Over the past couple of
weeks I have observed much online discussion among my countrymen over the
recent drama in Davos over matters such as Krasnov the Orange’s threat to seize
Greenland from Denmark by military force, Prime Minister Blofeld’s Churchillian
oratory, and other related incidents that were I to list them all, the list
would probably be as long as I intend this essay to be. What follows is for the most part an
expansion of a post on a social media platform that I had started to write
until I realized that I didn’t wish to commit the time that would be necessary
to following through if I got involved in the debate in that venue. The particular debate was between Krasnov’s
zombie cheerleaders purporting to be Canadian “conservatives” and Liberal Party
supporters who think maintaining their party in government perpetually is
necessary to protect Canadian sovereignty against American encroachments upon
the same.
Before proceeding, a few
observations are in order. The first is
that there will be some overlap between this essay and the previous two. The second is that the most vocal among
Krasnov’s “Canadian” zombie cheerleaders seem to be the Alberta
separatists. All that I have to say
about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of
their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen
Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by
inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case
for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.
Now, let us turn to the
subject of this essay which is that both groups, Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders
and Liberals who think their party to be the great defender of Canada and her
ways, are wrong. I have addressed the title
to the Canadian right because, as unlikely as they are to listen to a word I
have to say, I would consider trying to persuade such a lost cause as the Grits
a violation of Christ’s command to not cast our pearls before swine.
First of all the Liberal
Party has been the party of Americanization throughout all of Canadian
history. Confederation united the
provinces of British North America into a single Dominion – a word chosen by
the Fathers of Confederation from the Bible and given a meaning that is
essentially the same as “Commonwealth Realm” today – and the Fathers of
Confederation, led by the old Conservatives, recognized the biggest threat to
the Confederation Project to be the United States and her dream of “Manifest
Destiny.” The Liberal Party, organized
out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement which had considerable ideological
overlap with the classical liberalism that the United States had been founded
on, opposed the efforts of Macdonald’s Conservatives in the Dominion’s first
quarter century to build a national economy strong enough to resist the
economic pull of the United States, which Macdonald correctly saw as a stepping
stone to the cultural and eventually political subjugation of Canada to the
United States, and promoted free trade with the United States. In 1891, when Sir Wilfred Laurier openly
campaigned on a free trade – it was called reciprocity at the time – platform,
an intellectual associated with his party, Goldwyn Smith published a book
arguing that Confederation was a bad idea and that Canada should join the
United States. Freer trade with and
closer ties to the United States were the consistent policies of William Lyon
Mackenzie-King, Liberal party leader and Canada’s longest serving prime minister.
Second, the Liberals,
although they underwent a significant change in policy under the premierships
of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, never abandoned their essential nature as
the party of Americanization. Under
Pearson and especially Trudeau, the Grits moved much further to the left than
they had been, something that occurred again when the second Trudeau led
the party, but they remained the party of Americanization even when they were
mouthing left-wing slogans that in popular culture are often associated with an
anti-American outlook. The simple fact
of the matter is that the leftism of the Liberal Party has always had a “Made
in the USA” stamp on it.
Allow me to prove that
point.
Americans, especially the
Republicans, frequently accuse Canada (and Europe) of being “socialist.” While there are other factors, such as, in
the case of Canada, the supply management system (which is susceptible to
criticism, but would more accurately be called a form of cartelism than
socialism), the primary basis of this is the extensive network of social
security programs often called “the welfare state”. In the Great Depression, while it was the
Conservatives who introduced relief measures towards the end of the Bennett
premiership, the Mackenzie-King Liberals upon their return to government in
1935, after negotiating a trade agreement with the United States, began to
implement measures based on the “New Deal” programs that FDR had introduced in
the United States in the early 1930s.
Later, LBJ would expand the American welfare state as he introduced
policies aimed at redressing social ills that went far beyond the poverty and
unemployment targeted by FDR’s “New Deal.”
