Fires and Fire Extinguishers

 

The new Lieutenant (pronounced lef- tenant) Governor of Alberta has recently and needlessly provoked outrage among the “conservatives” in that province, that is to say, Albertans who are small-l liberals in the sense that term conveyed in Canada in the days when Sir Wilfred Laurier led the big-L Liberal Party.   When asked by a representative of the fourth estate, whether she would sign royal assent to Danielle Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Act, she said that she would consult experts about the constitutionality of the bill before doing so.     Few of those who took immediate umbrage with this answer, seemed to notice how strange it was that the question was asked in the first place.   While the conclusions of inductive reasoning are not infallible, the fact that bills that pass the appropriate legislative body, provincial legislature or Parliament, have always, or the next thing to it, received royal assent in the past means that it is rather silly of a reporter to ask such a question unless there is reason to think that it might be different this time.   There was no such reason to think this until the Lieutenant Governor answered the way she did.

 

Before proceeding to look at some of the criticism this answer has received, let us back up a bit and provide some background information.   The Lieutenant Governor of a province, as you may have deduced if you did not already know, is the provincial representative of our Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, corresponding provincially to the Governor General in the Dominion government.   Just as the Governor General, assuming the Queen is not present to do so herself, summons Parliament together and dissolves it, and appoints on the basis of who commands the support of Parliament, the executive ministers of Cabinet, so the Lieutenant Governor does with the provincial Legislative Assembly and the provincial Cabinet.  Just as all bills that pass Parliament – the House of Commons and Senate – become law when the Governor General acting on behalf of the Queen signs royal assent, so with the Lieutenant Governor and the bills that pass the provincial Legislative Assembly.

 

The Alberta Sovereignty Act is not a bill currently before the Alberta Legislative Assembly.   It is something that Danielle Smith has proposed as part of her campaign to become the next leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party.   The UCP needs a new leader because of the abysmal job that their current leader Jason Kenney has done as party leader and provincial premiers, especially during the bat flu in which he attained the dubious distinction of being the premier who locked up the most Christian pastors for doing their duty and obeying God rather than man.   Danielle Smith, who is the frontrunner in the race to replace Kenney, was formerly the leader of the Wildrose Party of Alberta which merged with the provincial Progressive Conservatives to form the UCP in 2017.   The Alberta Sovereignty Act is the reason why she is frontrunner.   It is not, as some might mistakenly conclude from the title, a proposal of formal secession of Alberta from the Dominion of Canada.   It is rather a proposal that Alberta claim for herself the same position, vis-à-vis the Dominion government, that the province of Quebec already enjoys, that is, the right to ignore the Dominion government on matters that she thinks are her business, and not Canada’s.   Smith maintains that this would be done within the limits of the Canadian constitution, and, indeed, would be merely reclaiming what is allotted to the province in the constitution.   Since the Act has not even been drafted yet, it is rather premature to opine on whether it meets the lofty goals of this rhetoric or not.   

 

Those who objected to the way Alberta Lieutenant Governor Salma Lakhani answered the strange question, objected to both the content of what she said and to what we might call the context in which she said it.   Like the Lieutenant Governor herself, they were partially right and partially wrong. 

 

“We are a constitutional monarchy and this is where we keep checks and balances” she said.  “I’m what I would call a constitutional fire extinguisher. We don’t have to use it a lot, but sometimes we do.”   While many of the objectors, including some who really ought to know better like Rebel News founder Ezra Levant, took exception to these words, there is nothing in the way of content here that is not fundamentally correct.   There is a constitutional as well as a ceremonial importance to the office of the Queen and that of her vice-regal representatives.   Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary famously told American President Teddy Roosevelt that his role as monarch was to protect his people from their governments.   The Fathers of Confederation saw the role of the monarchy in similar terms, as the final check on the danger of Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   The greatest constitutional expert our country has ever had, the Honourable Eugene Forsey, called this “an absolutely essential safeguard of democracy”.    The problem is not with the principle of what Lt. Governor Lakhani said, but with the application.    The most important power reserved to the Crown in our constitution, is the power to dissolve Parliament/Legislature, call an election, and if need be dismiss the Prime Minister/Premier.    Forsey’s dissertation on the subject, later published as a book, was entitled The Royal Power of Dissolution.    The fire extinguisher is indeed an apt metaphor for this, but it is only to be used when there is what would be the equivalent of a fire in this metaphor.   The Alberta Sovereignty Act as proposed by Smith is not such a fire.   It may be unconstitutional, it may not be - this can only be determined when the text is made available.   From the proposal, however, if it proves to be unconstitutional, it will not be in a way that corresponds with a fire, but in a manner in which the courts are the appropriate venue to deal with the unconstitutionality.

 

What would constitute a fire?

 

The closest thing to it that Canada has ever seen has been the behaviour of the current Prime Minister in Ottawa.  At the beginning of the bat flu, when fear was at its zenith and rational thinking at its nadir, he seized the opportunity to unburden himself of accountability to Parliament.   Having been reduced to minority status from a huge majority in a humiliating Dominion election the year previous, almost immediately after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, he sent Parliament home, calling them back together temporarily to ask them to approve a measure that would in effect have suspended the Magna Carta for two years, giving him carte blanche to tax and spend as he saw fit without having to account to Parliament.   While he was only given part of what he wanted, he nevertheless proceeded to govern from in front of the television camera before the front door of his cottage, while Parliament remained in suspension.   A year into the bat flu, he called a snap vanity election, which merely returned the status quo ante, but in the course of campaigning decided to take the dangerous and provocative path of demonizing and scapegoating a portion of the Canadian public that turned out to be much larger than he thought.   When, after the first two years of the bat flu, he began imposing new restrictions while the rest of the world was abandoning them, he found himself faced with a massive but peaceful protest.   Indeed, the protest was far more peaceful than any other mass movement of the last two years, many of which have been called “peaceful” or “mostly peaceful” despite being essentially riots characterized by violent language, violent behaviour, property destruction, looting and vandalism, none of which could be found in the truckers’ protest.   When defaming the protestors didn’t work, he evoked the Emergency Measures Act, giving himself the kind of powers designed for use when the country is besieged in war, to crush the protest.   He has continued since, to use law enforcement, the revenue agency, and other such branches of government to inappropriately attack his personal and political enemies.   If there is anything lacking to qualify his premiership as the sort of “fire” for which the reserve constitutional powers of the Crown are the “fire extinguisher” it is only the refusal to relinquish power after losing an election.

 

When it comes to what I have dubbed the context of the Lt. Governor’s remarks, her critics are on firmer ground.   The Alberta Sovereignty Act, whatever its merits and demerits might be, is not the sort of thing for which the reserve powers of the Crown are intended, and, worse, is a multilevel political matter.  What I mean by that is that it is at the present time at the heart of one political contest, the race for the leadership of a political party, the UCP, but should the person proposing it win that race, it will then become a bill to be debated in the Alberta Legislature between the various parties represented there and potentially an issue in another political contest, the next Alberta provincial election.   There is yet another level on which it is political in that it is of such a nature as will almost certainly generate contention between Alberta and other provinces and between Alberta and the Dominion government.   A Lieutenant Governor should not be involving herself in such matters.

 

One of the foremost benefits to the institution of hereditary monarchy in the age in which we live, is that a hereditary monarch is above politics in the partisan sense of the word.   For an example of what can happen when the head of state is not above partisan politics but is elected to office by running as the representative of a faction, we need look no further than the republic to the south of the 49^th Parallel.   Last Thursday, the current occupant of the White House gave an intemperate rant at Independence Hall in Philadelphia about how the approximately half of his country that voted for his opponent in the last election were some sort of existential threat to the United States and democracy.   To make this speech, already creepy enough, even more threatening, he delivered it from behind a lectern stationed in front of blood red illumination, mingled with shadows, while flanked by US Marines, conjuring up the images of dictators in general, Nazi Germany in particular, and the devil in hell.   This is what you will eventually get, when you fill the office of the head of state, the person who represents the entire country, by partisan election. (1)   Parliamentary government under a hereditary monarch is much better.    Queen Elizabeth II herself, has always understood that since her office is above partisan politics, she has a duty to that office not to descend into partisan politics personally.   Those charged with representing her in a vice-regal capacity in Canada, whether at the Dominion or provincial level, have a responsibility to follow this example.   Here, the Lt. Governor of Alberta has clearly failed.   Perhaps this part of her duty was not made plain to her.

 

God Save the Queen!

