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Colby Cosh: Smith won against separatism. Her battle with socialism is just beginning

The premier needs to focus her party on the NDP

Having had a few days now to watch realtime reactions to Monday’s Alberta referendum result, I keep thinking of the U.S. Civil War. It was the first major war, the first continental-scale war, to be conducted in the face of mass media, and in the presence of “news” as we now understand it; and, of course, it was itself a product of emerging new media.

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So a new feature of the American Civil War was realtime second-guessing of strategy and generalship; the people became capable of conducting arguments and trading information and speculating about individual leaders, even though those leaders themselves had to constantly make decisions with insufficient and incomplete information. (And historians are still arguing about it all.) No one in history before Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood had to face the kind of public pressure and the weight of democratic judgment they did while trying to win a war.

Colby Cosh: Smith won against separatism. Her battle with socialism is just beginning Back to video

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is a general trying to win a war — that is, the next Alberta general election, which is scheduled for almost exactly........

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