Conservative populism hits a chord with crowd

Kathleen Wynne is a radical leftist who wants to tear down the things that made Ontario, Canada and the West great, University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson told a crowd assembled by Tory MPP Randy Hillier in Carleton Place, Ont., on Thursday night.

“If she had a shred of integrity, she’d resign,” Peterson said to applause. “See if you can take the social-justice warriors out at the top,” he added.

Young people could and should be energized into conservative activism by the promise of completely wiping out the Ontario Liberal Party, he said. There should be not one Liberal MPP left after the next election.

Hillier had billed Peterson’s talk as non-political, focused on the importance of civic engagement. It . . . wasn’t. Peterson alternated between advocating some genuinely appealing conservative ideas and raging against conservatives’ political opponents:

Wynne is a radical leftist who’d have been a pariah even within the New Democratic Party 20 or 30 years ago; humanities programs at universities are “corrupt” and universities are turning out “cringing milksops” who see themselves as victims; “unconscious bias” is made up and benefiting from unearned privilege isn’t really a thing; we are almost at the mercy of social-justice warriors who hate the West.

Canada “is not the same country it was 10 years ago. We need to wake up and stop this,” he spat.

The crowd loved it. The gender mix was roughly even, and there were more young people than you typically see at a conservative event.

Peterson is a psychology professor who rocketed to fame outside academia last fall when he made a fuss over not using non-standard pronouns to refer to trans people.

Thursday night, he offered a list of suggestions for selling conservatism to young voters. They included being unapologetically in favour of Western values and individual freedom, recognizing that responsibilities are more important than rights, promoting traditional nuclear families, and championing “hierarchies of competence” that reward people for their work.

But here’s how quickly a plausible idea could turn:

“If you look around the world at the state of governance in most places . . . the most pathological and vicious thugs rule,” Peterson said. “We actually value the individual right? The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. You know how long it took? We don’t want to abandon that for some halfwitted collectivism, which we’re doing as fast as possible.” Are we? Peterson is a prof who took a tough public stand against political correctness. Now some people won’t talk to him; others are making monthly donations, ostensibly in support of lectures he puts on YouTube, to the tune of $45,000 a month.

The lectures range far beyond psychology, into political science, philosophy, sociology and economics. Peterson made $175,000 as a prof last year but now he’s on pace to bring in $540,000 a year in donations alone.

One of hard-edged conservatism’s rhetorical tricks is to talk about moderate mainstream liberalism as if it’s loony left-wing extremism. Peterson pathologizes that alleged extremism. People aren’t liberals just because they have different values or life experiences, but because they have disordered minds.

But do you engage with delusional people, take their views seriously? Of course not. Peterson said several times Thursday night that a healthy society needs debate. But it’s hard to say what legitimate leftism might look like in a Petersonian world.

It’s talk-radio populism with an intellectual wrapper, where the other side isn’t just wrong but sick and evil.

And it sells.