Trump versus Clinton, Huntington versus Fukuyama

On the final day of the Democratic National Convention one of the speakers was Khizr Khan. Not the fifteenth century founder of the Sayyid dynasty in India, of course, but a Pakistani born immigrant to the United States. Khan condemned Republican candidate Donald Trump’s policies with regards to immigration as violating the American constitution. He talked about his son who had died as an American soldier in the Iraq War and asked what Trump had sacrificed.

Most of the discussion that this has generated over the last week or so has been long on emotion and short on fact. Although Khan had publicly attacked Trump, anything Trump said in response, no matter how reasonable, was condemned, because Khan was a grieving parent. One would think, from the propaganda that began appearing all over the progressive media, that Trump had been personally responsible for the death of Khan’s son. The irony is that Trump was against the Iraq War and has condemned it frequently throughout his campaign, while Khan’s own preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, as Senator for New York voted for the war and thus was in part responsible for his son’s death.

That did not come up very often in the media’s anti-Trump fest. It did not fit the narrative. Nor did the fact that Khan had a personal motive other than the death of his son for attacking Trump. He is a lawyer who specializes in helping Muslims immigrate to the United States. He is also an advocate of Shariah Law who has been accused of having connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic organization that is the parent organization of terrorist group Hamas and which - with the support of the Obama administration and especially his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – has fomented revolution against several secular Middle Eastern governments which, when successful, has resulted in those governments being replaced by jihadist theocracies.

What is most interesting in all of this is the way in which the American election this year is turning out to be a contest, not just between the two individuals Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but the alternate visions of post-Cold War geopolitics offered two decades ago by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington.

Fukuyama, who is currently a professor at Stanford University, was the author of a famous essay “The End of History?” which appeared in the September 1989 issue of The National Interest. He expanded the thesis of this essay into a book length treatise entitled The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992. Fukuyama’s thesis was an update of the nineteenth century Whig Interpretation of History. He argued, that the triumph of the American-led free world over Communism in the Cold War, signalled, not just the end of that particular conflict, but the end of history itself in the sense that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism would become universally accepted and the basis of a new, world order. Fukuyama saw this outcome as both inevitable and desirable, and his vision of a Pax Americana – a new world order of liberal, democratic capitalism, benevolently policed by the American military – has been the basis of the foreign policy of every American administration since.

The late political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, saw the post-Cold War world as shaping up in a different way, and responded to Fukuyama’s book with an essay “The Clash of Civilizations”, published in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. He too expanded his thesis into a book length treatise, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which was published in 1996. He argued that conflicts between civilizations and cultures, however regrettable, were an inevitable recurrence in human history, which he viewed as being more cyclical, as opposed to the very linear understanding of history found in the original Whig Interpretation and Fukuyama’s thesis. The end of the Cold War, he believed, signalled the end of a particular kind of conflict, the ideological type that had characterized the Twentieth Century, but that other inter-civilizational conflicts would arise, and that the next one was likely to be between Western civilization and the non-Western world, especially the Islamic world.

Fukuyama’s thesis seems to me to be not just utter foolishness but dangerous utter foolishness. The Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant argued in Lament For a Nation (1965) that the world seemed to be headed towards a “universal and homogenous state” of American style liberalism, like the kind Fukuyama believed to be desirable, but observed that the ancients had believed that any such universal state would be a tyranny. If the ancients were right, as Grant believed as do I, then all the recent efforts to build a borderless, global, society, however well-intentioned they may be, are leading us down a path to darkness and misery.

Huntington’s thesis, by contrast, has been borne out by the events of the last two and a half decades. Western civilization is now in a clash with the non-Western, and especially the Islamic world, and those who believe in Fukuyama’s vision of universal, liberal, democracy are jeopardizing the West’s ability to survive, let alone win, this conflict. Observe, for example, the consequences of the attempts of the last two American presidential administrations to introduce liberal democracy to Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The overthrow of the Hussein government in Iraq and the weakening of the Assad government in Syria has led to much of these countries being taken over by the Islamic State, the most formidable jihadist opponent the West has yet faced, while Hamas was voted in by the Palestinians, remaining in control of the Gaza Strip, and Islamic theocrats have come to power in Egypt and Libya. Meanwhile, as we have seen over the course of the last two years, the vision of a global liberal order in which borders do not hinder the free movement of either people or goods and the ensuing relaxed attitude on the part of most Western governments to migration and border security, has internalized the threat from the Islamic world. The conflict between Obama-backed rebels in Syria and the Assad government there, created the pretext whereby droves of invaders, claiming to be refugees from this crisis, have overrun Europe while the number of large scale terrorist attacks on Western soil has been rapidly multiplying.