LBJ’s policies were dubbed the “Great Society” from speeches he made
including this phrase as his goal and when Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester
Pearson as Liberal leader and prime minister a few months before LBJ’s
presidency came to an end, he began introducing a similar welfare state expansion. In seeking the Liberal leadership, he used
the expression “Just Society” to describe what he sought to achieve.
In 1977, Trudeau introduced
the Canadian Human Rights Act, a poorly titled bill because it had nothing to
do with limiting government power and protecting people against the abuse of
the same, which is what is usually suggested by the expression “human
rights.” This piece of legislation did
quite the opposite of that. It empowered
government agencies created by the act, to investigate (Human Rights
Commission) and adjudicate (Human Rights Tribunal) complaints about
discrimination in personal transactions in everyday life. Since it was classified as civil rather than
criminal law, charges under this act do not have to meet the high standard of
proof in criminal law (guilty beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt) although
the act allows for penalties that far exceed what is normally allowed in cases
of civil mitigation. Although written as
if any discrimination on a forbidden basis (race, sex, etc.) was prohibited,
i.e., both white against black and black against white, the unwritten
understanding by which the system actually operates is that it is entirely one
way. The worst clause in the bill, Section
13 which defined language communicated, originally over the phone, later
extended to include all electronic communication, that was “likely to” expose
someone protected against discrimination to “hatred or contempt”, as itself an
act of discrimination, was repealed in 2013 and the Liberals have been trying
to reinstate it ever since. The CHRA, and its
counterpart in the UK which Keith Starmer has been so egregiously abusing as of
late, were both inspired by an American bill.
Specifically, the bill was the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Allow me a side note in
this paragraph. This US Civil Rights Act was the chief accomplishment of the
man the United States celebrated last Monday in a holiday signed into law by
Ronald Reagan despite the fact that the FBI records on the man are so damning
that they were long ago placed under a seal that doesn’t expire until next
year. Of course, what is known about him
without access to those tapes is bad enough. He was a total fraud in every possible way. “Dr.” – he obtained his degrees through
plagiarism – “Martin Luther” - his birth name was Michael - King Jr., was a
Baptist minister who denied all the articles of the Christian Creed and who
surrounded himself with Communist agents like Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levinson
and called himself a Marxist. The standard
answer on the part of his cult of fawning adorers, which is much larger than
that of Krasnov because it includes the whole of the left as well as the type
of supposed “conservative” that rallied to Krasnov’s support when he abandoned
everything that made him a fairly decent president in his first term and took
to pissing all over every other country in the world except Israel in his
second, whenever these things, and the failings in his, that is King’s,
personal life which are likely what most of the FBI recordings pertain to, come
up is that these cannot detract from the man’s accomplishments. Those, however, like his degrees and his
name, are fake. His entire reputation is
built on his career as an activist opposing segregation. Segregation, however, was dealt a legal death
blow in 1954 when the American Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas. King’s career as a civil rights
activist, at least as far as his being in the public spotlight goes, began with
the Montgomery Bus Boycott the following year.
Segregation, in other words, was a dead foe already at the time King’s
public crusade against it began. His
chief accomplishment, the aforementioned Civil Rights Act, did not end
segregation. It did exactly what its
imitations in Canada and the UK and elsewhere in the Western world did, sans
the speech clauses. It was a terrible
law, not a good one.
Canada, like the United
States, and indeed all of Western Civilization experienced a shift towards
social liberalism after World War II. A
number of factors contributed to this.
This was the period that saw the explosion of new communications
technology that altered how popular culture was created and transmitted. Prior to the development of what Richard
Weaver called “the Great Stereopticon”, popular culture was fundamentally
conservative due to tradition being its primary instrument of
transmission. Afterwards, however, as
popular culture was replaced with “pop culture", a commodity produced for
mass consumption in the factories of Los Angeles, California it became the
instrument for the rapid dissemination of liberal attitudes on culture,
religion, sex (both the thing and the act), and the like. Demonstrating the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s
observation that “the medium is the message”, even television shows as far back
as the Andy Griffith Show, which would be almost universally regarded as
conservative by today’s standards, were used to preach messages that subtly
subverted traditional ways in a way that was a step towards the “woke”
liberalism of the present day. Watch the
show, starting at the beginning. You
will not need to go beyond the tenth episode of the first season before my
point will have been made.
