by Paul Wells
Brimelow believed Canada’s New Class was even more influential than America’s. Ottawa was a relatively larger city than Washington, D.C. A larger share of Canada’s population was in the civil service. “The Canadian civil servant is therefore that much less exposed to the rude populace, and that much more inclined to develop a corporate identity than his American counterpart—who has not been slow.”
Brimelow was adamant that the Liberals had not won because they had avoided ideology. The notion of Liberals as a blandly efficient brokerage party is attractive mostly to Liberals. To Brimelow, the long line of Liberal prime ministers had followed “a consistent ideological and emotional thread. They were consistently on the left of their party and their community. This tradition has been all the more tenacious for being cherished in private, so as not to disconcert a less enlightened Canadian public.”
The Liberals had never hauled the population hard over to the left, because the population would have noticed and objected. Instead, they dissimulated about their motives and counted on time to accomplish what haste could not. “The Liberals’ relative caution in office was a source of constant frustration to socialist and Nationalist ideologues,” Brimelow wrote. But the hard Left needn’t have worried, because those in power were on their side. Brimelow pointed out Trudeau’s many ties to the radical Left in Montreal and around the world. He pointed out that Ed Clark, a bureaucratic architect of the National Energy Program, had written a PhD thesis at Oxford with the title “Socialist Development and Public Investment in Tanzania, 1964–1973.” (From 2000 to 2013, Clark was president of TD Bank Group. This long-term tenure might look like a challenge to Brimelow’s depiction of the former bureaucrat as an anti-capitalist crusader. But the notion of a New Class includes plenty of room for the affluent and powerful. In 2010, when Clark advocated higher personal income taxes to counteract budget deficits, Harper’s Conservative Party sent out a news release with the subject line, “Millionaire Ignatieff Economic Czar Calls for Higher Taxes.”)
Inherent in the notion of hegemony is the expectation that observers living in a hegemonic order won’t notice it even though they are surrounded by it. Brimelow believed he was immune because he came from outside. And his book found an enthusiastic audience in Western Canada because people there were outside the Liberal/New Class hegemonic bubble, too. “In the two thousand miles of Western Canada between the Ontario line and the Pacific Ocean, the Liberals won only two seats in 1980,” Brimelow noted.
So why hadn’t a durable alternative to the Liberals arisen in Western Canada? “The Liberal hegemony’s greatest success … has been its successful subjugation of considerable sections of the Tory party,” Brimelow wrote. The Progressive Conservatives might believe they were fighting the Liberals tooth and nail. In fact, they were buying the Liberal assumptions about almost everything. “This is, of course, the hallmark of a dominant ideology.”
When Brimelow wrote his book, one of the most important recent Canadian political events had been the Progressive Conservatives’ replacement of Joe Clark with Brian Mulroney. That Clark’s was the deeply co-opted face of Liberal hegemony was obvious to Brimelow, and went a long way toward explaining why so many Western conservatives had built up such contempt for this Western Progressive Conservative. Brimelow noted that in their book Contenders: The Tory Quest for Power, about the 1983 leadership race, Patrick Martin, Allan Gregg and George Perlin have Clark saying he felt “distinctly uncomfortable” with other Westerners and felt “no rapport” with them.
Clark stayed on the ballot in the 1983 leadership convention after he knew he couldn’t win, to split the votes of delegates from outside Quebec and ensure that Brian Mulroney beat John Crosbie. “Clark,” Brimelow wrote, “had sought to keep the Tory party on the left, preoccupied by the French-English question and disproportionately influenced by Quebec—a carbon copy of the Liberals in the Trudeau years, and certainly not responsive to the examples of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”
From this perspective, Mulroney’s rise was not a repudiation of Liberal hegemony but its purest expression. The enemies of Trudeau had found another Quebec-born, Quebec-obsessed son of one anglophone and one francophone parent to lead them. Mulroney didn’t want to replace Trudeau’s electoral coalition. He wanted to hotwire it and take it for a joyride. He was “trying to steal Trudeau’s formula and govern Canada from a Quebec base in alliance with the Anglophone centre-left,” according to Brimelow.
There is one more thing about The Patriot Game that gave it such power in those parts of Canada where people felt the Liberal consensus left them out: the timing of the book’s publication. If it had been written three years earlier it would have been seen as an expression of English Canadian resentment against Trudeau. It would have looked like a partisan pamphlet. It’s easy to imagine Mulroney waving copies of the book on the campaign trail, if it had been published before he ran for prime minister. But instead, it appeared after Mulroney had won a historic majority and begun to govern, and therefore to disappoint.
The book provided an intellectual framework for Conservatives to understand the disappointments of the Mulroney years, including the decision to award the CF-18 maintenance contract to Montreal instead of Winnipeg and then, later, the five-year agony of the Meech and Charlottetown constitutional negotiations. Mulroney did these things, students of Brimelow could tell themselves, because he was just another facet of Liberal hegemony. Or, as Reform MPs would say when they arrived by the dozen in Ottawa in 1993, “Liberal, Tory, same old story.”
