A Dead End

Michael Harris believes that Danielle Smith won't be Alberta's premier for long:

As premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith is a political mayfly; not long for the job.

By May 29, the woman who was made premier by one per cent of Albertans will be a gaudy footnote, in the dismal decline of a conservatism firmly captured by anger. This group continues to look for a fight with Ottawa under any pretence, however false.  

Donald Trump has done it in the United States, using unhinged surrogates like Marjory Taylor Greene.  Pierre Poilievre, who is trying desperately to sell the false narrative that “everything is broken” in Canada, does it with personal videos that wouldn’t pass muster in an elementary school show-and-tell class. And Danielle Smith is doing it with her inept and purposely belligerent Sovereignty Act.  

Smith’s bungling since winning the United Conservative Party leadership on the sixth ballot on Oct. 6, should have prepared everyone for this senseless, divisive, and anti-democratic power grab. This is the historically challenged leader who said that unvaccinated people are “the most discriminated against group” in her lifetime. 

The truth is that this brand of conservatism is now well-worn. It was rejected in the American mid-term elections. And it's being rejected here:

Smith, and Poilievre for that matter, don’t seem to realize that toxic conservative extremism is going out of fashion. With the recent convictions for seditious conspiracy of the ring leaders of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack in the United States, Trump’s hold on the Republican Part is all but gone. His dinner with a neo-Nazi and an anti-Semite have accelerated the process. The public in that country seems tired of the chaos, lies, and bullying—and the poor showing of the GOP in the November midterm elections just emphasizes that trend.  

It looks like there is a little of the same fatigue in Alberta, with demonizing everything that comes out of Ottawa. According to a recent poll by Janice Brown Opinion Research, Smith is in the process of delivering a majority government to the NDP and former premier Rachel Notley. The poll also found that the UCP may even lose seats in the areas around Smith’s rural base.

Modern conservatism has reached a dead end.

Image: Lifehacker Australia

Three Kinds Of Conservatism

George Monbiot writes that there are three kinds of conservatism:

Conservatism takes three main forms. Inclusive conservatism seeks to protect objects of value for the benefit of everyone. These might include great urban vistas, or national parks, or wildlife, or works of art, or great institutions, such as the NHS and the BBC. This is the conservatism governments invoke when a nation goes to war.

Exclusive conservatism, by contrast, resists change that would assist the great majority, on behalf of a privileged elite. This is the form – fighting the universal franchise, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and the welfare state – that has prevailed in the United Kingdom for most of its history.

Then there is a third form, which calls itself conservatism but is nothing of the kind: tearing down everything to clear a path for capital. This is the form that prevails today in Britain, in the United States and across much of the world. Its mission is the destruction of the norms, the values, the institutions, the public properties and the public protections that impede the scope for profit-taking.

The third form of conservatism is presently ensconced in the United States. For ten years, it was ensconced in Ottawa -- and, despite a change of face, it appears to have survived in tact. Now, Monbiot writes, it's laying its foundation in Theresa May's Britain:

The reason is as follows. In converting European law into UK law through the so-called great repeal bill, the government will grant itself the power, as its white paper states, “to correct the statute book where necessary”. “Correcting the statute book” will come to be seen as one of the great political euphemisms of our time.

The corrections will take the form of secondary legislation, which means using something called a statutory instrument. The government estimates that 800 to 1,000 of these instruments will be required – on top of the usual total – and their impact will be profound, as they are dealing with huge issues. In practice, there is almost nothing parliament can do to challenge them. As the Brexit analyst Ian Dunt points out, the bill is “shaping up to be the single biggest executive power grab in Britain’s postwar history”.

That's been the goal for thirty-five years. Neo-liberalism has sought to bypass legislatures. It happened here. It happened in the United States. And it's happening in Britain.

Image:  de.123rf.com

A Toxic Brew

Lawrence Martin writes that the Conservatives appear ready to take a leap off the cliff. The two leading contenders for the leadership of the party are Maxime Bernier and Kevin O'Leary:

If the polls are to be believed, it’s become a two-man race between newcomer Kevin O’Leary and libertarian Maxime Bernier. Kellie Leitch is far back. The more conventionally styled Tory candidates are not even within shouting range.

Mr. Bernier would be the biggest privatizer the party has ever had as leader. One of his radical planks is to end the federal role in funding health care by transferring tax points to the provinces. This could bring on a Balkanized system as well as more and more privatization. It risks, argues candidate Michael Chong, moving voters away from the party in droves.

Choosing Mr. O’Leary could invite as much, if not more, peril. He has never been elected, has no background in the party, is unilingual, hasn’t lived in Canada for years and has a policy kit – decried as juvenile by critics – that is all over the ideological map and devoid of substance.

Modern conservatism has become as scrambled as Donald Trump's brain. Andrew Coyne writes: 

Conservatism used to have some claim to being a coherent political philosophy. Of late it has become a series of dares. The most extreme voice will lay down the most extreme position, then challenge others to endorse it.