The spread of Hollywood
“pop culture” and its liberalizing message throughout Western Civilization was,
of course, facilitated by the United States’ having assumed the position of
first power in the West as a result of the two World Wars and the necessities
of the Cold War which commenced almost immediately upon the end of World War
II. It should be observed here, although
this pertains more to Europe than to Canada, that American assistance in
rebuilding after World War II was tied to the acceptance of Americanizing
propaganda. While obviously this was
more the case in militarily occupied former Axis countries where the
Americanization was introduced under the guise of denazification, it was also
part of the package of assistance to war-devastated Allied countries. Remember that in the muddled thinking of the
American government of the 1930s and 1940s, Nazism and European traditionalism,
although they had little to nothing in common except an opposition to
Communism, were frequently confused, although the American government of those
days did have a considerably clearer understanding of the relationship between
the founding American ideology and Communism than American governments of
subsequent decades.
This was a huge factor in
the European shift to the left after the war.
While American neoconservatives like Leo Strauss (What is Political Philosophy?) and Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)
attributed the shift to the left in American culture to the influence of ideas
from European philosophy, a thesis of which American paleoconservatives like
William Lind (Marxifying America) and
Pat Buchanan (The Death of the West)
offered a rather more accurate version (hence its being dubbed a “conspiracy
theory” by the ADL, $PLC, and other members of what Murray Rothbard called the
Smearbund) in which the European neo-Marxists who fled to America during the
‘30s and ‘40s influenced the left-ward movement of post-war American academia, that the influence moving in
the opposite direction has contributed more to the kind of leftism prevalent in
the last part of the twentieth century moving into the twenty-first has been
persuasively argued by American paleoconservative Paul Gottfried in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt:
Towards a Secular Theocracy (this book especially, but see also the entire
trilogy of which it is the middle volume).
If you consider the
different movements that made up this shift to the left throughout Western
Civilization it is evident that they spread out from an epicentre in the United
States. The second wave of feminism, the
wave which introduced the demand for the legalization of abortion, for
government provided day care (the idea behind which was that it is better for strangers
to look after young children than for mothers to stay at home rather than
rejoin the workforce as soon as possible after birth), and the like began in
the United States with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the founding of NOW a few years
later. True, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in 1949, but
this was hardly a movement starter since, unlike Friedan’s mass-marketed for popular
consumption, best-seller, the half-crazed existentialist musings of Sartre’s long-suffering
love-slave was written for an academic audience. Let us also not overlook the strong likelihood
of American government involvement here.
When Ms. was founded in 1971 one
of its many co-founding editors and the one with which the publication was most
associated in the popular mind was Gloria Steinem. I call her “the Spook Bunny” in allusion to
her previous positions as a cocktail waitress in Hef’s New York club (as
research for an article, she was already a journalist) and, more relevantly to the
point at hand, a CIA operative.
However, the real clincher
of the overall argument is that by far the most effective instrument of
accomplishing the ends of second-wave feminism was not the activist movement
itself, whether in the less radical version organized by Friedan, more radical
version represented by Steinem’s journalist, or totally nutbar version found in
the women’s studies departments of universities, but in an ally that successfully
marketed feminism’s ideals and values by not presenting them as angry demands
even if it was not always recognized as an ally by feminism. The year before Friedan’s book was published,
Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single
Girl became a best-seller and in 1965 she became editor-in-chief of Hearst
media’s Cosmopolitan. She gave it a total makeover into the magazine
it has been ever since. What is not
always recognized is that Cosmo as
Brown remade it became essentially the women’s counterpart to the magazine Hugh
Hefner had founded in 1953. The reason
this is not always recognized is because Hefner illustrated his magazine with erotic
nude photographs placing it, correctly enough, in the category of pornography
in a public mind that has always been reluctant to admit that almost 100% of literature
mass-marketed to adult females is pornographic, albeit verbal more than visual. If you look at the message preached in the two
publications – and, as I have said before the message of Hefner’s magazine has
always been the most dangerous part, so that ironically, somebody who actually
does “read it for the articles” is more likely to have his mind polluted than
somebody who just looks at the pictures – Brown’s message to women is the exact
complement of the “Playboy philosophy.” Friedan,
who did recognize this, failed to see that Brown, preaching to women “you can
have it all” (career, sexual freedom, etc.), was accomplishing her, that is
Friedan’s, ends far more effectively than Friedan ever could, by her more attractive
packaging and larger platform.