Fukuyama’s theory has generated a losing strategy in the conflict against Islam, a conflict in which Western civilization was already handicapped by the victory of its own liberalism in the Twentieth Century. That victory was not so much over the twin evils of Communism and Nazism (1) as over the traditions and religion of Christendom, i.e., pre-modern, pre-liberal, Western Civilization. For a thousand years Christendom fought against Islam’s relentless attempts to conquer it. There were notable losses – such as the defeat of the kingdom of Serbia by the Ottomans in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the fall of Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christendom, in the following century – but there were also major victories – such as when Charles Martel’s Franks defeated the Islamic hordes at Tours in 732 and when the Holy League turned away the invading Ottomans before the gates of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire in 1683. To Islam, the present conflict with the West is not something new but rather the renewal and continuation of its fourteen century long war of conquest against Christendom. The West, in which the Christendom that valiantly fought back against Islamic aggression has been replaced by a “Western Civilization” of modern, secular, liberalism, fails to understand this, and so is ill-equipped for the conflict.

The revival of Christendom would be the West’s best chance of surviving and winning this conflict. A Donald Trump presidency, in the American republic that is the centre of the modern liberal West, will not bring about a revival of Christendom. It would, however, be the second best thing, for it would mean the defeat of the Fukuyama inspired, idealistic, liberal triumphalism that, in its naïve belief that liberal democracy is destined to prevail over all its competitors, has been uniting the Islamic world, bringing it most fanatical proponents to power, and internalizing within the West, what was formerly an outside threat. Trump may be a crude, vulgar, egotist, with a tendency to speak before he thinks through what he is speaking about, but he is also a realist and a patriot, who understands that America and the West are in a war with Islam, in which open borders and unrestricted immigration can and will be exploited by the enemy for our own destruction. He is not ideologically committed to the idea that American liberal democracy is the only acceptable form of government and must become universal, and so has shown a willingness to get along with leaders like Russia’s Putin and Syria’s Assad who, while they may not govern in a way that American liberal democrats would approve of, have been fighting the jihadists and protecting the Christian communities in their own countries.

His opponent, by contrast, worked to destabilize the Assad government as Obama’s Secretary of State, which assisted the rise of ISIS at the expense of the safety of the ancient Christian communities in Syria, and has been rattling her sabre against Putin. Her assistance to rebel groups in Egypt against a government not pure enough by the standards of American democratic liberalism, brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in the mercifully short-lived, presidency of Mohammed Morsi. The consequences of her similar actions in Libya are well known. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the Iraq War for which she voted as Senator also contributed to the rise of ISIS, and the wars her husband’s administration – in which she had an unprecedented amount of influence as First Lady - fought against Yugoslavian/Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic – recently exonerated of all the charges made against him at the time – benefited Muslim groups in Bosnia and Kosovo who were allied with Osama bin Laden.

The Trump vs. Clinton presidential contest this fall, therefore, is also, in a sense, a contest between a realism that has a degree of similarity to that of the late Samuel Huntington and the pure liberal idealism of Francis Fukuyama, with the survival of the West in its clash with Islam hanging on the outcome.

(1) Liberalism had largely been colonized by Communism by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. As Tomislav Sunic remarked, in Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007) that “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”, an observation that seems rather justified when one compares the ten measures proposed in the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto with the accomplishments of which progressive liberalism is most proud in the United States and other Western countries. Historian John Lukacs has frequently made a similar observation about national socialism (of which Nazism is a contraction). Liberalism triumphed over these totalitarian enemies, in other words, at the expense of becoming the very thing it had defeated.

The Canadian Jeremiad On Its Golden Jubilee

The modern era is the age of progress. “The doctrine of progress is…an open-ended progression in which men will be endlessly free to make the world as they want it”. “The United States is the spearhead of progress”. “The pinnacle of political striving”, in the modern age of progress, is “the universal and homogeneous state”. “This state will be achieved by means of modern science—a science that leads to the conquest of nature”.