 

(1)   Totalitarian countries have been, almost without exception, republics – the Cromwellian protectorate, the first French Republic i.e. the Reign of Terror, every Communist country (they generally call themselves People’s Republics), Nazi Germany.   The freest countries in the world, with only a few exceptions, have had parliamentary government under a hereditary monarch.   Dictators are fundamentally a democratic phenomenon.  The dictator claims absolute power over people, because he claims to speak for “the people”.   Whereas kings and queens are the fathers and mothers of their countries, dictators are always Big Brother.   Dictatorship like democracy, is all about power, the ability to compel obedience.   Monarchy is about authority – the respected and recognized right, derived from a number of sources including ancient prescription and constitutional succession, to lead.    This distinction is reflected even in the difference between the two Greek suffixes of the words themselves.   The ancients understood democracy to be the mother of tyranny.   Modern democracy has become more totalitarian over time.   The original problem with democracy, as Alexis de Tocqueville spelled it out in the nineteenth century in Democracy in America, was the “tyranny of the majority”, i.e., the majority trampling over the rights of the minority.   The original Modern solution to this problem was to temper democracy with liberalism, in the sense of acknowledged, protected, rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities with which governments, even with majority backing, are forbidden to interfere.   NB, minority here means “the numerically less”, and not, what more recent liberals and democrats seem to think it means, people of certain designated skin colours, ethnicities, national origins, religions, sexual orientations, etc.  More recently, replacing the majoritarian principle with the consensus principle, has been the preferred solution.   This, however, makes things worse.   Under the consensus principle, a democratic decision is not valid without universal participation and universal agreement.   Universal agreement, however, translates into “dissent will not be tolerated.”   This is why such present day liberal democrats as the current occupier of the White House and the current Prime Minister of Canada are so absolutely intolerant of all who disagree with them.

Prescriptive Authority, the Power of Numbers, and Justice

In my last essay I offered my commentary, for what the commentary of a royalist, Tory, Canadian is worth, on what has been happening in the republic on our southern border in the ongoing electoral extravaganza that is this year's presidential election.   I opened with a paragraph, explaining, as I usually do when putting my two cents in about such matters, that I have no dog in this race and pointing out why the whole affair confirms my belief in our own institutions.   Specifically, I meant the monarchy, obviously.   When you  fill the office of head-of-state, the person who represents the country as a whole, by popular election, you run the risk of a scenario where factionalism has gotten so extreme that whoever wins, approximately half the country will resent the outcome and refuse to accept it.   That is what happened in the last American presidential election, 2016, leading to this year's fiasco.   That is one of many reasons to prefer a hereditary head-of-state.

Today I offer something of an addendum to the previous essay.   I have often stated in the past that I believe in and support Parliament the institution rather than democracy the ideal.   Parliament is a democratic institution, of course, but it is not merely democratic.   It is very old, if we include the history of the Westminster Parliament on which ours is modelled.   Its antecedents go back at least to the Great Council of the Norman kings and arguably to the Witenagemot of Alfred the Great.   These are the ancestors of both Parliament and the Privy Council and the former became recognizable as such shortly after the Magna Carta Libertatum.   It became more democratic over time, of course, but its authority, like that of the monarchy in whose name it legislates, is derived from ancient, established, and proven usage, or, to use Edmund Burke's word meaning the same, prescription.    I stress this, even though (or especially because) it places me at odds with most of our "Conservative" politicians, and more so the liberals and socialists, all of whom prattle on forever about our "democracy", because prescription confers a stable, secure, authority on a governing institution.   Democracy the ideal, can only confer power on a government, and a volatile, unstable, form of power at that.   Remember the distinction between authority and power.   Authority is the respected right to lead, power is the feared ability to coerce.   Authority needs a certain amount of power to back it up at times, but woe to those whose governors have only power and no real authority.

Democracy is specifically the power of numbers.   That the power conferred by having numbers behind you does not automatically translate into the just use of that power is an observation that was central to all of Plato and Aristotle's writings about governance.   More recently, although it was a couple of centuries back, Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary on democracy as he had observed it in the American republic, coined the expression the "tyranny of the majority" to warn about the danger of the misuse of democratic power.   Those who put together the constitution of the American republic were aware of this problem, which is why they put in features such as the Electoral College, rather than adopting a more simple democracy.   In the twentieth century there were those who tried to re-think democratic theory so as to eliminate the problem.   One proposal was to replace "majority rules" with "what everyone agrees on rules."   How such people failed to see that the potential for totalitarianism, already present in the older Modern ideal of democracy (there is a reason Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both "the father of modern democracy" and "the father of totalitarianism"), is magnified, not lessened, by this substitution, is beyond me.   If democratic legitimacy is conferred by getting everybody to agree rather than a majority vote then those would claim democratic legitimacy for their agendas can tolerate no dissent.   Everybody must be forced to agree.   Is it not obvious how that has become the attitude of the present, "woke", Left?

Now, let us think about the last American presidential election and the current one.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency in the Electoral College.   His opponent, Hilary Clinton, had been expected to win.   A sizable percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump that year did so, not because they wanted Trump per se, but because they couldn't stand the thought of Hilary Clinton as president.   Or, as some wags put it, they figured she had had her two terms as president already and didn't need a third one.

The "woke" Left refused to accept this outcome.   Donald Trump, who before running for president was a television celebrity, became first an object of ridicule for progressives in the media, then an object of hatred.   Note, incidentally, how the behaviour of the media over the past four years clearly proves what liberals have, until fairly recently, tried to deny - that the mainstream media is overwhelming slanted to the Left.   Well over 90 percent of television newsreporting, somewhat less for the print media but still well over fifty percent, dedicated themselves to the destruction and demonization of Donald Trump, his positions, and his supporters.  Day in and day out, for four years, there was a constant bombardment from the newsmedia, and not just the American newsmedia, about what a horrible, racist, neo-nazi, bigot and white supremacist Donald Trump was.   The violent wing of the Left mobilized and took to rioting, vandalism, and outright assault on Trump supporters, and the media winked at it, if it did not expressly state its approval.

The media has now declared Biden the winner of this year's election.   In my opinion they have acted prematurely.   Biden's win has not been certified and is being challenged in the courts.   Even as the media was declaring for him, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered all of the late Pennsylvania ballots, that is, those received after the cutoff, separated from the others.   However, the point I am making does not depend upon who is ultimately and legally declared the winner,

More people turned out this year to vote for Donald Trump than in 2016.   More, not less.   In 2016 a sizeable section of Trump's votes were really votes against Clinton rather than votes for Trump.   That is not the case here.   Biden is not the kind of person to inspire either enthusiasm or hatred.   Those who came out to support Donald Trump this year - approximately half of the voters, whoever legitimately has the slight marginal lead - did so, because they love their president, in spite of the way he has been demonized for four years.   Interestingly, and this is something I will probably have more to say about at a future date, that includes record numbers of black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters.  (1) Conversely, apart from his own vote, assuming he remembered to cast one, and those of his immediate family, very few of the votes cast for Biden were cast for Biden per se.   I am not referring to all those who rose from the dead to vote, voted twice or more and in states other than their own, or those whose Trump votes may have been switched to Biden votes through some high-tech gizmo.   The legitimate votes for Biden were votes against Trump, by people who hate him.

"Love trumps hate", Hilary Clinton said in 2016.   The "woke" Left latched on to this as a slogan and have used it ever since, oblivious to the fact that hate better describes the vicious rage that energizes and motivates everything they do than it does the words and behaviour of Trump and his supporters.   Does "love", in the ordinary sense of the word, trump "hate" in the ordinary sense of the word?   If so, then Donald Trump, who has endured four years of bitter hatred directed against him, only to have a record number of people turn out and vote their love for him, is the moral victor, the person who deserves the victory, even if the number of those voting their hatred of him is slightly higher.

Which is yet another reason for preferring the authority which prescription vests in ancient institutions, whether our own monarchy and Parliament, or those of the 244 year old American republic, over the power of democratic numbers.

(1) This is something the pre-Trump Republicans were trying to achieve for about three decades.   Their method involved trying to divest themselves of their image as a "white" party by adopting a moderate version of the "rainbow coalition" policies of the progressive Democrats.  It failed.  Trump, by contrast, did pretty much the opposite of that.  He ran on a platform of stopping the export of jobs, controlling immigration, securing the borders, and supporting law and order, which obviously had a strong appeal to middle and working class, white Americans and which explicitly opposed the anti-white hostility that the Democrats' "rainbow coalition" had evolved into under Obama's presidency, but was not racialist in the way his demonizers absurdly claimed.   Lo and behold, it accomplished what the Bushes and Dole and Romney and McCain all failed to do. 

Scrap the Social Sciences – Especially Sociology

Jeff Minick had an excellent suggestion last week at Intellectual Takeout, a cultural commentary website operated by the Charlemagne Institute. He proposed that instead of defunding the police, the universities which have been churning out these barbaric Maoist thugs who are trying to tear down Western Civilization should be defunded instead.

I can legitimately claim to have been ahead of the game on this one. Towards the end of May, while George Floyd, who is the pretext for all this crime, violence, and destruction, was still alive and kicking, I wrote not one, but two essays in response to the pissing and moaning from the University of Manitoba after they had their provincial operating grant slashed by five percent. I concluded the first one, “How the Universities Have Betrayed the Founding Principles of Academia”, by saying:

A five percent reduction of their funding? That's a start and it is only just considering that it is the experts they have been producing and telling us to listen to who have done so much unnecessary damage to the economy that supplies the government revenues that pay for their grants. It would be better to cut them off altogether until such time as they return to the principles of the Great Academic Tradition.

