In defending populism, Harper defends himself
Former PM tries to reframe legacy in new book
That presumably settles that. Throughout his time as prime minister, theories abounded as to what philosophy of government, if any, could explain Stephen Harper’s apparently rudderless course. A few diehards on the left persisted in describing his government as ideological or hard-right, even as it was borrowing billions, adding new regional development agencies and nationalizing the auto industry.
Others insisted he was a libertarian at heart who was either forced or tempted, by reality or expediency, to alter his approach once in power. A couple of loyalists essayed a reconstruction after the fact, in which the Harper government’s many disparate and contradictory policies were somehow made to fit into a single philosophical template called “ordered liberty.”
Well, now we have it from the proverbial horse’s mouth. The firebrand who famously deserted Preston Manning for being too populist and not enough of a conservative now claims the mantle of populism for himself: if not as a wholehearted adherent, then as the statesman who understands where others only condemn.
His new book Right Here, Right Now, is in large part an attempt to portray his government not as the cynical power-seeking machine it appeared to be, but as populist before its time. In defending populism, he defends himself.
And yet the mind it reveals is not that of the subtle, sometimes rueful voice of experience he clearly wishes the reader to imagine. It is, rather, all too conventional, even banal. What are presented as iconoclastic insights, in which the rise of populism is explained in terms of the failings of conservatism — former Conservative prime minister breaks with decades of conservative orthodoxy! — are a mix of received wisdom and undergraduate shibboleths, many of them long debunked.
Thus, Trump’s appeal to his supporters is presented as being primarily economic in nature: the familiar theory of the industrial working class whom globalization had left behind, which most observers have long since abandoned in the face of compelling evidence that Trump’s supporters were neither so economically dispossessed — the average Trump voter is better off than the average American — nor so motivated by economic concerns as all that.
Rather, opinion research has shown, they are driven primarily by cultural resentments and racial fears: resentment of educated “elites” and their media “allies,” who are accused (not without justice) of looking down their noses at the people in “flyover country” and fears of losing their place in a society that is rapidly changing.
That Trump was adept at tapping into those resentments is not in doubt, but it is less a matter of his superior insight or willingness to challenge conventional wisdom on matters such as trade, as Harper seems to imagine, than unprecedented, unimaginable shamelessness.
So, too, Harper misrepresents populism, certainly of the kind Trump and his ilk practice. It is simply wrong to describe it, as he does, as “any political movement that places the wider interests of the common people ahead of the special interests of the privileged few.” As he acknowledges, “every political party tends to frame its core appeal in such terms.” A definition that could describe any party or movement is without significance.
Rather, the term describes a view of “the people” as being under siege: if the populist is famously “for the people,” it invites the question of who is against — the Them that is supposedly menacing Us. The populist is never short of Thems: elites, foreigners, racial minorities, “globalists” — or in Harper’s (borrowed) formulation, the cosmopolitan “Anywheres” who owe no allegiance to nation-states, move between homes in New York, London and Singapore, and hanker after a world without borders: a description that would apply to perhaps dozens of people but whom Harper is convinced now control “all the main traditional political parties.”
The views on trade Harper ascribes to Trump’s supporters conveniently dovetail with his own. While careful to proclaim his belief in trade — what critic of trade does not? — he spends an entire chapter on the evils of trading with China, showing how little he really does. The notion that trade imbalances, such as the U.S. has with China, are due to unfair trading practices (and not capital flows, mostly driven by U.S. fiscal imbalances) — or that a trade deficit, as such matters a whit — is again presented as a stunning repudiation of conventional trade theory, and not the same trade-must-be-reciprocal complaint with which protectionists have always misrepresented the case for free trade.
Harper is right to say that conservatism, particularly as practised by the Republican Party, with its insistence on deregulation and tax cuts for the rich as the cure for every ill, has become stale, doctrinaire and out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. He is wrong, however, to suppose the “market dogmatism” of GOP rhetoric has been reflected in the actual policies they have pursued, any more than Trump’s policies — deregulation and tax cuts for the rich — have matched his.
Likewise, while Harper is right to insist that conservatism must apply itself to the real problems of today, not the problems of a generation ago, that still leaves open the question of how he defines conservatism. Statements such as “conservatism is successful over time because conservatism works” do not fill one with confidence, since what “works” is itself a matter of definition.
Certainly it is true that markets are not enough — that mere laissez-faire will not suffice. But that is an argument for supplementing markets, not supplanting them; for redistributing market outcomes, not distorting market processes; for correcting genuine market failures, not intervening hither and yon with a bit of hand-waving about the need to be pragmatic.
A serious critique of Conservative policy would produce examples of intervention without market failure — supply management, say — and of market failure requiring intervention, such as unpriced carbon emissions, for which a carbon tax is the proper corrective. Yet Harper supports supply management and opposes the carbon tax.
Because populism, I guess.