Is American Conservatism Possible, or can there be a post Trump Republican Party

I suspect not. American conservatism has long been problematic. Trumpism represents its most extreme form and it is a form that millions of American find alluring, if for no other reason that in its utter simplicity. Perhaps in recognition of this, a range of former (and some current) Republicans from previous administrations (and some from Trump's own government) are meeting to see if a new party is a viable alternative. I suspect it isn't, but you can find some information on this here. There are several points to consider.

First, we should not have any nostalgia for the old pre-Trump Republican party. That party was more than willing to make veiled allusions and play off the racist fears of white suburbanites and cosy up to homophobic Evangelical Christians in order to win elections. The coalition that Buchanan and Nixon began to forge in the 1960s (the "southern strategy") constitutes a significant part of the Republican Party today and they show no signs of going anywhere. Biden's tactics, as Mike Davis has noted, were predicated on imperfectly winning back sections of the Democratic vote that had abandoned Clinton.  The Democrats did take steps to broaden their own coalition and draw in new voters, but it did little to shake the Republican base of support, which one could argue is stronger than ever before. 

In this regard, the nostalgia that we hear about American conservatism (particularly on MSNBC) really is looking at the past through rose coloured glasses. Before anyone embraces the idea that there is a real, genuine American conservatism to which the Republicans can return they should pause and think about the corruption of the Nixon administration, the race-baiting assaults on "welfare moms" and women's rights of the Reagan years, the foreign policy adventurism of Bush, Jr., that shrugged off multilaterialist alternatives and engineered wars that led of the rise of ISIS. One should recall that tax cuts to large corporations have long been part of the Republican play book as has opposition to Roe V Wade and rejection of policies designed to promote equity, and opposition to equality for the LGBTQ community.  This is not to explain where Trumpism came from but it is to ask a question: if you reject Trump and you can't go back to a conservative innocent age, what will American conservatism look like and who will actually support it? 

This is a problem for conservatism which, by definition, looks to the past. There can be good reasons for that and I'll try to spell some of those out in another post. But, the problem is that that past -- as it is constituted as part of a Republican political history -- carries with it a heavy burden in the sense that it leads to Trumpism. At the least it is marred by its willingness to encourage intolerance and play on racist fears as part of its political strategies. 

Second, even if a new conservatism were possible, it would be seriously held back by their inability to get their message to voters. One of the things that has changed in the US with regard to politics is the politicization of the media.  This is not new but it is odd. The new media environment in which we live was supposed to encourage debate and discussion through diversity. It has not done that. Instead, what has happened is that a modest number of platforms dominant public discussion. Some are better than others, to be sure. No one watches FOX News thinking that they will get an unbiased perspective. The problem for a new conservatism is that it is (1) shut out of this media market, (2) that the platforms and networks that would give them air time (say MSNBC) are not connected to their potential voters, and (3) they will be subjected to on-going regular attacks from both media outlets like FOX and from evangelical churches. 

Third, a new conservative party will need to find a way to finance itself and while it might, initially, attract some media attention with some big donors, it would need to build a party infrastructure from scratch and that is both expensive and not easy to do. One of the advantages Trumpism has is that it can count on a dedicated body of workers who will volunteer their time. The people who encourage their neighbours to vote Republican, go door to door, donate to local campaigns, etc., will be lacking for this new party. What the new party has, right now, is a series of top level activists. This attracts news coverage (seasoned important Republicans leaving party!), but that has been going on since Trump took over the Republican Party.  It makes news but it does not make a new political party.  Canada is an example: Reform and the BQ initially succeeded not because they had high profile figures (although the BQ did, and Reform, too, but perhaps less so) but because they tapped into grassroots discontent (whether one agrees or disagrees with the discontent) and mobilize volunteers and enthusiastic supporters who joined those parties for their own reasons. 

Is there an enthusiastic body of supporters for a new conservative political party in the US? There might be but, to be honest, I don't see it. In fact, I see a lot of people who are (for a range of reason that have been aptly and seriously discussed by others) who are happy with the Republican Party the way it is. I was watching a group of Republicans condemn Liz Cheney. They seemed fully and deeply committed to the Trumpist direction and had little interest in Cheney, a name brand conservative figure who might, for instance, be a poster person for a new conservative party.  I doubt she would win her seat running for a new conservative party. 

I don't know what the future holds for the Republican Party. But, I don't really see it being successfully challenged by a moderate conservatism for control of the right-wing of the American political spectrum. At the very least, I don't think Democrats should hold their breathe on vote splitting as an electoral strategy. If Trumpism is to be driven back, it will have to be driven back by the Democratic Party. In fact, there might actually be a danger for the Democrats in a moderate conservative party.  Its most likely voters are moderate centrist independents and Democrats. If enough of those people deserted the Democratic party (and it would not take many in a small number of states), Trumpism is back in power.

The Same Old Same Old: Or, the Politics of a Stalled Modernity

Doug Ford is now premier of Ontario and wants to roll back sex ed, limit education on Indigenous issues, and enhance the development of the northern Ontario natural resources industry. Donald Trump's popularity does not seem to be on the wane. We are having some sort of semi-debate about Canada's role in the world ... but not really. The US government wants allies to increase military spending and is, at least from the headlines, worried about Russian influence in Europe. A trade war looms, is averted, looms again ....

Have we seen this all before? As I watched the PC media guy stick to his talking points on the news and listened to Ford explain that he was ditching cap and trade so as to put money back in people's wallets, the idea that we have heard all this before -- that we have had these debates before -- was nearly complete. Said differently, our politics have become stalled, or at least ... sort of. What does this stalled politics tell us?

It likely tells us several things but let's try to keep focused on a few issues rather than a bunch that can confuse the matter by drawing examples from all over the place. Let's also do our best to limit our geography. I'm not convinced that the issues are precisely the same in, say, Hungary as they are in the United States, as they are in Canada. There are similarities, to be sure, but there also seem to be several different processes at work. Moreover, as I've said in other blogs, the approach I like to take is one of trying to understand verses trying to castigate. A progressive politics, it seems to me, cannot simply content itself with a point and shout approach, a matter I'll address in the future. Instead, it needs to understand and respond. It either has something to offer that will make things better or it does not. We can think about what those things might be another time. For now, let us assume that it does, a big assumption, I recognize for those who reject progressive thinking and politics. Explaining why there is progress, however, is something that requires much more time that I have in this blog.

So, what does the stall of contemporary politics tell us? To begin, let me highlight two interrelated points:

First, it tells us that a great number of people were never reconciled to the equality politics of the last generation.  It tells us that they rejected things like racialized equality, Indigenous rights, gender equality, and acceptance of LGBTQi identities and subjectivities.  We can likely narrow this down and speculate about the demographics of those who have not reconciled to equality politics, but I don't have the data at hand. What we can see from the political discourse, however, is that equality politics is often presented by those who oppose it as a huge waste of money. Environmental protection is the seen in the same way.

Is this simply ignorance? Is it bigotry? Is it an economic squeeze on the middle and working classes?  Likely all of these factors play some sort of role in this but there also seems to be a role for socialization, as well.  Why do I say this: because the idea that equality politics has (a) failed and (b) produced perverse effects, and (c) costs too much ...  is treated as simply a matter of fact. It is something that requires no proof and no evidence. In fact, while the opponents of equality spend a great deal of time talking about its failures and its costs, they often provide only anecdotal evidence and offer no costing.  The PC's failure in Ontario, for example, to cost their policies in the run-up the election is a case in point.

