CONSERVATISM ACROSS NORTH AMERICA IS IN CRISIS, BUT IN CANADA, AT LEAST, THERE ARE MOVES WITHIN TORY RANKS THAT MAY YET YIELD A ‘ HOPE AND CHANGE’ AGENDA.
Faces ascendant Left across North America
M any comparisons have been drawn between Ba rack Obama and Justin Trudeau: both are left of centre, both were elected on a message of optimism, and so on.
But of these surely the most salient is: both are in power.
Across North America, the right is in disarray. It isn’ t only at the ballot box that conservatives are in retreat. It is in the broader contest of ideas. On issue after issue, the left has been running the table, whether overturning orthodoxies long considered invincible, like the taboo on deficits, or opening new territory for the expanding state, from pensions to pharmacare to a guaranteed annual income.
Perhaps the most startling advances have come in the social issues. From same- sex marriage to legalized marijuana to assisted suicide, public opinion and legislation seem in a headlong race to see which can undo centuries of custom and precedent the fastest, while across the multiplying fronts in the wars of identity — racial, sexual and the rest — one famous victory follows another.
I do not say this is a good thing or a bad thing. Some of these developments are welcome, some are not. I record it only as a fact. The energy, the impetus, the advantage today is all on the left.
Whether the intellectual in coherence on display in the Republican presidential race is a cause or consequence of this is hard to say. The extremity of the solutions offered by the“conservative” candidates is not a sign of the health of the movement, but of its increasing disconnect with reality. None has a fiscal plan that is remotely credible. Each would, if implemented, bankrupt the federal government in short order.
The special obnoxiousness of Trump ism, while in some sense a reaction to the excesses of identity politics, is in fact its own form of it. Trump is not appealing, as his answer to “political correctness,” to a universalistic liberalism that transcends differences of race and sex: he is simply championing an identity politics for white males.
But the crude re van chism of his racial politics isa graduate seminar next to the rest of his platform, a nightmarish mix of big- government populism and authoritarian nationalism. Worse, he has dragged the other candidates in his direction. To see conservatives turning against free trade is the surest sign of their confusion.
But then, as others have noted, while Trumpism may be a repudiation of conservatism, it is also a creation of it: not as a philosophy, in the distinguished tradition of Burke and Hayek, but in the caricature form practised by the Republican Party. The winking indulgence of racism and other forms of in tolerance, the extreme ideological rigidity of the Tea Party, the anti- intellectualism and general goonishness of the party’ s“entertainment wing” in talk radio: all helped prepare the way for Trump.
The weakness of Canadian conservatism in recent years is in many ways the opposite. If the Republicans who shut down the government rather than accept a budget deal that included any increase in revenues — not just tax increases, but any additional revenues — were in the grip of an un- reasoning fanaticism, the Conservatives under Stephen Harper seemed to have had no ideological moorings whatever.
Not only was it impossible to predict what position they would take on any given issue, but they seemed tor evelin their in coherence, boasting of their commitment to the most regulatory- heavy approaches to economic questions — crossborder pricing, anyone? — even as they were claiming to be the party of free markets.
And yet they could be, on some issues, as purblind as any Tea Party activist, notably in their opposition to any form of carbon pricing. Had they been smarter, they might have made the issue their own; carbon pricing might have been used not merely as a shield, to ward off attacks on their environmental credentials, but to trim back more interventionist policies, to cut other taxes, and to make the case for market solutions more generally.
And in the end, they wound up in much the same place as t he Republicans: if in less virulent form than Trump ism, then with the same aimless populism, the same coded or not- so- coded appeals to intolerance, the same paranoia and yahooism.
The good news is that Conservative sin Canada are showing signs of having learned from their mistakes, or at least their defeat. While the Republicans seem headed for a crack up of some kind, the Tories are gearing up for a leadership race that has every potential to be a showcase for new ideas, or at any rate some perfectly good old ideas.
At the recent Manning Conference on Recharging The Right, potential candidates could be seen testing out campaign themes. Michael Chong called upon the party to rethink its opposition to carbon pricing, and to embrace radical tax reform. Maxime Bernier championed an end to corporate welfare. Tony Clement proposed defunding the CBC.
It’s early days, of course, and these hardly amount to the kind of searching reinvention the party needs: not just rediscovering conservative principles, but applying them in new ways, to fresh concerns. It ’s always possible the party will punt, that it will decide the alternative to harsh partisanship is meaningless happy-talk. But “hope and change” can also come in the form of serious policy, rooted in coherence and conviction.