que los liberales avanzaran en ciertas políticas sociales.

In 2022, the NDP signed a confidence-and-supply agreement: they promised not to bring down the government in exchange for the Liberals advancing certain social policies.

Era pragmático, pero muchos militantes del NDP lo vivieron como una traición, como rendirse al partido que se supone que son sus adversarios históricos.

It was pragmatic, but many NDP members experienced it as a betrayal, as surrendering to the party that is supposed to be their historical adversary.

And then the deal fell apart in 2024, which is when things got messy.

The NDP pulled out of the agreement, they voted to bring down the government, and then in the subsequent election they got absolutely hammered.

Lost dozens of seats, lost official party status at some point.

It was a disaster.

Es que eso revela el problema estructural de la izquierda en sistemas bipartidistas o cuasibipartidistas: cuando te alías con el centro, pierdes tu identidad;

That reveals the structural problem of the left in two-party or quasi-two-party systems: when you ally with the center, you lose your identity;

cuando rompes con el centro, te quedas sin poder.

when you break with the center, you lose your power.

Singh intentó navegar entre los dos y terminó encallado en ninguna parte.

Singh tried to navigate between the two and ended up stranded nowhere.

Y después de eso, el partido necesitaba no solo un nuevo líder sino casi una refundación ideológica.

After that, the party needed not just a new leader but almost an ideological refounding.

So enter Avi Lewis.

And look, I've watched some of his films and read his writing over the years, and he's genuinely intellectually serious.

The Take, the film he made with Naomi Klein in Argentina, it's not agitprop.

It's actually a careful, nuanced look at what happened when workers occupied abandoned factories after the 2001 crisis.

It asks real questions about economic democracy.

Mira, yo vi esa película cuando salió y me pareció honesta, lo cual no es poco para un documental político.

I saw that film when it came out and found it honest, which is saying something for a political documentary.

Pero hay una distancia enorme entre hacer un documental sobre cooperativas obreras en Buenos Aires y gestionar un partido político federal en Canadá con presupuestos, estrategas electorales, sindicatos que quieren cosas específicas y periodistas que te acechan a las seis de la mañana.

But there's an enormous distance between making a documentary about worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires and managing a federal political party in Canada with budgets, electoral strategists, unions wanting specific things, and journalists ambushing you at six in the morning.

The Naomi Klein dimension is worth sitting with for a second, because she's not just his partner, she's one of the most influential political thinkers on the global left in the last thirty years.

No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything.

If Avi Lewis wins a federal election, she would be something like the ideological architect of a governing party.

That's extraordinary.

A ver, eso es lo que hace que este momento sea tan significativo más allá de Canadá.

That's what makes this moment significant beyond Canada.

Klein lleva décadas argumentando que la crisis climática y la desigualdad económica son inseparables, que no puedes resolver una sin resolver la otra.

Klein has spent decades arguing that the climate crisis and economic inequality are inseparable, that you can't solve one without solving the other.

Si esa visión llega al gobierno de un país del G7, aunque sea en coalición, sería un experimento político sin precedentes en el mundo desarrollado.

If that vision reaches the government of a G7 country, even in coalition, it would be an unprecedented political experiment in the developed world.

The extraordinary thing is that the NDP has actually been here before, sort of.

In the early seventies, David Lewis, Avi's grandfather, ran a campaign against what he called corporate welfare bums.

Big corporations taking government subsidies.

It was ahead of its time, it was rhetorically brilliant, and the party still didn't win.

There's a pattern here that Avi Lewis has to break.

Es que esa continuidad familiar es casi novelesca.

That family continuity is almost novelistic.

El abuelo usando el lenguaje de la lucha de clases en los setenta, el padre convirtiéndose en la voz moral de África en la ONU durante la crisis del SIDA en los noventa, y ahora el nieto llegando con el lenguaje del Antropoceno y la justicia climática.

The grandfather using the language of class struggle in the seventies, the father becoming the moral voice on Africa at the UN during the AIDS crisis in the nineties, and now the grandson arriving with the language of the Anthropocene and climate justice.

Es la misma familia adaptando el mismo proyecto moral a cada época.

It's the same family adapting the same moral project to each era.

I want to push back on something, though.

Because there's a real question about whether the activist-to-politician pipeline actually works.

I've watched it fail in a lot of places.

