Harper fighting for the right
New book looks at populism in age of Trump
At one point in Right Here, Right Now, Stephen Harper writes that he does not want his new book to focus on Donald Trump. Nor does he want it to focus on himself. Inevitably, it does both. The book’s subtitle is Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption. The agitator in this case is Trump, and Harper has set himself the task of understanding the disruption of the populist age and writing a “manual for conservative statecraft” to help political leaders respond. It is not a memoir, but it leans heavily on Harper’s policy experience as Canada’s 22nd prime minister during a decade that included the turbulence of the Great Recession. Harper sets up his own government like a North Star for conservatives in the United States and the United Kingdom to follow — jurisdictions where conservatism has, he deems, failed. Released Tuesday, Right Here, Right Now is a slight volume — a mere 171 pages — but it achieves its primary goal of forcing the conservative or non-aligned reader to re-evaluate his or her assumptions.
(Harper suffers the same flaw as Justin Trudeau and other progressive partisans — namely that people from an opposing ideology are not just in error, they are iniquitous and beyond redemption. There’s not much here for the progressive reader, except scorn, with added vitriol, about the “danger” of “intellectually adolescent” left-liberalism.)
Harper’s analysis is that many Americans voted for Trump because they are not doing well — and that they are not doing well in part because of some of the policies conservatives advocate, such as free markets, free trade and free movement.
The result has been the creation of a large number of socalled losers — U.S. labour participation rates are at a 30-year low.
This pent-up desire for change, and the rejection of establishment figures like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, created the ideal conditions for outsiders like Trump and Bernie Sanders.
As Harper describes, Trump articulated a drive to bring back jobs to America, to offer protection to the industrial heartland from trade deals, to put “America First,” ahead of global priorities and to reject low-skill immigration.
While he professes not to admire Trump’s erratic behaviour or scandal-prone governance style, Harper suggests the conditions that brought the president to power are not going away, and that if the conservative movement does not adapt to populism it will be a left-wing iconoclast who next rides its wave. Harper tries to detoxify the label by defining populist as any movement that puts “the wider interests of the common people ahead of special interests of the privileged few.” He uses the taxonomy of “anywheres” and “somewheres” coined by British journalist David Goodhart in writing about the fault lines around Brexit.
Those who live “anywhere” — urban, university-educated professionals who read The Economist, and aspire to attend the Davos World Economic Forum — have come to dominate traditional political parties around the world, despite their slim numbers.
They contrast with the majority of voters, those who live “somewhere” — who grew up in the same community in which they live, whose social life is connected to a church, sports team or community group and whose work life is being disrupted by import competition and technological change. Large sections of the book detail how the Harper government set out to prioritize the interests of these “somewheres” — “those who shower after work, rather than those who shower before it” — during its time in office. The surprise for many readers of this book will be how much Harper identifies with the role of populist, going so far as to label his own time in government as being at the helm of a populist conservative party. Many of his opponents painted him as a rabid ideologue, constrained from libertarian excess only by the leash of electoral pragmatism. If this were true, the book would be an acclamation of unrestrained markets, trade, globalism and immigration. It is not.
Harper claims to be a “proponent of market economics and a skeptic of market dogmatism.” On trade, he remains a fan but acknowledges it is complicated and creates winners and losers. “It is as possible to get a bad deal as it is a good deal. And political leaders have the responsibility to know the difference,” he writes.
The political elite don’t grasp this, he maintains, particularly in today’s Republican Party, which lost touch with Ronald Reagan’s pragmatism and belief that “if trade is not fair for all, then trade is free in name only.” Harper even defends the concept of supply management in the dairy and poultry sectors, which many believed he supported in office out of pure political expediency intended to win votes in Quebec. However, he writes, its demise would devastate rural communities where the sector is the economic backbone. When trade deals with Europe and Asian partners required opening dairy markets, it was done through consultation and “generous” adjustment programs.
Harper considers his own government to have been sensitive to the wider interests of the “somewheres.”
On immigration, for example, the discontent felt elsewhere in the world is not apparent in Canada, he contends, because of an immigration policy rooted in uniting the aspirations of new arrivals with those of citizens. “Make immigration legal, secure and, in the main, economically driven, and it will have high levels of public confidence,” he writes.
He contrasts that with the “low-wage corporatism” of liberals and “open border alienism” of the hard left, which “reflexively identifies with other cultures and denigrates one’s own society.”