Indeed, I can even claim to gone a step further than Mr. Minick. He has excluded the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) departments from his proposal:

I don’t mean in all academic departments, of course. American universities still lead the world in scientific research. We still produce fine mathematicians and excellent engineers, though not enough of the latter. Our colleges and universities still graduate skilled nurses and doctors, business professionals, and computer scientists.

By contrast, these were the very departments I condemned in the essay referenced above, on the grounds that by dividing what was traditionally regarded as a unified whole – human knowledge – into isolated fields that had little to do with each other, they were producing the very sort of thing – “experts” who profess far more knowledge they actually possess, and masses who ignorantly take their every word as Gospel – that the Socratic school attacked at the beginning of the Western Academic Tradition. Of course, at the time I was thinking of the way the lockdown, suspending our basic freedoms, had been so widely accepted because the “experts” recommended it. Since then we have passed from Apocalypse 2020 Mach I: The Stand to Apocalypse 2020 Mach II: The Camp of the Saints and in the context of the latter, Mr. Minick is quite right to target the humanities as they are presently being taught in the universities, as I did in my second essay, “The Bonfire of the Humanities.”

There is a third major division of university departments which deserves “defunding” in the light of the present crisis, however. Indeed, most of the bad ideology which is now corrupting the humanities has bled into the liberal arts from this division. The division in question is that of the “social sciences” or as they are sometimes called the “soft sciences.”

The social sciences occupy a kind of middle territory in academia between the humanities and the STEM disciplines.” The social sciences purport to be “sciences” in the same sense as the “hard sciences” of physics, biology, and chemistry, all of which fall under the S in STEM. Human behaviour, especially the organized behaviour of groups such as communities and societies, is their subject matter. While this has been a major subject for organized human knowledge right from the beginning – the entirety of the Platonic canon can be said to be concerned with it in one way or another, as are the Ethical and Political writings of Aristotle – the social sciences are distinguished from previous studies of human behaviour by their claim to apply the methodology of Modern science. This is why some disciplines, such as history, can be classified as falling under both the humanities and the social sciences, depending upon the approach to the subject matter taken.

Conservative Christians have subjected the methodology of Modern science to sound criticism from a number of different angles. Gordon H. Clark, for example, the Calvinist theologian and apologist, who was for many years the chairman of the Philosophy Department at Butler University, argued that it was epistemologically worthless in his The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God (1964). Its value, Clark argued, is strictly utilitarian. It helps us to improve our standard of living, but it does not lead us towards the truth. Its laws and theories, for all of their usefulness to mankind, are always false. George Grant, the conservative Canadian Anglican philosopher who taught in the philosophy department of Dalhousie University and the religion department of McMaster, criticized Modern science and the technology with which it is inseparably intertwined, from an ethical standpoint. Modern science is Baconian science, and as such has as its end the subjecting of all it studies to the human will, or as Bacon himself put it “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This, Grant argued was the goal of the Age of Progress, which in theological terms amounted to an eschatological view of history that substituted the “Kingdom of Man” for the “Kingdom of God.”

The social sciences are especially vulnerable to both of these critiques. Since human beings are themselves the subject of the social sciences it is that much more impossible for them to separate the output of the study from the input of the investigator. As for Grant’s criticism, if we agree with him, as I happen to do, that the project of bending nature to serve the will of man set mankind down a wrong path of trying to put himself in the place of God, then the further down the path we get, the deeper into error we sink, and surely the bending of our own nature to our own will is about as far down the path as is possible to get.

The preceding criticism calls the value of the social sciences into question. The positive case for defunding them is that they do little other than indoctrinate gullible young people with left-wing ideology turning them into the sort of people who like to put on masks to intimidate lecturers they disagree with, stir up riots, and vandalize the memorials of the past. Not a dime of public money should ever go towards such indoctrination. The humanities are also guilty of this, but there is a significant difference between them and the social sciences in this regard. The humanities are the disciplines, mostly going back to ancient times, which formed the core educational curriculum up to the Renaissance. If they are churning out neo-Maoist cultural revolutionaries today, this is because they have been infiltrated and subverted from their original purpose. Taught properly, they would do no such thing. With most of the social sciences, however, the corruption goes back almost to the very beginning of the disciplines.

In the case of sociology, a convincing case can be made that is was built upon the shaky foundation of left-wing ideology right from the very beginning. Sociology has long been held in suspicion by those who view it as simply the dumping ground for all the spare parts left over from the other social sciences and not a real discipline in its own right. Conversely, its proponents have maintained that it is the unifying discipline of the social sciences, that ties anthropology, psychology and all of the others together.

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote in his biography of Karl Marx (1937) that he was the “true father of modern sociology in so far as anyone can claim the title.” By this, he did not mean that Marx had thought up all the basic ideas of sociology and laid down its operating principles in its writings. He meant that Marx, as a critic, forced those who were doing this work, to clarify their ideas. That having ben said, Marx and Auguste Comte, who founded the discipline in the more formal sense, were both heavily influenced by Henri de Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon was born into a French aristocratic family and as a teenager took off to North America and fought in the American Revolution under George Washington. After his return to France he joined the Jacobin Club in the early stages of the French Revolution. It is important to remember, that while it is now commonplace to speak of the Left as “Marxist” as if it began with Marx, the subversive movement against Christian civilization is much older. It was first called the Left in the French Revolution, but even the Jacobins, who took Cromwell’s revolt of a century and a half earlier as their inspiration, were not the originals. The Left is older, therefore, than Saint-Simon, although it did not go by that name until he had joined it. He left his mark on what it would thereafter be, however, in that he was the first socialist. Marx and Engels classified him as a “utopian socialist”, but all of the different socialisms that sprang up in the nineteenth century, from Proudhon’s to that of Marx and Engels themselves which eventually became the dominant socialism, can be traced back in one way or another to Saint-Simon.

Comte was a student of Saint-Simon in the most literal sense. He served him as secretary for a period in the early 1800s, during which time he also studied under him. It was in this period that Comte’s first writings appeared under Saint-Simon’s patronage.

Given the influence of the French Revolutionary and first socialist Saint-Simon on sociology’s official father, Comte, and Marx’s influence on the development of the discipline as discussed by Berlin, it is hardly a huge leap of logic to saw that the overwhelming left-wing dominance of this field that is evident today, as it was throughout most of the last century, can be attributed to a left-wing slant having been built into it from the very beginning.

It should be noted that Robert Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition (1966) can be cited as giving evidence to the contrary. Nisbet was that rara avis, a conservative sociologist, which is all the more unusual in that he received his Ph.D from Berkeley, began his teaching career at that stronghold of left-liberalism, and ended it at Columbia University, the epicentre of the outbreak of the cultural revolutionary brand of leftism in North American academia. In The Sociological Tradition, he identified five “unit-ideas” of sociology – community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation – and traced the history of each in the thought of such nineteenth to early twentieth century sociological pioneers as Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, and Simmel. With regards to each of these, he argued that the early sociologists had borrowed heavily and knowingly, from how these same concepts appear in the counter-revolutionary writings of Edmund Burke, Louis de Bonald, François-René de Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre. As the discipline was being established, he argued, the ideas of two polar opposite figures, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx, struggled and strove to shape it. He argued that Tocqueville, who represented the thought drawn from the well of the aforementioned counter-revolutionaries, had triumphed over the revolutionary socialist Marx, before the nineteenth century was even over.

Nisbet’s history of sociology is not as contrary to the idea that it was built with a left-wing bias as it may appear. He was not arguing that sociology itself was traditionalist, conservative, or reactionary, much less that the average sociologist was any of those things. He merely maintained that the aforementioned unit-ideas had been borrowed by the early sociologists from the writings of the right-wing critics of the Enlightenment Project and the French Revolution. Unit-ideas are the basic concepts from which philosophies and theories are constructed, in the history of ideas as postulated by Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being (1936), from which Nisbet borrowed the term. Much like how the same kind of brick used to build a school can also be used to build a slaughterhouse, so can unit-ideas from one philosophical tradition, be borrowed in the construction of another that is radically different. In this case, the unit-ideas in question were used by the counter-revolutionaries to challenge the individualistic values of Enlightenment liberalism. These leading figures in sociology borrowed these concepts from the counter-revolutionaries because they also rejected these liberal values, but they put them to a radically different use.