“Only through submitting to an almost unknown and quite atypical leader could the party of the majority come to power,” Brimelow wrote. “The only solution Mulroney could offer to the party’s problems, which were ultimately those of Canada, were personal, charismatic—and therefore temporary.”
I do not want to give the impression that The Patriot Game became a user’s manual for Harper. Nor was Brimelow’s book influential because it was quirky or offered a wildly different worldview than its readers had seen before. The Patriot Game landed like a bomb among Alberta conservatives precisely because its arguments weren’t novel and isolated but gave expression to something deep-seated, broadly based and cultural. The book functioned as myth, in the way Northrop Frye used that word: not as a tall tale, but as a highly charged revelation of a truth that was already present and felt in the culture before the myth gave it words.
Brimelow’s book did not tell Harper what to do, but reading it helps us understand what Harper has done. In government, Harper would often seem to be borrowing Liberal methods to undo their legacy. Where Liberals had been patient, he would be patient. Where they frustrated socialist ideologues while playing a longer game, he would frustrate conservative ideologues so he could survive long enough to play a longer game. Liberals once won by uniting French Canada and dividing English Canada. Harper would take as much of English Canada as he could, leaving behind only the salons and National Capital Region cubicles of the New Class, and making only fitful and distracted overtures to French Canada. Where Liberals had worked to transfer wealth to the East, he would leave it in the West. Where they had eroded the Crown and the memory of a distinctly British heritage, he would build them up.
Undoing years of Liberalism would require years of Conservatism. Starting from a position of bewildering weakness—the leadership of the battered Canadian Alliance Party—Harper needed to figure out how to win and then hold power, not for a few tumultuous months but for many years. The next item on our reading list shows how he proposed to do that. The key idea was that he had to resist the temptation to make conservatism meaningless in order to make it broadly acceptable. He could not sell a stew that had no flavour. Indeed he needed to make it spicier.
In 2003 Harper spoke to a gathering of the secretive conservative group Civitas. The shroud of secrecy is not total: the group has a website that offers a little information, enough to suggest its activities are harmless. Civitas members meet once a year for
a couple of days to talk politics. The organization bills itself as “A Society Where Ideas Meet,” and the ideas that meet are the ones you might expect from a society whose founding directors included journalists Ted Byfield, Michael Coren, David Frum and Ezra Levant; author William Gairdner; Gwen Landolt, a leading figure of REAL Women of Canada; and political strategists Tom Long (who used to whisper in Mike Harris’s ear) and Tom Flanagan (who no longer whispers in Harper’s). It’s pretty conservative. Visiting in 2003 to give a speech, Harper brought them what they wanted to hear.
The Canadian conservative movement had dodged a bullet, he said. When he ran for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance a year earlier, the party was so buffeted by controversy and defection that its members were no longer sure why it had been put on earth. “What Alliance members feared most was seeing our agenda slipping away. Simply put, our members worried less about having two so-called ‘conservative parties’ than about having no conservative party at all.” Harper said his job was to get the Alliance past that crisis of confidence and establish it as the country’s leading voice for conservatism.
There was a time, he said, when the Alliance’s predecessor, the Reform Party, had been such a voice. From its founding in 1987 until about 1998, Reform had been “policy-driven,” taking strong stands on spending restraint, low taxes, and the Meech and Charlottetown constitutional fiascos.
But then Preston Manning decided Reform had run its course and had to be replaced by a broader “united alternative” to the Liberals. Manning dragged his party through a succession of conferences and referendums to plan and ratify assorted expansions. He tried everything to lure interested renegades from the otherwise aloof Progressive Conservatives. This was the Reform/Alliance’s “process phase,” Harper said. He wasn’t arguing that process must be avoided at all costs. If the Progressive Conservatives could be persuaded to merge with the Alliance, he would certainly be interested. But Joe Clark didn’t want to play, and Harper saw no point in obsessing over hypothetical processes at the expense of real ideas.
Besides, whether it merged with the party next to it or not, any conservative party would always contain elements of a coalition. “Two distinctive elements have long been identifiable. Ted Byfield labelled these factions ‘neo-con’ and ‘theo-con.’ More commonly, they are known simply as economic conservatives and social conservatives. Properly speaking, they are called classical or enlightenment liberalism and classical or Burkean conservatism,” Harper explained.
Economic conservatism values individual freedom most highly. It is the conservatism one is most likely to find in the newspaper columns, if one can find any. “It stresses private enterprise, free trade, religious toleration, limited government and the rule of law,” Harper said.
But more of his speech was devoted to the second kind of conservatism: social, or Burkean, conservatism, after the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke. This branch of the family was familiar to many in his audience but deeply out of fashion in the broader Canadian commentariat. “Its primary value is social order,” Harper said. “It stresses respect for customs and traditions—religious traditions above all—voluntary association, and personal self-restraint reinforced by moral and legal sanctions on behaviour.”
Here Harper cited Russell Kirk, the founding editor of the influential U.S. journal National Review. A proudly fusty man, Kirk refused to drive an automobile or watch TV right up to his death in 1994. He converted to Catholicism at forty-four years of age. Social conservatism, Harper said, quoting Kirk, was “the preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives … think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.”