I had a similar experience a couple of years ago in one of my courses. As I was discussing gendered inequality and its contemporary patterns, a number of male students objected to this discussion and claimed that there was no such thing as gendered inequality. I pointed to evidence from Stats Canada, showing income inequality and found that the students completely rejected it.

Years ago, I had a similar experience in a similar type of situation. Much has changed, of course, in terms of patterns of gendered relations in twenty years, but I recall a male student explaining that he simply did not accept the idea. I asked him, I recall, what evidence I could provide that would allow him to accept the idea that there was inequality and that gender was an important axes of understanding. My goal might have been overconfident but my intention was to provide that evidence and then move on to the discussion at hand so as to not slow down the class. He replied "none." And, then stated that he simply did not believe it be the case. I recall then, as in the more recent case, that I did not know what to say. I had university level students in front of me who were so certain of their views that they told me nothing -- no evidence -- could dissuade them of their views.

In the US, this rejection of equality politics takes on different forms than Canada. It takes on opposition to groups like, say, Black Lives Matters, and the politicized distortion of their message or support for a wall across the southern US border. In Canada, its politics are less evident than in the US, but is notable in Islamophobia, opposition to Indigenous/Settler reconciliation, and concerns about sex education in the schools in Ontario which are supposedly blamed for ... what? I don't know but there is some sort of idea that having kids learn about sex, about sexual differences, and about LGBTQi issues will somehow be bad and is an infringement on parents right to control what their kids learn.

And this, just about, bring us full circle. I would be surprised if this were an accident: that what people object to is an education that teaches that sexual diversity is OK. They object, I think, to both the idea of teaching this and the idea that someone other than they themselves will educate their kids on this matter.

Likewise, the canceling of education programs regarding reconciliation between Indigenous people and Canada is seen as too expensive. Or, a waste of money. In effect, this position states that we will not provide an education to kids on this issue but leave it up to processes of socialization (among family, friends, peer groups, churches) to educate on this issue.

Second, in terms of demographics, we need to be clear that this view is not the majority view. It speaks in the name of the majority, but isn't. After his election, Doug Ford, or someone close to him, said something like "we have reclaimed our province." This statement says a lot. It says that it views the proponent of non-conservative politics as illegitimate and, in particular, it views itself as the rightful "owners" of the province. Claims made by others -- diversity groups, for example -- are seen as alien or foreign, illegitimate. Clearly this is a violation of a basic principle of democracy but it speaks to a demographic that views itself as the people who rightly "own" a province or a country.

I suspect something similar goes on with Trump's supporters south of the border or with the anti-EU vote in Britain. In Canada, the key point is that majorities are hard to come by. The question, then, is how does a group of people who are not the majority gain political power? Trump and Ford supporters seem to have an answer, even if they don't come out and stay it: conspiracy, deep state, corruption.  In the US, this was what fuelled the "crooked Hilary" discourse. The idea that a liberal-minded woman could potentially be elected was so disturbing to some people that they issued a pre-emptive strike: the only way she could win was by corruption. The birther campaign against Obama is another example.  The supposed reclaiming of Ontario is another.

I want to clear: I don't think a progressive mirror image of this view gets our analysis very far. The "Russia conspiracy" is an example, I think (even if I think I understand the politics behind it). But, it does not help advance our understanding of the issues at play. In the US, for instance, Trump was elected with one of the most significant minorities in American history. In Canada, the single member plurality system has long been know to distort politics. One needs secure only about 40% of the vote to win and perhaps not even that.

In conclusion: we can put these two points together. The first thing that the stalled politics of modernity tells us is that a sizeable body of contemporary society has never reconciled to the politics of equality and that this group views itself -- and you can see the tie to the opposition to equality -- as the legitimate "owners" of public life. They continue to exercise appreciable political power and their leaders are looking to find ways to roll back, as it were, time.

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.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield: Bigotry and Conservatism

As the CPC and its intellectual allies grapple with their defeat, they have a number of options, two of which I have already highlighted. It appears that the Parliamentary caucus is ambiguously settling on a Tea Party like opposition mode, which is  both their right and their job ... in some ways. I'd advice them against it because even though it will play well with their base, I'm skeptical that it will play well with the rest of the country. I'm sure, of course, that this is not their only plan. I'm sure they have already worked out the details of a multi-pronged oppositional strategy that includes their own efforts to re-brand progressive policies in a negative way that casts them as political manipulation or corruption, in the same way that Republicans in the US seem to have convinced a large section of the US population that health care is actually not good for you and the US Government is evil for providing it.

Where the Conservatives run into problems, however, is in the loose mishmash that makes up their party. All political parties have core supporters. One becomes concerned about a party and its future only when -- or, well, seriously concerned -- you start to lose your core supporters. That is: the people who have hung in there, voted for you, put signs on their lawns, donated, come to meetings (or, perhaps protests), encouraged friends and family to turn out, etc. This core group is what carries a party through opposition or a minority position in Parliament or the legislature. One's core group is, by definition, not amenable to much change (hence, the term "core").  They are not easily swayed by the shifting winds of politics. They may or may not be a party members (my grandfather, for instance, was an on-again-off-again member of the PCs here in NB but whether or not he was officially a member, he always voted Tory) but that is less important than their votes and support.

When there is a shift in core supporters, that signals a wide change in what political scientists call "the party system." For instance, the demise of Social Credit in Alberta and the rise of the PC dynasty was such a shift ... of sorts. Likewise, the collapse of the Conservatives and, for a while, Liberals in BC (replaced by SoCred and CCF-NDP) is another example. And, a third might be the demise of the old PC party federally which, for a while, left the Liberals without any serious challenger as a national political party. Instead, the Liberals fought a series of regionalized battles against other parties (NDP and PC in the Atlantic, BQ in QC, Reform and then CA in the west).  Reform and the Bloc sucked away core PC supporters in their regions of the country, forcing the demise of the PCs as a viable political alternative.

Viability, as you can tell, is a key issue. Parties and independents periodically win local elections for a variety of reasons that can include the popularity of local candidates, the temporary demise of another political party (say, CoR's brief foray into NB politics), or isolated and localized support among a relatively small core group (Quebec solidaire in QC and the Greens in PEI, NB, and BC might be examples). But, viability means something other than winning a seat or a few seats. Joe Clark and Jean Charest no doubt helped win a few seats here and their for the old PCs as they struggled on after the 1993 debacle. But, that did not make the party viable as a national alternative to the Liberals because they had lost core support in QC and the west. To be a viable political party, you need to have people who you can count on to turn out and vote for you, sign your petitions, donate money, come to events, etc., time after time after time. This is what differentiates parties that have a brief moment in the sun (Bloc populaire, Cape Breton Labour, PANB ... well, almost) from even smaller parties with a core group of supporters.  Without this group, the party will disappear.