Note that whether marketed
to males or females, the Playboy/Cosmo philosophy was a fundamentally American message. It was not thought up by agents of
international Communist disloyal to the United States (Friedan, as Daniel
Horowitz later revealed, hid her Marxist past when presenting herself as a
typical American middle-class housewife, but no such claims have ever been made
to the best of my knowledge against either Helen Gurley Brown or Hugh Hefner,
nor would they have been remotely credible if they had been) but by individuals
who embodied capitalism and the American dream and who had no qualms about
tying their message of sexual liberation to both of these things.
Americanism – or at least
Yankeeism, the culture of the American northeast that crushed the rival culture
of the American south to become the ruling culture of the entire United States
in the 1860s, more about which will be said later – began life its life as a
secularized Puritanism, and while Puritanism’s reputation is that of a strict,
Pharisaical, killjoy moralism with the world’s largest pole stuck up its rear
end, which it was, it was also a revolt against the traditions and order of
Christendom which were usually firmly grounded, both on the Bible and the
Church’s interpretation of such on the one hand and human nature and common
sense on the other. Before it was secularized,
Puritanism was the rejection of anything in Church tradition that could not be
shown to be explicitly spelled out in the Bible as an offense against Christian
liberty which rejection the Puritans translated, without noticing the irony,
into harsh rules against these traditions, which, like the celebration of Christmas,
were usually joyous ones. As it
transitioned into its secular form, Puritanism rejected traditional Christian
rules limiting the pursuit of wealth so as to constrain the vice of avarice,
most conspicuously the rules against usury, and so paved the way for
capitalism. The sexual revolution was
merely the next logical step in the path of secularized Puritanism, the
rejection of traditional rules limiting the pursuit of sexual desires. It is all wrapped up in that phrase “the pursuit
of happiness” that Thomas Jefferson substituted for “property” in the three
basic rights recognized both by the Lockean liberalism Jefferson obtained the concept
from and by Tory jurist Sir William Blackstone. All that was needed for it to
enter this phase was the pseudo-scientific justification provided by American
cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research in the South Pacific (later
debunked by New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman) and the attempts by notorious
American quack sexologist Alfred Kinsey, to pass off the findings of research
done primarily with prostitutes and prisoners as representative of the larger
population.
If, as I have just shown,
second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution of which second-wave feminism
could be regarded as a manifestation, began in the United States and spread
throughout the rest of Western Civilization, this basically establishes this to
be the case with the post-World War II shift towards social liberalism in
general for, with the exception of the American Civil Rights movement, all the
other movements within this shift took their cues from either the sexual
revolution, women’s liberation, or the American Civil Rights movement. The gay rights movement, for example, which
took its cues from all three, began with the demonstrations and riots at the
Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in Manhattan in 1969. I give this example, both because many,
probably most, of the other movements in the general shift to the left are either
variations of it or closely enough related to be included in the constantly expanding
alphabet soup umbrella designation and because American conservatives often
portray this as being particularly and distinctly un-American. I don’t know who they think they are trying
to kid. Although I have refused to watch
it since it started cheering on Krasnov’s threats against my country, before
that it seemed like every second guest on Fox News was gay. San Francisco, the last time I checked, was
in the American state that was governed by Reagan at the time the city first
gained its reputation as the world capital of this sort of thing. Fran Lebowitz, whose witticisms I have always
appreciated even if her political and religious views couldn’t possibly be
further removed from my own, basically summed up the matter when she said “if
you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is
generally regarded as American culture you would pretty much be left with Let’s
Make a Deal.”
