Soft Stalinists in Exile
Mark Steyn - Monday,6 November 2006
I won't pretend to know what was going through Michael Ignatieff's mind when he called the Israeli raid on Qana a "war crime." He was speaking to a Lebanese-Canadian audience so most likely he was just doing the usual Liberal ethnic glad-handing and got a little carried away: given what he saw in Bosnia, it's hard to believe he doesn't know what a real war crime looks like. But anyway folks got a bit miffed so a day or two later he found himself pandering to another section of the Liberal mosaic and having to work a little harder than he'd expected with the party's Jewish voters.
In his Ignaminious way, the great man usefully illuminated the problem with a one-party state: the one party takes it for granted that it's everybody's party, at least in non-genocidal polities such as Canada. The polite gloss on these arrangements was best put by some or other President-for-Life to the Duke of Edinburgh on a royal visit to Africa. I forget which Afro-Marxist basket case it was--Kenya, maybe, or perhaps Zambia--but for the purposes of illustration almost any will do. It was a couple of years after independence, and as was by then customary the Westminster constitution bequeathed to the fledgling nation by the Colonial Office wallahs had been torn up and replaced by a one-party state.
His Royal Highness was amused to find that the parliamentary chamber still had benches arranged on two sides, London-style, and remarked to the President-for-Life that the seating arrangements were surely a trifle absurd given that under the constitution of the new People's Republic only one side was permitted.
This was perhaps not the most culturally sensitive quip, and the Kleptocrat-for-Life was sufficiently chippy about these things that he felt obliged to respond. He explained earnestly that his country had learned from the mistakes of the British: having a lot of different parties simply meant you wasted too much time arguing with each other. Under his nation's evolved form of democracy, lots of different views were still allowed, but now they were brought together within one party, which was much more effective. You'd be surprised how plausible this line was in the poli-sci departments of western universities.
Unfortunately, in less coercive one-party states such as Canada what tends to happen is that the one party finds itself home not so much to "different views" but a lot of people who have no particular reason to be there other than that's just where you have to go to do business in a one-party state. As evidence of that, look no further than the extraordinary number of failed Conservative
leadership candidates in the Liberal ranks--Scott Brison, Belinda Stronach, Keith Martin, probably half a dozen others I've forgotten. Try to imagine Sheila Copps, Brian Tobin and John Manley sitting on the Tory benches. It's not that the party embraces "different views" rather than it's a one-stop shop for people who have a remarkably similar view of themselves a year or two hence, usually involving a ministerial car and driver and an expenses tab. And, if that's your priority, the Liberal Party has generally been the best place to be. Indeed, the only place to be.
The trouble is, once the car and driver and lunch account are removed, it's not clear there's much left. That's the situation the Liberals presently find themselves in. If the main selling point of your party is that you're the winners, what's left once you've stopped winning? For the quickest answer to that question, look no further than the Afghan mission. Technically, it's grossly unfair for leftie whiners suddenly to see our chaps in the Hindu Kush as part of some Harperite warmongering to curry favour with the lunatic Texan cowboy down south. After all, it was the Grits who signed us up for this, and quite a while ago. But the then government did it out of their usually finely calibrated cynicism: they sent troops to Afghanistan in order not to have to send them to Iraq, etc. It was a necessary manoeuvre in order to maintain the fiction that Liberal Canada was engaged with the world, albeit not too engaged. But, if M. Chrétien or Mr. Martin ever gave any we-won't-come-back-till-it's-over-over-there big stirring speech on the Afghan mission it must have been to a small room in Iqaluit, and during a CBC strike. It was Mr. Harper who made Afghanistan a cause, and one in the national interest rather than as some desultory multilateral peacekeepy tagalong. This prime minister believes in it; for his predecessors, it was just the usual artful triangulation.
That's quite a revealing difference. Even when the policy is the same, for the Tory leader it's a noble and necessary component of being a serious power in a turbulent world; for the Liberal leaders, it's something you do jus' cuz. In theory, a leadership campaign is an excellent opportunity for a party to lay out what it believes in. But a party that's been in government as long as the Grits mostly believes in being in government and, when it's not, it doesn't find it easy to remember what else it's good for. There are, of course, "da Canadian values" to which scary right-wingers are such a threat. You remember? "Troops. On the streets. In our cities. I am not making this up." True, if when you say "our cities," you're a Pushtun yakherd hired by the Liberals for a little freelance voice-over work. But, as I understand it, the demand from the NDP and the media is that Gunboat Harper is throwing so much at the Taliban, no one's seen a single troop on the streets of Toronto for months.
