Politicians You’d Like to Have a Beer With
Doug Ford, Ontario’s reactionary premier, did not run on a lot of concrete promises, preferring instead vague bromides about liking the little guy and dark mutterings about the radicalism of the opposition. But there was one policy that he hammered home: lowering the minimum price of a can or bottle of beer to one dollar. The plan, called “buck a beer”, was met with disinterest by the province’s breweries and recognized by the media as an insulting and transparent ploy for votes. Ford, of course, won a majority.
In effect buck-a-beer was a largely pointless policy, “challenging” breweries to lower their prices with nothing more than “non-financial incentives” like prime shelf space. It was a cheap sales gimmick elevated to provincial policy. In the end, only three companies took up Ford’s “challenge”, and the only significant one (grocery giant Loblaw’s) rescinded the offer after a week. Nevertheless, Ford continued to use beer as a springboard for publicity, ordering that the provincially-run LCBO be open longer hours.
But this was still not the end of Ford’s attempt to turn Ontario’s love of drink into a political platform. Tailgating would be allowed at sporting events, with a quiet suggestion that drinking and driving was okay if hockey or football was involved. Beer would now be stocked in convenience stores. (This, in fact, lead to a minor dispute when Conservative MPPs attacked local stores for not following along.)
On the airwaves of North America, meanwhile, the latest advertising campaign by American monolith Budweiser has politics of its own. With a medieval fantasy setting and the kind of nonsensical slogan the company is famous for, the “dilly dilly” ads feature hearty beer drinkers inflicting Dark Age tortures on snooty guests who prefer wine, microbrews, or anything other than the products of Annheiser-Busch. The not-so-subtle undercurrent of the commercials is the same as that of Ford’s pandering: the opposition of the simple, working-man’s beer against the effete and intellectual craft beer.
The world’s most un-avoidable figure of right-wing populism, Donald Trump, is famously a teetotaler (although perhaps his publicized diet of McDonald’s and Diet Coke serves the same purpose.) So is his Republican predecessor George W. Bush. But beer-drinking, as a symbol of unreconstructed masculinity, has long had purchase in the conservative political imagination. We were, after all, told that Bush was more electable than his effete Democratic opponents because Americans could imagine themselves having a beer with them.
Think, too, of the confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh (even if it feels like a lifetime ago.) Throughout his red-faced, blustering testimony, the future Supreme Court Judge and possible molester kept going back to the decency of what all evidence suggested was binge drinking. “I like beer,” he repeated, almost a kind of slogan. Kavanaugh appealed to beer as part of a near-mythic American male upbringing: hanging out with Tobin, having a couple of brewskis. If a couple of girls got felt up along the way, it was all in good fun.
So, why has beer become such a potent symbol for reactionary politics? In part, it is its ordinariness that makes it so powerful. Beer is, after all, consumed by all social classes, races and genders (if not all religions — the fact that such celebrations leave out groups like Muslims is probably a bonus to these people.) At the same time, beer has an association with working-class masculinity, in contrast to effeminate wine or snobby liquor. Beer allows conservatives to slip between the seemingly universal and the very specific movement they represent.
When someone like Doug Ford dedicates his government to providing people with beer at as many times and locations as possible, it is appealing to a right-wing concept of populism. The venal sins and pastimes of the majority are presented as more worthy of programs that minorities (autistic kids, disabled adults, LGBTQ people, the unemployed, library users, and so on) need to survive. And so a few retail changes are supposed to make up for the slashing of the social safety net.
Beer-drinking is also a form of working-class drag. When a Kavanaugh or a Ford speaks of their love for beer, it is meant to express that they are not so unlike you, the ordinary schlub watching them on television. (Of course, this is tremendously condescending, but what else do you expect?) Sure, they may have gone to elite prep schools and colleges while you were just laid off of your manufacturing job, but you both got blackout drunk as a teen. It imagines a shared identity based on something entirely banal.
This is, perhaps, the ironic thing about nationalism: for all it trumpets the nation as unique and vital, nationalists from every part of the word sound the same. There are stereotypes and jokes about how Canadians are heavy drinkers, but you can say the same thing about Americans, Irish, Scots, Englishmen, Germans, the French, Poles, Russians, Japanese, and the list goes on and on. And this is, ultimately, all nationalism has to go on in the globalized age: nostalgia and bad jokes.
I’m not a drinker. I don’t have a stake in the rhetorical batle between macho corporate beer and hipster craft ale. Nor am I suggesting that there’s something evil about the substance of beer just because right-populists like to incorporate it into their language. But I think it’s important to be aware of how, and why, the right cynically appeals to our pleasures in an attempt to destroy the pleasures of others.