What does this have to do with the Conservatives and with bigotry? Or, even with my oblique Star Trek reference in the title of this blog? Bigotry is a dilemma for the conservatives and highlights, in fact, the problems of that party (all parties, of course, have problems). The CPC wants and needs the support of people who call themselves "social conservatives," or "traditionalists" or even "real Canadians." If it is going to win, it needs those votes. It needs the votes of people who want to ban the niquab, who want to restrict immigration, who would -- if they could -- turn back the clock on gay and lesbian equality, who want to find ways to limit women's control of their bodies, and who want to ignore environmental problems because deep down they don't really believe that there are environmental problems (its all exaggerated, etc.). Now, I hasten to add that I am not accusing anyone in the CPC or its Parliamentary caucus of holding such views. Truth is, I've not looked up all these people and likely will not since its not on point to the point I am making (and, would be incredibly time consuming).  What is on point is that these people (a) don't vote Liberal or NDP or Green and (b) have found a home over the years in various conservatives parties. The old Reform Party, you will remember, had a serious problem with bigotry when it started out (Preston Manning used the metaphor of finding bugs when you  turn over rocks to explain this away). They find their home there because (a) the conservatives recognize that they need these votes, (b) seem to share *some* of these views (Harper, as well know, encouraged Islamophobia through his bizarre campaign against the niquab, or at least what The Globe found bizarre -- see previous blog), and (c) other parties clearly will not have them (racists, I am guessing, would be quickly forced out of the NDP and Green Parties and I assume would be told to go away in the Liberal Party as well).

The problem with this group of people and their views is not that they have them or that they vote Conservative but that having them and having them in the CPC creates problems for other voters. More exactly, it creates problems attracting other voters. I met Reformers -- and CoR members! -- who just could not understand why their anti-Francophone rhetoric stopped French Canadians from voting for them. Just another sign, I recall one person say, of the problems with French Canadians. But, more astute conservative politicians understand the problem right away. I'll go out on a limb and state this bluntly: most Canadians don't agree with bigotry, most believe in equality, and most think that the state should not tell individuals what to do with their bodies (that is, that the regulation of the body should be as limited as possible). Most, it appears, want to help Syrian refugees; most believe that climate change is a problem, and most embrace diversity. What "most" means is fluid, but you get my drift. By themselves, the core group of CPC voters is a minority (larger than we might like but smaller than that core believes), not large enough to win elections -- except in unusual circumstances -- and the views of their core supporters drive away other potential voters who just cannot accept the views of core Tories.

One lesson of the 2015 election for Tories (whether they want to learn it or not) is precisely the above: core voters can stand behind you and be energized by your campaign, say the anti-niquab, but ... well ... its not a winning formula. In fact, its a recipe for defeat.

Over the years, conservative parties have tried a range of approaches to address this problem. The old Red Tories, for instance, in Canada simply exiled the bigots (this was Stanfield's approach, at least): you might have support but you are no longer welcome in our party. This is a principled and ethical stand. Others have simply accepted the fact of their eventual demise (CoR), perhaps railing against it but not really contesting elections. Some have accepted their place on the fringe (say, Christian Heritage), because they believe a bigger principle is at stake. The approach of Reform, the CA, and then CPC, however, was different. It tried to keep these votes but silence the voters.

Now, I've overstated that point. I don't think -- to give him his due -- Preston Manning  tried to silence anyone and Stockwell Day was incapable of silencing dissidents in his own party. The issue was not censorship but an effort to keep people who hold particular views quiet while disavowing their statements or chocking it up to internal debate, free speech, a "lone wolf," etc. Harper, for instance, did not impede discussion of anti-abortion laws but he simply said that the CPC under his watch would not bring forward such legislation (even if members of his party might support a private members bill ... that was their business).

Another strategy has been to try to recast particular views as good and noble and consistent with the best conceptions of freedom and democracy. Thus, Harper avoided actually talking about the fact that his campaign against the niquab was an instance of him -- as PM -- telling women what they could and could not wear. In this way, a policy aimed at limiting the rights of an incredibly small minority group was transformed into a campaign for women's freedom, an anti-Islamic stance was made to sound like "freedom of religion." Harper said that no women should be made to cover her face but the irony -- that he was involved in precisely the same activity (telling women how they should dress and threatening to make it a matter of law) -- seemed to be lost in the shuffle. Likewise, the opponents of gay marriage went to incredibly length to explain that they were not bigoted but merely "defending the family" (even though equality was not a threat and that there other important concerns -- say, daycare -- that should have been addressed if one really was concerned about the family).

The final strategy is trans-formative as well, but in a different way. It involves arguing that the issue that is being discussed is not actually the issue that is important. For example, conservative apologists tell us that they are not defending bigotry which, they assure us, they themselves oppose. But, they also reject "censorship" because it is a greater problem and so must, reluctantly they assure us, support the "rights" of bigots to campaign publicly to subvert the very rights they claim to uphold. (In fact, a few years ago we saw an odd group called "Journalists for Free Speech," or something like that, argue that if they were not allowed to stage offensive and racist public lectures on someone else's private property -- that is, on the property of a private institution, meaning that they were arguing that even private institutions should be forced to accept racist lectures; they have no free choice or ability to control themselves -- censorship was occurring!) It is an odd circular reasoning, to be sure, but the key problem is that it creates a stalking horse. It makes it seem like free speech is somehow under threat in Canada when the only threat that has really reared its head in recent years is the Conservative federal government itself.

There is a real problem, of course, with this reconstruction of bigoted views as somehow about democracy, freedom, etc. Well, likely more than one but one on which I will comment right now: what happens is that bigotry is given the veneer of respectability. Indeed, the CPC helps to create arguments that seem to make some level of intellectual sense (see my blog on the idea of a referendum) or which seem to be about higher principles, as opposed to the crass views they dress up. In this way, the CPC, may, in fact, be helping to perpetuate views that otherwise would be consigned to the margins as inconsistent with freedom and democracy. For instance, if the government came out and said "we are prejudiced against Mexicans and so are going to introduce new rules that make their entry into the country more difficult" ... well ... most Canadians would have pause. But, if we dress this up as "illegal immigration" or a "security threat" ... well, we have something else (because we all know that there is no way a Mexican got to Canada, legally, right?). After Harper began his anti-niquab campaign I heard more people who had never given a fig about women's rights -- and, to the best of my knowledge still don't -- talk as if they were defending women's rights. Ideally, of course, women's rights could be best defended by keeping "them" (aka niquab-wearing women) out, too.

To say this in different words: the CPC tries to walk a thin line. It does not want to lose votes it know it needs but it does not want the views of those voters to dominate party policy or scare off other potential voters that it also needs. This is the dilemma and the electoral implications of it. To avoid this dilemma, the party adopts a number of strategies that includes asking party members to stay silent (with, one presumes, the promise that something will be done in the future), transforming the issue from what it is into a point of principles (this is not about Islam, its about ... women's rights!), or distracting attention from the matter at hand by claiming that a greater issue is at stake (I'm not a bigot but I won't stand for censorship). The effect is twofold. First, the CPC has to deal with views that, sooner or later, come home to roost. Sooner or later, someone in the party will make manifest what it has been trying to keep silent, as Harper himself did in the last federal election. Second, the CPC becomes complicit in the perpetuation of bigotry. Its dilemma, in this way, feeds into and becomes another dilemma, but for all of Canada, and not just it.