One of the primary instruments for the spread of social liberalism in both the
United States and Canada has been judicial activism. In some cases, traditional laws were
liberalized by legislation. This is how
the liberalization of divorce law was accomplished. Here in Canada, this started in 1968, the
transition year between the Pearson and Trudeau premierships, when the Liberals
passed the Divorce Act. This made
divorce more easily accessible after a marriage had effectively already broken
down as evidenced by three years separation.
The following year, the Family Law Act introducing no-fault divorce (the
most liberal kind) was signed into law in California by, interestingly enough,
Ronald Reagan. Other states followed suit over the course of the following
decade. Also interestingly, New York was
the last state to go fully liberal on this.
In Canada, the 1968 Act was amended to allow no-fault divorce by the
Mulroney Conservatives in 1986. The
difference seen here between what jurisdiction divorce law falls under in the
two countries, the federal Dominion in Canada versus the individual states in the
United States, partially explains why liberalism has historically preferred the
courts to make this sort of change in the United States.
This aspect of the matter
is further illustrated by the difference in how liberalism accomplished the
redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples in both countries. In this case, it was accomplished by
legislation at the Dominion level in Canada but by the Supreme Court in the
United States. Liberals in both
countries first attempted to achieve this goal piecemeal, state by state in the
USA, province by province here, but in the end relied on federal legislation
here and on the Supreme Court in the United States.
This was one of the very
few instances where Canada anticipated the United States in a move to the left
(in terms of changes to the law, that is, see the Lebowitz quote above and the
paragraph in when it is found). More
often than not, the social liberal changes were made in the United States long
before they were made in Canada. Prayer
and the Bible were banned from public schools in the United States, for
example, in Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963, in which years my parents
were 12 and 13. The Upper Canadian Court
of Appeal did not rule against mandatory prayer in school until I was 12 in
1988 and while this became the precedent that gradually spread through the
provinces the 1988 ruling affected only the one province at the time. When I was in high school in rural Manitoba
in the early 1990s the Lord’s Prayer was still recited – those who objected to
participation, were allowed to leave the classroom – and it was not until two
years after I graduated that the practice was discontinued throughout the
Dominion.
This is not merely one big post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The
reason this happened so much later in Canada than in the United States is the
same reason why the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of Morganthaler v. The Queen happened in 1988, over a decade later
than its American equivalent Roe v. Wade. The reason is that prior to 1982 the courts
simply were not available to Canadian liberals as a weapon in the same way they
were available to American liberals. 1982
was the year that Pierre Trudeau repatriated the British North America Act of
1867 – renaming it the Constitution Act of 1867 – and added to it the Charter
of Rights and Freedoms. This entire
incident is glorified in the Liberal Theory of Canadian History, that Canadian
version of the Whig Interpretation of History that Donald Creighton derided as
“the Authorized Version”, which, contrary to Canada’s true history, depicts
Canada’s story as virtually identical to America’s story – an emerging nation,
breaking from the mother country and forging a new identity for herself on the
basis of a rejection of the past – but accomplished diplomatically rather than by violence. By contrast, Canada’ true
story is that of a country built on the opposite foundation to that of the
United States, by retaining ties to the mother country and accepting and
incorporating the past. I mention this
because it is relevant to the overall point. In the immediate context the point
is that the Charter empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the same way
as the American Supreme Court. The US
Supreme Court had already been given the power to strike down laws older than
itself by the American Constitution in the eighteenth century, although it was
the amendments to the American Bill of Rights that the Republican Party forced
through in the Reconstruction period that provided the court with the tools it
used for this purpose in the second half of the twentieth century, especially
after Earl Warren was named chief justice by Dwight Eisenhower (about whom, see
my previous essay “Is Orange the new Red?”).