These ideas and quotations are taken from George Grant’s Lament For a Nation, (1) which first saw print fifty years ago, but they could as easily have come from his earlier Philosophy in the Mass Age, his last book Technology and Justice, or any of his other writings in between, for this theme, that we live in an age in which man, rejecting the limits imposed upon him by tradition and the eternal unchanging order that men of previous eras believed in, is, through the new science of technology, asserting both his freedom and his rule over himself and nature, was never far from his thoughts. Nor was his scepticism towards the idea of progress.

That we are advancing towards the “universal and homogeneous state”, is a matter upon which both Karl Marx and American political scientist Francis Fukuyama would agree with Grant. Marx and Fukuyama would further agree, despite the radical difference in their visions of what that universal state will look like, that it will be something desirable, something good. Grant, however, sceptically reminds us that “the classical philosophers asserted that a universal and homogeneous state would be a tyranny”. While he does not authoritatively assert that this is so, by taking the position of Socrates and declaring “I do not know the truth about these ultimate matters”, he gives a clear indication of his preference for classical philosophy, the wisdom of the ancients, over modern thought. Modern, progressive, thought, whether that of Marx or that of Fukuyama, asserts that the universal, homogeneous state will be good, because it sees it as being inevitable and necessary, and to modern thought necessity and goodness are one and the same.

This identification of goodness and necessity is a basic assumption underlying the concept of progress. Grant begins the seventh and final chapter of Lament with a rejection of this assumption arising out of a philosophical conservatism rooted in classical philosophy and his Christian faith.

Grant’s conservatism was political as well as philosophical and Lament was the most political of his books. A Canadian patriot, he was a conservative in the classical tradition of Richard Hooker, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson and the mature Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This conservatism, predicated on the conviction that above all human arrangements there is an unchanging, transcendent, order established by the eternal God, is a belief in earthly order, grounded in tradition, and manifested in institutions, especially ones such as monarchy and the Church which predate the modern age. In the context of Canada this has historically meant an emphasis upon our country’s Britishness and our relationship to Great Britain, first in the empire then in the Commonwealth, and a resistance to Americanization. This was Grant’s conservatism, as it is mine.

The subject and subtitle of Lament For a Nation is “The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism”. There has been more than one idea to go by the name of Canadian nationalism and it is important, if we wish to understand Grant’s book, that we do not mistake which of these he was talking about.

That a classical conservative at odds with the modern age would lament the defeat of a nationalism seems paradoxical. While Tories have always been patriots, as patriotism, the love of country, has been recognized as a virtue since ancient times, they have historically been suspicious of nationalism. Nationalism, after all, is a product of the modern age which was generally regarded, in the century of its birth, the nineteenth, as a liberal or radical phenomenon. The specific conservative objection to nationalism was that it demanded that loyalty to the nation-state take priority over all other loyalties, no matter how ancient, whether loyalty to the king and the church, the family and the community, or even, it seemed, to God Himself and was an instrument of demagogues for stirring up hostility towards other nations and therefore wars.

The Canadian nationalism of which Grant wrote, bore little resemblance to this kind of nationalism, otherwise it would have held little attraction to him, yet nationalism seems nonetheless, to be the appropriate word for it as it was more than just the heartfelt attachment to country that is patriotism. It was the effort to keep Canada, a country that shares the same continent as the United States, from being dominated culturally, politically, and economically, by the dynamic power to her south. Even by this definition, however, there was more than one “Canadian nationalism” and the failure to distinguish between these has led to many a misunderstanding of Grant.

Professor Ron Dart, in his recently published reflections upon Lament, (2) observes that “The New Left thought Grant’s form of nationalist Toryism had many an affinity with their agenda”. After a brief discussion of Gad Horowitz’s coining of the expression “Red Toryism”, Grant’s dialogue with Horowitz, suspicions of the label “Red Tory”, and doubts about the secular Left, Dart concludes that Grant “was, in most ways, a High Tory which most in the New Left lacked the historical depth to comprehend”. I agree and would add that they did not comprehend his nationalism either.

Fifty years ago, when Grant’s book was first published, the Liberal Party of Canada had draped itself in the banner of “Canadian nationalism”. This “Canadian nationalism”, however, was an effort to forge a new Canadian identity by throwing Canada’s British traditions and institutions overboard. In the fourth chapter of Lament, Grant considers the Liberals, the “political instrument” of the Canadian establishment, and concludes that it is “absurd to argue that the Liberals have been successful nationalists”. In his second chapter, speaking of an earlier manifestation of the kind of “Canadian nationalism” the Liberal establishment was espousing at the time he wrote Lament, Grant remarks “It is well to remember that the anti-British nationalists of English-speaking Canada in the 1930’s have nearly all shown the emptiness of their early protestations by becoming consistent continentalists later on”. The “Canadian nationalism” of the New Left has largely been of this anti-British type indicating that Grant’s New Left admirers could not have read him that closely.