Shattered Mirror: Conservative Economics and Counterfactual History

The mirror universe alternative history of the 2015 election, then, runs something like this: the Harper Tories had a justly and accurately winning record if they had just stuck to the economy and ditched all the other stuff for which they became know (culture wars, anti-rights, Islamophobia, opposition to democracy, etc.). Here is how The Globe (in the piece I cited in a previous blog) puts it:

The key issue of the election should have been the economy and the financial health of Canadians. On that score, the Conservative Party has a solid record. Hardly perfect but, relatively speaking, better than most. However, the election turned into a contest over something else: a referendum on the government’s meanness, its secretiveness, its centralization of power in the most centralized Prime Minister’s Office in history, its endless quest for ever more obscure wedge issues, and its proclivity for starting culture wars rather than sticking to the knitting of sound economic and fiscal stewardship. It turned this election into a referendum on the one-man show that has become the Harper government.

In an election about the economy, the Conservatives might have won, and would have deserved to. But thanks to the Harper government’s own choices, this election has mostly not been fought on the Conservative Party’s strong suit. Attention has instead been turned to the rotten culture of Mr. Harper’s government.

The same op-ed suggests that the Liberals and NDP had simply absorbed the Conservatives economic policies (which, if true, really begs the question of why one needs the CPC to win if one is, like The Globe, only interested in economic issues, but I'll leave that to your imagination). It then goes on to slag Trudeau as a pretty boy, the Liberals as a party without policy other than what they stole from the Tories, and to reiterate its point: Harper had to go because his neo-con sideshow had become the problem. So, ipso facto, on two counts, Canada still has a Tory government, either (a) through Liberal cribbed policies or (b) because good sense Canadians would have embraced the good Tory record if they had just ... well ... not been Tories.

My intention, as I explained in a previous blog, is not to slag conservatives or support anyone else. It is to look at how conservatives are responding to electoral defeat. My argument is that they are responding in no one way because the party itself is a mishmash of different perspectives, but all the ways involve some measure of distortion that goes beyond "putting a good face on a bad situation." It involves, as I intimated in a previous blog, living in the equivalent of a Star Trek Mirror Universe.  I'm not certain what perspective Rex Murphy represents, but The Globe is clearly neoliberalism looking to assure us that neoliberalism is (a) good, (b) has a good track record, and (c) what good ordinary Canadians want (and, thus has both a good sense and a democratic sanction, in case you missed the "finer" points).

There are, of course, a host of problems with this alternative history. The Conservative economic record is, in fact, not particularly good. They made bad decisions at the beginning of the recession and reversed them only when they thought they would lose power (suggesting that they were making those decisions for a reason other than a commitment to the national economy ... but, again, I'll leave that off). They wasted resources needlessly on partisan spending, engaged in a costly aggressive foreign policy that accomplished next to nothing, and put all the national economic eggs in the Tar Sands basket ... the results of which are now evident to anyone who has tried to buy something online from the US. In short, Tory economic policy was shaky at best, produced needless -- as in it served no useful economic purpose -- debt, and created an intensely problematic (both economically and ethically) resource dependency (I noted before that this was the message of the Alberta provincial election that the Tories did not get: Albertans recognized the problems of economic resource dependency and voted NDP not because they suddenly turned lefty but because the NDP was the only party that was talking seriously about diversification).

What you will notice about The Globe's narrative, however, is the way it avoids all these issues by simply ignoring history. The past is, in effect, addressed simply in a single sentence that runs like this Conservative = good economics. What you will notice is that this point is taken for granted and never explained. There is no significant analysis; no facts; no discussion of national debt, no discussion of Canada's relative HDI, no discussion of standards of living. I wrote a blog on this point years ago, but I'll say it again: the historical record simply does not back up the position that Conservatives are better managers of the economy than moderate centrists (Liberals) or even lefties. (If you are interested in more discussion of this issue from someone other than me: look here and here and here.) The point, of course, is not to refute The Globe point-by-point, but to suggest that Conservative economic policy is not a black and white, good v everyone else bad, issue. Its complicated and requires some degree of nuance that looks at things like mismanagement, standards of living, spending patterns, etc., the future it laid out. In fact, from this op-ed, we don't even know what The Globe means by a good economic record since they never explained it. They simply asserted it was good. Was it good in terms of employment? working hours? diversification? skill development?

I am not trying to suggest that a single op-ed changes the world because it doesn't. I am trying to use it as an example that illustrates a core point.  The narrative of sound Conservative economic management is asserted and taken for granted in the complete absence of any serious discussion of the economy. Look at the piece again, if you doubt me. Hence, what we have is an assertion that the Conservatives are good at something and that something is important -- perhaps vitally important -- for the nation. In fact, it is so important others copy it but we won't actually tell you what it is or give any evidence to support what we are saying. Now, if we were talking about just about anything other than Conservative economic management ... would you accept this point on the basis of what you've been given?

What is equally disconcerting is the fact that The Globe seems to think that one can easily separate out CPC economic and cultural policies. The Globe holds out hope that the CPC will again become a progressive political party that manages the economy well while adopting liberal values that embrace social progressivism. If that is what you want ... why would anyone vote CPC? In fact, that is a distortion of the CPC.  Think about this ... if the Conservatives embraced liberal reform, dropped their opposition to Islam, embraced diversity, side up with gay and lesbian equality, agree that women should control their own bodies, remove restriction on scientists, stopped mobility discrimination against Mexicans, and encouraged democracy ... would they be Conservatives any longer? I know a number of people who voted Conservative. None of them voted that way because of Harper's sterling economic record. To a one they think the Liberals (or, more exactly "Justin") will be bad for the economy but that did not colour their vote. Opposition to Islam, the perceived need for an aggressive foreign policy, concern about diversity, worries about feminism, etc. did. To a one, everyone I know who voted Conservative did so for cultural -- and not economic -- reasons.

The Globe's discourse -- as an example of Conservative discourse -- enters into something that is more than a bit of a fantasy land. It reconstructs the Conservative Party at the same time that it reconstructs (by ignoring) history. It would have us believe that the CPC (a) would have won but for Harper's misguided policies that were (b) not necessary to conservatism. In other words, Harper alone bears the burden of the electoral defeat: an odd man who refused, according to this op-ed, to stop engaging in problematic behaviour and policies. This, of course, simply ignores the fact that Harper's oddities reflect conservative views in Canadian society (not of all Canadians, but of a good chunk of them). We can dislike these policies. I do. But, 30%+ of Canadians voted for him and that says something. (For a fuller discussion of the electoral ramifications of this ... see my next blog.)

What is equally confusing about this op-ed is its odd disregard for Canadians. The fact that Canadians stated that they did not want the Tories back in office in overwhelming numbers is not ignored but it is downplayed. The almost seven of ten Canadians who elected a progressive alternative are not discussed nor is their reason for their voting this way discussed. It is, instead, assumed that they voted this way -- for "progressive" alternatives -- purely out of a dislike of Harper.

Is that true? I suspect not. A lot of people disliked Harper (and, according to The Globe, with good reason) but why? I'd argue that it was, in some measure, a rejection not just of Harper but of what Harper symbolized: a political project in which the majority of Canadians could not see themselves and which did not represent their vision of the future or the country. Said differently, I think we should allow some value to the stated wishes of the about 70% of Canadians who thought they were voting for a progressive political option. That thought -- whether or not the Liberal Party meets those expectations -- means something too, and that is what is also eclipsed in this editorial.

