The Electoral Dilemmas of Conservatism

A quick follow up to my last blog. You can find Eric Grenier's interesting analysis of the electoral problems (and successes) of the Conservative Party here:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-conservatives-centre-1.3388778

We are coming at the same issue from different directions, but the points are about the same. Exactly how the Conservatives expand their vote with their base is not clear.

Through the Mirror Darkly: Counterfactual History and Conservative Election Victories (Part I)

Among my favourite Star Trek episodes are those that focus on the Mirror Universe, a dark alternative reality where history has played out differently. First introduced on the Original Series, the mirror universe was picked up on DS 9 and then used again on Enterprise.  Rather than developing a peaceful democratic and humane (!) federation of planets, humans created an evil empire that subjugated other races, practiced slavery and torture, used assassination for career advancement, condoned corruption and graft, etc. Eventually, the human empire is overthrown and humans themselves are subjected to slavery. The point being, of course, a take on "what comes around goes around": the empire built on oppression and corruption and hedonism collapses only to enslave its former masters; the democratic and ideal-driven society committed to the public good survives.

I mention this because some conservative commentators seem to live in this mirror universe. They live a world where the Tories won the 2015 election ... or, rather, should have ... were it not for some simple twists of fate or mistakes on the part of the CPC. An example of this kind of reasoning can be found in this Globe editorial.  It is, in my view, interesting because it illustrates a different type of counter-Liberal discourse than that articulated by Rex Murphy and on which I commented in a recent blog. Instead, in this discourse, the Liberals did not so much win the election as the Conservatives lost it by failing to play to their strengths. Instead of fighting the election on economic grounds -- a supposed sure winner for the Tories -- they elected to fight it on cultural issues, guaranteeing their own loss. The upshot, if you've missed it, is this: Canadians did not really elect a progressive alternative to the Tories, marginalizing them with something like 30% of the popular vote. Indeed, Canadians, in this mirror universe, are still committed to conservative economic ideas and would have kept the conservatives in power *if* the conservatives had just not made a mistake or two.

Like Rex Murphy's extremist anti-Liberalism on which I commented in a previous blog (in which the Liberal Party is preemptively accused of subverting democracy and individual rights and promoting government sanctioned theft ... they haven't yet but just in case they do, best to get that accusation out of the way in advance and, if they don't, well heck, they surely will do something nefarious anyway so why not slag them with this?), The Globe's post-hoc rationalization of the Liberal victory serves to construct a pro-Conservative discourse, albeit in different ways. It is those different ways that interest me and that is what I am addressing in this series of blogs.

Before I do so, however, I should explain what I am trying to do. I am trying to understand, assess, analyse, how conservatives are responding to 2015 and what their project of nation -- their vision of Canada -- entails. How do they approach the issue of constructing an alternative government (one job of an opposition party)? What discourses do they enable that will enhance their position in the public sphere? How do conservatively-minded Canadians respond to progressive Canadians? What do they think is wrong with the country and with public life? In other words, my aim is to do something I might not be good at but this is a blog, after all: assess the discourses of Canadian conservatism using its response to the 2015 election defeat as a case study. In this blog I will back up and look a bit at the nature of conservatism in Canada today before shifting ground in the next blog to look more directly at the Mirror Universe of Conservatism.

Proviso: I am not trying to apologize for anything that the Liberal Party has or might do. I've offered, elsewhere, a critique of Canadian liberalism and I might offer more in the future. What I am interested in is how conservative Canadians -- supporters of the CPC, partisans, contrarians, anti-Liberals, traditionalists, neo-liberals, etc., are responding to the Liberal victory, and responding to something that looks a lot like a victory for a "progressive" vision of Canada. This is important, of course, because it is not just a Liberal victory to which The Globe and Murphy are responding. It was the overwhelming rejection of conservatism ... an ideology that has long had shaky foundations in Canadian public life and which fashioned a government out of the sponsorship scandal, twists of fate, moderated policies, and a particular cultural context.  Canadian conservatism, as I've also noted elsewhere in this blog, has become an odd duck.  At one point in time, it carried forward a fairly solid and cohesive ideology epitomized by the work of George Grant, among others.