People who are brilliant at building movements, at framing arguments, at making films, are sometimes catastrophically bad at the compromises and coalition-building that governing actually requires.

No, no, espera, que eso es verdad pero también es demasiado fácil como argumento.

That's true but also too easy as an argument.

Porque los políticos puros, los que llevan toda la vida dentro del sistema, tampoco lo están haciendo especialmente bien en ninguna parte.

Because pure politicians, those who've spent their whole lives inside the system, aren't doing especially well anywhere either.

La crisis de confianza en la política occidental no la han creado los activistas que llegaron demasiado tarde, la han creado los profesionales de la política que llevaban demasiado tiempo.

The crisis of trust in Western politics wasn't created by activists who arrived too late.

No, you're absolutely right about that.

And I think that's actually the deeper story here.

This isn't really about Avi Lewis specifically.

It's about a question that every center-left and left party in the Western world is wrestling with right now: do you try to win from the inside, playing by the existing rules, or do you try to change the rules of the game itself?

Y los ejemplos recientes no son muy alentadores para ninguna de las dos estrategias.

Recent examples aren't very encouraging for either strategy.

Syriza en Grecia intentó cambiar las reglas y terminó aplicando exactamente las políticas de austeridad que había prometido destruir.

Syriza in Greece tried to change the rules and ended up implementing exactly the austerity policies it had promised to destroy.

Corbyn en el Reino Unido intentó transformar el Partido Laborista desde dentro y lo dejó en una posición peor de la que encontró.

Corbyn in the UK tried to transform Labour from within and left it in a worse position.

Podemos en España llegó al gobierno en coalición y lleva años discutiendo si eso fue un éxito o una trampa.

Podemos in Spain reached government in coalition and has spent years debating whether that was a success or a trap.

Right, so the graveyard of the left is pretty crowded.

But here's what strikes me about the Canadian context specifically: the political moment is unusual.

You've had this enormous national conversation about sovereignty, about not becoming the fifty-first American state, about what it actually means to be Canadian, accelerated by Trump's second term and his comments about annexation.

That changes the landscape for a party like the NDP.

Bueno, eso es fundamental.

That's fundamental.

Porque cuando Trump empieza a hablar de Canadá como si fuera territorio disponible para absorber, algo cambia en la psicología política canadiense.

When Trump starts talking about Canada as if it were territory available to absorb, something changes in Canadian political psychology.

De repente la soberanía nacional se convierte en un tema de izquierda también, no solo de derecha.

Suddenly national sovereignty becomes a left-wing issue too, not just a right-wing one.

Y el NDP, con su tradición de defender lo público, el Medicare, los servicios del estado, puede enmarcar eso como: esto es lo que vale la pena defender, esto es lo que nos hace canadienses.

And the NDP, with its tradition of defending public institutions, Medicare, state services, can frame that as: this is what's worth defending, this is what makes us Canadian.

I spent some time in Canada during the first Trump years and I remember Canadians being very aware of their difference from Americans.

Universal healthcare wasn't just a policy, it was an identity marker.

It was a way of saying: we chose something different.

And the NDP has always been the party most associated with that choice.

La verdad es que hay algo irónico en todo esto, porque durante décadas el NDP fue el partido que más abiertamente criticaba el imperialismo estadounidense, el más anti-OTAN, el más reticente a la integración económica continental.

There's something ironic in all this, because for decades the NDP was the party that most openly criticized American imperialism, the most anti-NATO, the most reluctant about continental economic integration.

Y ahora ese discurso, que antes sonaba marginal, suena de repente muy pertinente para muchos canadienses que están mirando al sur con una mezcla de miedo y determinación.

And now that discourse, which used to sound marginal, suddenly sounds very pertinent to many Canadians looking south with a mixture of fear and determination.

So let's get specific about what Lewis brings that Singh didn't.

Because personality and style matter in politics, and these are quite different people.

Singh was essentially a communicator, a retail politician, very good at connecting with individuals.

Lewis is more of a big-picture intellectual.

Those are different skill sets and they attract different coalitions.

Mira, lo que Lewis aporta, potencialmente, es una narrativa coherente que conecta el cambio climático, la desigualdad económica y la soberanía nacional en un solo relato.

What Lewis potentially brings is a coherent narrative connecting climate change, economic inequality, and national sovereignty in a single story.

