Archived version: https://archive.fo/S5jqO.
The Conservative activist Ben Woodfinden was in despair. “I’m more depressed about the state of conservative politics in Canada right now than I think I’ve ever been,” he lamented in a widely read post online. “I look at all sorts of conservative camps and factions right now and I see intellectual poverty everywhere.”
The comment was occasioned, in particular, by a new outburst of Conservative infighting set off by, of all people, the Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre. At a Calgary Stampede event, Mr. Poilievre celebrated the victory of former Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay in the recent British Columbia Conservative leadership race – a victory he described as being won over “Liberal lobbyists from out east.”
That was a reference to the campaign of Caroline Elliott, managed by Kory Teneycke, whose other client, Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford, has a relationship with Mr. Poilievre that would probably be described as frosty, if they had any relationship at all. Mr. Ford might not be Mr. Poilievre’s favourite Conservative, but to describe Mr. Teneycke, who has worked for Conservative causes all his adult life, as a Liberal is beyond bizarre.
But Mr. Woodfinden’s comment was not directed only at the Conservative leader’s disparagement of Ms. Elliott’s campaign, for whom he also worked. He was describing a more general malaise. It occasioned a great deal of reaction, some of it unintentionally confirming Mr. Woodfinden’s thesis, some of it more thoughtful.
In the latter camp was an article by another Conservative activist, Howard Anglin. Cheer up, was the gist of it: “I have never been more bullish” about conservative politics, he claimed, citing “a riot of new ideas and their growing traction,” and pointing to the proliferation of conservative journals online.
And it’s true. There is an animated debate going on right now about what conservatism is, what it believes, and who should get to define it, with vastly different perspectives being expressed. That might be interpreted as a sign of intellectual health. Or it might be seen as a sign of intellectual confusion.
For Mr. Woodfinden, the problem isn’t so much that there are no good ideas on the Conservative side, as that they are not being translated into policy. Or rather they are – just not by Conservatives. “The pipeline that turns ideas into policy in this country is working fine,” he observes, in an article responding to Mr. Anglin. “It just isn’t running through us.”
Instead, it is running through the Liberals, under Mark Carney – and sometimes the ideas are suspiciously conservative-looking. Conservatives, meanwhile, confine themselves to fighting with each other – not the contests over ideas that might light up the intellectual journals, but fights over “cliques and personalities and who is aligned with whom.” Ideas, he writes, seem to be used mostly to “dress up quarrels that were really about status.”
“We now assign ideological identity by association and vibe rather than conviction,” he goes on. “Increasingly the thing that certifies you as properly conservative is not what you believe but how you perform. Are you angry enough? Bombastic enough, contemptuous of the right enemies, willing to say the outrageous thing?
“Temperament has become the loyalty test. Being boorish and abrasive now reads as conservative, whilst civility and an even temper read as vaguely Liberal, and a great many conservatives have internalised this without noticing that it is nonsense.”
“Someone can hold thoroughly conservative views and be written off as a squish for expressing them substantively, civilly and calmly, whilst someone with barely a coherent thought in his head sails through on pure aggression, because he sounds the way the algorithm has taught us a conservative is supposed to sound.”
I quote this at some length because I think it absolutely nails the Conservative predicament at the moment, where, as Mr. Woodfinden writes, “style has eaten substance.” Conservatism has become a tantrum, a pose, an affected contrarianism, a clutch of conspiracy theories, all expressed in a querulous tone that might be called High Choleric.
And yet Mr. Woodfinden seems to be at a loss to explain it. The article wanders off into a discussion of the baleful effects of social media and a bit of warmed-over George Grant about “imported” American small-government conservatism and how conservatism in Canada has to be about big government because of things like our “harsh and beautiful environment.”
Let me attempt a synthesis. The phenomena described above – huge divisions among conservative intellectuals, contrasted with a politics that has little room for ideological debates but lots of nasty infighting between factions, all while the Liberals are busy implementing conservative ideas – may not be entirely unrelated.
