Andrew Coyne seems angry:
You need Conservative MPs to make what happen? To ensure that “more” is done in the way of “delivering” for the GTA. Want more passport offices and bridges? Vote Conservative.
This is the Prime Minister of Canada talking, you understand. The candidates for President of the United States debate the shape of the financial system and whether it is strategically wiser to focus on Iraq or Afghanistan. The Prime Minister of Canada — a Conservative Prime Minister — devotes himself to delivering passport offices to Ajax.
This is what is left of conservatism in Canada. This is what our politics have become, or reverted to — trawling for votes with hooks baited with other people’s money, like any 1940s ward-heeler. It’s the same old game, telling voters in every riding that they can make off at the expense of all the others, that the Liberals played for years. Only I remember a time when there was a party, and a leader, that said they’d put a stop to it.
While most of Coyne’s criticism is aimed at the Conservatives’ lack of substantial policies, he notes that ”doing nothing is certainly a better alternative than the raft of pointless busywork the Liberals have on offer, to say nothing of the NDP’s giddy spendathon.” And in general, ”Canadian politics sinks, election after election, ever deeper into the mire.”
This is pretty consistent with my own thoughts. While I expect this kind of thing from the Liberals and NDP, I’m feeling a little betrayed by the Conservatives. As I already wrote in response to Harper’s ambition to “make conservatism the natural governing philosophy of the country,” I can’t support this. It isn’t good government and it certainly isn’t good conservative government.
David Brooks wrote a good columna couple weeks ago about the same kind of turn being taken by the U.S. Republican Party. Brooks was concerned more specifically with Sarah Palin and the “experience” question:
There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.
It’s interesting to consider the relation of neoconservatism to all of this, which I understand to have grown as an intellectual and elitist movement, but has somehow become construed by some people with George W. Bush’s populism.
What the two types of conservatism have in common that they both oppose the moral relativism of liberals and the moral indifference of libertarians. What distinguishes neoconservatism from populoconcervatism is that neoconservatives oppose moral relativism in favour of ”the best that has been thought and said” – i.e. what was thought and said in ancient Jerusalem and Athens.
(I’m a bit vague on this part; my familiarity with the roots of neoconservatism goes more through Allan Bloom (teacher) than Irving Kristol (figurehead). This has given me a good kick to study a little more into the history of different strains of political thought.)
Whereas populoconservatism is based on a God-given sense of self-assurance — to paraphrase Sarah Palin, “you don’t second guess” — with little regard to history and wisdom.
Where neoconservatives invoke patriotism and religion as necessary, populoconservatives invoke patriotism and religion as sufficient. It has very little regard for reason, evidence, consistency, substance, or coherence.
My reason for concern with this way of governing was already addressed in my discussion on the meaning of integrity in politics — integrity in the sense that practices and ideas are integrated into a functional whole that works effectively on its own, without the need to constantly respond to internal, operational crises:
In order to address the complex issues in the world, we need a program that is itself complex (in the sense of being a living, complex adaptive system, not merely in the sense of being complicated), that uses conflict and complementarity to generate new solutions and opportunities, while still being unified and coherent.
What I see instead is a Conservative Party merely taking advantage of the relative weakness (not to mention vote-splitting) of the other major Canadian parties, rather than investing in strength that can be further built on and refined.
A possible criticism of my own criticism has occurred to me, that maybe the elements of pragmatism and prudence in Canada’s cultual climate and soil might turn the the populist conservative varietal into a successful Canadian vintage.
Maybe. But without keeping notes and accounting for how and why new practices and ideas gain influence, we don’t have any way of evaluating them and making sure we’re on schedule and on still on the right course — say, if the new attitude creates a whole new political climate that turns out to be perfectly suited to strengths the NDP didn’t even have when the game was played by the old rules.
Harper used the word “prudent” in his Ajax speech. But floating along like this seems to be anything but prudent. It neither creates or conserves anything of lasting value.
