Get Your Hands On Fire And Ashes: Success And Failure In Politics Drafted By Michael Ignatieff Offered As Digital Edition

really good read of the ins and outs of backstage politics and political backstabbing, It touches on patriotism in a new light, questioning how one can lead a country when they have lived outside of it for so long, This is a fusion of political treatise, memoir and a loveletter to Canadian democracy, While Ignatieff's experience is coloured in Liberal red, his selfawareness allows for an objective assessment of partisan politics and his failings as a politician, Fire and Ashes is rooted in a two year timeframe spanning the author's return to Canada, his election as party leader and thefederal election that saw the gutting of the Liberal Party.
The title would suggest a focus on the election itself, but readers may be disappointed that this is not the case, Instead, Ignatieff outlines the degradation of democracy through zerosum, warlike politics in parliament that quashes dialog and compromise, While this is a worthy discussion, he dodges specific reasons for the election loss in favor of rallying prospective political participants for the future, What the reader receives are reasons for increased political participation, while being aware of the compromises one must incur for the sake of positive change, “Als overtuigingskracht geen rol speelt in het democratisch debat, worden discussies zinloze, venijnige vertoningen, Als er iets is wat de democratie in de achting van de burger doet dalen, is het we het beeld van twee politici die elkaar scheldwoorden naar het hoofd slingeren in een overigens lege zaal, maar dat is nu een vertrouwd beeld in politieke systemen over de hele wereld.
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Dit boek uitschetst een politiek die we inen eerder ook wel ook in Nederland zien, Het is niet alleen een verhaal over de politieke opkomst en neergang van Ignatieff, maar ook een oproep tot hoffelijkheid en politiek als roeping, InMichael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada, By, he was leader of the country's Liberal Party and poisedshould the governing Conservatives falterto become Canada's next Prime Minister, It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned,

What did he take away from this crash course in political success and failure Did a life of thinking about politics prepare him for the real thing How did he handle it when his own history as a longtime expatriate became a major political issue Are cynics right to despair about democratic politics Are idealists right to hope Ignatieff blends reflection and analysis to portray today's democratic politics as ruthless, unpredictable, unforgiving, and hyperadversarial.


Rough as it is, Ignatieff argues, democratic politics is a crucible for compromise, and many of the apparent vices of political life, from inconsistency to the fake smile, follow from the necessity of bridging differences in a pluralist society.
A compelling account of modern politics as it really is, the book is also a celebration of the political life in all its wild, exuberant variety,,/

Reseña completa en el blog: sitelink blogspot . one of the best books i've ever read about politics Un politólogo y opinador de fama mundial es fichado para que vuelva a su país y arregle el tradicional partido del sistema, la Pesoe local, en plan paracaidista de buena familia.
Sale mal, para alegría del lector un poco harto de tanta referencia, Ignatieff se venga castigándonos con una larga serie de sermones sobre la política moderna y lo injusta que ha sido con él, como si fuese una interminable columna de The Atlantic o de Foreign Policy.

Como ya voy teniendo una edad y el autor tiene un apellido muy sonoro, puedo acordarme de sus columnas apoyando cualquier invasión y genocidio que le saliera al paso, y lamento que esas palabras tan cargadas de sangre no hayan tenido consecuencias reales.

buen punto de vista honesto de la política y gran experiencia de vida A refreshingly candid look at elected politics, The author was a professor at Harvard who had left Canada foryears and was recruited to move back to Canada to run for Parliament and eventually for Prime Minister.
He went through it all bad faith attacks, growing ambition, and unexpected defeats, His writing is frank, honest, and, often, raw, He is also a great writer,

Lot of good quotes, ran out room,

“A politicians job can be so thankless at times that if you dont acquire a sense of vocation you turn yourself, by stages, without realizing it, into a hack.
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“These are the momentsand they occur in every tough jobwhen youre no longer sure youre up to it, Your every mistake seems to confirm that you arent, Your selfconfidence is shot. All you know for certain is that you once wanted this and that you have to find that primal desire within if you hope to survive, So it had better be there,
Politics tests your capacity for selfknowledge more than any profession I know, What I learned is this: the question about why you want to be a politician is a question about whom you want it for, In my case, whom did I want it for”

“Any sense of entitlement that you might take from your past is absolutely fatal in politics, The best thing about democracy isor should bethat you have to earn everything, one vote at a time, I knew enough not to feel entitled, I knew I had to earn it, But the fact that I come from a family with a calling for public life played powerfully in my mind as I considered whether to accept the offer from the men who had come to dinner that October night.
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“By this point, you have every reason to be tired of the selfdramatization and selfimportance in this search for the motives that led me into politics.
All I would say is that selfdramatization is the essence of politics, You have to invent yourself for public consumption, and if you dont take yourself seriously, who else will”