Singh nunca tuvo eso.

Singh never had that.

Singh era bueno poniendo cara humana a políticas concretas, pero no tenía una visión del mundo que lo abarcara todo.

Singh was good at putting a human face on specific policies, but he didn't have an all-encompassing worldview.

Lewis, si consigue traducir lo que hace en los documentales a lenguaje político cotidiano, puede ofrecer algo diferente.

Lewis, if he can translate what he does in documentaries into everyday political language, can offer something different.

The danger, though, is what you might call the Bernie Sanders problem.

Sanders was brilliant at diagnosis, absolutely brilliant, his analysis of economic inequality was sharp and prescient.

But he was never able to build a coalition wide enough to actually win.

And part of that was because his movement attracted a very specific demographic: young, educated, overwhelmingly white, ideologically homogeneous.

Lewis risks the same thing.

Es que ese es el desafío central de toda la izquierda occidental en este momento: cómo mantener la coherencia ideológica suficiente para saber qué defiendes, y al mismo tiempo construir la amplitud de coalición que necesitas para ganar.

That's the central challenge of the entire Western left right now: how to maintain enough ideological coherence to know what you stand for, while building the coalition breadth you need to win.

Porque si solo convences a los que ya estaban convencidos, no cambias nada.

If you only convince the already convinced, you change nothing.

Y si te vuelves tan amplio que lo aceptas todo, te conviertes en lo que criticas.

And if you become so broad that you accept everything, you become what you criticize.

Here's what gets me.

The NDP has this historical pattern I find genuinely strange: they lose elections, then the winning party, usually the Liberals, implements a version of the NDP platform a decade later.

Medicare, that was the NDP.

Old age security improvements, NDP.

A national childcare program, the NDP pushed for it for thirty years before the Liberals finally did it.

They win by losing, in a way.

Eso es una observación muy interesante y también muy deprimente si eres del NDP.

That's a very interesting observation and also very depressing if you're in the NDP.

Básicamente significa que llevas décadas haciendo el trabajo intelectual y político de desarrollar políticas, asumiendo el coste electoral de proponer cosas impopulares antes de tiempo, y luego el Partido Liberal llega, recoge el fruto maduro, lo implementa con una versión más suavizada y se lleva el crédito histórico.

It basically means you've spent decades doing the intellectual and political work of developing policies, bearing the electoral cost of proposing unpopular things ahead of their time, and then the Liberal Party arrives, picks the ripe fruit, implements a softer version, and takes the historical credit.

Es un papel ingrato.

It's a thankless role.

So the question for Lewis is whether he wants to continue being the party that plants trees whose shade he'll never sit under, or whether this political moment, with the Liberals weakened, with the Conservatives under pressure, with this national conversation about Canadian identity, actually creates a genuine opening for the NDP to break the pattern.

A ver, para que eso ocurra, necesita que se den varias cosas a la vez.

For that to happen, several things need to align.

Que los liberales sigan debilitados después de los años turbulentos con Trudeau y su sucesor.

The Liberals need to remain weakened.

Que los conservadores de Pierre Poilievre no consigan capitalizar el momento nacionalista, cosa que no está garantizada.

The Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre need to fail at capitalizing on the nationalist moment, which isn't guaranteed.

Y que Lewis consiga convencer a suficientes canadienses de clase trabajadora, no solo a universitarios progresistas, de que el NDP es su partido.

And Lewis needs to convince enough working-class Canadians, not just progressive university graduates, that the NDP is their party.

Eso es mucho.

That's a lot to ask.

Look, I've covered enough elections to know that political moments are unpredictable.

I was in Buenos Aires in 2001 when the whole system collapsed, and within a year you had a center-left Peronist government doing things nobody had thought politically possible six months earlier.

The Overton window can move very fast when the circumstances are right.

Sí, aunque Argentina en 2001 es quizás el ejemplo menos tranquilizador que podrías haber elegido, Fletcher.

Although Argentina in 2001 is perhaps the least reassuring example you could have chosen, Fletcher.

Lo que ocurrió allí después del colapso fue un período de caos político extraordinario antes de que las cosas se estabilizaran.

What happened there after the collapse was a period of extraordinary political chaos before things stabilized.

No sé si los canadienses quieren ese tipo de ventana de oportunidad.