I doubt the Liberals will try the Scary Stephen routine next time round. Power may corrupt but in our system it also normalizes. As for "da Canadian values," to some of us that always had a totalitarian-lite unpleasantness, as if Liberal pieties had somehow been enshrined as inviolable pillars of the state. But again, if that's the case, once da Canadian values are in the other chap's hand, what's left for you? A mere nine months out of office, whenever Liberal leadership candidates cite the old lines, that's all they sound like: old lines. What of the various "new faces" with their plans for "renewal"? Stephane Dion? Sorry, but this time I'd like a bit more than a six-month interlude between Quebec prime ministerships. Iggy and his Quebec-is-a-nation-within-a-state rubbish? Sorry, I think I'd also like more than a six-month interlude before the inevitable resumption of Quebec's role as the be-all and end-all of Canadian politics. The Liberals' act feels exhausted.
I acknowledge I'm not typical, certainly not of the Canadian electorate, and even less so of the Quebec electorate, or even the anglo-Montreal electorate. So the question is how many other people are not yet ready to bring the Liberals back in from the wilderness? With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit last January as Canada's Conservative Revolution. The Tories didn't win so much as the Liberals lost--and, given their bumbling leader, mountain of corruption and staggeringly inept campaign, they lost by very little. Unfortunately for them, they've lost a lot more since. In an informal one-party state, when the one party ceases to be the state, it loses its mojo. Go back to that Afro-Marxist analysis--lots of different views brought together under one umbrella, etc. Another way to look at it is like this: a lot of folks in and around the party are only there because that's where the action is. Once word gets out that the action is elsewhere, not everyone wants to stick around. In Canada, Stephen Harper may be, technically, the Queen's first minister, but almost every other lever of state power and influence remains under the control of the Liberal club, from the governor general to the heads of pretty much every government agency and every pseudo-private monopoly. The question for the party, though, is how reliably Liberal are all these fellows? I think it's fair to say her viceregal eminence is of a genuinely leftie disposition and would prefer a Liberal restoration, and so would the massed ranks of the CBC. But what about the Heather Reismans and Leonard Aspers et al? How many influential props of the Liberal state are prepared to stick with the Grits when it's no longer necessary to do so?
If I were an ideological Liberal (whatever that is), I would be a little rattled by the emptiness of the last few months. The leadership campaign sounds like a competition to run yesterday's world.
Mark Steyn - Monday,6 November 2006
I won't pretend to know what was going through Michael Ignatieff's mind when he called the Israeli raid on Qana a "war crime." He was speaking to a Lebanese-Canadian audience so most likely he was just doing the usual Liberal ethnic glad-handing and got a little carried away: given what he saw in Bosnia, it's hard to believe he doesn't know what a real war crime looks like. But anyway folks got a bit miffed so a day or two later he found himself pandering to another section of the Liberal mosaic and having to work a little harder than he'd expected with the party's Jewish voters.
In his Ignaminious way, the great man usefully illuminated the problem with a one-party state: the one party takes it for granted that it's everybody's party, at least in non-genocidal polities such as Canada. The polite gloss on these arrangements was best put by some or other President-for-Life to the Duke of Edinburgh on a royal visit to Africa. I forget which Afro-Marxist basket case it was--Kenya, maybe, or perhaps Zambia--but for the purposes of illustration almost any will do. It was a couple of years after independence, and as was by then customary the Westminster constitution bequeathed to the fledgling nation by the Colonial Office wallahs had been torn up and replaced by a one-party state.
His Royal Highness was amused to find that the parliamentary chamber still had benches arranged on two sides, London-style, and remarked to the President-for-Life that the seating arrangements were surely a trifle absurd given that under the constitution of the new People's Republic only one side was permitted.
This was perhaps not the most culturally sensitive quip, and the Kleptocrat-for-Life was sufficiently chippy about these things that he felt obliged to respond. He explained earnestly that his country had learned from the mistakes of the British: having a lot of different parties simply meant you wasted too much time arguing with each other. Under his nation's evolved form of democracy, lots of different views were still allowed, but now they were brought together within one party, which was much more effective. You'd be surprised how plausible this line was in the poli-sci departments of western universities.
Unfortunately, in less coercive one-party states such as Canada what tends to happen is that the one party finds itself home not so much to "different views" but a lot of people who have no particular reason to be there other than that's just where you have to go to do business in a one-party state. As evidence of that, look no further than the extraordinary number of failed Conservative
leadership candidates in the Liberal ranks--Scott Brison, Belinda Stronach, Keith Martin, probably half a dozen others I've forgotten. Try to imagine Sheila Copps, Brian Tobin and John Manley sitting on the Tory benches. It's not that the party embraces "different views" rather than it's a one-stop shop for people who have a remarkably similar view of themselves a year or two hence, usually involving a ministerial car and driver and an expenses tab. And, if that's your priority, the Liberal Party has generally been the best place to be. Indeed, the only place to be.