This is not really the case anymore. Instead, the party and its supporters are an odd informal coalition of sorts that is guided by a mishmash of ideas that make for something much less than ideological cohesion. Part of this mishmash is the simple fact that even Tories recognize that they will never win election with a straight forward conservative platform. They cannot, for instance, oppose equality for gays and lesbians, consign women to the kitchen, and reverse immigration flows in a Quixotic effort to whiten Canada. They can't really limit women's control over their own bodies (at least they can't in much of the country) and they can't turn back the clock on a range of other reforms -- limiting prayer in schools, for instance -- that they might like. Thus, their policies lack cohesion, on one level, because they can't really speak their policies out loud. Every once in a while a so-called "social conservative" will express disappointment with the CPC and suggest that grave things might happen if the Tories don't respond to conservative evangelical demands, but most of the time even these people realize that they are on the losing side of history (a generous perspective, and one that I'd be inclined to take, might use a different language here and refer to the inherent difficult of fashioning ideologically consistent policies in brokerage parties. Thus, Reform, the old post-1993 PCs, and then the Canadian Alliance might have been more ideologically consistent but ... they had no chance of winning. A 'big tent" politics necessarily means some inconsistency as a party strives to unite disparate electoral communities into a winning party.)

But, another reason that this CPC lacks ideological cohesion is that ... well ... it simply lacks ideological cohesion. The people it attracts often have little in common with each other, a point made by people more in the know than I (I think here of Michael Beheils' review essay in the American Review of Canadian Studies published a number of years ago). The social conservatives who rail against changes in Canadian demographics or gender relations don't have a lot in common with the neoliberal anti-welfare state resource capitalist looking to get Keystone XL up and running. Small town Maritime traditionalists (of which there are fewer than one might think) don't have a great deal in common with free market advocates in the Fraser Institute or Quebec "soft nationalists" concerned about Islam (a minority position in Quebec, I hasten to add!).

What unites these different groups of people is that they all self-identity with a particular part of the political spectrum (the right) and all reject another part of the political spectrum, which they associate with the left, but which actually includes most of the centrist civic nationalism that formed the field of force in Canadian politics from the 1960s through the early years of the 2000s. Exactly what they dislike about it varies. Some don't like its commitment to individualism (which they see as introducing a wimpy "rights talk" and subverting the old fashion "stand on your own two feet" approach to life or which is associated with equality for gays and women and minorities). Some feel that the welfare state makes for bad economics. Some dislike the supposed secularization of Canadian society and what they see as the abrogation of tradition. What these different groups share, then, is not an affinity with each other but an antipathy to liberalism and the Liberal Party.

I'll give you an example: many evangelical social conservatives -- no matter what they might say -- actually have little problem with state involvement in society and the economy. As we've seen, for instance, evangelical universities in Canada (of which there are a few) can make just as much use of state money (not in volume but in the fact that they get it) as secular institutions. Evangelicals, in fact, often call *for* state intervention to limit access to abortion, as one example. Other  conservatives support such matters as income splitting, using the state to lobby foreign governments to import Canadian oil, aggressive foreign policy that includes the use of the military, restrictions on immigration, building new prisons (despite a lowering crime rate), and other like matters. In other words, the issue is *not* opposition to the state, but opposition to what they believe the state does. If it does different things, its OK. But, and this is my point, economic conservatives (neoliberals) might look at some of these things in a very different way and oppose the state on principle. I recall listening to an friend of mine (an economics prof) respond to a business person at a conference we host years ago. The business person was complaining about the limited market in the Maritimes and suggested the government needed to do something about this. My friend said "its not the government's job to find you customers." That is opposition to the state.

The other thing that these groups share is a belief not simply that they are right but that they represent "the people." What do I mean by this? Well, think about it this way: as I noted in my previous blog on Rex Murphy, Murphy distorts Canadian constitutional law, ignores the election act, seems oblivious to history, and seems unaware of how Responsible Government functions let alone Parliament but he does all this in the name defending "the people." The idea that the current government could somehow represent "the people" is rejected by Murphy out of hand. I don't have space to engage Murphy's odd argument but what is interesting is that in his calculus, everyone who did not vote Liberal somehow becomes an opponent of progressive policies, that is: a conservative. (Remember, the issue Murphy is opposing is making the Canadian political system more responsive to the electorate ... that was what he was taking his stand *against* and suggesting that it is a particularly nefarious theft of popular rights.)  It does not matter if you voted Green, NDP, BQ, or Conservative, a vote for any of these parties makes one, ipso facto, on the Conservative side of the ledger, thus Murphy can claim that 60% of Canadians do not support progressive changes designed to enhance democracy.