If Nisbet maintained that Tocqueville was triumphant over Marx by the end of what he called the “Golden Age of sociology”, he was not so naïve to think that this was still the case. In the new “author’s introduction” to the 1993 re-issue of his book, he discusses the poor state of sociology in the United States when he was a student, and the renascence it underwent in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the forces that brought about that renascence was the influx of European scholars who had fled the Third Reich. While these scholars were not all Marxists, a great many were. These included both classical Marxists and the neo-Marxists whose re-interpretation of Marxist theory into cultural rather than economic terms produced the Critical Theory that is now being shoved down everyone’s throats, in academia and out, by the militant woke. While Nisbet makes no comment on this directly, it is interesting to note that toward the conclusion he states that “The pathetic truth is that what I have chosen to call the sociological tradition, the tradition emanating from Tocqueville in the first instance and continuing unmistakably in the writings of Weber and Durkheim and others, is in serious straits at the present time, as is sociology as a whole.” He then makes reference to an article by Irving Louis Horowitz entitled “The Decomposition of Sociology” which complained that sociology “has largely become a repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas, from gay and lesbian rights to liberation theology” and that this was driving all the real scientists out. Horowitz, whose own company Transaction Books put out this re-issue of Nisbet’s book, felt so strongly on the matter that he expanded that very article into a book, which Oxford published that same year, in which he stated “Sociology has become a series of demands for correct politics rather than a set of studies of social culture.”

The state of sociology that Horowitz and Nisbet decried twenty-seven years ago has certainly not improved since then. It has gotten much, much worse and is bearing a most toxic form of fruit.

It is time that it be cut off from the public purse entirely.

Reactionary Tory Principles and the Present Day “Right”: Part One

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, the universe as a whole being the largest example of such a system, the level of entropy will increase over time. While this is technically a statement about energy moving from an ordered and usable state to one that is disordered and unusable, the popular understanding of the Law as saying that everything eventually breaks down is not wrong. Translated into poetry, William Butler Yeats’ lines “Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (1) is a decent approximation.

That this Law is valid when applied to history ought, with certain qualifications, to be considered a fundamental reactionary principle. By history, of course, I mean the history of human civilizations, and one qualification is that the Law must be applied in a particular rather than a general sense. Speaking of any given civilization, the creative energy that was put into building it eventually runs out and the civilization enters into a period of decline. Those who are familiar with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West will recognize in his theory of the life-cycle of civilizations – although he called them cultures – what the history of human civilization in general looks like when the Law of entropy is applied to each civilization in particular. The other qualification, is that, as with any other application of this Law including its original usage in physics, it is a property of fallen Creation which in no way binds the Creator. The decline of a civilization can be and often has been retarded and even turned around by a religious revival. This is why there is no essential conflict between the reactionary’s anti-Whig understanding of history as moving in a downward direction towards decadence, decline, doom, and destruction and his call to “turn back the clock.” Whether the reactionary recognizes it or not, the latter is really a call for religious revival, a call to turn back to God.

The opposite of this reactionary principle is the idea that the history of human civilization, apart from any divine input, is an exception to the Second Law and is constantly moving towards a higher order, greater freedom, and maximal human potential. This is the idea of progress to which all forms of modern thought subscribe in one form or another. The nineteenth century Whig interpretation of history which treated all of past history as one long preparation for liberal democracy was one well known version of the idea of progress. The neoconservative Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man was an updated edition of this version. As Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1952) and George Grant (Philosophy in the Mass Age, 1959) observed this idea was produced by inappropriately transferring to the history of human civilization the attributes of God’s redemptive history which transcends the history of human civilization and culminates in the Kingdom of God. The result of this transferal is the substitution of the Kingdom of Man for the Kingdom of God and Grant, who pointed this out in his first major book, devoted the writing side of his career to contemplating the consequences of this substitution in the modern, technological, age.

A quick glance at the mainstream “right” today will tell you that it has entirely abandoned the reactionary principle in favour of some form of the idea of progress. In Manitoba our most recent provincial election just took place a day prior to the request for the dissolution of Parliament launching the next Dominion election. Provincially, the status quo was more or less maintained, with the majority of seats held by Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives. Note the adjective in the party’s title. During the campaign Pallister’s PCs – the initials are even more appalling than the adjective by itself – used “Moving Manitoba Forward”, previously used by the socialists, as their slogan and ran ads urging voters not to let Wab Kinew’s New Democrats turn back the clock. In this context, of course, turning the clock back does not mean a religious revival, a recovery of worthy elements of the ancient and Christian traditions that were lost or damaged in the transition to modernity, or anything else a reactionary would mean by the phrase but rather a return to the policies of the previous Greg Selinger government – huge deficits, high taxes, long emergency room wait times, and general mismanagement of the public health care system. It speaks volumes of the mainstream “right” in this province, however, that it would rely so heavily on the language of progress to sell its platform to the public.

There is also a growing right outside of the mainstream. If we compare it to the mainstream right on an issue by issue basis we find that overall it is much to be preferred to the mainstream right. In Canada today any stronger position against abortion than “I am personally against it, but I believe it is a woman’s right to choose” has been almost completely pushed into the non-mainstream right. Any position on immigration stronger than “we need secure borders and to enforce our border laws” such as the suggestion that legal levels of immigration are way too high was pushed out of the mainstream right in all Western countries decades ago. To say that selection of immigrants is the prerogative of the country admitting the immigrants and that Western countries need more prudence in exercising that prerogative because not all cultures are equally compatible with our own, although common sense and until about sixty years ago non-controversial, is now regarded by the entire left and the mainstream right as beyond the pale. Speaking these truths about immigration has become the signature issue of most of the various forms of the non-mainstream right.

This “right” too, however, seems incapable of speaking its truths in any language other than that of the left. Take the movement behind Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Make America Great Again movement that put Donald Trump into the presidency of the United States, and the movement represented by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party here in Canada. All three of these movements are populist. Populism is a style of politics in a democratic state that involves appealing directly to “the people” and vilifying the governing elites. A populist conceives of the policies he promotes in terms of “the will of the people” and prefers direct democracy over representative democracy. Each of these aspects of populism is an obvious characteristic of each of the three movements that I have specified – even though, ironically, it is due to representative democracy having been given the upper hand over direct democracy in the constitution of the American Republic that Donald Trump is now their president.

Indeed, the association between the non-mainstream right and populism is such that many people today think of populism as being naturally and inherently right-wing. It is not. Populism’s natural home is on the left. The idea of “the will of the people” is the very fiction upon which the left was historically based. It is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called la volonté générale and was incorporated by the French Revolutionaries into the sixth Article of their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Indeed, the very concept of “the people” is a fiction, for it has no consistent meaning. When a republican speaks of “the people” he means all citizens of the republic, governor and governed alike. A populist, by “the people”, excludes the elite. A lot of leftists use “the people” to mean “the poor” and exclude “the rich”. Hitler, by “the people” meant German-speaking Aryans. “The people” can mean whatever the person invoking the name of “the people” wants it to mean and therefore it means nothing at all. It is an expression, like so many others in the leftist lexicon, which is defined not by its designation of a corresponding reality, but by its usefulness as a tool for justifying violence and seizing and exercising power.

By contrast, kings and queens do not traditionally speak of “the people” but rather “my people” or “our people.” This wording is clear and definite – it means the monarch’s subjects – and expresses the traditional relationship between sovereign and subject in which feudal allegiance and familial ties are connected, kings and queens being both the liege-lords of their realms and the fathers and mothers of their large extended family of subjects. A true man of the right, a reactionary, is always a royalist.

To our list of reactionary principles we can add that pure democracy is the worst form of government, and that direct democracy as opposed to representative democracy, is the worst form of democracy. These principles are the opposite of all modern thinking, which is what makes them reactionary, but they are demonstrable.

Imagine a group of twenty people. One of them, Bob, puts forward to the rest of the group, the proposition that another of their members, Joe, should be beaten, tortured, mutilated, and killed for their amusement. The proposition is debated and they decide to settle it by taking a vote. Fifteen vote in favour, five against. The outcome is rather rough on poor Joe, but it was a democratic decision, fair and square, majority rules.

While that example is rather absurd and extreme, it illustrates what is wrong with the popular modern thought that democracy is the ideal form of government. If, however, you were to make one slight adjustment to the illustration and have Bob put forward the proposition that since Joe, who is quite wealthy, has so much property, and the rest of them, who are rather poor, have so little, it is only fair that they confiscate Joe’s wealth and distribute it equally among themselves, you would no longer have a situation that would be highly unlikely to arise in real life but a small-scale depiction of what is called economic democracy or socialism.

This problem with democracy has been recognized since it was first invented by the Greeks in ancient Athens and is one of the reasons why Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle condemned democracy as the worst form of government. Alexis de Tocqueville described the problem as “the tyranny of the majority.” Modern thinkers believed that the solution to the problem was to combine democracy with liberalism – the idea that government is itself subject to the law and that the law must recognize the natural, inalienable, rights of the individual. When men like John Locke and John Stuart Mill first proposed this doctrine they saw it as a restraint on the power of government to oppress. Today, centuries later, we are surrounded by an abundance of examples of how the doctrine of liberalism can be the basis and justification of state oppression. To give but one, we are now living in a day when someone can get in trouble with the law for using the pronoun “he” to refer to someone born with a penis on the grounds that it violates the individual’s inalienable “right” to choose his/her/its/whatever own gender.