The book Freedom Wears a Crown (3) had been published eight years previously to Lament. Edited posthumously from the manuscript prepared by its author, John Farthing, Freedom defends Canada’s British traditions, especially our parliamentary monarchy, and lambastes the new nationalism. He calls it “the usurping fallacy” and in the chapter by that title writes that “A very real distinction exists between our present pure-Canada nationalism and a true Canadian nationhood”, the distinction being that the former rejects Canada’s Britishness as being alien to the country, whereas the latter sees the British tradition as being essential to Canadian nationhood. It is significant, that Grant dedicated Lament to two patriots of British Canada, one of which, Toronto journalist Judith Robinson, was the editor of Freedom Wears a Crown.

In Grant’s Lament, the British tradition is as essential to true Canadian nationhood as it is in Farthing’s Freedom. Only by giving the book the most superficial of readings could someone fail to pick up on that. In explaining the defeat of Canadian nationalism Grant points to the facts that the liberalism upon which the American system was built also had its origins in the British tradition and that by middle of the twentieth century Britain herself had come into the orbit of the United States as reasons why that defeat was inevitable. One reading Grant superficially might interpret this as laying the blame for the defeat on Canada’s Britishness if one fails to note that Grant also gives that British tradition, which still retained pre-American Revolution and pre-modern elements, despite its permeation by modern liberalism, as the very reason the project of Canadian nationalism was worthwhile in the first place, and hence worthy of lamentation in its defeat.

There are two threads of thought regarding British Canada that are interwoven throughout the book. In one, the British tradition is a means to the end of Canadian independence from America, which independence stands in the way of the universal homogeneous state. In this thread, the goodness of Canadian independence rests upon the universal homogeneous state being tyrannical rather than good. This thread terminates in the uncertainty of the final chapter, in which, the distinction between goodness and necessity having been drawn, the question of the goodness of the coming universal homogenous state is left open. Grant is doubtful, and has good reasons to doubt that are founded upon the wisdom of the ancients, but since he cannot with certainty proclaim the universal homogeneous state to be bad, he writes:

My lament is not based upon philosophy but on tradition. If one cannot be sure about the answer to the most important question, then tradition is the best basis for the practical life. Those who loved the older traditions of Canada may be allowed to lament what has been lost, even though they do not know whether or not that loss will lead to some greater political good.

This is the other thread, in which the older traditions of Canada, are loved because they are good in themselves, and the independence of Canada is good because it serves those traditions.

The early chapters of Lament explain why Grant felt that Canadian nationalism had been defeated. The Kennedy administration in the United States wanted the NORAD Bomarc missiles in Canada to be armed with nuclear warheads. The Conservative government of John Diefenbaker said no, on the grounds that Washington should not be allowed to dictate policy to Canada. The Diefenbaker government was then brought down when the Liberals and NDP united against the government in a confidence vote in the House. This demonstrated both that the Americans could bring down a Canadian government that opposed their wishes and that Canada’s elite classes had turned against the idea of a sovereign Canada and set their will towards continental unity.

Grant defends Diefenbaker as a man of patriotic principle against attacks on his character while criticizing what he saw as weaknesses in the Diefenbaker government that undermined their own position, foremost among these being their reliance upon the business class. These criticisms do not imply that had the Diefenbaker government not made these mistakes their defeat could have been avoided. The only alternative courses to becoming a client state of the United States, he argued, were Castroism, a left-wing nationalism that would “establish a rigorous socialist state that turns to the Communist empire for support”, and Gaullism, a right-wing nationalism that would “harness the nationalist spirit to technological planning” and “insist internationally that there are limits to the western ‘alliance’”. Although his preference is clearly for Gaullism, of which he says Sir John A. MacDonald’s “National Policy” was an early form, he argues that neither option was actually available to Canada in the 1960s.