He is right, up to a point — the Conservatives took the economic class of new entrants up to around 60 per cent of the total to make it more sensitive to labour-market demand, moving it away from the growing emphasis on family-class arrivals. Harper contends that the concern any reduction in the family class stream would be politically fatal was wrong, since his party won strong support from new Canadians in 2011. He neglects to mention the promise by Trudeau to help “reunite families” in 2015 saw the Liberals win all but four of the 30 seats where immigrants make up more than 50 per cent of the population.
But his point stands: the consensus in Canada on mass immigration was strong and is now showing signs of stress, as the link between the aspirations of new arrivals and citizens becomes more tenuous — in particular, over the influx of economic migrants gaming the system at the border. Conservatism must be empirical, Harper emphasizes, the opposite of dogmatic.
He recalls the dark day he signed the bailout package for the North American automobile industry on his 50th birthday in 2009. “It was not pleasant,” he writes.
But he was presented with the prospect of the entire car industry relocating to the U.S., with the loss of half a million jobs. “Conservatism is not, at its core, about markets. It is about making an economy work. Markets will generally do that. But when they do not, as a conservative, you do what will work.” Harper credits his government for achieving things that not even Trump’s populist insurgency has attempted — namely cutting taxes for working families. He calls the recent corporate tax cuts “quite imbalanced,” with too little emphasis put on workers, families and consumers.
The Harper government, by contrast, was a tax-cutter for all, cutting taxes every year it was in office and reducing federal revenues as a share of GDP to 14 per cent, the lowest in 50 years (the tax burden in the U.S. is 19 per cent of the economy). “Partly because of tax breaks for ordinary, hard-working people, income inequality actually fell,” he claims.
In this, he gets carried away. The share of the nation’s wealth owned by the top one per cent did fall between 2006 and 2010, but mainly because of the financial crisis; it had risen again by 2015. But again, the wider point is made: if populism is meant to advance the wider interests of the common people, it follows that responding to the current disruption requires broad-based tax cuts.
In large measure, Harper resists wading into domestic political waters. The exception is a passage on NAFTA renegotiation, where he contends it was at its heart a U.S.-Mexico dispute over the automobile sector. “Given that Trump had indicated no grievance with Canada and that our interests are much more closely aligned with the Americans,” he writes, “our government should have avoided being on the same side of the table as the Mexicans in this dispute.”
Let’s charitably assume this was written long before Trump imposed 25-per-cent tariffs on steel, and threatened to do the same on autos, unless he got concessions in the Canadian dairy market.
For the most part Harper stays above the political fray, though the book makes a piercing criticism of modern progressivism that is applicable to the Trudeau government. Harper contends — correctly I think — that the underlying presumption that blames Western society for all ills makes left-liberalism vulnerable because it is “way off-side” with the majority of working people.
In part, Trump’s election was a reaction to the perceived “apologetic tenor” of the Obama years. The unwritten assumption is that a similar phenomenon may yet occur in Canada. Harper’s advice to nascent conservative populists skates over his electoral demise. It almost goes without saying that populists should be popular, and to be popular they have to convince voters they care. Harper recounts something told to him early in his career by a former colleague, Greg Thompson: “No one cares what you think until they think you care.” It was advice Harper seemed to have forgotten by the time he left office.
He concludes by counselling conservatives to focus on the issues being faced by working people and their families, especially their concerns about market economics, trade, globalization and immigration. That means getting back to pragmatic applications and away from ideological rigidity.
In practical terms, it means resisting the calls from “anywheres” for a market-oriented, socially progressive approach. Harper argues that parties promoting that approach don’t really exist because those voters don’t really exist.
The reason: in an unpredictable world, ordinary people are vulnerable and such an agenda would “dismantle all the certainties and protections of their lives. It is, on the face of it, the ideology of a wealthy, mobile elite.” Harper’s central contention is that electors who are economically interventionist and socially conservative are numerous and it is they who flocked to Trump, after being ignored by the establishment parties of left and right. “That is what opened the doors to the populists of the right. They have appealed to such voters by emphasizing their conservative social values while being less committed to market economics.”
The recommended response is not to condemn or bemoan today’s populism. “It is to listen from it and learn from it.” Even Harper’s enemies concede he has always been one of the most prescient political analysts in the country. With Right Here, Right Now, he has made a convincing case that the cozy assumptions shared by all parties in this country may need to be revised.