“While a painters medium is paint, a politicians medium is time: he must adapt, ceaselessly, to its sudden, unexpected and brutal changes.
An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politicians interest is exclusively in

the question of whether an ideas time has come.
When we call politics the art of the possible, we mean the art of knowing what is possible here and now, The possible includes the potential, Where an average politician sees only a closed room, a visionary one sees the hidden door at the back that leads to a new opportunity, What we call luck in politics is actually a gift for timing, for knowing when to strike and when to bide your time and wait for a better opportunity.
When politicians blame their fate on bad luck, they are actually blaming their timing, Only fools believe they can control it, ”

“In politics as combat, any stick will do, and in combat what matters is not proving your good faith but winning, ”

“Many successful people, contemplating entry into politics, disdain the endless meetandgreet, the forced bonhomie of life under the public gaze, as beneath their dignity, but they are wrong.
The grind of politics, the endless travel, the meetings, the impossible schedule, the constant being on show are all in search of an authority that can be acquired in no other way.
You have to learn the country, ”

“What a good politician comes to know about a country cant be found in a briefing book, What he knows is the way the people shape place and place shapes the people, Few forms of political expertise matter so much as local knowledge: the details of the local political lore, the names of the dignitaries and powerbrokersmayors, high school coaches, police chiefs, major employerswho must always be named from the platform.
Great politicians have to be masters of the local, They have to at least remember every place they ever set foot in, Wherever they are, they have to give the impression of being at home, When they ask someone in a crowd where they hail from, they should be able to produce a story that neatly connects them to that voter with the jolt of human recognition.
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“As soon as democracy loses its connection to place, as soon as the location of politics is no longer the union hall, the living room, the restaurant and the local bar and becomes only the television screen and the website, well be in trouble.
Well be entirely in the hands of imagemakers and spin doctors and the fantasies they purvey, Politics will be a spectacle dictated from the metropolis, not a reality lived in the small towns and remote communities that are as much part of the country as the big cities.
For all the talk about the Internet as the enabler of democracy, the Internet could cause us to lose the aspect of politics that makes it truly democratic: the physical contact between voters and politicians.
”

“Now that I was in the fray, I admired the masters of the art even more, and I thought back to a master class I had been given in politics in.
I was steering Bill Clinton through a room at the Davos meetings at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, I was amazed at his ability to remember namesand not just names but whole family storiesas he squeezed this hand, leaned in to kiss that cheek, locked his gaze on anothers, and kept moving, baling them in like a combine harvester.
When I met President Obama later on, I will never forget the grip on my elbow, the quick mention of a book of mine, a reference to a mutual friend, Samantha Power, and his casual grace, together with the capacity to make you feel, when you were speaking, that you were the only person of interest to him in the room.
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“When we call a politician a “natural,” we mean she has this mysterious ability to make a connection with others, to make them feel at ease, to make them feel special.
All naturals get better with practice, but unless it comes naturally, it doesnt look real, What must be real is not so much the smoothness for which politicians are both envied and despised, but real curiosity and interest in peoples stories, in the way they tell them and the meaning they are trying to convey.
Of all the qualities that go into sprezzatura, I would rate listening, being able to deeply listen to your fellow citizens, as the most underrated skill in politics.
For what people want in a politician, what they have a right to demand, is to be listened to, Often, listening is all you can do, Their problems may not admit of a political solution, or at least not a solution you can devise, People will accept that you cannot solve their problems if you give them all of your attention, looking into their eyes, never over their shoulder at the next person in line.
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“Countries are “imagined communities,” and politicians are the ones who represent what we share and then figure out the compromises that enable us to live together in peace”

“What you learn from your mistakes is that politics is a game with words, but it isnt Scrabble.
No one who enters the political arena for the first time is ever prepared for its adversarial quality, Every word you utter becomes an opportunity for your opponents to counterattack, Inevitably you take it personally, and that is your first mistake, You have to learn what the lifers, wise with years of experience, have long since understood: its never personal its strictly business, ”

“Obviously, a straight answer to a straight question is a good idea, and when citizens put a question to you, such candour becomes an obligation, They elect you, after all, The rules are different with the press, In the strange kabuki play of a press conference or interview, candour is a temptation best avoided, Be candid if you can, be strategic if you must, All truth is good, the African proverb goes, but not all truth is good to say, You try never to lie, but you dont have to answer the question youre asked, only the question you want to answer, ”