Mr. Poilievre took a lot of flak for his Stampede comment, as he has often for the harsh, divisive approach he brings to politics. The only difference was that this time the nastiness was aimed at other Conservatives. But Mr. Poilievre is more a symptom than a cause of Conservative alienation. A great many Conservatives think he’s just fine. They like the acid tone, the empty posturing, the smug media-bashing. When Mr. Poilievre munched on an apple as he humiliated a small-town reporter, a lot of Conservatives thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
Figures like Mr. Poilievre are the kinds of leaders parties elect when they are in a particular frame of mind. And that frame of mind at the moment is uncertain, insecure, lacking direction or purpose or sense of self but driven only by a desire to lash out, to offend, and to attack. It was directed at those outside the party for a while, but it was only a matter of time before it turned inward.
Mr. Woodfinden writes in wonder about the B.C. leadership campaign, where “the candidates largely agreed on most policy questions … And yet the contest was bitter and tribal and personal.” And yet? Or and so? In politics, the less the substantive differences, the more likely a fight is to turn personal.
That was the paradox of Conservative politics under Stephen Harper. For all his credentials as a conservative intellectual, a man of ideas, the fate of the Conservatives under Mr. Harper was to bleed themselves of all they had once believed, to cease all interest in actually changing things in favour of meek obedience to the leader’s ever-changing dictates. The party was in power for nearly 10 years under Mr. Harper, yet left scarcely a footprint.
This has, admittedly, deep historic roots. You don’t lose two out of three elections for more than a century, as the Conservatives have done since 1891, without it doing deep damage to your psyche.
The Conservatives have suffered for tending to concentrate their support in the less populous regions of the country. They have served, as a result, as the party of the outs – all those left out, for one reason or another, of the Liberal coalition.
“For one reason or another” is the operative phrase here. The Conservative coalition has tended to be unwieldy at the best of times, a catch-all of grievances and resentments, many of them regionally based, lacking the glue that binds all Liberals: ambition, and the prospect of power. And they are never more divided than when the Liberals fail to offer a convincing bogeyman.
Liberal governments tend to alternate between two phases, revolutionary and consolidationist. In revolutionary mode, best represented by the party under the Trudeaus, père et fils, Conservatives can be rallied by the need to save the country from the wreckage of “Liberal ideology.”
But when Liberals turn consolidationist, as under Jean Chrétien and now Mr. Carney, Conservatives fall apart. How do you differentiate yourselves from a party that is busy stealing your policies? What is the Conservative raison d’être in such moments? Why be a Conservative and not a Liberal, if the results are the same?
Conservatives like to tell themselves they are more principled than the Liberals, but more practical than the NDP. The truth is rather different. Conservatives have combined the worst of the other two parties: all the commitment to principle of the Liberals, all the electoral success of the NDP. It isn’t that the Conservatives are too high-minded for power. They just don’t seem to know what they want to do with it. Voters can sense these things.
The problem has become particularly acute in recent years, with the rise of populism and the know-nothing right, around the world but particularly south of the border. The natural, and healthy, conservative suspicion of “liberal nostrums” has curdled into suspicion of all nostrums, including established facts.
The historic conservative skepticism of intellectuals – meaning, in particular, overconfident intellectuals, sure of their ability to plan other people’s lives – has become an undifferentiated disdain for experts, and expertise, and ultimately knowledge.
With conservatism in disarray, it has been easy for charlatans and hucksters and ideologues of all kinds to wander through the wreckage, peddling this or that as the “true” or the “new” conservatism. Under Donald Trump, the American right has become a movement for big government, protectionism, and truckling to foreign despots, all things that conservatives used to despise.
Here in Canada the populist moment seems to have passed. In its place have come the so-called “new right,” youngish, very online, and fond of announcing themselves as the future – a thing usually better demonstrated than stated. They might best be described as ideological pre-Raphaelites, both in their swooning earnestness and in their undisguised hankering after a conservatism untainted by two centuries of contact with western liberalism – not so much post-liberal as pre-liberal.
Thus, while conservatism has traditionally devoted itself to restraining the excesses of liberalism, notably in the latter’s 20th-century enthusiasm for the state as the engineer of social and economic change, the “new” conservatives simply want to harness it to their own ends: to be as ruthless in using the state to serve right-wing cultural causes as the Trudeaus were in the service of the left. It’s not about whether the government should meddle in people’s lives, in other words, but who should do the meddling, and in which direction.
This is a strange position to take for a party that has spent most of the past 130-odd years out of government. It is an even stranger one if it ever hopes to spend more time there in the future.
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