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Rétrospective on the CPC, redux
Nov. 4th, 2015 09:03 pmThe record of the CPC over the past several years frequently had me scratching my head in puzzlement: so much of what they did seemed ham-fisted, guaranteed to alienate the voters in the middle whom they would need for re-election; and so it proved in the end, with an election showing the clearest marks of strategic voting I have ever seen.
Some of what they did was straightforwardly comprehensible as reflecting an expected ideology. Thus their explicit small government agenda gave rise to tax cuts and cuts to the civil service. At a somewhat quirkier level, the long-form census downgrading, which nobody had agitated for, seems to have been driven by a variant of small-l libertarianism held by Harper personally.
But for the rest of it... muzzling scientists? Splitting incomes for well-off couples (against the advice of the Finance Minister and implemented only after his death)? Inactivity, or, worse, obstructiveness on the immigration portfolio - where immigration is needed to correct a demographic imbalance, not so much to get established wealthy immigrants today? Stupidly butting heads with the Supreme Court of Canada? In what way are these "conservative"? Why the overall impression of meanness, a word which has kept coming up in retrospectives on the Harper years?
My own take is that this reflects three extremely problematic driving forces which have nothing to do with "conservatism" per se but which have been constant underlying strains in the CPC: populism, control, and an approach which is constantly small-scale, tactically, political (in the sense of always campaigning, not Aristotle's sense of the word or anything like it). And it's shaped, within that context, by a base which looks a lot like Rob Ford (minus, admittedly, the substance abuse problems): somewhat bigoted, not very bright, anti-intellectual, angry and sure that someone else is to blame.
In a notional phase space of political attitudes, conservative parties in the West seem to have wandered into a particularly nasty local maximum, where the core is resistant to any attempt to move away but there is a significant gap over to the majority of voters in the middle and left: culturally xenophobic, anti-elitist, attached to an energy-based, carbon-heavy lifestyle which is on its way out. (The old archetypal Tory was a member of the elite, originally a member of the landed classes and latterly a lawyer connected with high finance or the corporate world. Recently Canada and Ontario have seen "pure" career politicians like Harper and Manning, with a golf pro as the only successful provincial Conservative leader since Bill Davis.) This has been made even more marked by the move towards direct election of leaders, which favours populist appeals.
The old split between "social conservatives" and "economic conservatives", although still present, has become overshadowed in North America by a form of fused ideology which combines xenophobia and nostalgia for a "simpler", idealized society (from the social side) with a championing of small government and a small-business rhetoric on the economic side, along with a tendency, in power, to support the 1% while deploying populist propaganda. Although this is more emphatic in the USAn Tea Party, it's a reasonable summation of much of the CPC under Harper, and it certainly looks as though it describes the bulk of its base.
It is also increasingly out of touch. Demographics will soon be a firm barrier to the US Republicans, in their current form, having any chance of winning the presidency, if they haven't already become so. Without a firm rejection of this sort of movement conservatism, the Canadian (and Ontario) parties can look forward to a very long time out of power, unless the Liberals overreach very badly, and if any form of IRV or proportional representation is introduced, they will have even less in the way of a chance at recovering power.
That's a broad context. On top of that, the centralization went well beyond anything seen before in the PMO. It went beyond the need to control loose cannons in the caucus; it went beyond anything healthy for the future of the party, as it suppressed any other emerging talents. It seems to have been an expression of Harper's personal need to feel in control: so any message to come out of the government, at whatever level, had to reflect the central views of the PMO. Likewise, although the regular confrontations with the courts in part reflected a core cabinet short on lawyers (Tony Clement and Jim Flaherty, certainly, and the three successive Attorneys General, as law officers if the Crown) part of it seems to have been anti-elite posturing and part a refusal to give in to the idea that the PMO, via the legislature, could not control everything. It's going to take the party a while to recover from this abnormal degree of control, and one can hope that they react against it rather than trying to replicate it.
It looks to me as though they're going to be in the wilderness for a while.
Some of what they did was straightforwardly comprehensible as reflecting an expected ideology. Thus their explicit small government agenda gave rise to tax cuts and cuts to the civil service. At a somewhat quirkier level, the long-form census downgrading, which nobody had agitated for, seems to have been driven by a variant of small-l libertarianism held by Harper personally.
But for the rest of it... muzzling scientists? Splitting incomes for well-off couples (against the advice of the Finance Minister and implemented only after his death)? Inactivity, or, worse, obstructiveness on the immigration portfolio - where immigration is needed to correct a demographic imbalance, not so much to get established wealthy immigrants today? Stupidly butting heads with the Supreme Court of Canada? In what way are these "conservative"? Why the overall impression of meanness, a word which has kept coming up in retrospectives on the Harper years?
My own take is that this reflects three extremely problematic driving forces which have nothing to do with "conservatism" per se but which have been constant underlying strains in the CPC: populism, control, and an approach which is constantly small-scale, tactically, political (in the sense of always campaigning, not Aristotle's sense of the word or anything like it). And it's shaped, within that context, by a base which looks a lot like Rob Ford (minus, admittedly, the substance abuse problems): somewhat bigoted, not very bright, anti-intellectual, angry and sure that someone else is to blame.
In a notional phase space of political attitudes, conservative parties in the West seem to have wandered into a particularly nasty local maximum, where the core is resistant to any attempt to move away but there is a significant gap over to the majority of voters in the middle and left: culturally xenophobic, anti-elitist, attached to an energy-based, carbon-heavy lifestyle which is on its way out. (The old archetypal Tory was a member of the elite, originally a member of the landed classes and latterly a lawyer connected with high finance or the corporate world. Recently Canada and Ontario have seen "pure" career politicians like Harper and Manning, with a golf pro as the only successful provincial Conservative leader since Bill Davis.) This has been made even more marked by the move towards direct election of leaders, which favours populist appeals.
The old split between "social conservatives" and "economic conservatives", although still present, has become overshadowed in North America by a form of fused ideology which combines xenophobia and nostalgia for a "simpler", idealized society (from the social side) with a championing of small government and a small-business rhetoric on the economic side, along with a tendency, in power, to support the 1% while deploying populist propaganda. Although this is more emphatic in the USAn Tea Party, it's a reasonable summation of much of the CPC under Harper, and it certainly looks as though it describes the bulk of its base.
It is also increasingly out of touch. Demographics will soon be a firm barrier to the US Republicans, in their current form, having any chance of winning the presidency, if they haven't already become so. Without a firm rejection of this sort of movement conservatism, the Canadian (and Ontario) parties can look forward to a very long time out of power, unless the Liberals overreach very badly, and if any form of IRV or proportional representation is introduced, they will have even less in the way of a chance at recovering power.
That's a broad context. On top of that, the centralization went well beyond anything seen before in the PMO. It went beyond the need to control loose cannons in the caucus; it went beyond anything healthy for the future of the party, as it suppressed any other emerging talents. It seems to have been an expression of Harper's personal need to feel in control: so any message to come out of the government, at whatever level, had to reflect the central views of the PMO. Likewise, although the regular confrontations with the courts in part reflected a core cabinet short on lawyers (Tony Clement and Jim Flaherty, certainly, and the three successive Attorneys General, as law officers if the Crown) part of it seems to have been anti-elite posturing and part a refusal to give in to the idea that the PMO, via the legislature, could not control everything. It's going to take the party a while to recover from this abnormal degree of control, and one can hope that they react against it rather than trying to replicate it.
It looks to me as though they're going to be in the wilderness for a while.
