What's the big idea?
Monday, 20 December 2004
Mark Steyn
If I had to choose one single episode that sums up the state of our politics, it would be that moment in the 2000 election debate when Stockwell Day, leader of the Canadian Alliance, held up his homemade "NO TWO-TIER HEALTH CARE" sign and Joe Clark, leader of the Progressive Conservatives, waggishly scribbled out the "NO."
Mr. Clark was implying that the sinister right-wing Alliance had a "hidden agenda." If only. Had the Tory leader wished to convey more accurately the state of our medical system, he'd have scribbled out the "TWO." And if, vis-à-vis our no-tier health care or any of the other problems facing this country, Stock and his chums really did have a hidden agenda, all I can say is they did an awfully good job of hiding it. The problem in 2000 was not that we had a divided opposition, but that we had a divided opposition competing to demonstrate how much it agreed with the ruling party.
Four years on, we're now told that Stephen Harper is making efforts to move the Conserva-tives toward the "political centre." Good grief. He wasn't exactly a flaming right-wing firebrand last time round, and I still get miffed when I think about his use of the quintessential weaselly left evasion, "a woman's right to choose."
But the point about moving toward the "political centre" is that, in doing so, you move the centre. If the Liberals are at one on the scale and the Tories are at nine, and their focus groups tell them to move to five, all they've done is ensure that henceforth the centre will be three, and they'll be fighting entirely on the left's terms and the left's issues. If you're a Scott Brison type--presentable chap who's gone into politics because he talks a good game--and the main object is a junior ministry and a car and a driver, the move toward the "centre" may make a kind of tactical sense. But if you're interested in making a difference to your country, it won't.
Successful conservatives don't move toward the political centre. They move the political centre toward them. That's what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both did. Canadian conservatives tend to get a little gloomy when they look to the south and see with envy the great tide of Bush-state red pushing the Democrats to the coastal fringes and a few Great Lakes enclaves hard up against the Canadian border. In a preview of the president's belated state visit to our decayed Dominion, the Vancouver Sun's Douglas Todd gleefully pointed out that Paul Martin and John Kerry were to all intents and purposes identical twins separated at birth--both "moderate" Catholics, bilingual, etc. Well, maybe. But try to imagine Paul Martin running for election the way John Kerry just did--boasting that he "personally believes" life begins at conception; ostentatiously mentioning his Catholicism and his many years as an altar boy at the drop of a hat; firing off guns and slaughtering wildlife at every stop. Regardless of the eventual outcome, Kerry's conduct in the campaign told you the real truth about the dynamics of American politics.
It's easy for disheartened Tories up here to say, oh, well, America's a much more conservative country. That wasn't so obvious pre-Reagan. His predecessor, Gerald Ford, was no conservative, only a tribal Republican who believed in nothing very much. Likewise, Ford's British contemporary, Ted Heath, was a tribal Tory who believed in nothing other than his fanatical and un-Conservative attachment to a united Europe. Both men implicitly accepted that there was a left-wing ratchet effect in the West: abroad, you couldn't hope to defeat Communism; at home, you couldn't hope to reverse creeping semi- (in America) or full-blown (in Britain) socialism, and all a "conservative" could do was try to slow the rate of decline. That's what "moving toward the political centre" usually boils down to.
For Thatcher and Reagan, it wasn't enough. And, because of the clarity with which they made their case, they moved the centre toward them. That's not just because they were powerful personalities, but because they had powerful ideas. The British Tories' "privatization" programs were taken up eagerly by all the new democracies of Eastern Europe. The Britain and America of a quarter-century ago--mired in Jim Callaghan's "winter of discontent" and Carterian "malaise"--seem like foreign countries. By contrast, what of the lame third leg of the Anglosphere? Where is the legacy of Brian Mulroney? He put together a ramshackle coalition that held together just long enough to get him into office. But that's all. He was in office but not in power. He left the illusions of the seventies essentially unchallenged.
So our problem is that the Trudeaupia of a quarter-century ago doesn't seem like a foreign country; we're still mired in it, ever more so. I drive a lot between Quebec and New Hampshire, and you don't really need a border post to tell you you've crossed from one land into another. On one side, the hourly update on the radio news lets you know that Canada Post workers are thinking about their traditional pre-Christmas strike and employees of the provincial liquor stores are already on strike. "Strike": you could listen for years to a New Hampshire radio station and never hear that word outside the baseball play-by-play. Now that the Liberals have invested so much of their prestige in Canada's fast-track immigration program for strippers, it's surely only a matter of time before CJAD's newsman announces that, just in time for Christmas, Quebec's Amalgamated Union of Exotic Dancers is dropping everything and downing tools, and who wants to go to a strip joint where all you can see are scabs?