What is also apparent in our day and age is that while “the tyranny of the majority” is a problem unique to democracy, the tyranny of the minority over the majority is just as much an element of democracy as of an outright oligarchy. Interestingly, the best example of this is the very issue which the non-mainstream right insists on framing in leftist, populist, terms. The populist, nationalist, “right” is not wrong in saying that Western countries have had too much of the wrong kind of immigration and placing the blame for this on “the elites.” What they don’t seem to grasp is that the guilty elites are democratic elites qua democratic elites.

Every organized society will always have an elite. There will always be a minority in any society that steers and directs it. This is what Robert Michels called “the iron law of oligarchy” (Political Parties, 1911) and it is true of all forms of society, no matter how democratic they might be in theory, and it does not make a difference if the democracy is direct or representative. In a true direct democracy, where every single question of public policy would be decided by a popular referendum, the ability to persuade the majority to vote its way most of the time, would be in the hands of a minority, and they would be the elite. The elite that actually wields power is not necessarily the same as those nominally in charge. Thus in a representative democracy the elite may be those who have gotten themselves elected into public office or it may be a hidden minority who have the ability to control elected officials. The nature of the society has as much of an effect on the nature of the elite as the nature of the elite has on the nature of the society.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem The Solution (1959) was intended as a criticism of the Communist government of East Germany’s suppression of the uprising of 1953. The poem’s ironic conclusion “Would it not in that case be simpler/for the government/To dissolve the people/and elect another” has frequently been borrowed as a critical description of the motives behind Western governments’ liberal mass immigration policies. The criticism is apt, but my point is that it is only a democratic society that provides its elites with an incentive for trying to “dissolve the people/and elect another”. An oft-heard argument for democracy is that it allows us to periodically “throw the rascals out.” One can see the appeal in this but the flipside is that it gives the political class a motive to “do unto them, before they do unto you.”

It is hardly a coincidence that radical, demographic transformation producing, mass immigration was introduced throughout the West in the 1960s – only a decade and a half after the end of the war in which the United States had emerged as the predominant power in the West. The United States, which had been led into the First World War by a President who wanted to “make the world safe for democracy” and who therefore insisted on driving the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns from their thrones paving the way for the rise of Hitler, was able after the Second World War to introduce radical democratic changes throughout the West whether by forced re-education in the former Axis countries, the bribery of the Marshall Plan re-building assistance among the European Allies, or the dependence of both upon the American nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against the threat of Soviet invasion. The Americanization of the West led almost immediately to the spread of liberal mass immigration. Here in Canada, Tom Kent, an important Liberal Party strategist in the days of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and one of the men who spearheaded the radical changes to our immigration policy in the late 1960s, as much as admitted to the Brechtian motive of maintaining the Liberal hold on power by dissolving the old electorate when he said that it was done to break up “Tory Toronto.”

If the radical immigration the West has been suffering from for decades is due to what Christopher Lasch called “The Revolt of the Elites” and that revolt in turn is the result of the triumphant ascendancy of American-style liberal democracy in the post-World War II Western world (2) then the insistence of the non-mainstream right on using the left-wing language of populism, democracy and “the will of the people” to combat this kind of immigration seems like a major strategic error.

I must point out, before concluding this essay, that the preceding strong criticism of democracy is not a criticism of the institution of parliament. As noted above, the true reactionary right is royalist, but no king or queen has ever governed without a council of advisors, and the institution of parliament has been a part of royal government in Christendom for over a thousand years. Parliament as an institution is democratic, but not completely democratic, and its virtue, historically, was that it incorporated a form of representative democracy into royal government in a way that strengthened the latter while diluting the many negative aspects of the former. While this virtue has been greatly lessened by the triumph of Whiggism the problem is with the Whig principle not with the institution. The Whig principle is that parliament is the democratic safeguard against royal tyranny. The Tory principle – the reactionary principle - is the exact opposite of this – that in parliament royal authority is the safeguard against democratic tyranny. The Tory principle is the true one.

In Part Two, I shall, Deus Vult, consider the reactionary principle that religion is the foundation of civilization in opposition to the liberal idea that the secular retreat from religion is the foundation of civilization and we shall weigh the mainstream, neoconservative, right in the balance of this principle and find it wanting.


(1) From The Second Coming (1919).
(2) Lasch would presumably disagree strongly with my explanation. The full title of his final, posthumously published, book was The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1996).

The Monarchy is More Important Now Than Ever Before

Her Majesty Elizabeth II reigns over the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and her other Commonwealth realms and that reign has now surpassed that of Queen Victoria as the longest in our line of monarchs. This is reason to celebrate and to wish Her Majesty many more years upon the throne.

Unfortunately there are those who insist on spoiling occasions like this. One such person is Anthony Furey, former comment editor of the Ottawa Sun and columnist for the Sunmedia chain of newspapers. We are living in days of great confusion about our identities, as was evident in the recent media circus surrounding Bruce Jenner's apogynosis, and Mr. Furey is a confused individual of an all too common type - a liberal who thinks he's a conservative.

I don't mean he is a liberal in the contemporary North American sense of a progressive who believes in the nanny state, coddling criminals, and the soft tyranny of sensitivity classes and human rights tribunals. He is a classical liberal, a true believer, in Eric Hoffer's sense of that term, in capitalism, individual liberty, and democracy. That is better than the other kind of liberal, but it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference, and his Toronto Sun column of Sunday, September 6th, is one of those times. He choose this time in which we are rejoicing in Her Majesty's long reign to suggest that Canada severe our ties to her successors and become a republic.

That shows the kind of lack of class one would expect from a Grit or an NDP supporter. Perhaps not a Green supporter, as, while I would say that their leader, Elizabeth May, is wrong about many things, perhaps most things, she at least is a monarchist who understands the importance of the institution. It is most unbecoming, however, in a supporter of the party that calls itself Conservative, and is so to the extent at least that it takes seriously the eighth of their Founding Principles.

Furey begins his screed the way most republicans do, by talking about newcomers to Canada and projecting onto them puzzlement over why the "democracy" to which they have come to flee "tyranny, instability, or religious fervour" is a monarchy and not a republic "like our neighbours to the south". This is the updated version of an old liberal trick. It used to be, when the Liberals would attack our country's British heritage and institutions, they would do so in the name of French Canadians, not because French Canadians had told them these things were offensive to them, but because they assumed they would be. It was a dirty trick, for the Liberals wished to replace our country's British institutions and, not coincidentally, secure their hold on power in the country, by turning French and English Canadians against one another. They came very close to tearing the country apart. More recently, progressive opponents of the monarchy, usually from the NDP, have expressed this opposition in the name of New Canadians but this is the same old dirty trick - trying to turn Old Canadians and New Canadians against each other for political gain. One would think that no one who has moved to Canada in the last forty years bothered to find out any basic information, such as that it is a Commonwealth country and a constitutional monarchy, before coming here.

There will be a "crisis of confidence" in the monarchy at the next succession, Furey argues, which may very well be the case but it will not be due to any fault in the institution, but rather to republicans bent on stirring up trouble. Failing to grasp the distinction between the regality and dignity attached to the office of monarch with that of the person who holds the office, which latter is due in part to personal traits of character and in part to having absorbed it from the office during a long and successful reign, he states that neither Prince Charles nor Prince William carry the same "heft" as the queen, which could not reasonably be expected of them until they have reigned as long and as well as she has. He brings up the cost of converting all of our currency over to the name and image of the new monarch, ignoring the fact that this would have to be done if we converted the country into a republic as well, but with the additional cost of opening up the constitution again, which, the last time it happened, created a crisis that for the good part of two decades threatened to split the country.

Furey shows no understanding of either the country or the institution of which he writes. "Time to set us free", he says, but this is nonsense. The idea that to be free one must be a citizen of a republic rather than a subject of a monarch belongs to the country south of our border and was adopted by that country at a time when they were the largest slave-owning country in the world. One of the reasons the Americans rebelled against the Crown was that it had guaranteed the French Canadians the right to the practice of their Roman Catholic religion after the Seven Years War and they wanted all of North America to be Protestant.

Does this sound like their republic was a more free system of government?

We are free subjects of Her Majesty and if we are less free today than we once were it is entirely due to acts of our elected officials. Furthermore, much of the legislation that has lessened our freedom has been done by our politicians in imitation of laws first passed by the American Republic. Income tax, which takes far more out of our pockets than any other tax, which requires us to hand over our records of employment to the government, and for the government to maintain a large tax collecting agency, was introduced by the Americans temporarily in the 1860s, then permanently in 1913. We introduced it in 1917, the year the Americans entered the war we had already been fighting for three years. The expansive social security network that we call the Welfare or Provider State was introduced in North America in two big leaps, the 1930s and 1960s. In both cases the Canadian government followed the example of an American President, FDR and his New Deal and LBJ with his Great Society. In 1964 the Americans passed the Civil Rights Act, which was unnecessary to end de jure segregation in the South as it had already been ruled unconstitutional by the American Supreme Court in 1955, but which interfered with the freedom of association of all Americans by telling them they could not privately discriminate as individuals in certain situations. In 1977 our country followed their example by passing the Canadian Human Rights Act. This went further than the American bill because it included a section, mercifully recently removed, that told us what we could and could not say on the telephone and on the internet, but we would never have passed this Act at all without the American example. More recently, both the Liberal government of Jean Chretien and the Conservative government of Stephen Harper followed the example of the second Bush administration in the United States by passing laws, in the name of fighting terrorism, that weakened the ancient constitutional safeguard of our freedoms that requires police agencies to get a judicial warrant before investigating and arresting us.

