Conservative definitions don’t match up with policies

Wild contradictions on display at annual Manning conference

Cognitive dissonance is a term from psychology describing the state of mind of a person who holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The conflict between the reality conveyed by the senses and prior belief commonly gives rise to feelings of immense anxiety and frustration, which the patient attempts to resolve in various ways.

Then there is the Canadian conservative movement, which seems capable of convincing itself of any number of conflicting ideas without visible discomfort of any kind. Nowhere is this particular case of cognitive dissonance on better display than at the annual Manning Networking Conference, where the movement’s core gathers every year to congratulate itself on two things: the rightness of its beliefs, and the greatness of the government of Stephen Harper.

It seems to me a healthy psyche requires one to choose between the two (or indeed neither). But to spend the better part of a weekend reiterating your profound faith in the policies of conservatism, all the while roaring your approval for the government that has repudiated them at every turn, would seem evidence of some sort of pathology.

Oh, there was the odd sign of unease. At a question-and-answer session with Jason Kenney and Maxime Bernier, a woman went to the microphone to ask the two ministers why their government, with the national debt now in excess of $600 billion, was still spending more than any government in our history. (Which is true. Program spending had only once exceeded $6,500 per capita, in constant 2012 dollars, in all the years before the Conservatives came to power. It has averaged nearly $6,900 over the last seven years.) The ministers gave noncommittal answers, though Bernier restated his heretical belief that spending should be frozen at current levels.

But soon she was replaced at the microphone by a young man who wondered how to “break through” to those on the left who persisted in the belief that massive deficits were the appropriate response to an economic slump. The ministers nodded sympathetically. Yes, they averred, that was a problem.

Conservatism has traditionally revelled in its contradictions. Consistency was the preserve of intellectuals, for whom conservatives maintained a healthy suspicion. But while the movement remains as ideologically incoherent as ever — it was Harper himself who once said conservatives in Canada believed both that the Charter of Rights should be abolished and that it should be amended to include a property rights clause — its most significant rift today is not so much between this or that element of the conservative coalition as between the movement and the party, or perhaps from reality.

I was struck by a passage in Preston Manning’s keynote speech to the conference that bears his name. He was emphasizing, against the odds, the commonality between the disparate strands of modern conservatism. He listed them off: libertarians, “for whom freedom from constraint is the most important dimension,” fiscal conservatives, “for whom budget balancing and living within our means financially is most important,” all the way through progressive conservatives, green conservatives, social conservatives, democratic conservatives, and constitutional conservatives, “for whom subsidiarity and decentralization of power is the most important.”

Well, he forgot one: “snowmobiling conservatives,” the ones who presumably frequent the snowmobile clubs the government keeps showering with public funds. Or perhaps “ribbon-cutting conservatives,” for whom pictures of Conservative MPs handing out grants to constituents is the most important.

Well, no. But it is significant that he neglected to mention “free market conservatives.” Once upon a time these were considered central to the definition of conservatism. Perhaps this was Manning’s concession to reality, for whatever else the Harper government may pretend to believe in, it does not even pretend anymore to believe in the free market. The addition of $150 billion to the national debt might have been put down to the exigencies of politics, but the announcements of recent weeks — hundreds of millions of dollars for the auto industry, hundreds of millions more for the venture-capital sector (“venture” apparently has acquired a different meaning lately), billions in loan guarantees to a Newfoundland hydro project, plus that wholesale plunge into 1970s-style industrial policy via defence procurement — all too clearly reflect this government’s most sincere convictions.

But go back over that list: all those varieties of conservatism, and there isn’t a single one of them that can find itself reflected in the policies of this Conservative government. Libertarians? How exactly has this government lightened the load of bureaucratic impositions on personal liberty — and if you say the long-form census, let me remind you that this was unveiled on the same day as the government announced it was extending the universal, mandatory boat-licensing regime.

Fiscal conservatives I’ve already discussed. Social conservatives? Pretty much their only demand — more of a request, really — is for some sort of restriction, however mild, on the availability of abortion, in the only country in the democratic world that has none.

Democratic conservatives? Don’t make me laugh.

And yet the base remains, on the whole, quiescent. One has to wonder how long this can last?