“most people regard the spectacle of political combat with a mixture of disgust and alarm, fading quickly into indifference, Working with this permanent state of alienation is an important part of the politicians art, Politicians have to negotiate trust against the backdrop of permanent dislike of their own profession, When you represent the people, you actually spend most of your time trying to overcome their suspicion that you have left them behind to join a brutal game that will do them no good.
You counter this feeling, as best you can, by attending the neighbourhood garden party, the parentteacher association meeting, the ribboncutting ceremony, the school prizegiving: all to show that you have not delivered yourself up to the alien political world.
The impossible schedules of politicians, the almost total surrender of their private lives, the way they boast of how many constituency events they attend every weekend: all this activity springs from the need to show “presence,” to prove your loyalty to the people who elected you, not to the dire game played in the capital city.
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“Yet the gulf between representatives and the people cannot be fully overcome, You and your voters do not share the same information, the same space or the same concerns, Political issues divide roughly into two: those that matter only to politicians and to the tiny ingroup of press and partisans who follow the game, and the much smaller number that matter to the people at large.
You can destroy yourself if you confuse the former for the latter, ”

“When politicians cry foul in the middle of the game, voters mostly ignore them, on the sensible suspicion that “they would say that, wouldnt they” Voters also thought, and this reflects a widely shared conception of representative democracy, that they had selected us to represent them and we should just get on with it and come back and see them at election time.
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“Liberals like me, who believed in an empowering government, failed to appreciate what it was like to beg for visas, to queue in a government office, to be kept waiting by a computerized government answering service or to hang around a mailbox every day for a late pension or employment insurance cheque.
Having had their fill of these experiences, some of my constituents wanted to keep government as far away from their lives as they could, Once the liberal state fails to treat citizens with respect, citizens conclude that the less they have to do with it the better, and the less they have to do with the state, the lower they want their taxes to be.
The political beneficiaries of this downward spiral were our Conservative opponents, They offered no solutionslashing services in order to lower taxes is no answer if the services remain as necessary as everbut they had heard the mood music out there and we Liberals had not.
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“The longer you leave an attack unanswered, the more damage it does, and if you refuse to “dignify” the attacks with a response, you have already given up.
Dignity doesnt come into it, If you dont defend yourself, people conclude either that you are guilty as charged or that you are too weak to stand and fight, After all, if you wont stick up for yourself, you wont stick up for them either, This is how you lose standing with voters, ”

“But standing is not a right, It is a privilege earned from voters, one at a time, It is a nontransferable form of authority, Nothing about past rank, expertise, qualifications or previous success entitles you to it, We can all think of people of good character who never achieved standing with a national electorate, We can also call to mind political figures whose character was questionable, Bill Clinton being a possible example, who never lost standing with the voters, Nor is having standing the same thing as being liked, We can all think of successful politicians, like Richard Nixon, for example, who were never much liked but still managed to conserve reluctant standing from the electorate, You might suppose that popularity would confer standing, but there are plenty of celebrities, pop, basketball players and television show hosts who fail to translate their popularity into political success.
Some think that money will confer standing, but multimillionaires recurrently run for office in the United States and lose, the most recent example being Mitt Romney, Nor do degrees confer standing, "

“Success in education is a badge of merit that people actually earn, yet people with degrees often have trouble converting their achievements into standing, The reason is simple: education codes as entitlement, and voters hate entitlement, the way they hate privilege, Educated people routinely complain about this but they are wrong, Standing has to be earned and degrees earn you nothing, This estimable principle leads, however, to a paradox, You can be elected without education, character, likeability, popularity, degrees or a fat bank account, but you cannot be elected without standing, Given these rules, its a wonder that we elect as many capable politicians as we do, ”

“irsttime candidates, like myself, learn soon enough that party selection, authoritative endorsement and our supposedly impressive CVs do not entitle us to standing with voters, If you think standing is an entitlement, you are bound to lose, You have go to out and earn it, face to face, doorstep by doorstep, phone call by phone call,
As voters decide whether to give you standing, they listen to the political parties as well as to neighbours and family members, but increasingly they make up their minds alone in front of a computer or television screen.
Instead of empowering the voter, this solitude disempowers: it increases the influence of bigbuy advertising, the negative attack ads that were used so effectively against me, The solitary voter faces the negative ad onslaught alone, and if there is no one out there prepared to contradict those ads, their impact shapes how voters see you.
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“The rational reason why issues matter less than personality in politics, why elections turn on which candidate successfully establishes standing, is that voters are good at deciding who is worth hearing and who is worth trusting.
To decide whom to trust, voters focus on the question of whether the candidate is like them or not, The question a citizen asks when determining whether another citizen should represent them is whether that person is representative of them, Voters want a candidate to recognize who they are, and candidates do this by showing that they are one of them, Voters ask further questions, like: “Is this person who he says he is”

“They will cease to be referenda on the kind of country we want.
Of the three elections that I fought, none was a debate on the countrys future, All were vicious battles over standing, It is striking that in five and a half years in politics, none of my opponents ever bothered to attack what I was saying, what my platform said.
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