6

I don’t do a lot of interviews. Mostly because I don’t like people, and mostly because most of the people worth interviewing are either lying to me or lying to themselves, and frankly I can’t always tell which is worse. But every so often somebody comes along who annoys me in exactly the right way — annoys me the way a smart friend does when he’s right about something you don’t want him to be right about — and I figure, well, hell, let’s put that on the record.

Enter Declan Murray. Sudbury-born, Toronto-based, allegedly responsible for enough published venom to have gotten himself disinvited from three separate holiday parties this year alone. He’s a socialist. I am not a socialist. He thinks the free market is a mugging with a business card. I think the state is a mugging with a badge. You’d think we’d have nothing to say to each other.

You’d be wrong. (I can hear people out there — mostly the professionally reasonable ones — already composing their outraged emails. Get in line.)

What follows is the conversation, more or less as it happened, trimmed only where one or both of us repeated ourselves for effect — which, if you know either of our work, was often.

On the Corpse of the Canadian Press

Douglas Ashcroft: Let’s start with something we might actually agree on, which terrifies me a little. The CBC. The National Post. The Globe. Pick your poison. Are you going to sit there and tell me any of them are still doing journalism, or are we both just watching a very well-funded hospice?

Declan Murray: We agree, and it should terrify you, because agreement is usually the first sign that one of us has stopped thinking. But no — I won’t pretend otherwise. What passes for the Canadian press now is not journalism; it’s stenography with a pension plan. The job used to be finding out what power doesn’t want you to know. The job now is finding out what power is comfortable with you knowing, and dressing that up as news. The Globe didn’t miss the housing story because it’s complicated. It missed the housing story because three of its major advertisers and half its dinner-party circuit are landlords.

Ashcroft: See, now here’s where I expect you to swerve into “and that’s why we need more state media, more public funding, more government-backed —”

Murray: You’d be wrong, and I’d ask you to actually read what I write before you finish my sentences for me — it’s a bad habit, and you’re better than that. I don’t think the CBC is the answer. I think the CBC is the same disease wearing a nicer suit: an institution captured by the same professional-managerial class that captures everything else, just captured a little more politely, with better manners and a worse union contract than people assume. Is the CBC better? Yes. Is it as good as we need it to be? Not by a long shot. Public versus private was never really the fight. The fight is capture — who owns the room, and who’s allowed to ask the question that ends a career.

Ashcroft: Okay. Okay, fine. That’s actually — that’s a fair answer. I wasn’t expecting a fair answer. I’m a little unsettled.

On Freedom, and Whose Freedom We’re Actually Discussing

Ashcroft: Alright, here’s where I figure we stop being friends. You’re a socialist. I’ve read enough of you to know you think the state, when properly directed by properly enlightened people — and don’t kid yourself, that’s always the promise — is the tool that fixes things. I think the state is the thing that needs to be chained up and monitored every second of every day, because every single time in human history somebody’s handed it power “for the greater good,” it has used that power to make somebody’s life smaller. So: my question to you is this. When does the state get to tell me what I can put in my own body, in my own home, on my own property? Give me the line. Draw it.

Murray: I’ll draw it, and you’re not going to like where it lands, because you’ve built a straw man out of the word “state” and you’re about to be disappointed that I won’t fight the straw man. I’m not interested in the state telling you what to smoke in your basement. Never have been. What I’m interested in is the fact that you’ve spent — what, twenty years? — writing furiously about the tyranny of a cigarette ban, and comparatively little about the fact that three grocery chains in this country posted record profits in the same years wages stagnated, that a landlord class backed by pension funds raised rents nineteen percent in a single quarter while a government task force scheduled its first meeting for March. That’s not freedom being threatened by a health inspector. That’s freedom being strip-mined by people who never had to pass a bylaw to do it. You want the line? Here’s the line: the state that can’t stop you from smoking a cigarette and the market that can double your rent in eighteen months without a vote, a hearing, or a single elected official’s name attached to it — those are not equally dangerous. One of them at least has to answer to you every four years. The other one doesn’t answer to you at all.

Ashcroft: And there it is. There’s the sleight of hand I knew was coming. First, you assume the state is a check on corporate power rather than, historically, its primary enabler — its enforcement arm, its zoning board, its central bank. Second, you assume that because a landlord isn’t elected, he’s therefore less accountable than a politician, when in my actual experience the politician is the one who never answers the phone. And third, you assume that the answer to concentrated private power is concentrated public power, when every single time we’ve tried that, for cryin’ out Pete’s sake, we’ve just built a bigger, shinier boot. Again and again — Same shit. Bright, new, shiny shovel.

Murray: No. I assume no such thing, and I’d ask you not to hand me positions I haven’t taken so you can enjoy demolishing them, because that’s a cheap trick and you’re better than the cheap trick. I’m not proposing bigger government as an abstraction. I’m asking why a movement that calls itself “civil libertarian” spends its outrage on the bylaw officer and none of it on the man who owns four thousand units and answers to a spreadsheet. Power is power, Douglas. It doesn’t stop being dangerous because it’s wearing a suit instead of a uniform. You’ve built your entire career on distrusting the badge. Fine. I distrust it too. I just haven’t stopped there, the way you have.