This is a very odd math, but it makes sense if someone thinks that their own personal views are broadly representative of majority views. (I will confess, as a Green Party supporter, I have never been able to harbour this particular illusion). I've told this story before but I'll give you a personal example. I once found myself at a party in a small Maritime town where I was the only person who believed in gun control. The 20 or so other people at the party (who were all nice enough) found it impossible to believe that a majority of Canadians favoured gun control because everyone they knew did not. They thus ascribed gun control to some soft of elitist lefty plot to rid ordinary folks of their cherished guns. You might have heard similar things from opponents of Syrian refugee ("no one wants them"), of opponents of women's control over their bodies ("no one believes in this"), of equality for gay and lesbian equality, etc.

Such ideological positions are difficult to disentangle, I will confess, and sometimes there is, in fact, a recognition that the views being held are not majority positions. But, at that point, the discourse shifts. I'll simplify to illustrate a point: real Canadians think X. This discourse is disturbing because it draws the type of cultural distinction that made many of us distrust the more radical separatists in Quebec. It seems to work through a discourse that creates perpetual marginalization for some people and rationalizes inequality. There are those of us who are *real* Canadians whose voices should count more than those people who are *not* real Canadians. These unreal Canadians could be ethno-cultural minorities, people of particular political stripe (feminists, for instance), people who speak a particular language other than English at home. The point, of course, is political. This discourse recognizes that conservative views are a minority perspective but explains this away by demoting other views and making them not count.

Why is this important? Am I involved in something other than a rant? I'll answer yes to both questions, I hope. It is important because, for conservative people, it creates a problem. If *real* Canadians are those that share particular views -- say who see refugees as a threat and want to exclude them or who feel women should be the primary cooks in a family or who oppose celebrations of holidays other than Christian -- then the 2015 election creates a particular problem, doesn't it? The vote did not go the way it was supposed to go. There is no way to disguise the fact that only about 30% of  Canadians voted  the way they should. That means that real Canadians are outnumbered 2:1 by unreal Canadians or ... it mean something else.

Likewise, economic conservatives -- people at The Globe, for example (neoliberals) -- need to explain why their ideas did not carry the day. I won't go through this thought exercise again because the point is obvious, but you can see where I would go. The punchline: if all good and real Canadians (perhaps those knowledgeable about the economy) support a neoliberal economic order ... how do we explain 2015?

The Mirror Universe -- to which I will turn more fully in my next blog -- is one answer.

Anger and Public Life: Or, Attack Ads as Cultural Artifact

I recently tried to argue that one thing that had changed in the recent Canadian federal election was the tone of public discourse. The Conservatives who -- for right or wrong -- had mastered Bush II era negative advertising techniques in Canada took a hit by not recognizing that times had changed. Even before the election had officially been called, the CPC rolled out their usual panoply of negativity -- which had been used to effect in previous elections -- but ... nothing happened. The Tories could not gain any traction and, for one reason or another, voters shifted over the Liberals -- whose leader was under near continual Conservative attack.

There could be a number of reasons why negative attack adverts did not work this time. It could be that people simply did not believe them because they held a different view of Trudeau. It could be that a significant chunk of voters were simply so interested in getting rid of Harper that they were willing to vote for whomever, regardless of public discourse, under a "lesser evil"-type of approach to public life. It could be that the adverts backfired and actually drew attention to the Liberals and their leaders. All of  these things likely played some role in the process of Conservative defeat, but in a previous blog I argued that Canadians were moving beyond negative advertising and hence, the adverts missed their market.  Should I re-think my assessment? Have I spoken too quickly? I tried to argue that Canadians moving beyond negative advertising was a "good news story" that gave us -- along with some other things -- more reasons for optimism in Canadian public life than we have had in some time. But, am I right or ... might not such an assertion require more explanation?