Where does this leave us? It shows a different type of discourse than that articulated by Murphy, a point I made earlier. Instead of attempting to brand progressive democratic reform as somehow illegitimate, The Globe takes a different approach to reassure the neoliberal faithful.  The Conservatives did not lose; Harper's silliness cost them a good thing. Judged on their merits, the CPC should have won and the fact that it did not says nothing about the wishes or desire of Canadians, whose desire for a progressive alternative to the CPC is, similarly, ignored. It says only that the CPC should ditch cultural issues for economic ones. The fact that they did not shattered the mirror in this alternative universe and allowed another party to gain power.

Revisiting the Secret Intellectual Bagman

I don't enjoy being proven right ... well ... maybe ... just a bit. For those who thought I might have been  too hard on Rex Murphy in a previous blog (or, say, that my language became flowery): see this link:

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/scott-reid-electoral-reform-must-go-to-referendum

Note the similarity in both argument and expression.

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.

Is Rex Murphy Secretly a Conservative Intellectual Bagman? Or, Responding to Liberalism Part I

I have long liked Rex Murphy. I found his commentaries odd, at times, but I generally found his Cross Country Check Up  talk show fair, (although I will confess I don't listen to it any longer and I understand that he's no longer the host). Thus, when Twitter alerted me to an op-ed he wrote for The National Post -- which you can find here -- I quickly hit the link and started to read. What I found shocked me and I hope it is an aberration. I know others have accused him of holding disguised -- but intense -- right-wing political biases but I've not really noticed them ... until reading this piece. It is, of course, an op-ed and op-eds have a specific objective. Their goal is -- or should be -- to encourage discussion of important issues (those could be political issues, social issues, historical issues, etc.).  They should be reasonable. They are supposed to "take sides" -- and in this differ from reporting that is supposedly more neutral -- but that taking sides should be based on fact, evidence, reason, etc. Canada has, perhaps because of its political culture, managed to avoid the political advocacy disguised as op-ed/reporting that Fox News has become in the US (in effect, Fox News -- in case you've missed it -- has become an unpaid branch of the Republican Party/Tea Party extreme) in which it no longer even makes much more than a pro-forma pretense to neutrality in reporting. Sun TV tried this approach in Canada. It failed for lack of an audience response. The National Post, tried this approach, too, but it failed for lack of a market and so while The Post retains its biases, the newspaper did try to adopt the standard trappings of mainstream journalism. Its op-eds always, however, have bent to the right-wing of the political spectrum, at least from what I can tell.

It is, therefore, perhaps appropriate that Murphy's oddly extremist anti-Liberal, anti-democratic distortions are published in The Post. After all, this was the newspaper that triggered Andrew Coyne's, a right-winger with a certain measure of integrity, resignation. You can read about that here. What confuses me, of course, is exactly what Murphy is doing writing what amounts to an ill-informed, at times silly, anti-Liberal diatribe such as he did. He is a respected commentator. Why sink to this level?

I am, I hasten to add, not trying to simply critique Murphy. He is more than entitled to his views. The problem, of course, is that when a respected individual offers views, they have an unusual weight. He might deny that, but it would be disingenuous. After all, my work will not appear on CBC or in a national newspaper. Thus, I would argue, that there is a responsibility that comes with being a serious public commentator; that is: if one wants to be something more than a Fox News north. That responsibility is accuracy, balance, advocacy based on reason, and the provision of evidence. In effect, what Murphy does in this column is to attack the Liberal party for things that it has not done but -- according to him but no one else -- might do. In the process he intuits a great deal of intention to the current government without providing a single shred evidence.

This is, I will eventually argue, more broadly important because it illustrates, I think, how conservative Canadians are going to respond to the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. I had hoped, in previous blogs, that changes in the character of Canadian culture and public life had made the conservative approach to electioneering -- to attaining government -- outdated. Indeed, I tried to argue that one of the reasons that the CPC lost the election was that they did not realize that this change had taken place (in part, I suspect, because they interacted only with their own true believers and not the wider Canadian public). Murphy's column -- along with a series of other public statements by Conservatives and conservatively-minded media outlets, suggests that (a) this is not the case and (b) that they intend to continue their negative, attack at all costs, approach in an effort to convince Canadians that there is something morally degenerate about Liberals (and, in this way, ideally winning back power).  More on this later, let me leave off this issue right now to return to my original point: what does all this have to do with Rex Murphy? Murphy's column, I think, is emblematic of the type of discourse that conservatives will seek to forge over the next four years in their effort to disable a government they don't like.

For those who have read this column, I am sure you already know that this is not one of Murphy's finer efforts. Murphy may or may not be a Conservative (I didn't know Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin were until they were appointed to the Senate). He might just be contrarian (I'll comment more on this in a future blog, too). But, what he should know is that his piece was published as one of a series of pieces (other examples here and here) that are thinly disguised anti-Liberal pieces masquerading as journalism. In other words, whether knowingly or not (and I sincerely hope not) he lent his voice to a partisan activity. In the process, he is part of an effort -- that we will see over and over and over again in the coming weeks and months -- to discredit the Liberal Party, to cast it as an elitist anti-democratic organization, and to suggest that the conservatives are a good alternative and should be voted back in. In the process, the Conservatives will claim that they are champions of "the people," while the Liberals are "corrupt," etc. Moreover, there is more than a little mystification here.

Now, at this point, I hasten to add that I am not a Liberal.  I say this frequently and, periodically, someone accuses me of such a political leaning. Here is my bias and my only statement with regard to the current government. I did not vote for them. I believe only that they should be given a chance to govern, like any other political party that wins should be given a chance to govern. Their policies can be and should be criticized. That is part of the democratic process but we should know what those policies are before we criticize them. That is it. After a year, for instance, I am less than happy with the provincial Liberal government we have here in NB, but that is after a year where we have had a chance to see what these folks are doing. Likewise, people who have read this blog for a while will know that I was initially optimistic about the PC government that predated our current provincial one here in NB. As time went by, there were an increasing number of policies with which I disagreed and I supported a different political party in the provincial election that brought the Liberals to power. But, in each instance, I waited until the "ink was dry" on the new letterhead before suggesting that there were things wrong with the government. In the case of Murphy, however, the simple fact that he's joined a Conservative partisan rush to create a negative impression of a new government's first days in power should be a telling sign. This government might be good; it might be bad. The truth is that right now, we don't know. (And, I'll say more about the generally positive views of the new government in a future blog as well).

My first concern with Murphy, then -- and what his piece illustrates about the conservative discourse we will see developing in the near future -- is that he decided to ditch what is the better sense of public commentary -- find out what is going on before one comments -- and perhaps unknowingly let his work appear in a series of anti-Liberal op-eds. I suspect, then, that we will see more of this "quick and dirty" public commentary offered through venues like The Post in the future.

There are, however, other problems, too. What are these? Let me highlight a few. First, they start with Murphy's title, which he might or might not have picked himself:

"The Liberal government does not have the right to unilaterally change our voting system"

The title slants the argument he wants to make against the Liberal Party because it makes it seem like the Liberal Party is trying to something illicit to someone else's property. Those Liberals are not a government, elected on a platform of democratic and progressive reform, but something else: a meddling bunch who have no mandate but are doing something nefarious to something of "ours". Murphy follows this up by demanding an referendum and stating that this is a matter of "right." He re-emphasizes this point at the end of this piece:

"So the idea of unilaterally making a decision to change our voting system without a full debate and a referendum is just simply wrong. It is not a government’s choice to make. It is the people’s choice."

