Tories must rebuild tradition, from ground up
Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who announced his resignation last Thursday, has been criticized for years for his socially conservative views.
Even elements of his own party believed this made him an unsuitable leader.
But is this correct? Is “social conservativism” so toxic it should be banished, even from the Tory party?
The answer isn’t so simple. Much depends on definitions. If social conservatism is a mere shorthand for rigid judgments about gay people – as it has seemed to become – it will fail and deserve to fail. But this is a limiting conception of what should be a rich tradition of social thought.
The true social conservative says aloud what everyone knows privately: that certain habits, behaviours, virtues and choices are instrumental to human flourishing. In turn, other personal decisions, practices and vices are impediments to living and doing well.
A second distinction is that the social conservative appreciates how the web of social forces around us directs the choices we make. This includes public institutions and public policy.
But social conservatism needs to change its emphasis and focus. What may have once been a lens for interpreting problems like sexual behaviour and drug use must expand, becoming relevant to more people’s actual lives and challenges.
Major life decisions and habits – from higher education to personal finance, from home ownership to marriage, from community involvement to charity, from work ethic to engagement with the life-affirming arts and culture – are not mere personal preferences. They are common values that reflect the whole of society. Any person’s single set of habits and choices may not be significant in isolation; but in the aggregate, they matter.
To be socially conservative is to take what most people want for their own families and friends – stable relationships, meaningful work, freedom from addiction, financial security – and extend it: from family to community to nation.
This is the theory. The practical question so many people want to answer is “can social conservatism win?” The answer is that it must win. Not in the sense that social conservatives have to govern alone, but that they must be a part of the fabric of national argument. The stakes are too great to sideline those with a genuine concern for the common good and a voice to articulate it.
But let’s revise the question: “Can a socially conservative Tory leader win?”
Sure, but only if the movement does a great deal more work to bring this tradition out of its slumber, from a posture of virtue-signalling to a rigorous body of thought and policy research, providing an alternative to today’s monopoly of received liberal wisdom on social questions.
What mainstream forum in Canada publishes socially conservative critiques with the rigour and depth of a Heather MacDonald or a Charles Murray? And who is interested and willing to support such work on a serious scale?
The left gets much of the blame for trying to make social conservatism in any form beyond the pale. But the right has done its share of the work by neglecting social questions that are politically sensitive, ostensibly on the belief that free-market principles alone will do the trick. Surely Mr. Scheer’s election performance shows there is much more room for substance.
Small-c conservaives need to get some real work done on Canada’s social condition and the influenceable factors behind it.
Then, whom the Tories pick as their leader becomes less important. Heck, put forward some measurable ways to help families be more self-sufficient, more community-minded and more healthy, and having a social conservative in the leader’s chair wouldn’t even be necessary. But it all starts with rebuilding this important tradition from the ground up.