One thing to look at might be the character of public discourse.  "Back in the day" -- that is, when I was an undergrad, one of my profs introduced the concept of the "spirit of the age" (zeitgeist) and argued that it just was. One could recognize that culture had shifted (one way or the other) but it was impossible to explain. One could just detail that it happened but historians -- he was a history prof -- should remain silent on cause because they would not be able to find it.

Even then I did not like that explanation, the way we might say it now is like this: Canadians in the recent past responded to negative advertising because they were angry. They didn't, in 2015, because the "sunny ways" promised by the Liberals captured a more optimistic, upbeat Canada. In other words, the spirit of the age had changed and the Liberals benefit from it, in the same way that the Tories had previously benefitted from people's anger. One might not agree with this type of explanation but we have all heard explanations like this. For instance, after 9/11 "people were scared." Or, "people don't like change." Or, "people think it is time for a change." Etc.

There is, of course, a serious problem with this way of thinking, likely more than one but let's focus on one right now. There is no "spirit of the age," as it were, because culture is not a seamless whole. Instead, it is a fractured, fragmented, self-contradictory, and contested. We have, for instance, lived through a time  of remarkable technological achievement but that achievement has spawned both advocates and opponents.  In the past, the Industrial Revolution spawned Romanticism and, in Canada, the Group of Seven and back-to-the-land movements.  Equality between different ethnic groups in the US has spawned both amazing developments in mass media, athletics, the arts, etc., but also indignant disregard of Black lives. In Canada, today, respect for Original Peoples sits side-by-side with indifferent to MMIW; respect for the environment (something some might see as built into Canadian culture) is an odd bedfellow with the Tar Sands.

Thus, there is no singular spirit of the age. Canadians have not passed through an "angry age" to "sunny ways." Instead, some Canadians have been angry (and, some political figures played to this anger and perhaps inflamed it); while other Canadians are more optimistic or believe that optimism is warranted with the right approach to public life: negotiation, common cause, mutual support can replaced confrontation and antagonism if we ditch the needless confrontation and antagonism (this is, after all, 2015!).

The question, then, is -- or, was --  not an angry culture but who is angry and why? Or, to draw this back to my theme:  to whom did attack adverts appeal and why? Why did they stop appealing or to whom did they stop appealing and why?

I suspect that the number of people to whom attack adverts appealed is actually pretty low. I think those people are there, but I think their numbers were made to seem artificially inflated by the odd electoral circumstances in which Canada found itself in the federal elections of 2006, 2008 and 2011, where a significant number of middle-class suburbanites -- people who had spent most of their lives voting Liberal (or, occasionally, NDP, or very occasionally PC with an emphasis on the P) -- voted CPC. Said differently, they were disaffected Liberals who could not vote Liberal (for whatever reason) but had not dramatically shifted away from their personal or class views.  Negative advertising may have cemented their support in those elections for the Tories but it did not cement their attachment to the party or to conservatism, as an ideology.  They were swayed by negative advertising but their views had not been changed.

I also suspect that there were others, however, for whom negative advertising -- or the negative adverts that they saw -- were something other (and, more) than a political strategy.  I suspect that the views they articulated really represented deep-seated views and it is to these people, I think, that we need to turn our attention if we want to understand the negative anger of that time because these people really were, it seems to me, angry and negatively so. Who were these people? There seems to have been several distinct groups:

1. Alienated westerners: supporters of the old Social Credit, some former PCs, Reformers and member of the Canadian Alliance (or, perhaps, if we were to back far enough we might find routes in the Western Canada Concept). Western alienation is still discussed in the news  but its changed and the news, in fact, has a very poor handle on it. The  character and nature of the anger, the sense of being pillaged by the "rest of Canada," the sense of being disrespected and being outsiders in their own home, as it were, was a very real feeling that we cannot just chock up to some sort of zeitgeist. It had real roots and real causes.

2. Oddly ... self-identifying evangelical Christians. Not all, but there were an oddly large number (of a much smaller group in Canada than in the US) who were angry. The character and nature of this anger, I suspect, has little to do with Christianity. But, there are Christians who clearly have felt outside the loop, a sense that the world is not unfolding the way they think it should, and that if not their position than that of their religion is in trouble. They are angry at women's rights, equality for gays and lesbians, Sunday shopping, increased respect for non-Christian religions combined with decreased respect for Christianity, and any number of other things.