Is this true? Obviously, on one level, this is truism. It tells us, in fact, nothing that we don't already know. In a democratic political system "the people" should have the final word. This, however, is so true, its silly to state it and one cannot believe that Murphy wrote a column to tell us something we already all knew. Instead, the point seems to be that the Canadian government -- provided that they are Liberal -- cannot change electoral law without a referendum. Is this true? Is the Canadian government required to hold a referendum before making changes to Canadian elections law? 

Well ... no. It is not. I am not saying I agree with this part of the constitution. I am saying that Murphy is empirically wrong, at least according to the Canadian constitution. Here his wording is important. He could have argued -- and I might -- that referenda are a good idea and here is an opportunity for Canada to enhance democracy and embrace a progressive reform. He didn't. He tried to say that the Liberals were doing something wrong, as if they were avoiding a provision of the Canadian constitution -- violating fundamental rights of Canadians -- in what is made to seem a nefarious effort to take away something that is "ours."  

This is just not true. A referendum might be a good idea or it might not. But, under the Canadian constitution, it is not required for changes in electoral law. The previous Conservative Harper government changed electoral law frequently (a list of those changes can be found here) without referenda and, to the best of my knowledge, no one suggested that they needed one. The basic idea of responsible government, in fact, is that the elected representatives of the people make decisions on the basis of a mandate given them by the people. Said differently, demanding a referendum is, in fact, breaking new ground and moving outside Canadian tradition and the constitution. Unlike our neighbours to the south, Canadians make very limited use of referenda (and, some have argued, for potentially good reasons). Perhaps Murphy just made bad use of language (something those who have heard him speak will find difficult to believe), because, as I said, if not, he is simply in factual error. The key point he wants to assert, then, in this op-ed is simply and bluntly empirically inaccurate. 

Second, you should also note that Murphy is suggesting that the Liberals are not going to have a full debae on this subject. Is this true? Well, we don't know. They might not. But, at this point, with the paint sill wet on the government, we -- again --  simply don't know. He is intimating that they won't but surely there will be debate because debate is required for a law to pass. There must, of course, be debate in Parliament and I suspect that over the coming months -- as Canadians consider electoral reform -- that there will be extensive debate in the media, in the scholarly periodicals, in "town hall meetings" perhaps event televised by CBC in which Murphy might have a role commenting. Certainly electoral reform is not a secret. Canadians have been discussing it, in different forms, for a long time. They party I support -- the Green Party -- has been asking for electoral reform for some time. They are a small minority but they have not been silent on this issue (I hasten to add that I don't personally agree with everything the Green Party has to say on this issue either). 

Thus, the second problem with Murphy's piece is that he's criticizing the Liberals for something that they have not done, ignoring discussion that has already gone on and that he has to know -- because he has to be familiar with the rule of Parliament -- will go on in the future. This is an odd blind spot and one that is difficult to attribute to a slip in language because to do so one either has to believe that (a) Murphy does not understand how a law is passed in the Canadian Parliament (which strains credulity), (b) does not believe that The Post, or CBC, or the Globe, etc., will not hold endless discussions of this matter (which strains credulity since he's been intimately involved in precisely these types of discussions in the media for years, (c) is unaware of the extensive discussions that have taken place in NB, ON, BC, and PEI regarding electoral reform already (which, again, I find difficult to believe). If all these things were true. If Murphy did not know how a law was passed, if he did not know how the media (that employ him) work, if he is unaware of the debates and discussions of electoral reform that have already gone on ... why would he be commenting on this matter? Surely, it would not bode well for his authority on the subject? 

Finally, let us also note a certain level of mystification. Murphy implicitly compares the Trudeau government to the Harper government and says that if the Harper government tried to change electoral law without a referendum Harper would have been called a tyrant (he neglects the fact -- noted above -- that the Harper government made frequent changes to electoral law). In the process he creates a classic misconception: he fails to note that there is a difference between a law that is intended to promote democracy and a law that is intended to limit it. I've made this point before and it might be worth making it again. Laws that are designed to maintain oppression or marginalization -- say, inequality for gay and lesbian Canadians, not something going on ... just an example -- are not the same as laws designed to promote equality. 

Thus, the question in dealing with changes to electoral law is not that there is a change but what is that change intended to do? Two of the changes the Harper government introduced (and -- again -- for which they required no referendum) disenfranchised some Canadians and limited the degree to which Elections Canada could encourage voting. These were *not* progressive, forward looking changes that those who support democracy -- which includes Murphy -- could support. These are a different order of change than a change -- whatever it might be -- that is intended to enhance democracy. 

The mystification here is that the one is being confused with the other. For example, imagine a change that the current government might bring it. Elections Canada can renew its encouragement to Canadians to vote. Does this require a referendum? Should not a democratic society encourage people to vote and is this not well done by a neutral agency (as opposed to a partisan group)? The Harper government added seats to Parliament in an effort to better represent Canadians. Is this a negative change? Does it require a referendum? Would a proposal to add still more seats require a referendum? 

I still might argue that a referendum is needed. I still might argue that it could be good. But, let's not confuse the one for the other. A law intended to enhance democracy -- a progressive reform of the electoral system that makes government more response to the people -- is not the same as a law that is intended to distance government from the people and make it less responsive to remove the right of some Canadians to vote. Let's not pretend that it is. 

Murphy's column, then, makes a number of serious mistakes. It is too quick off the mark, makes claims that are empirically incorrect (that is, simply factually wrong), ignores history (slamming the Liberals for things that Conservatives did, too, while being silent with regard to the Conservatives), insinuates specious claims, and mystifies the issues that will be before Canadians with regard to electoral change in the near future. I suspect that Murphy wrote the piece because ... well ... its his job to write pieces for The Post. I would if it were my job. I think, however, that it might be part of a broader pattern that is, in one way or another, designed to limit the power of the current government and limit the degree of progressive change that they can bring to the system. It is, said differently, illustrative -- and part -- of a new conservative discourse. 

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.

Good News Stories and Federal Elections: The Fate of Negative Advertising

What does this federal election tell us about Canada? In a too previous blog I indicated that there were several under-reported stories. The story is a sea change, of some sort, with regard to environmental politics and the jobs versus the environment trade discourse. I argued that this discourse no longer worked for an increasingly large section of the Canadian population and thus Tory attacks on provincial NDP in Alberta, efforts to tar the federal NDP with the Stefan Dion brush after the McQuaig "oil in the ground" comment ... just no longer worked with the constituency to whom they were appealing.

The second thing that happened is that negative campaign advertising didn't work. Years ago I wrote a blog about how the federal Tories took a page from the Karl Rove book and tried to use a combination of low voter turnout and negative advertising and fear mongering to win elections. Negative advertising, at least as I am using the term here, is not saying "my opponent is incorrect." All parties do that in all elections. It might more better be called attack ads. Ads that paint your opponent as a bad person who will endanger others through immaturity or bad ideas. It is not disagreeing with your opponent because that is, after all, why they are your opponent and why we have elections. It is the effort to win elections by using thinly veiled lies and attack one's opponent on a personal level. Thus, when someone says "Stephen Harper's environmental policies are bad" ... that is not an attack ad or negative advertising. When someone says "Stephen Harper is immature or clueless" that would be an attack ad. So would splicing comments of your opponent together from different contexts to give a misleading impression of his or her ideas or saying something that was not true or that fear mongered or that played to people's worst instincts.