To summarize, the Liberal
Party of Canada when during the Pearson-Trudeau premierships it pushed Canada in the direction of the new social
liberalism that was spreading throughout Western Civilization in the post-World
War II era primarily through the medium of American pop culture manufactured
for mass consumption in Hollywood, it did
so with legislation inspired by American precedents, the Canadian Human Rights
Act, an imitation of the US Civil Rights Act, and the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, an imitation of the American Bill of Rights designed to give the
Supreme Court of Canada the same powers to undermine tradition that the
American Supreme Court had been exercising long before 1982.
The Liberal Party, therefore, when it took a massive leap to the left in the
1960s and 1970s and pushed Canada in the same direction, remained the party of
Americanization that had been from Laurier to Mackenzie-King. It remained the party of Americanization
during the premiership of the second Trudeau, Captain Airhead. Captain Airhead often seemed like he spent
more time in the United States than in Canada, was a strong believer in free
trade, and being incapable of original thought, was basically an imitator of
the forty-fourth president of the United States, in whose second term in
office, Captain Airhead became leader of the Liberal Party and then prime
minister. He heavily subsidized the
far-left Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which was founded during his premiership on
the model of the American Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), which provided the
start-up funds. CAHN specializes in the
same kind of smear tactics its American parent and counterpart engages in. It claimed that concern about the erosion of
personal rights and freedoms and their constitutional protections during the
Bat Flu scare was an extremist position and branded the Canadian Red Ensign,
which was baptized our flag in the blood of the Canadian soldiers who died fighting
for God, King, and Country against Hitler, a hate symbol. That is the sort of idiocy one can only
expect from an organization whose founding chairman was Bernie Farber.
The only reasonable
conclusion from all of this is that the Liberal Party does not deserve the
trust of Canadians, especially when it comes to dealing with the threat of an
American takeover.
Let us turn now to the
Conservatives.
Canada’s original
Conservatives fought against the forces that sought to pull Canada closer to
the United States and Americanize her.
Confederation took place in the years immediately following what is
conventionally called the US Civil War, although it was not a war between two
factions for control of the same country, as is usually what the expression
“civil war” denotes, but rather a second war of independence on the part of
eleven states who declared their secession from the United States after the
election of the first Republican president.
In this second war of independence, those fighting for their secession
lost as the Republican government in Washington waged total war against those
who by their way of thinking were still their own countrymen to prevent them
from leaving. It is most unfortunate
that in the last couple of decades, there has been a push to suppress all
discussion of this conflict other than the naïve narrative that reads it
entirely through the lens of the toxic American racial politics that was a very
predictable by-product – or perhaps, primary product – of the mass media
manufactured Civil Rights Movement, led by the phony discussed in the side note
several paragraphs back. At any rate,
the war ended with the triumph of the Republican north and when the first
Republican president was assassinated and replaced by his vice president, a
weaker man than himself, he was dominated by the far more radical Republicans
who controlled Congress. In British
North America, the triumph of the Union represented a threat, a threat that the
same Republicans who had just so mercilessly consolidated their own power by
subjugating their own countrymen would turn their sights northward and once
again try to take Canada by force of invasion as the United States had
attempted in the War of 1812. One of the
purposes of Confederation, which was led by Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives
was to protect against this threat. As
Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald implemented the National
Policy, a policy of protecting new industries and investing in infrastructure,
of which the most obvious example was the construction of the Canada Pacific
Railroad, so as to build a strong national economy on east-west internal trade
that would make for greater national unity and resist the economic pull of the
United States. Resisting Americanization
and being in general very wary of the United States, remained official
Conservative policy from Sir John A. Macdonald through to John G. Diefenbaker.
Unfortunately, in the 1980s
the Conservatives abandoned their essential nature as the party of resistance
to Americanization and standing for Canada’s own traditions when, under the
leadership of Brian Mulroney, they negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with the
United States. By doing this, they
betrayed the historical essence of their party in a way that the Liberals, the
party of Americanization, never had. The
result was that they became a second Liberal Party, a Liberal Party lite, and
hence a redundancy. The Reform Party
which was organized in the late 1980s as a Western protest party criticized the
Mulroney Conservatives for being just this.