3. Professional anger mongers. These are far more common in the US, where there is -- apparently -- a lot of money to be made by being angry. The Fox-News continually angry talk-show hosts cum semi-sort-of-journalist crew ... does not really exist in Canada. In fact, those right wing Canadians who want to be this kind of person might be better off heading south of the border after the failure of Sun TV, or whatever it was called, last year (I think). Professional anger mongers sell a product: righteous indignation. They also sell a political messages: moderates, liberals, leftists ... heck, anyone but conservatives, are rotten hypocrites who irrationally hate the nation. Said differently, this is anger directed to political purpose. It is designed to discredit particular political perspectives and serves to reinforce that discrediting by increasing the level of emotion. I'm not certain if professional anger mongers are really angry or they are putting on an act. I suspect, its 50/50; some are and some are not. The key, however, is that these are people who are already angry. Anger is their "go to" position.

4. But ... this is a small group. To whom are they speaking? And, this is where I start to run into trouble because, it turns out, that group number 3 does have a bit an audience and that audience are also people who seem to be ready to be angry. What are they angry at? Well, all matter of things. If western alienation could be mobilized against Stefan Dion's carbon tax; anger at Muslims -- and, particularly women who wear Niqabs -- is another question. This is anger that is not regionalized. Indeed, this is one of the things that we might note as a "take away" from the last election, the "Harper Government's" war on those who oppose the Tar Sands failed. It might have, ultimately, secured a few votes in AB and SK, but even here the CPC fortress was shaking. The message -- mobilize anger against premiers who oppose Keystone -- fell flat except with those who were already pre-disposed to it. There were no new votes to be won here.

Likewise, I don't think the Tories scooped up any new votes with their attacks on Muslim women. It possible it got them a few extra votes here and there but the polls don't suggest that because most people who were pre-disposed to this message were already voting Tory. Same too with the anti-terrorism thing.

This does not, of course, answer the question. But, it helps a bit. The anger that the Tories mobilized seemed to be hit its mark (even though that mark was far more limited than they thought) when they went after visible signs of diversity. My guess is that this anger was primarily working class, overwhelmingly white, and largely -- but not exclusively -- male. When I did have the opportunity to talk to some of these people, I asked them directly "why are you angry?" Their answers were pretty consistent: person X (Muslim woman) is trying to get something for nothing, disrespecting "our" traditions, illustrating that they are not "loyal" to Canada, etc. In other words, their anger was animated by a sense that the world they knew was being undone and that someone else -- someone who they identified as an outsider -- was getting preferential treatment.

Now, I hasten to add that I am not agreeing with any of this. There is clearly much more than an implicit racism in these contentions. They lack historical perspective, claim the right to define the nation, are empirically problematic, fail to reflect on white privilege, among other things.

I will also confess that I still find this anger -- this vindictive -- odd. It can be so harsh, so powerful, so immune to reason that it becomes the antithesis of reason and discussion. It is about reinforcing views that were already held; not defending or explaining those views.  It struck me in talking to people who held these views that their minds were made up. They did not want to discuss. If I disagreed with them -- if I said a good word about Niqab or spoke of women's right to determine their own dress -- I was almost instantly subjected to the same anger. How could I say such things ... ? Didn't I know that ... ?   I must be a ... (liberal was the usual word that was used here)! It struck me in these not-conversations that these people -- at least the ones to whom I spoke -- had been angry for some time. They were rehearsing statements they had made many times, heard others make, and that had received support from their friends and family.  Anger -- at least at diversity -- had become a "go to" position for them that was unquestioned.

There is more to this, but I'll leave off this discussion now because it is already too long. I might return to it because there are unaddressed issues but I still maintain my optimism. Yes, there is a lot of anger "out there" but ... it did not rule the day and, right now at least, likely cannot. Some of that anger in the past reflected real processes -- regional marginalization -- and should be treated seriously. Others, well ... they represent the odd conjuncture of political opportunism, the consumerism of anger (its transformation into a commodity), and race-based class politics.