The Tories made a lot of use of negative advertising. I did not see a lot of NDP adverts this election, in part I suspect because I live a region of the country where the NDP won ... well ... nothing ....  so I can't speak to them. But, in the past, the Conservative attacks on Ignatieff and Dion were negative advertising and attack adverts. They had little or nothing to do with public policy and played on people's worst thoughts and fears while distorting their positions. Likewise the anti-Justin Trudeau adverts of various stripes were horribly negative because they focused on things like his hair and looks (immaturity), without addressing the substance of the Liberal platform.

I am not, I hasten to add, a Liberal supporter. I did not vote Liberal in this election or the last one or the one before that or the one before or that ... you get the picture. My interest here lies in diagnosing or explaining a process; not in taking sides.

What can we say about negative advertising? Several things. It may make a comeback -- in fact, I think it lurks on the margins of democratic politics for reasons that might be worth exploring some time -- but outside of the true believers -- the hardcore Conservatives -- it had little play in this election. Again, the mainstream media was slow to pick up on this. I read a story on CBC or in The Globe or somewhere that said something to the effect -- about a month into the campaign -- that the Tories negative attack adverts were finally working. What we can say now is that they weren't and they didn't. They got no traction out of the adverts at all.  The Liberals weathered their storm, Canadians tended, I think, to ignore them, and the Liberals ended up being able to make some hay be mocking them as the election date drew closer.

True to form, however, Tory adverts got nastier and nastier as the election date loomed. It was as if they had nothing else in their election toolbox. And, it is difficult, in some ways, to blame them. After all, from their perspective, they had gotten a good run out of negative advertising, taking down Dion and Ignatieff, reducing the Liberals to a rump caucus and securing a majority government for themselves. What they missed -- and what I am trying to point out in this blog -- is that the story changed. It changed, I think, for two reasons.

First, negative advertising is more difficult to use when you are the government. You can use it. But, attacking the opposition with it when you have to defend your own record is, in effect, saying "I don't stand by my record. I think you should vote for me because my opponent is an idiot." Second, I think -- again -- there has been a change. The Canadian electorate seemed less receptive to negative advertising this time round, more interested in discussing issues (which the Tories outside of energy and niqabs seemed to avoid), less willing to accept personalized attacks as legitimate. Moreover, that trend seemed to amplify as the election went along. The Conservatives ended the election campaign about where they began. The Liberals -- the subject of most of the attacks -- did not. They managed to dramatically increase their share of the vote. The more the attacks went on ... the more the Liberals vote increased.

The second storyline, then, is again optimistic. It points away from a lowest common denominator politics, where majorities are built around opposition or, in the case of the bond forged by attack ads, shared dislike. Instead, it points to a desire on the part of a large section of the Canadian voting population for something else. Whether or not the Liberals are this something else is not at all clear but they are doing their best to continue to occupy that position. The increased voter participation rate might be another example of this. Undoubtedly, a certain percentage of this increase occurred because people wanted to get rid of Harper and the Tories, but that does not tell the whole stories. Indeed, there is actually no reason people who disliked Harper and Crew had to vote. They could have just not voted, opting out of the process because they were completely disillusioned with it. The fact that they did not suggests, as I intimated before, that there is something other than disillusionment going on. Instead, the appears to be a desire for two things:

• a focus on different issues (addressing the environment, First Nations issues, Canada's role in world affairs, etc.) 
• a desire for a more upbeat, less angry, more progressive type of politics where people can disagree with each other without accusing each other of having destroyed the country, or threatened national security, etc. Heck, even Rona Ambrose -- admittedly in the wake of the election -- got in on the act by reversing the Tories traditional opposition to addressing the grave problem of MMIW and promising that she would be a happier more upbeat leader of the opposition

Now, as I said, I don't think that negative electioneering and negative discourses have gone away. In a future blog, I'll explore this a bit and try to go a bit beyond the Karl Rove election politics of the Tories to address the prevalence of negativity in Canadian public life. In short, I don't think its just a manifestation of Conservative electioneering. The question, one supposes, is how long it will last and whether or not this shift is permanent.

I honestly don't know but ... for now at least I am going to enjoy this shift and the less vicious tones coming from the state and from the public.

The Power of Ideology or ... What Actually Are Conservatives These Days?

As I was driving home on Monday from a meeting in Fredericton, a friend and I spent a great deal of time talking about contemporary Canadian politics and its problems. We spent a bit of time thinking about each of the major federal parties and were, in some ways, stumped by the Conservatives. A recent CBC story about the increased possibility of an NDP federal government (which you can find here) echoes some of our thinking. What struck both of us about the Conservatives was how hard it was to place them, ideologically, within a tradition of Canadian conservatism. In short, neither of us felt that the Conservative Party of Canada, despite its name, was actually particularly conservative. They were right wing, but what that meant, to us at least, was not all that clear. It meant a general opposition to some things but this general opposition was also tempered by the need to conform to more moderate strains in Canadian political culture and by a complicated semi-worshiping relationship with American Republicanism.  So ... as we head into a federal election this fall ... what are Canadian Conservatives in this day and age?

This is not an idle question. For good or ill, I suspect that 30%+ of voters will cast their ballots for the Conservative Party this fall. For what are they voting? The fact that I am asking this question might lead some to say "OK, it is pretty clear that this guy is not a Conservative, if he has to ask what Conservatism is all about." And, that would be a fair statement. But, what I want to capture is what I see as a shift, drift, reformation of political ideologies in Canada. In my last two blog entries, I tried to grapple with the state of the independence movement in Quebec today. I tried to argue that the broad social-democratic movement that could see itself as a legitimate heir to the Quiet Revolution (although certainly not the only heir) and that linked independence with modernity and social democracy has fragmented. The PQ tries to discursively maintain this interconnection but it is increasingly at odds with its realities that have, in important ways, sought to make peace with a neoliberal Quebec, Inc., while broadening the popular base of nationalism cum independence in disturbing and prejudiced ways that are disavowed by the leftist Quebec solidaire and other progressive Quebecois thinkers.

Conservatism is linked to this history because it was the failure of the 1980s conservative project a generation ago that helped to fracture a resurgent Canadian conservatism that was already moving rapidly away from its roots to also embrace a  neoliberal agenda that dramatically scaled back on the state, embraced continentalism (described as globalization) and looked to connect Canada more directly to the project of American international hegemony under Reagan. In effect, conservatives were interested in demonstrating to the US that Canada was a faithful ally on whom they could count. This project bears strong similarities to Harperite conservatism today but it differs in key respects. The first is that 1980s conservatism in Canada still carried with it enough of an older collectivist tradition that there were principles at stake. While the liberals who had ruled the Canadian roost for much of the twentieth century embraced individualism, conservatives stood back from this idea, continued to talk about public and collective goods, and saw society as some sort of organic composite. Much of the weight of conservative opposition to liberalism, in fact, built, for right or wrong, on this ground. They saw liberal commitments to individualism, the free market, economic growth, as disorienting and potentially destructive of the institutional framework that maintained an organic community wedded to concepts of morality, moral and self-sacrificing leadership, social harmony through elite commitment to public good, the naturalness of nationalism, and other such things.