So we're still living in That '70s Show. Our prince has yet to come.
Can Stephen Harper play that role? His post-election performance isn't encouraging. If he's playing footsie with Quebec's on-again-off-again "soft sovereigntists" on principled grounds--i.e., in the cause of a truly decentralized federation-that's fine. But if he's just trying to weld together the old Mulroneyite jalopy, it will have no more staying power than it did last time round.
Conservatives win when they champion ideas. They win in two ways: sometimes they get elected; but, even if they don't, their sheer creative energy forces the intellectually bankrupt left to grab whatever right-wing ideas they figure they can slip past their own base. That's how Tony Blair "reformed" the Labour party; that's how Bill Clinton survived Newt Gingrich, by co-opting Republican issues like welfare reform. When Tories don't champion ideas, they get nowhere. If they're incumbents, they may cling to their jobs, but at the price of long-term damage to their parties--see Mulroney, Ernie Eves, and maybe even Ralph Klein.
But let's say Paul Martin was in the market to filch some Conservative ideas. Where are they? What are they? Other than the Belgianization of Canada, what big idea is associated with today's Tories? In America, conservatism is constantly replenished from sources which, above the forty-ninth parallel, are demographically less significant (evangelical Protestantism) or constrained by government regulation (talk radio). Virtually every prop of conservative creativity down south is up here dependent to some degree or other on the blessings of the Liberal state--big business, book publishers, the over-consolidated media.
If Canadian conservatives want to elect a government that will make a difference in 2008 or before, they have to promote conservative ideas and develop their own ways of injecting them into the political bloodstream. Because the liberal state subsidizes its own cheerleaders, the conservative ideas have to be strong enough to overcome the structural disadvantage. Is victory certain? No. But defeat certainly is, if you play the media game and remain an ideas-free zone.
Suppose you're one of those Quebec separatists who thinks the whole Péquiste approach is clapped out. Suppose you're one of Canada's hard-working immigrants who didn't realize quite how much of his income the Grits would urinate away in the dancing fountains of Shawinigan. Suppose you're one of the many Canadians (judging from my mailbag) who've watched a loved one die in the rictus grip of our diseased health system. Maybe you're ready to make common cause with the Conservatives. But it's hard to make common cause with people who don't have a cause. Between now and the next election, Tories need to articulate a conservatism that's big and bold and rooted in intellectual energy. Otherwise, we're doomed to near misses from here to eternity.
Monday, 20 December 2004
Mark Steyn
If I had to choose one single episode that sums up the state of our politics, it would be that moment in the 2000 election debate when Stockwell Day, leader of the Canadian Alliance, held up his homemade "NO TWO-TIER HEALTH CARE" sign and Joe Clark, leader of the Progressive Conservatives, waggishly scribbled out the "NO."
Mr. Clark was implying that the sinister right-wing Alliance had a "hidden agenda." If only. Had the Tory leader wished to convey more accurately the state of our medical system, he'd have scribbled out the "TWO." And if, vis-à-vis our no-tier health care or any of the other problems facing this country, Stock and his chums really did have a hidden agenda, all I can say is they did an awfully good job of hiding it. The problem in 2000 was not that we had a divided opposition, but that we had a divided opposition competing to demonstrate how much it agreed with the ruling party.
Four years on, we're now told that Stephen Harper is making efforts to move the Conserva-tives toward the "political centre." Good grief. He wasn't exactly a flaming right-wing firebrand last time round, and I still get miffed when I think about his use of the quintessential weaselly left evasion, "a woman's right to choose."
But the point about moving toward the "political centre" is that, in doing so, you move the centre. If the Liberals are at one on the scale and the Tories are at nine, and their focus groups tell them to move to five, all they've done is ensure that henceforth the centre will be three, and they'll be fighting entirely on the left's terms and the left's issues. If you're a Scott Brison type--presentable chap who's gone into politics because he talks a good game--and the main object is a junior ministry and a car and a driver, the move toward the "centre" may make a kind of tactical sense. But if you're interested in making a difference to your country, it won't.
Successful conservatives don't move toward the political centre. They move the political centre toward them. That's what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both did. Canadian conservatives tend to get a little gloomy when they look to the south and see with envy the great tide of Bush-state red pushing the Democrats to the coastal fringes and a few Great Lakes enclaves hard up against the Canadian border. In a preview of the president's belated state visit to our decayed Dominion, the Vancouver Sun's Douglas Todd gleefully pointed out that Paul Martin and John Kerry were to all intents and purposes identical twins separated at birth--both "moderate" Catholics, bilingual, etc. Well, maybe. But try to imagine Paul Martin running for election the way John Kerry just did--boasting that he "personally believes" life begins at conception; ostentatiously mentioning his Catholicism and his many years as an altar boy at the drop of a hat; firing off guns and slaughtering wildlife at every stop. Regardless of the eventual outcome, Kerry's conduct in the campaign told you the real truth about the dynamics of American politics.