Unfortunately, although this criticism was correct, they did not
understand their own criticism.
The Reform Party, which merged with much of the old Conservatives to form the
Canadian Alliance in the late 1990s, failed to see that it was by signing the
Free Trade Agreement that that the Conservatives betrayed their essential
nature and became a second, redundant, Liberal Party. The Reform Party, which took the name of the
movement that gave birth to the Liberal Party of Canada, was in favour of free
trade with the United States and wanted more Americanization not less. Consider their position on Senate
Reform. All that would be needed to make
the Senate function much better and as intended by the Fathers of
Confederation, would be for the nomination of whom the Crown appoints to the
Senate to be taken away from the prime minister, the rest of the Cabinet, and
anyone who sits in the Lower House and given to a nomination committee to which
the provincial governments appoint the members.
This would fix the main problem with the Senate as it currently stands
while preserving it as the same body established in 1867. The Reform Party, however, demanded that the
Senate be remade on the Triple E model, which would essentially remake it into
the image of the American Senate.
The Reform Party was a
populist party that considered itself to be small-c conservative and to be
exerting a right-ward pull to counter the left-ward pull of the Trudeau era
Liberals in a way the old Conservatives had failed to do. The problem with that is that they took their
entire idea of what it means to be “conservative” or on the “right” from a
country that was consciously built on the ideological foundation of liberalism
and which never had a “right” in the truest, political, sense of the term. The United States was founded in a left-wing
revolution. There is no other kind of
revolution, the right’s response to revolution is found in the words of Joseph
de Maistre, “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite
direction, but the opposite of a revolution.”
The quotation comes from Maistre’s Considerations
on France, written, like Burke’s Reflections,
in response to the French Revolution, which was born out of the same ideas and
in some cases with the support of the same individuals – Thomas Paine, Thomas
Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette are the obvious, but not the only
examples – as the American Revolution.
The term “left” first took on its political sense in the French
Revolution when it was used of supporters of the revolution based upon where
they were standing in the French Chamber of Deputies. Similarly, “right” first took on its
political meaning, basically the continental equivalent of what had been called
Toryism in England for over a century at this point in time, in the French
Revolution based upon where the opponents stood. The “right” in North America at the time of
the American Revolution, were the Tories, the Loyalists who, persecuted by the
triumphant revolutionaries, fled the new republic and became the first English
Canadians who a century later, along with the French Canadians who had been
spared going through the French Revolution by having been ceded to the British
Crown at the end of the Seven Years’ War and were at the time more to the right
than the English Canadians, founded the Dominion of Canada on a foundation of
preserving and adapting the old order.
When something that called
itself a “right” emerged in the United States in the period between the two
World Wars, it did not stand for the things the right had historically stood
for in Europe, which can basically be summarized as the political and religious
heritage of pre-Modern Christendom, but was basically eighteenth century
liberalism protesting against how twentieth century liberalism was moving away from
its roots and converging with Communism, or at least socialism. This first American right, similar if not
entirely identical to what is called libertarianism today, was correct to be
alarmed at the direction in which liberalism was moving, although the new
liberals had a better perception of the related nature of liberalism and Communism,
both of which grew out of Modern man’s turning away from the older order of
Christendom and embracing abstract ideals which, while not all necessarily bad
in themselves – “freedom” and “equality” were the main two such ideals, and
while “equality” is a perversion of the good that is “justice”, “freedom” is
itself a good (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has shown how, contrary to Modern
assumptions, the two are contrary to each other and cannot be maximized at the
same time) – in the hands of both liberals and Communists, became what Edmund
Burke called “armed doctrines”, destructive weapons to be used by ignorant
revolutionaries against the old order.