As often as not this has nothing to do with conservatism. It is rather a kind of moral exhibitionism, populist virtue-signalling, in which the object is to say and do the most intolerant or ill-considered thing that comes to mind — anything that might attract the condemnation of bien-pensants in the media and elsewhere, whose opposition becomes proof in itself of its merits.

The willingness to court such controversy in turn becomes the test of political purity. To demur, conversely, can only be a sign of cowardice, or worse, liberalism, a heresy that that would seem to have overcome much of the conservative movement, to judge by the ever-lengthening list of the excommunicated.

Like it or hate it, conservatism used to possess internal consistency. All the parts fit together. Now the parts form a toxic brew and the centre will not hold.

Playing The Victim

The present crop of conservatives are a strange lot. They are, Scott Reid writes, nothing like their predecessors:

Conservatives used to campaign on rugged individualism and the projection of strength. Those of the modern breed are a whimpering litter of easily wounded weaklings. And they just can’t shut up about it.

Exhibit A is the President-Elect of the United States:

Almost daily, Donald Trump takes to Twitter to complain about the slights and insults inflicted upon him and, by extension, his millions of supporters. He is a 70-year old white male billionaire set to assume the full authority of the presidency of the United States. Outside of comic books, it’s impossible to imagine someone with greater access to personal power. And yet, he persistently rallies his followers with claims that he, and they, are subject to humiliating treatment by powerful, threatening forces. Like comedians and Broadway musicals.

Across the pond, it's more of the same:

Consider the messages underpinning the appeal of Marine Le Pen or the disaffection that fuelled Brexit. It’s a familiar litany of propagandized harms. Immigrants are taking your jobs. Sharia law is set to sweep our cities. Dollars spent on the EU could fund the National Health Service. And to quarrel with these arguments is to be branded as some sort of reverse-bully — with minorities portrayed as menacing scolds and bigotry applauded as politically incorrect courage.

And, in Canada, the Conservative Party is populated by the same kind of whiners:

Kellie Leitch moves from caucus nobody to number one in the Conservative leadership contest by reminding the rank and file that she is permanently under attack for the audacity of her views. Recently, her campaign went so far as to blame a break-in at her home on unscrupulous, dangerous leftists. So rattled was she by the violent intentions of these anonymous, tax-hiking multiculturalists that she had to withdraw from a leadership debate. The police, meanwhile, reported that there was no evidence that anyone — on the left or the right — had broken into her house. Never mind. It made for a good fundraising email.

There are no profiles in courage in this crop. Reid correctly calls them "Crybaby Conservatives."

Image: Pinterest

In A Dark Place

The Harper Party has changed its name three times. First it was the Reform Party. Then it was the Canadian Alliance. And, finally, it called itself the Conservative Party. The last label is entirely disingenuous. Both Rob Ford and Stephen Harper claim they are Conservatives. Those claims are as fatuous as the name which the present federal government proclaims. Andrew Coyne writes:

So no, Ford is neither a product of conservatism, as such, nor a particularly sterling example of it; nor should Conservatives be tainted by association, except in so far as they associate themselves with him. This last is the point: It is clear that Ford, and Fordism, are very much an outgrowth of the same political culture as the federal Conservatives, a culture each has done much to create and nurture. It just doesn’t have a lot to do with conservatism.

There is a noble conservative tradition in this country. It was best embodied -- at least in my memory -- by Robert Stanfield. Many forget that Stanfield fought and lost an election on the issue of wage and price controls. In the inflation ravaged 1970's, Stanfield favoured them and Pierre Trudeau did not. After Stanfield lost the election, Trudeau adopted wage and price controls. Today's Conservative Party would have -- and has had -- nothing to do with Stanfield.

Modern conservatism is, quite simply, a fraud. Coyne writes:

The modern Conservative movement is built on two things: populism and pragmatism (sometimes indistinguishable from opportunism). Both have contributed to the Ford phenomenon: populism, with its heavy emphasis on the social divide separating Us (suburban, less educated) from Them (urban, more educated), its infantilizing insistence on the need for a strong leader to protect the former from the latter; pragmatism, in detaching the party from any principled foundation, a contempt for “purism” that too easily bleeds into an expedient disregard for principles of any kind.

Put them together, and you get a number of subsidiary traits: hostility to intellectuals (fancypants who think they’re better than us; academics who don’t understand how politics is actually played); imperviousness to facts (manufactured by a biased media elite; expendable in the pursuit of power); and so on. What is observable in the Harper Conservatives reaches its ultimate nihilistic expression in Ford, where absolutely no amount of evidence is sufficient to discredit him.

Modern conservatives canonize ignorance and promote division. Like cats marking their territory, they define their boundaries by urinating on those they consider outside those boundaries. And that, Coyne writes, "is taking our politics to a very dark place."