Especially because they viewed society as the complex and intractable product of generations of irrevocable decisions and omissions, social conservatives were often suspicious of economic conservatives, who seemed always to be looking around for a revolution to start. But through the twentieth century these two brands of conservatism had more often allied than competed, setting aside their differences in the face of a common enemy, “the rise of radical socialism in its various forms.”
“Various forms” turned out to be a bit of an understatement. Domestically, Harper said, socialism looked like “public ownership, government interventionism, egalitarian redistribution and state sponsorship of secular humanist values.” Abroad, it took the gloves off, appearing as “fascism, communism and socialist totalitarianism.”
In opposition to that vast (but related!) assortment of enemies, Harper said, both neo- and theo-cons “favoured private property, small government and reliance on civil society rather than the state to resolve social dilemmas.” For decades, those prescriptions had proved popular, ensuring conservative parties’ dominance in much of the West. But now conservative parties were losing elections and even, as in Canada, falling apart. And it was all happening at what should have been a moment of triumph, coming as it did after Reagan and Thatcher.
“I believe that it is this very success that is at the heart of the current difficulties,” Harper said. Reagan and Thatcher had thumped the left-wing parties so soundly for so long that those parties finally abandoned many of their old-fashioned social democratic ideas and adopted much of the conservative economic agenda. “Socialists and liberals began to stand for balanced budgeting, the superiority of markets, welfare reversal, free trade and some privatization.” Even as the domestic opponent was shape-shifting, the unifying external threat all but vanished. The West won the Cold War. Soviet Communism vanished.
What conservatives must now do, Harper said, was to reimagine their opponent so they could adjust their response. “The real enemy is no longer socialism. Socialism as a true economic program and motivating faith is dead.” In its place was a subtler kind of big government. Harper called it corporatism: “the use of private ownership and markets for state-directed objectives. Its tools are subsidization, public/private partnerships and state investment funds. It is often bad policy, but it is less clearly different from conventional conservative economics than any genuine socialism.”
So if the enemy was not the international Left, and it wasn’t leftist economics, what could it be? It was, Harper said, “the social agenda of the modern Left. Its system of moral relativism, moral neutrality and moral equivalency is beginning to dominate its intellectual debate and public-policy objectives.”
The new Left social agenda could be seen most clearly in international affairs, he said. Remember that Harper was speaking less than two years after 9/11, and only a few months after the invasion of Iraq. “There is no doubt about the technical capacity of our society to fight this war,” Harper said. “What is evident is the lack of desire of the modern liberals to fight, and even more, the striking hope on the Left that we actually lose.”
Where previous generations of conservatives had to stop the Left from handing Western society over to the Communists, this generation had to stop it from handing the world over to Muslim fundamentalists and Saddam Hussein. The threat was clear in the response to the Iraq war “from our own federal Liberals and their cheerleaders in the media and the universities.” Harper was positing a Liberal-affiliated New Class that responded to George W. Bush’s moral clarity with all sorts of contradictory arguments: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that they did have such weapons and would use them if goaded; that war was “immoral, then moral but impractical, then practical but unjustified.” When the World Trade Center went down, some said the West had done something to deserve this attack. When Saddam’s statues came down in Baghdad, they were glum.
“Conservatives need to reassess our understanding of the modern Left. It has moved beyond old socialistic morality or even moral relativism to something much darker. It has become a moral nihilism—the rejection of any tradition or convention of morality, a post-Marxism with deep resentments, even hatreds of the norms of free and democratic western c
ivilization.
“This descent into nihilism should not be surprising because moral relativism simply cannot be sustained as a guiding philosophy. It leads to silliness such as moral neutrality on the use of marijuana or harder drugs mixed with its random moral crusades on tobacco. It explains the lack of moral censure on personal foibles of all kinds, extenuating even criminal behaviour with moral outrage at bourgeois society, which is then tangentially blamed for deviant behaviour. On the moral standing of the person, it leads to views ranging from radical responsibility-free individualism, to tribalism in the form of group rights.
“Conservatives have focused on the inconsistency in all of this. Yet it is actually disturbingly consistent. It is a rebellion against all forms of social norm and moral tradition in every aspect of life. The logical end of this thinking is the actual banning of conservative views, which some legislators and ‘rights’ commissions openly contemplate.”
Now Harper moved from diagnosis to prescription, from describing the new political gameboard to telling conservatives how they must move on it. “In this environment, serious conservative parties simply cannot shy away from values questions,” he told his audience. “On a wide range of public-policy questions—including foreign affairs and defence, criminal justice and corrections, family and child care, and health care and social services—social values are increasingly the really big issues.”
Expressing a mere fondness for fiscal belt-tightening could offer voters no salient distinction between conservatives and their opponents. Besides, how far could you cut taxes if you believed the state should do everything Paul Martin believed it should do? “There are real limits to tax-cutting if conservatives cannot dispute anything about how or why a government actually does what it does.”