The trouble is, once the car and driver and lunch account are removed, it's not clear there's much left. That's the situation the Liberals presently find themselves in. If the main selling point of your party is that you're the winners, what's left once you've stopped winning? For the quickest answer to that question, look no further than the Afghan mission. Technically, it's grossly unfair for leftie whiners suddenly to see our chaps in the Hindu Kush as part of some Harperite warmongering to curry favour with the lunatic Texan cowboy down south. After all, it was the Grits who signed us up for this, and quite a while ago. But the then government did it out of their usually finely calibrated cynicism: they sent troops to Afghanistan in order not to have to send them to Iraq, etc. It was a necessary manoeuvre in order to maintain the fiction that Liberal Canada was engaged with the world, albeit not too engaged. But, if M. Chrétien or Mr. Martin ever gave any we-won't-come-back-till-it's-over-over-there big stirring speech on the Afghan mission it must have been to a small room in Iqaluit, and during a CBC strike. It was Mr. Harper who made Afghanistan a cause, and one in the national interest rather than as some desultory multilateral peacekeepy tagalong. This prime minister believes in it; for his predecessors, it was just the usual artful triangulation.
That's quite a revealing difference. Even when the policy is the same, for the Tory leader it's a noble and necessary component of being a serious power in a turbulent world; for the Liberal leaders, it's something you do jus' cuz. In theory, a leadership campaign is an excellent opportunity for a party to lay out what it believes in. But a party that's been in government as long as the Grits mostly believes in being in government and, when it's not, it doesn't find it easy to remember what else it's good for. There are, of course, "da Canadian values" to which scary right-wingers are such a threat. You remember? "Troops. On the streets. In our cities. I am not making this up." True, if when you say "our cities," you're a Pushtun yakherd hired by the Liberals for a little freelance voice-over work. But, as I understand it, the demand from the NDP and the media is that Gunboat Harper is throwing so much at the Taliban, no one's seen a single troop on the streets of Toronto for months.
I doubt the Liberals will try the Scary Stephen routine next time round. Power may corrupt but in our system it also normalizes. As for "da Canadian values," to some of us that always had a totalitarian-lite unpleasantness, as if Liberal pieties had somehow been enshrined as inviolable pillars of the state. But again, if that's the case, once da Canadian values are in the other chap's hand, what's left for you? A mere nine months out of office, whenever Liberal leadership candidates cite the old lines, that's all they sound like: old lines. What of the various "new faces" with their plans for "renewal"? Stephane Dion? Sorry, but this time I'd like a bit more than a six-month interlude between Quebec prime ministerships. Iggy and his Quebec-is-a-nation-within-a-state rubbish? Sorry, I think I'd also like more than a six-month interlude before the inevitable resumption of Quebec's role as the be-all and end-all of Canadian politics. The Liberals' act feels exhausted.
I acknowledge I'm not typical, certainly not of the Canadian electorate, and even less so of the Quebec electorate, or even the anglo-Montreal electorate. So the question is how many other people are not yet ready to bring the Liberals back in from the wilderness? With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit last January as Canada's Conservative Revolution. The Tories didn't win so much as the Liberals lost--and, given their bumbling leader, mountain of corruption and staggeringly inept campaign, they lost by very little. Unfortunately for them, they've lost a lot more since. In an informal one-party state, when the one party ceases to be the state, it loses its mojo. Go back to that Afro-Marxist analysis--lots of different views brought together under one umbrella, etc. Another way to look at it is like this: a lot of folks in and around the party are only there because that's where the action is. Once word gets out that the action is elsewhere, not everyone wants to stick around. In Canada, Stephen Harper may be, technically, the Queen's first minister, but almost every other lever of state power and influence remains under the control of the Liberal club, from the governor general to the heads of pretty much every government agency and every pseudo-private monopoly. The question for the party, though, is how reliably Liberal are all these fellows? I think it's fair to say her viceregal eminence is of a genuinely leftie disposition and would prefer a Liberal restoration, and so would the massed ranks of the CBC. But what about the Heather Reismans and Leonard Aspers et al? How many influential props of the Liberal state are prepared to stick with the Grits when it's no longer necessary to do so?
If I were an ideological Liberal (whatever that is), I would be a little rattled by the emptiness of the last few months. The leadership campaign sounds like a competition to run yesterday's world.
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