Brian Mulroney's 1980s conservatism was always a mishmash. It brought together various and sundry political and ideological perspectives that rejected liberalism -- particularly the Trudeauvian liberal project -- but that had little in common with each other. It attempted to embrace but redirect the progressive nationalism of post-Quiet Revolutionary Quebec, neoliberalism (that looked askance at the welfare state), the old "Red Tory" tradition I just detailed, and variants of western populism drawn into the Progressive Conservative party through Diefenbaker and his followers. This mix of perspectives did not work well. The movement both failed to refashion that Canadian constitution to remake Canada in its image, and lack staying power. Parts of its fell by the wayside and in 1993 voters deserted it in large numbers.  What was brought back together by Harper and Co. in the early 2000s was something different. It was a coalition but one in which Harperite "Tories", if they can even be called that, were ascendant.  There was, at the time, much concern about how well
Western Canadian populists and PC "Red Tories" could coexist again in party in which their only raison d'etre was opposition to liberalism. It turns out, this was the wrong question. The right question was: what shape would Canadian conservatism take.

On the surface, the answer to this question is seems to run something like this: it is not clear because the Conservatives have banded together a bunch of policies that are (a) out of date, (b) prisoners of their own ideology, (c) silly, (d) lack coherence. Few old time Red Tories seem at all operative in today's conservative party and I think it is safe to say that that perspective is dead as a political movement. But, equally importantly, few western populists seem to have any sway. Harper's government has moved painfully slowly, for example, to address key populists concerns about democratization. In fact, one could argue that the country is less democratic now than it was when Harper took power. So, what do today's conservatives stand for? Here is a short list:

• law and order 
• demonstrating that we are a faithful ally to the US
• hard power foreign policy 
• tax cuts
• opposition to legalized pot
• opposition to  environmentalism
• natural resources-based economic development
• "balanced books"

There are no doubts that some of these policy objectives strike at the heart of what a significant section of the Canadian population thinks, but nor are they particularly controversial in many instances and there is nothing inherently conservative in them. For instance, I don't know any leftist or centrist or environmentalist or feminist who thinks we should not have a justice system. And, I know all kinds of people who think one needs to balance economic and environmental issues. Heck, even the Green Party thinks this. And ... on down the line. What makes these conservative policies, it seems to me, is not the policy in-and-of-itself but the way in which they are presented, the chain of logic that accompanies them, and the extremism of  the degree to which Conservatives will go to maintain them. In other words, when we look at the way conservatives think about particular issues we can begin to isolate the central characteristics of contemporary Canadian conservatism. 

For instance, I know many people who think we should get tough on crime. The problem with this perspective, I keep telling them, is that the Conservatives have been in power for a long time and have been tough on crime. The crime rate, of course, was falling long long before the tough on crime approach, but if further toughness was needed ... why did the Tories not introduce it ages ago when they first came into power? As for, say, hard power ... how is that working? Is the world safer today than it was, say, ten years ago now that Canada is standing up and demonstrating to people that we are tough and willing to bomb others? 

I don't want to refute CPC policies, I want to point something out. They seem to function without recourse to what is actually going on. They involve things that people think "should" work. Getting tough on crime should lower the crime rate. Is that true? ... my point is that it does not matter because people think it "should". Likewise, getting tough with the rest of the world is supposed to make the world safer. What evidence do we have that that is the case? Pot is a plague that will destroy society. Hmmm ... I don't doubt the sincerity of different people's beliefs. What I am saying is that Conservatism operates through what we could call a politics of confirmation. Rather than proposing new ideas, it works with ideas that people have and confirms these and, in this way, serves to reaffirm itself to its supporters. 

It is possible that all political movements do this is in some way, but I am not so sure.  In fact, Conservative efforts to get "tough on crime," for example, seem to suggest that somewhere, deep down, Conservatives know that there is something wrong with what they are saying. They have, for instance, and as I just said, been getting tough on crime for a long time. Yet, the fact that they still feel that they have to get tough on crime suggests that, for them at least, their original get tough policies have not worked. Yet, they seem to avoid the logic of their own perspectives. For example, most people, at some point, might pause. They might say to themselves "gee, I said X. I did X but it did not improve things. Perhaps I should rethink whether or not X is actually a good thing to do." Instead, the Conservatives have done this: "I said X. Things have not improved, so what we need is XX." This is an odd perspective because it assumes that the original proposition is right in the absence of evidence. Tougher sanctions will get rid of crime. If we introduce tougher legal sanctions and crime still exists ... what this means is that we need to get even tougher. 

There is, too, a point at which toughness comes to be seen as a virtue in and of itself. There is an odd sort of masculinist politics to contemporary Conservatives that worships toughness in and of itself. We need to stand up and be tough in our defense of industry (come what may), we need to be tough in international affairs, we need to be tough against crime. What this perspective lacks -- and I think Conservatives see this as a virtue -- is sympathy. 

Consider an alternative to toughness. "Gee, I said let's get tough on crime. That has not eliminated crime and the longer term trends with regard to crime were going down anyway. I wonder if we might think about why people commit crimes in the first place and find out if that is a way to lower the crime rate?" Friends of mine dismiss this idea as weakness. You need to be tough. People will take advantage of you. You need to think about the victim and don't treat the criminal as if they were the victim. In fact, or so this argument runs, we should have no sympathy for the criminal at all. 

There is in this perspective a politics of othering in which criminals are cast as irredeemably other and also a case study that speaks to how conservatives conceptualize relationships. Othering:  the logic runs something like this: criminals are, once and forever, once they have been identified as criminals, something very different. How else can one reasonably explain the Conservatives efforts to keep Khadr behind bars. How else can one explain the degree to which the Canadian government pursued an individual who was a brainwashed teenager who found himself at 15 in a war zone and did things, as a result, that he clearly deeply regrets? How else can one explain the way in which the Canadian government called Khadr a terrorist over and over and over again. Consider an analogy. If, when you were 15, you once got drunk ... should you be considered a drunk (with all that that entails) for the rest of your life? 

Relationships is the other point that comes out of this example and it is something about which we don't think often or discuss often in our society. The question is this: how should we relate to each other. Different political movements have different answers. Separatists in Quebec, for instance, were fond of saying over and over and over again "you do not understand us; you will never understand us" when they spoke to Anglo Canadians. They saw culture as a barrier that did not simply impede relationships but, in fact, made them impossible. Conservatives have a particular take on relationships as well that is difficult to specify. They see the world as tough, relationships as fraught, tough masculinist self assertion as a good and necessary thing that allows you to accomplish your goals in the face of people who will take advantage of you ... if you let them. Culture, too, is an odd thing to conservatives that impedes bonds of common allegiance or even self respect. How else, for instance, can one explain conservative efforts to refashion citizenship tests and prevent Mexicans and Romi from coming to Canada? 

In this regard, and perhaps only in this regard, are Canadian conservatives really conservatives. Their answers are behind the times. The policies that they offer -- natural-resource based economic development, opposition to the medical use of pot, a lack of sympathy, othering and the sense that reform is not possible (people don't change) -- are underscored by a worldview that seems out of place today. When they first came to power, the Conservatives promised many things, democratic reform and accountability are the two big examples. They have not delivered on either count but I doubt that matters to their core voters because their core voters are not about accountability or democracy. They are about a masculinist worldview that sees toughness as an answer,  that sees human character as fixed, that sees sympathy as a problem, and that confirms its own perspectives  (and, hence, does not change ... at least easily). There is little place for democratic reform or government accountability in this worldview. In fact, it is irrelevant to it.