Clearly it is not the monarchy which is to blame for the erosion of our liberties and following the example of the American republic has not made us any freer.

Indeed, in Canada, the monarchy is the basis of our freedom, as two real conservatives, John Farthing and John G. Diefenbaker, explained in their books Freedom Wears a Crown and Those Things We Treasure, both sadly out of print. Diefenbaker explained how the erosion of our basic rights and freedoms under the Trudeau premiership went hand-in-glove with that government's attack on the institution of monarchy, and Farthing explained how the attack on the Crown's reserve powers and reduction of its role to the purely ceremonial, under Liberal governments going back to Mackenzie King's, undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown above and Parliament below, paving the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

The Americans, when they put together their federal republic after the Treaty of Paris, relied heavily on Montesquieu for their idea of the separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial. What they did not want to admit was that Montesquieu had gotten the idea by observing this same division of powers in the British Parliament. Nor did they want to admit that not only did the British Parliament, and later our own in Canada, already contain this division into the executive powers of the Crown ministers led by the Prime Minister, the legislative powers of the whole of Parliament, and the judicial powers of the courts, Montesquieu saw that it also embodied Aristotle's idea of the most stable constitution - one that combined the elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a mixed constitution that would avoid the destructive cycle of constitutions that he had observed in the ancient Mediterranean city states. We, having inherited this mixed constitution from the UK, would be fools to give it up, which we would be doing if we ceased to be a monarchy.

The fact of the matter is that democracy is not the source of freedom that Furey thinks it is. The ancients believed it to be the worst of the three simple forms of government, each of which could be good or bad, depending on whether the one, the few, or the many, ruled for the common good or their own interest only. They regarded democracy as the worst because its good form was closest to its bad form and it contained no internal brakes on adopting its bad form. This is all the more true of modern democracy, which is based on the idea of the collective sovereignty of the people. When sovereignty belongs to the people, and the people are the government, everything the government does is the action of the people to themselves. Anything and everything can be justified.

The American founders recognized this, which is why they set up their republic the way they did. It was not to be a simple democracy - even the president would be elected only indirectly by the general populace, through the Electoral College. Indeed, what is truly praiseworthy about modern Western governments is not that they are democracies but that so many of them have kept democracy's worst tendencies in check. This is a basic characteristic of the English-speaking world but it was not true of the French Republic of the 1790s, of Russia after the Tsar was deposed, or Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. What made the difference was that English-speaking countries were liberal in the best sense of the word - holding to the idea that individuals had rights and freedoms which all governments, even democratic ones, must respect, and if they are to be violated in the name of the common good, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and under clearly defined limits.

Effective as liberalism has been in holding democracy's excesses in check, it does not have an infinite capacity to do so. It is not a naturally stable check on what Tocqueville called "the tyranny of the majority" because it sees itself as being based upon principles of abstract reason that are universally applicable and available, and does not recognize that it could only have developed and can only operate in certain contexts, under certain conditions. It functions best in the British parliamentary monarchy system in which it first developed for this system contains additional checks on the excesses both of democracy and of liberalism itself.

One of the negative aspects of democracy is that it places power in the hands of politicians, who are by definition ambitious people who seek power. Lord Acton was not entirely correct when he said that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but it is true to say that power is very dangerous in the hands of those who seek it for themselves. Our system divides the ownership from the exercise of power. The sovereign ownership of the powers of government belongs to the monarch, but they are exercised in her name by the Crown Ministers, the Parliamentary assembly, and the courts. The House of Commons is filled with politicians including the Crown Ministers but the fact that they are in the position of servants, exercising the Queen's powers in her name, injects a degree of humility that would not be present if they were merely representatives of the people. Governments that speak in the name of the people - like the 1790s French Republic, the Third Reich, and every Communist "People's Republic" the world has ever known, are the most arrogant and cruel governments possible.

Canadians made the right choice in choosing loyalty to the Crown and the British model of government. The French Canadians, who had only just come under the British Crown after the Seven Years War, chose to remain loyal when the Americans rebelled. The English-speaking Loyalists chose to come up here and live under the Crown over persecution and dispossession in the United States. When the Americans tried to "liberate" us from the Crown in the War of 1812 we fought back, and when we confederated as a nation in 1867, English and French Canadians alike agreed to a federation of provinces, with our own federal parliament under the shared Crown. A great many Canadians would still look upon the moment when, no longer automatically at war when Britain was, we declared war on Nazi Germany and fought side by side with Britain, for our separate countries and common king, as our country's finest moment. To describe our monarchy as foreign is to be out of touch completely with our country, its nature, and its history.

No, Mr. Furey, we still need the monarchy. Indeed, we need it more now than ever, to keep our increasingly arrogant politicians humble, to give our government a touch of class and dignity that is above the demeaning circus of democratic electoral politics, and in these turbulent, ever-changing times, to provide us with a link to our past, history, and heritage, that has withstood the test of time.

God Save the Queen,
Long May She Reign

Don't Pull Down the Post!

I never thought former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was as smart as his journalist and academic groupies made him out to be. There is a huge difference between an intellectual and being intelligent and Trudeau was the former rather than the latter. Compared to his son, however, Trudeau the Elder was a genius, albeit an evil one.

Since taking over his father’s old role as leader of the Liberal Party Justin Trudeau has had a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth and otherwise talking and acting like a complete moron. This week, however, he outdid himself with his 32 point plan to “restore democracy” in Canada. While some of the points have merit, most, like the goal of greater gender parity are utter foolishness, and the one which we will be concentrating on here is absolute insanity.

Before turning to that point, however, it must be said that it is not democracy that needs to be restored in Canada so much as freedom. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing nor do they necessarily go together. The idea that democracy and freedom go together like a knife and fork is an idea that has strong roots in the American tradition but which Canadians have traditionally rejected since the days of the American Revolution when the Loyalists chose to remain loyal to the Crown rather than jump on the republican bandwagon. Alexis de Tocqueville warned our American friends, after his visit to the United States in the nineteenth century, that democracy can potentially be the basis of the greatest tyranny of all, the “tyranny of the majority” as the history of his own country’s democratic revolution, begun fifteen years after that of the Americans ended, so well illustrates. Far superior to the modern ideal of democracy, is the classical ideal of the mixed constitution, as explained by Aristotle and Polybius, in which the three basic simple forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – are combined and balanced. That, of course, is exactly what our traditional form of government, the Westminster system consisting of the monarchy, Senate, and elected House of Commons embodies, and it is this system that historically and traditionally went together with and safeguarded freedom and justice in Canada.

The point of Trudeau’s plan to “restore democracy” that has attracted the most attention is his announced intention to abolish “first past the post” by the next election. It is this point to which we will now turn to show that when Ezra Levant dubbed Justin Trudeau the “shiny pony” a few years ago, it was an unfair slur on ponies everywhere.

First past the post is an expression borrowed from horse racing for our traditional way of determining the outcome of elections. The House of Commons is made up of the representatives of constituencies or ridings. In each constituency when the general election is called – or if for some reason there is a by-election for that particular riding – many candidates are allowed to run against each other for the right to sit in the House as that area’s representative. They may run as representatives of a party or independents. Sometimes the outcome of the election is a majority in which one candidate receives over half of the votes. Other times the outcome of the election is a plurality in which the vote is so divided that no one candidate receives over half. In this case, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes, wins the election.

So what are the objections to this?

Well, one common objection is that by awarding the election to the person with the highest number of votes the system is going against the wishes of the majority of voters who voted for someone other than the winner. While this objection seems to have merit upon first hearing it, you must realize that in a plurality election this would be the case regardless of which of the candidates is determined to be the winner. Proposed alternatives, such as multiple round elections until a clear majority is achieved or ranking the candidates on the ballot in order of preference rather than picking one would have the effect of making elections more expensive, more complicated, and with more factors for the unscrupulous to manipulate, without really eliminating the objection seeing as the person who wins the final round will still be someone the majority voted against in the first round and a ranked preference ballot can still return a winner who did not receive a majority of first preference votes and who therefore is still technically someone the majority voted against, all in order to fix a system that isn’t really broke, on the grounds of an objection that ultimately reduces to the idea that an election should be determined by its negative outcome, the most votes against, rather than its positive outcome, the most votes for.