On Scientism, Expertise, and the People Who Get to Be Wrong Forever

Ashcroft: Fine, fine, let’s move on — I want to ask you about the priesthood. My priesthood, specifically — the scientism crowd, the ones who spent 2020 to 2022 telling you that any deviation from The Consensus, capital T, capital C, made you a “denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “grandma-killer.” You’re a man of the left. Your own tribe did most of that enforcing. Does it ever bother you that the same people who’d cheerfully quote Chomsky at a dinner party turned into the most vicious little inquisitors the moment an actual authority figure in a lab coat told them to be?

Murray: It bothers me constantly, and I’ve written about it, and I got exactly the reception you’d expect from people who’d rather manage a controversy than survive one. Here’s the thing you’re circling without quite landing on it, though: the failure wasn’t science. Science, done honestly, is one of the only tools we’ve built that can tell power “no” and be right about it. The failure was a professional class — university-credentialed, media-adjacent, terminally comfortable — that mistook deference to institutions for intelligence, and then mistook its own panic for virtue. They didn’t fail because they trusted experts. They failed because they’d stopped being able to tell the difference between an expert and an institution defending its own authority. Those aren’t the same thing, and confusing them is exactly the kind of smart-idiot move you’d expect from people who’ve never had to be wrong about something that cost them anything.

Ashcroft: “Smart-idiot.” I like that. I’ve been saying that for twenty years and nobody in your circles would say it out loud.

Murray: Then your circles and mine have the same disease with different symptoms. Willful stupidity in service of comfort is a moral failure whether it’s wearing a MAGA hat or a “trust the science” tote bag. I’ll add the part you’ll leave out if I don’t say it plainly: the correction for bad expertise was never “no expertise.” It was more scrutiny. More transparency. More names attached to more decisions — more daylight, full stop, shone into every corner of it. You want to throw out the lab coat because a few people abused it. I want to know who signed the memo, why they signed it, and whose payroll they’re really on. And here’s where your crowd and the MAGA crowd part ways for good, because it matters: the MAGA response to a legitimate reason for suspicion is to upgrade willful stupidity into base stupidity — to celebrate the not-knowing itself, to treat ignorance as a kind of virtue, to run to the brutally uninformed for answers. My answer is the opposite. If the expertise gives you reason for suspicion, you don’t burn the lab down. You investigate, you expose, and if the expertise turns out to be rotten, you replace it with expertise that actually works. That’s not anti-science. That’s what taking science seriously enough to demand it earn its authority actually looks like.

On Whether Any of This Fixes Anything

Ashcroft: Last one, because I can already hear my editor telling me this ran long — it always runs long, that’s the whole business model. What do you actually want the reader to do? Not think, not feel, not “engage with the discourse.” Do.

Murray: Find out who’s actually deciding the thing that affects your life, and put their name on it. That’s it. That’s the whole instruction. Not the abstraction — not “the system,” not “the market,” not “the government” as some weather pattern that happens to you. A name. A vote they took. A memo they signed. A rent increase somebody in a boardroom approved on a Tuesday afternoon. Power survives on your inability to locate it. So, locate it. Everything else follows from that.

Ashcroft: And I’ll give you the last word on the state, since apparently that’s the kind of night we’re having: don’t trust it. Don’t trust the ones who tell you they’re expanding it to protect you, and don’t trust the ones who tell you they’re shrinking it to free you, because in my experience it’s usually the same three families cutting the ribbon either way. Trust the guy asking the question nobody’s paying him to ask. That’s rarer than either of us would like.

Before We Let Him Go

Ashcroft: Alright. I’m told I have to wrap this up before my editor starts sending me passive-aggressive emails about word counts, so — Dec, thanks for sitting through this. I mean that, more or less. Before you go: what are you working on? Anything landing on OpinionOverload.com that I should be warning people about in advance?

Murray: There’s a piece coming in the next few weeks, and fair warning, it’s going to make some people at the Chamber of Commerce spill their coffee. The argument, in short: “capital” isn’t a thing. It never has been. Most people — including, I’d wager, half the economists who get paid to explain it to you — think capitalism is defined by markets, by competition, by property changing hands between consenting adults. It isn’t. Capitalism is a legal status, manufactured and maintained by the state, full stop. Limited liability. Priority claims in bankruptcy. Perpetual existence — a corporation that never dies, never answers for what it did thirty years ago under different management. Monopoly rights handed out by legislatures and patent offices like party favours. None of that is the market. That’s the law, selectively arming certain assets with powers a human being will never have, before a single transaction ever takes place. Which means the inequality isn’t produced by the exchange — the exchange is downstream of a rigged starting line the legislature drew years earlier, in a committee room, with nobody watching. What they call “the free market” is a political architecture wearing the market’s clothes. I intend to name the architects.

Ashcroft: God help us all. I’ll be reading that one twice.

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We did not agree on much. We agreed, more or less, that the people currently running things are lying to us about the reasons why, and that the lie is more profitable than the truth would be. Make of that what you will. I certainly intend to.

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Douglas Reid Ashcroft writes from Ottawa. Declan Murray writes from Toronto, when he’s not being formally complained about. Neither man apologized for anything in the writing of this piece.