There is a cautionary tale unfolding for governments which call themselves Conservative. Maxime Bernier is staging a frontal assault on the Conservative Party of Canada. And in Britain, Theresa May's government is unravelling over Brexit. May was a Remainer. Yet she has been tasked with negotiating Britain's divorce from the E.U. The deal she reached with Brussels has split her party. Andrew Hammond writes:
The cabinet resignations reflect, in large part, the continuing U.K.-wide divisions over Brexit which leaves Ms. May’s tenure in Downing Street precarious. These problems were meant to have been put to bed by publication of the government’s Brexit White Paper in July.
Yet, if anything, Ms. May is even more politically isolated following the subsequent departure from her cabinet of leading Brexiteers Boris Johnson and David Davis. The former senior ministers have previously stood to be Conservative Party leader, and may do so again in the future, and are both lobbying hard against what has become known as Ms. May’s Chequers version of Brexit.
Her vision in the Chequers document came under intense criticism from the British political right and left, not to mention outside players such as U.S. President Donald Trump. Indeed, such was the opposition of elements of even her own Conservative Party, which lobbied to “chuck Chequers,” that the Prime Minister had to effectively rebrand it.
Now a draft U.K.-EU Brexit deal has been agreed to, the parliamentary arithmetic is such that Ms. May could need to rely on the votes of opposition Labour Party MPs to get the agreement through the House of Commons. Here it is highly unclear how many such Labour parliamentarians would support Ms. May, despite the potential pressure to do so for those politicians representing constituencies that voted in 2016 to leave the EU.
During the 1980's conservatism rejected its Burkean roots and adopted Ayn Rand as its philosophical godmother and Milton Friedman as its accountant. Rand and Friedman trumpeted the beauty of the Individual Unbound. The result was that conservatives became so enamoured of individualism they could agree on virtually nothing -- except what they were against. And what they were against, most of all, was government.
The end result has been that, when conservatives achieve power -- in Britain and the United States -- they can't govern because they can't craft policy. Their differences doom their dreams.
That's a lesson Ontario's Conservatives, under Doug Ford, are now learning.
Image: Politico Europe
8 comments:
I'd like to publish your comment, Anon. But it needs to be initialled. Send it back with some identification and I'll publish it.
Canadian conservatism has been wobbly since its collapse post-Mulroney. The first insurgency was launched out of the prairies by Manning and Harper who, in due course, commandeered the PCs, even purging "Progressive" from the party name. Eventually the party went to a form of hard mouth centrism while it retained its Calgary orientation. The new insurgency comes out of the east, seeking again to draw off the hard right faction. If Bernier's movement gains purchase we may be in for another Golden Era for the Liberals.
Chretien, for all the bombast, was really pushing on an open door in winning majorities while the conservatives were in the midst of a Reform/PC civil war. The Fenian claims it was Chretien's brilliance. Nonsense. We liked him but not that much and, while he and Martin did wrestle Canada back to fiscal sanity, I've met no one who, when asked, can point to any great, iconic legislation during the Chretien years. Yes, he kept Canadian soldiers out of Iraq but he came within a whisper of losing the last Quebec sovereignty referendum largely by his indifference.
The EU has always been more than just a trade deal. Being part of it means being constrained by it as well as benefiting. Many English don't like the constraints. I listen to BB4 quite a bit. What I hear a lot is that those who voted for Brexit want out of the EU; no reshuffle, just out. Teresa May voted against Brexit and is trying to hang on by renegotiating participation in the EU. I don't know how she has held her seat as long as she has.
I caught an interview with Chretien on TVO awhile ago, Mound. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he made no grand claims. He used one word: "competent."
It's beginning to look like she's headed for the exit, Toby.
And so it goes. Everywhere in the West neo-right usurped conservative parties—or, really, neo-liberal-infested zombieCon parties—are falling apart, or ripping themselves apart. And being abandoned to death.
It’d be too convenient to make this phenomenon out to be a life-and-death struggle between the neo-liberal usurpers and an ‘old-guard’ of real, Tory conservatives. No zombieCon party that is or recently has been government contains a Tory old-guard anymore: they’ve either attritted over the last 35-40 years of the Neo-Right phenom, been converted to neo-rightism (in which case they were no longer Tory conservatives) or, most likely, moved to other parties like the Liberals which have, federally, moved themselves to the right to accommodate them. (How ironic that Harper once thought he’d slayed the Liberal middle and evermore bipolarized Canadian politcs to far left and far right, only to have the Liberals, Greens and Dippers make room in their respective hotels for PC refugees leaving the HarperCon party, now a seething caldron of Geckoid libertarians and far-right extremists.)
So it remains only that the demise of the zombieCons features neo-rightists, some of whom double as far-right extremists, ripping themselves apart, perhaps cheered on by a rump of such real conservatives still holding out hope in the party. That’s what I always ask pro-reppers: how can the supposed ‘true majority’ of runners-up to a plurality-won government call themselves a majority that deserves to govern when they can’t even get along with themselves? Maybe that’s why the zombieCons are tearing themselves apart: they don’t really like each other.
I’m reminded that Scheer and Bernier each won virtually half the zombieCon members’ votes and, if they represent their supporters as much as they promise they will, you gotta wonder what the rank-and-file members think about each other now that Bernier left the party in a huff. I don’t know how much rock-ribbed religious rightists approve of libertarianism.
The common anti-intellectualism amongst the zombieCons does not endow them with much politcal sophistication —hence the low-brow demagoguery we see deployed by Trump who loves “the undereducated.” Their resultant resort to faith blinds them to the reason the Neo-Right movement will continue to decline: they’ve staked out climate-change-denial as their hill to die on, but the rest of the world is marching right past them—all faster now, I dare say, with the Neo-Right’s hate and odious racism, never mind the yawning wage-gap, choking air pollution and fish-killing water pollution.
I think the Neo-right is doing us a favour by ripping themselves apart—but they can never really atone for the damage they’ve wrought these past four decades, nor for the increasing resort, these days, to identity and race politcs. That’s okay, so long’s they get so toxic that they eventually become the irrelevant fringe most of their current members used to be, and real conservatives take the opportunity to regroup into the moderate, patriotic and ethical parties they used to be.
You've hit upon the existential question, Scotty. How many "real conservatives" are left?
I'd like to publish your comment, Anon. But it needs to be initialled.
Post a Comment