It's easy for disheartened Tories up here to say, oh, well, America's a much more conservative country. That wasn't so obvious pre-Reagan. His predecessor, Gerald Ford, was no conservative, only a tribal Republican who believed in nothing very much. Likewise, Ford's British contemporary, Ted Heath, was a tribal Tory who believed in nothing other than his fanatical and un-Conservative attachment to a united Europe. Both men implicitly accepted that there was a left-wing ratchet effect in the West: abroad, you couldn't hope to defeat Communism; at home, you couldn't hope to reverse creeping semi- (in America) or full-blown (in Britain) socialism, and all a "conservative" could do was try to slow the rate of decline. That's what "moving toward the political centre" usually boils down to.
For Thatcher and Reagan, it wasn't enough. And, because of the clarity with which they made their case, they moved the centre toward them. That's not just because they were powerful personalities, but because they had powerful ideas. The British Tories' "privatization" programs were taken up eagerly by all the new democracies of Eastern Europe. The Britain and America of a quarter-century ago--mired in Jim Callaghan's "winter of discontent" and Carterian "malaise"--seem like foreign countries. By contrast, what of the lame third leg of the Anglosphere? Where is the legacy of Brian Mulroney? He put together a ramshackle coalition that held together just long enough to get him into office. But that's all. He was in office but not in power. He left the illusions of the seventies essentially unchallenged.
So our problem is that the Trudeaupia of a quarter-century ago doesn't seem like a foreign country; we're still mired in it, ever more so. I drive a lot between Quebec and New Hampshire, and you don't really need a border post to tell you you've crossed from one land into another. On one side, the hourly update on the radio news lets you know that Canada Post workers are thinking about their traditional pre-Christmas strike and employees of the provincial liquor stores are already on strike. "Strike": you could listen for years to a New Hampshire radio station and never hear that word outside the baseball play-by-play. Now that the Liberals have invested so much of their prestige in Canada's fast-track immigration program for strippers, it's surely only a matter of time before CJAD's newsman announces that, just in time for Christmas, Quebec's Amalgamated Union of Exotic Dancers is dropping everything and downing tools, and who wants to go to a strip joint where all you can see are scabs?
So we're still living in That '70s Show. Our prince has yet to come.
Can Stephen Harper play that role? His post-election performance isn't encouraging. If he's playing footsie with Quebec's on-again-off-again "soft sovereigntists" on principled grounds--i.e., in the cause of a truly decentralized federation-that's fine. But if he's just trying to weld together the old Mulroneyite jalopy, it will have no more staying power than it did last time round.
Conservatives win when they champion ideas. They win in two ways: sometimes they get elected; but, even if they don't, their sheer creative energy forces the intellectually bankrupt left to grab whatever right-wing ideas they figure they can slip past their own base. That's how Tony Blair "reformed" the Labour party; that's how Bill Clinton survived Newt Gingrich, by co-opting Republican issues like welfare reform. When Tories don't champion ideas, they get nowhere. If they're incumbents, they may cling to their jobs, but at the price of long-term damage to their parties--see Mulroney, Ernie Eves, and maybe even Ralph Klein.
But let's say Paul Martin was in the market to filch some Conservative ideas. Where are they? What are they? Other than the Belgianization of Canada, what big idea is associated with today's Tories? In America, conservatism is constantly replenished from sources which, above the forty-ninth parallel, are demographically less significant (evangelical Protestantism) or constrained by government regulation (talk radio). Virtually every prop of conservative creativity down south is up here dependent to some degree or other on the blessings of the Liberal state--big business, book publishers, the over-consolidated media.
If Canadian conservatives want to elect a government that will make a difference in 2008 or before, they have to promote conservative ideas and develop their own ways of injecting them into the political bloodstream. Because the liberal state subsidizes its own cheerleaders, the conservative ideas have to be strong enough to overcome the structural disadvantage. Is victory certain? No. But defeat certainly is, if you play the media game and remain an ideas-free zone.
Suppose you're one of those Quebec separatists who thinks the whole Péquiste approach is clapped out. Suppose you're one of Canada's hard-working immigrants who didn't realize quite how much of his income the Grits would urinate away in the dancing fountains of Shawinigan. Suppose you're one of the many Canadians (judging from my mailbag) who've watched a loved one die in the rictus grip of our diseased health system. Maybe you're ready to make common cause with the Conservatives. But it's hard to make common cause with people who don't have a cause. Between now and the next election, Tories need to articulate a conservatism that's big and bold and rooted in intellectual energy. Otherwise, we're doomed to near misses from here to eternity.