I don't know if Canadians want that kind of window of opportunity.

Prefieren la estabilidad.

They prefer stability.

Es parte de su identidad nacional.

It's part of their national identity.

Fair point.

Canadians are famously moderate.

Though I'd argue that's partly a myth, because some of the most radical social experiments in North American history happened in Canadian provinces.

Saskatchewan basically invented social democratic governance in North America.

But yes, at the federal level there's an allergy to anything that feels too disruptive.

Bueno, y eso es quizás el mayor desafío retórico para Lewis: cómo presentar transformaciones profundas de forma que no asusten a esa clase media canadiense que valora la estabilidad y la moderación.

That may be Lewis's greatest rhetorical challenge: how to present deep transformations in a way that doesn't frighten that Canadian middle class that values stability and moderation.

Naomi Klein y él han pasado años diciéndole a la gente que el sistema está roto, que hay que cambiarlo radicalmente.

Klein and he have spent years telling people the system is broken, that it needs radical change.

Ahora él tiene que persuadir a esa misma gente de que él es la persona adecuada para hacer ese cambio de forma ordenada y sin caos.

Now he has to persuade those same people that he can make that change in an orderly way, without chaos.

Es una acrobacia política.

It's a political acrobatic act.

And yet.

And yet.

There's a version of this that works, historically.

FDR did it in 1932.

He was an aristocrat who sold transformative policy as the only way to save the existing order.

Sometimes radical change is most effectively packaged as conservation, as protection.

Lewis could potentially frame his whole project as: we are protecting what Canada built, from those who would sell it or surrender it.

La verdad es que eso sería inteligente.

That would actually be smart.

Porque en el contexto actual, donde la amenaza viene de Estados Unidos bajo Trump, puedes convertir el Medicare, los sindicatos, los servicios públicos, no en proyectos de izquierda radicales sino en instituciones nacionales que hay que defender frente al modelo americano.

Because in the current context, where the threat comes from the United States under Trump, you can turn Medicare, unions, and public services not into radical left-wing projects but into national institutions to be defended against the American model.

Es una reformulación que podría funcionar, aunque requiere una disciplina narrativa que los partidos de izquierda no suelen tener.

It's a reframing that could work, though it requires the kind of narrative discipline that left-wing parties don't usually have.

So where does this leave us.

I mean, the honest answer is: we don't know how this plays out.

Avi Lewis was elected leader yesterday.

He has no seat in parliament.

The party is in a weakened state.

The next federal election could come relatively soon.

He's starting from a very difficult position.

And yet the lineage, the moment, the political context, they're all more favorable than they were two years ago.

Mira, lo que sí sabemos es que lo que pase con Lewis y el NDP en los próximos dos o tres años va a ser un test interesante para una pregunta mucho más grande: ¿puede la izquierda occidental regenerarse desde los movimientos sociales y el activismo cultural, o esos mundos son fundamentalmente incompatibles con la disciplina y el compromiso que requiere gobernar?

What we do know is that what happens with Lewis and the NDP in the next two or three years will be an interesting test for a much bigger question: can the Western left regenerate itself from social movements and cultural activism, or are those worlds fundamentally incompatible with the discipline and compromise that governing requires?

Canadá va a ser un laboratorio para esa pregunta.

Canada is going to be a laboratory for that question.

And I'll add one more thing, which is that the dynasty angle shouldn't be dismissed as mere symbolism.

Avi Lewis grew up at a dinner table where people talked about these things with total seriousness.

He has absorbed, in a very literal sense, decades of accumulated political thinking from people who gave their lives to this project.

That kind of formation is unusual in a party leader.

It's either a great asset or a great weight.

Es que probablemente sea las dos cosas a la vez, y la clave está en si consigue llevar el peso sin que lo aplaste.

It's probably both at the same time, and the key is whether he can carry the weight without being crushed by it.

Hay una frase de Gramsci que viene al caso aquí, que también es muy NDP: pesimismo de la inteligencia, optimismo de la voluntad.

There's a phrase from Gramsci that's relevant here, and also very NDP: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

Eso es lo que necesita Lewis.

That's what Lewis needs.

Saber exactamente cómo de difícil es lo que tiene por delante, y seguir adelante de todas formas.

To know exactly how difficult what lies ahead is, and to press forward anyway.