Another common objection is that under this system the percentage of seats awarded to a party in the House of Commons is not the same as the percentage of the popular vote that party received. The popular vote is the accumulated vote of all voters in all ridings across the country. A small party, with voters scattered across the country, may win one or no seats, while receiving a comparably larger percentage of the popular vote. The Green Party, for example, won only the seat of its leader Elizabeth May in the 2011 election, although it received just under four percent of the popular vote. In the previous election it won no seats although it received just under seven percent of the popular vote. Supporters of the Green Party and other fringe parties regard this as being unfair and call for a system of proportional representation, in which the makeup of the assembly by party percentage is representative of the popular vote. That proportional representation would have the obvious effect of making the House of Commons even more ideological and partisan than it already is, and that this would not be a good thing, never seems to occur to such people.

What all of this shows is that while we are hardly in need of having the democratic element of our government fixed by a man who like his father is an admirer of Chinese Communist dictatorship, we are in urgent need of having our educational system, especially when it comes to the teaching of civics, repaired. The popular vote is a meaningless abstraction. When an election is called, it is not the ideological or partisan make up of the House of Commons for which people are supposed to be voting. They are supposed to be voting for the representative of their constituency. Thus, it makes no sense for a person to say “I’m not represented in Parliament because my party didn’t win a seat”. You are represented in the House of Commons as someone living in a constituency and not as a supporter of a party or a subscriber to an ideology – and this is a good thing. Your representative is the Member for your riding, whether you voted for him or not. Even though I can’t stand the jackass and his bloody socialist party, I know full well that Pat Martin is my representative in the House of Commons, because he is the Member for the constituency in which I live, as much as I find that fact intolerable.

Our Members of Parliament need this basic civics lesson as well. When a party puts forward a candidate in an election, he is running for the right to represent his constituency in Parliament on behalf of his party. This means that he is supposed to represent his party to his constituency in the election, but his constituency in the House if he wins. In other words, when campaigning for the votes of a riding, he is supposed to explain that he belongs to such and such a party which stands for such and such a platform. When sitting in the House as a Member, he is supposed to speak on behalf of the people who live in his constituency, including those who did not vote for him, work on their behalf, and protect their interests.

Of course the way the system works in practice does not always or perhaps even often resemble the way it is supposed to work but it would be no improvement to remove the reminder, once every so many years, that our politicians are supposed to be working on behalf of their constituency and tell them that they will now be sitting in Parliament only as representatives of their party and ideology. It is sheer madness to think otherwise.

Justin Trudeau, you can stick that in your joint and smoke it.

When the People Have the Power

Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred by John Lukacs, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005, 248 pages, $25.

Richard Percival Graves in his excellent biography of the late 19th – early 20th Century classical scholar and poet A. E. Housman recounts how Housman once told an audience that the only good quality of democracy was that it decreased the likelihood of a revolution because people would find it harder to turn on a government they themselves had chosen. The anti-democratic views of old-fashioned Tories like Housman are not popular in this day and age, nor are they widely understood. For many people today, to express opposition to the concept of democracy is to express opposition to freedom and preference for autocratic government, for despotism.

There are, however, good reasons to be skeptical of the benefits of democracy and the best political thinkers in the Western tradition have displayed just such skepticism. Modern egalitarian democracy proclaims all men to be equal. The theory behind this form of democracy is that every person ought to have an equal voice with every other person in government – or at least in choosing who makes up the government.

“Isn’t that what is good about democracy?” many will ask. “What could be wrong with that?”

Well, for one thing it displays a very infantile attitude which can be seen in the familiar expression “I’m just as good as any other man!”. More importantly, however, is that this form of government established as its ideal, the Common Man who is the embodiment of a statistical average. The cult of the Common Man or the Average Man must by necessity always be a leveling force in society rather than an elevating force. A leveling force operates by tearing down the top rather than raising up the bottom. It is destructive rather than constructive.

In this egalitarian democracy is a marked contrast with aristocracy which is an elevating force in society. It does, however, have much common ground with socialism, which is an economic leveling force. Some forms of socialism indeed, refer to their economic goals as “economic democracy”.

“That doesn’t make any sense” someone will say, “democracy goes together with capitalism not socialism. Democracy and capitalism are both about freedom!” This is indeed a widespread notion, especially among those with a progressive vision for the world which involves “democracy” and “capitalism” being spread to every corner of the globe by the American military. People who share this vision are often erroneously called “conservatives” today which creates tremendous confusion in our terminology.

The notion in question, however, is wrong. Democracy is not about freedom and indeed has always been a tremendous threat to liberty. Democracy is the rule of the majority which is an expression of right by might – the might of sheer numbers. This is a force which would completely obliterate liberty – and other more important social goods, like civilization – if it were to be completely unleashed. In Western countries democracy has co-existed with a great deal of political liberty. This liberty has not been due to the fact that the countries are democratic, however, but rather to the fact that democracy has been balanced and checked by other competing principles and forces in government.

Originally, those competing principles and forces were hereditary monarchies and aristocracies. In the Modern Age these were weakened and their role as check on the absolute rule of the majority has been taken over by the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism has for its ideal the absolute rights and liberties of the individual and of minorities rights and liberties which cannot be voted away by majorities. The ideal of liberalism and the ideal of democracy are in fundamental opposition to each other making the notion of a “liberal democrat” something of an oxymoron. A “liberal democracy”, however, in which the forces of liberalism and democracy compete and hold each other’s excesses in check is a constitution which shares some of the strengths of the traditional English parliamentary constitution.

Liberal democracy is therefore preferable to either pure democracy or pure liberalism. While it lacks many of the advantages which the traditional English parliamentary constitution had which can only come from strong aristocratic leadership, it is at its best a form of mixed government, the ideal of the parliamentary tradition, which has been identified with the best possible constitution in Western thought since the days of Aristotle. At its worst it is one step in the Western world’s path towards the democratic ideal. While some see movement towards that goal in positive terms, as being “progress”, others such as myself, do not.

John Lukacs is one of the skeptics. Hungarian by birth and raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Lukacs saw his country of birth conquered, first by the Nazis and then by the Communists. He fled to the United States where he began his career as a professor of history and as an author. Lukacs identifies himself as a reactionary, indicating a traditional or classical philosophical conservative worldview that is radically different from much that is called “conservative” or “right-wing” today, especially in his adopted country. In his autobiography Confessions of an Original Sinner he describes his self-realization of himself as reactionary upon hearing the Nazis sing the Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazi anthem, in the third verse of which the Nazis sing of their comrades fighting against both “Reds” (Communists) and “reactionaries” (traditional, aristocratic, Catholic conservatives).

Throughout Lukacs’ many books there are several themes to which he constantly returns. One of these is the idea that the Modern Age is coming or has come to an end. This does not mean that Lukacs is a post-modernist – at least not in the usual use of term. To a post-modernist, like Jean-François Lyotard, the end of modernity is indicated by the collapse of its “meta-narrative” (a big story explaining everything) and an ensuing skepticism towards all “meta-narrative”. This is an account of spectacular failure. To Lukacs, however, the end of the Modern Age is a success story. The Modern Age is ending or has ended, not because its ideals have failed, but because its vision has succeeded.

Why then is Lukacs to be counted among the skeptics of the progressive view of history?

Lukacs derives his understanding of the Modern Age from Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat of classical liberal views who visited the United States in the early 19th Century and wrote a book about the democracy he saw there. Tocqueville had been born after the French Revolution and had been influenced by Burke’s Reflections, accepting Burke’s negative assessment of the Revolution without fully embracing his admiration for the past. Tocqueville saw the Modern Age as an age of transition, from aristocratic leadership to the age of democracy. Lukacs agrees with Tocqueville’s understanding of the Modern Age and concludes that the transition is now virtually complete. This, however, opens the door to the special dangers of democracy. Tocqueville warned against the “tyranny of a majority” that would characterize an undiluted popular sovereignty.