FDR, therefore, was correct to see America’s founding liberalism and
Communism as being on the same side of history, although his opponents in the
first American right were correct to see that what that side was moving towards
was the opposite of the Golden Age of Utopia of which FDR dreamed. In 1948, ideas from the more authentic
European right entered the American right when, in response to the development
and employment of the atomic bomb – something that the American right of the
1940s unanimously condemned as atrocious – Richard Weaver, wrote Ideas Have Consequences, tracing the
moral, intellectual, and civilizational decay that could lead to such a
monstrous occurrence, back through the centuries to Occam’s nominalism in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Except that his title, chosen by his editor rather than himself, stuck
around as a slogan, Weaver’s influence on the American right was
short-lived. Today, his most obvious
intellectual heir in the United States is Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist,
and organic farmer from Kentucky, who defies categorization as “left” or
“right” in either the American or the proper sense of these terms. Meanwhile, the American right has abandoned
his abhorrence of the atomic bomb and of America’s wartime use of it, an
abhorrence shared by Russell Kirk (“we are the barbarians within our own
empire”), Colonel Robert McCormick, Henry Regnery, and basically by everyone on
the American right prior to William F. Buckley Jr., for the lunatic position
that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved lives” (the reasoning used to
arrive at that absurd conclusion is easily rebutted by the testimony of General
Douglas MacArthur if anybody wishes to look into it).
In other words, although
the American “right” from its beginnings in the first half of the last century
has never been a true right but rather a form of liberalism, the original
American right-liberalism prior to William F. Buckley Jr. was preferable either
to the mainstream of American liberalism which was moving left-ward or to the
mainstream American right after Buckley became is self-appointed gate-keeper. It is not, however, to the original American
right that the Reform/Alliance looked for its definition of “conservatism” but
to the Buckley brand, and especially to the later editions of that brand which
incorporates every sort of vile argument for the United States going around the
world, shaking it member in the face of every other country, and whacking them
over the head with a stick, to prove how big and powerful it is. These
arguments are fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity. They include the view of good and evil of the
Manichean heresy (formed in the early centuries of the Church by reading
Christianity through the lens of Eastern dualism), as reflected in Hollywood movies
and comic books. They also include “might makes right”, an
ancient notion revived by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, the refutation
of which notion as expressed by Thrasymachus by Socrates in Plato’s Politeia (misleadingly translated “The
Republic”) was a basic foundation stone of civilization, ancient and Christian.
Even, however, if those who
saw the Conservative Party moving towards liberalism under Mulroney had looked
to Robert Taft, John T. Flynn, William Henry Chamberlin, and Albert Jay Nock rather
than William F. Buckley (at best) and Rush Limbaugh for their ideas of what
conservatism is it would have been a mistake on their part. True Canadian conservatism, as expressed in
such neglected volumes as John Farthing’s Freedom
Wears a Crown, John G. Diefenbaker’s Those
Things We Treasure, the essays of Stephen Leacock, the histories and essays
written by Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton, the philosophical treatises of
George Grant, and in the family saga of novels about the royalist, Anglican, Whiteoak
family of Jalna written by Mazo de la Roche the most read Canadian novelist of
the 1930s, whose books remained extremely popular well past her death in the
early 1960s, is more authentic, being a Canadianized form of British Toryism,
itself an early form of the European right, which stood for the order and
heritage of Christian civilization, for kings and the Christian religion and
the Church against Modern rationalistic and liberalizing tendencies. This is the well of inspiration from which a
movement that wished to exert a pull to the right in Canada to counter the
leftward pull exerted by the Americanizing Liberal Party and the liberal drift
in the Conservative Party, should have drawn.
You cannot counter a “Made in the USA” left-liberalism, with a “Made in
the USA” right-liberalism, that has no roots deeper than the origins of
liberalism in the early Modern era, and it is foolish to try to do so when you
have available a domestic Toryism, which had absorbed some of classical
liberalism but still had roots that extended back to pre-Modern Christendom, to
utilize instead. Attempts to counter the
“Made in the USA” leftward pull of the Liberal Party, with a “Made in the USA” “conservatism”
will only further the leftward drift of the country.
God Save the King!