In his 2005 book entitled Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred Lukacs returned once more to this Tocquevillian theme:

We can see – more: we ought to see – that the entire so-called Modern Age, 1500-2000, especially and particularly in the West, was marked by this dual development: aristocracy retreating, democracy advancing: and that this was once something new, and that this is now at an end. (pp. 7-8, bold indicating italics in original)

Democracy has, of course, meant different things to different people at different times. In the Modern Age and in this book it means the idea of popular sovereignty, i.e. that “the people” are sovereign. The modern advancement of this kind of democracy means, Lukacs declares, the end of mixed government. Mixed government, the classical ideal of Aristotle and Polybius, embodied in the British parliamentary tradition and to which the classical republicans who wrote the original American Constitution aspired, diluted and limited the sovereignty of the people. Now that popular sovereignty has triumphed whatever vestiges of the ancient regime survive do so only at the mercy of the people:

Constitutional monarchies…exist only on popular sufferance: democracy and majority rule may put an end to them in an instant. (p. 11)

This is the situation in my country and in Great Britain, with whom we share a constitutional monarch. Thankfully there appears to be no significant movement to abolish the monarchy although every so often a newspaper will publish an article by some ignorant person suggesting it. Having the monarchy dependent upon public support for its survival is not a good thing for an important reason many people fail to consider. Dependence upon popular support (or popular inertia) for survival prevents a monarchy from properly fulfilling one of the most important roles of a constitutional monarchy – i.e. the role of holding the power of the democratic government in check. This is not the only role of a hereditary monarchy. Lukacs writes:

A hereditary monarchy lends a certain sense of stability to a democratic people, the sense of a family…That is not so under the rule of an elective monarchy such as the American one…Even more important: at moments of great national crises a hereditary monarchy—whatever his other weaknesses or shortcomings—may save an entire country from destruction. In 1943 it was the king of Italy (Victor Emmanuel III) who had Mussolini arrested and deposed; in 1945 it was the emperor (Hirohito) who declared Japan’s surrender, the impact of which was even more decisive than either of the two atomic bombs cast on Japan, or Stalin’s declaration of war a week before. (pp 11-12)

This, of course, is only a small digression in Lukacs’ book which I am stressing because of its relevance to my own country and to my own Tory royalist views. Lukacs discusses surviving monarchies to make the point that the ongoing existence of constitutional, hereditary monarchies does not affect his assessment of the outcome of the Modern Age – “the unchallenged principle of popular sovereignty worldwide”. This, Lukacs contrasts with the aristocratic leadership which characterized the Western world, both in monarchies and republics, prior to the Modern Age.

If aristocracy and monarchy no longer hold popular sovereignty in check what about liberalism? It has been seduced by the idea of Progress and has consequently decayed. As the Modern Age ends, not only has popular sovereignty become dominant, but liberalism has accomplished its major goals rendering itself irrelevant and unappealing. Lukacs puts it this way:

If “liberalism” means the extension of all kinds of liberties to all kinds of individuals, mostly as a consequence of the abolition of restrictions on all kinds of people, these have now been institutionalized and accomplished in formerly unexpected and even astonishing varieties of ways. (p. 217-218)

If liberalism has accomplished its major goals and is veering off into nuttier and nuttier territory losing whatever appeal it may have once had, it too can no longer serve as a check on popular sovereignty. Thus we arrive at Lukacs’ major question: “how traditional democracy can exist much longer, when traditional liberalism has decayed.” (p. 6)

What happens to democracy in the absence of aristocracy and liberalism?

[W]hen this temperance [liberalism] is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing more (or else) than populism. More precisely: then it is nationalist populism. (p. 5)

Lukacs distinguishes between patriotism which he admires and nationalism which he deplores, while acknowledging that in certain periods it is very difficult to distinguish between the two:

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people,” justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. (p. 36)

Lukacs identifies nationalism as one of two movements that after 1870 became the two powerful forces that would dominate the Western world throughout the 20th Century. The other movement is socialism. Of the two “nationalism proved to be the more powerful and enduring” (p. 31). The achievement of socialism’s goals were made inevitable by the advancement of democracy. In a sense, therefore, socialism’s victory was won before socialism even began as a movement, weakening it’s populist appeal. Nationalism, however, became a very powerful force after 1870, supplanting both patriotism and conservatism. It had a very strong populist appeal and inevitably a populist demand for a “national socialism” to fight international capitalism and international socialism (Communism) arose.

This topic draws Lukacs naturally and inevitably to the movements which figured so prominently in the historical events which dominated his early years and which are the subject matter of many of his historical books. Here Lukacs challenges many of the notions that have accumulated on both the left and the right about World War II, the Cold War, and the participants in both. Lenin and Trotsky, he tells us, were as bad as Stalin if not worse, and were fools to boot, contradicting a popular view in leftist intellectual circles. Stalin, however, was motivated by Russian nationalism rather than by ideological Marxism. He was, like Hitler, a “national socialist”. This, of course, contradicts a popular view on the right.

This part of the book becomes most interesting when Lukacs discusses the relationships between the various forms of thinking in the Axis countries. He dismisses the notion of “fascism” as a general category, arguing that historically fascism is an Italian phenomenon, an older movement than national socialism, which was eventually replaced by the latter, and it is the latter not fascism which has survived 1945. The idea of categorical, generic, fascism he traces back to Stalin, who banned the use of the expression “national socialism” in Soviet Russia, insisting that Hitler and the Third Reich be referred to as “fascists”. He also dismisses the notion of categorical “totalitarianism” as pure nonsense, writing off Hannah Arendt as a “muddled and dishonest” writer.

Hitler, Lukacs argues, was not a reactionary, counter-revolutionary, or man of the Right in any way, shape or form. One would think that this does not need to be argued, as Hitler constantly referred to himself as a revolutionary and a socialist and defined himself in opposition to monarchy, aristocracy, the Church and even the bourgeoisie. Sadly, however, it does have to be pointed out, and Lukacs does a better job than any one else I have ever read on the subject. Indeed, there is very little comparison because much conservative thought on the subject amounts to little more than “liberals believe in big government, Hitler believed in big government, therefore Hitler was a liberal”, an assessment which is confused on every detail, inane, and stupid.

Lukacs does not make the silly claim that Hitler was a liberal. Rather he demonstrates that Hitler was a populist who used his nationalism to unite the German people in support of him. Hitler was by his own words a nationalist rather than a patriot. While many draw a strict dichotomy between dictatorship and democracy Hitler was not opposed to popular sovereignty. Rather he looked to popular sovereignty and depended upon it for his support knowing that he could keep the people behind him by appealing to their nationalist sentiment, uniting them in the face of external enemies and, more disastrously, aliens and traitors from within.

Lukacs’ successful demonstration that Hitler was not a true man of the Right may not be as pleasing to many conservatives as they may think. All countries are national socialist now, he argues, although not in the extreme form that manifested itself in the Third Reich. Moreover, what often is called “conservatism” in the United States today, is actually nationalist populism. The United States did not have a conservative movement until the last half of the twentieth century, he points out, at which point the debate between conservatism and liberalism which had dominated the historical 19th Century was long over, replaced by the new Right and Left of nationalism and socialism. With the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the end of the Modern Age with nationalism triumphant in an era of universal acceptance of the notion of popular sovereignty, Lukacs foresees the conflict of the future as one between two Rights.

With much of Lukacs’ commentary I agree. I do have a few reservations. Lukacs is very opposed to anti-Communism (as well as to Communism itself) for obvious reasons – it was Hitler’s anti-Communism that led Germany’s conservatives to make the mistake of giving Hitler their support in the early days of his rise to power. They would all too soon realize that mistake. Lukacs may have allowed this to have too much influence on his views of the relative merits and demerits of Communism and nationalism. Stalin’s regime closely resembled Hitler’s in its brutality. So did Mao’s, Pol Pot’s, and those of virtually every other Communist you can name. Is this because all of these governments were nationalist or because they were all Communist? When you take into consideration Lukacs assessment that all Western countries are national socialist now an answer strongly suggests itself which Lukacs equally strongly appears to resist.

Then you have the character of Sir Winston Churchill whom Lukacs admires above all others. Of the various personalities of World War II, Lukacs likes to contrast Churchill with Hitler, making Churchill the typical “reactionary” and Hitler the typical “revolutionary”. I do not disagree with this but it is fairly obvious that Churchill was a very strong anti-Communist. He was also unquestionably a nationalist as well as a patriot.

While Samuel Johnson did indeed say “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” I doubt very much that the distinction Lukacs draws between nationalism and patriotism is what he had in mind. The scoundrel patriots that Dr. Johnson had in mind were the American colonists who called themselves “patriots” in their war to separate themselves from Parliament and the Crown and their Whig supporters in Parliament. Were these people motivated by nationalism? Perhaps, but it seems rather anachronistic to me to say yes. There was certainly a tremendous amount of populism in their rhetoric but it focused more on political organization than on ethnicity.

Lukacs does an excellent job of showing the dangers of populism. A demagogue tells the people that an enemy – whether it be an external enemy, their own elites, or traitors amongst them – poses a threat, drawing upon their nationalist sentiments, and demanding that they exercise their sovereignty as a people, by putting him in power and supporting him while he deals with the problem. This is a very real danger. Lukacs fails, however, to address the question of whether there are circumstances in which a limited degree of populism or even nationalism would be an appropriate. What if, for example, elites really were betraying the interests of their own people as the late Christopher Lasch suggested, and demonstrated, that they were doing in his last book, The Revolt of the Elites? In my country and in the United Kingdom, both of which do have a Tory tradition there have been traditional conservatives – reactionaries – who have felt a direct appeal to the people to oppose policies that are against their interests to be appropriate on certain occasions. Enoch Powell did this in the UK. John Diefenbaker did this here in Canada.

Is the answer perhaps that these Tories appealed to the people from within a constitutional framework whereas a true populist would call upon the people to assert their sovereignty without regards to the constitution?