He begins his fifth chapter, however, by asserting that the actions of politicians and businessmen “cannot alone account for Canada’s collapse” and that it “stems from the very character of the modern era”. This launches him into a discussion of the nature of the modern era of progress and the “universal and homogeneous state” the striving towards which “gives content to the rhetoric of both Communists and capitalists” in which he defends his assertion that the United States is “the heart of modernity” and “the spearhead of progress” against the denials of Marxists and American conservatives. Here his reasoning is at both its strongest and its weakest.

The Marxists maintain that the United States is a reactionary rather than a progressive force. This is the logical conclusion of their view of history. Their basic mistake, Grant argues, is to misunderstand the nature of progress. It is not, he says, “the perfectibility of man”, but “an open-ended progression in which men will be endlessly free to make the world as they want it”. Fifty years after Grant wrote this, in a day in which men declare themselves to be women and instead of considering them to be crazy we attempt to reshape reality to fit their delusion, it is apparent that Grant understood far better than Marx where the modern age was headed and what progress looks like in practice.

American conservatives, on the other hand, regard their country as “the chief guardian of Western values” because it retains “certain traditional values that have been lost in Communist societies”. Their argument is based on an interpretation of the history of modern political philosophy – an interpretation that Grant accepts, it should be noted - that separates it into two waves, the first including such thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Smith, and Hume, and the second beginning with Rousseau and including Kant, Hegel, and, of course, Marx. The second wave was much more revolutionary than the first which still retained something of an understanding of human nature, so, the American conservative argument goes, the United States, which was founded on the thinking of the first wave, “should be called a conservative force” and “must be accepted as the guardian of Western values against the perversions of Western revolutionary thought as they have spread into the East”.

Grant’s answer to this is to acknowledge the truth in the argument since American “society does preserve constitutional government and respect for the legal rights of individuals in a way that the eastern tyrannies do not”, but to argue that these traditions are “no longer the heart of American civilization” and that they “become more residual every year.” Such “older aspects of the Western tradition” as “the Church, constitutional government, classical and philosophical studies” are becoming “more like museum pieces, mere survivals on the periphery”. This too, seems to be much more evident in our own day than it was fifty years ago.

Grant contrasts American conservatism with the conservatism of Britain and Canada, noting correctly that American conservatives are actually “old-fashioned liberals” and that the Tory Loyalists who founded English Canada “were Anglicans and knew well that in opposing the revolution they were opposing Locke” and who “appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker.” “Traditional conservatism”, he writes, “asserts the right of the community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good”. As true as this is, the greatest weakness that I see in Grant’s reasoning in this book, is that he can come across as reducing traditional conservatism to little more than this assertion, which does not exactly make it sound appealing. Traditional conservatism was not based upon the idea that freedom is something bad, dangerous, and scary, and Grant, who in his later book English Speaking Justice says that freedom is good and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a nut did not think that it was, but this is not as clear as it should be in Lament.

Conservatism and liberalism have different understandings of the nature of freedom as a good. It is not enough to point out the flaws in liberalism’s understanding of freedom, the conservative needs to explain his own. King Charles I in his final speech before his martyrdom did just this when he said: “for the people and truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever, but I must tell you, that their liberty and their freedom consists in having of Government; those laws, by which their life and their goods may be most of their own.” Roger Scruton, in his The Meaning of Conservatism, written on the eve of the Thatcher/Reagan era, explained that conservatism was not about freedom itself but about the order, traditions, and institutions that generate the context in which freedom is possible. George Grant tells us in Lament that liberalism sees freedom as being the essence of man and the emancipation of his passions but he does not tell us where the good that is freedom fits into the conservative order. Indeed, at times he seems to go out of his way to avoid doing so, such as when in discussing the possibility that the universal state will be a tyranny, as the ancients thought, he defines tyranny as “a society destructive of human excellence”, which is not a wrong definition, per se, but one that noticeably avoids the concepts of usurped power and stolen liberty that ordinarily define the term.

This is not the only noticably singular definition to appear in the book. “Yet what is socialism”, Grant asks, “if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good?” That is a question that would have sounded very strange to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the nineteenth century socialist who is credited as being the father of anarchism, i.e., the rejection of the legitimate authority of government. Ordinarily socialism is defined as the idea that the means of production should be collectively owned by the public rather than privately owned. Grant, however, is making an argument that socialism is “appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom” and the rejection of private ownership, while it might appeal to some idea of social order, certainly does not appeal to a conservative one. Just as there is a conservative idea of freedom as well as a liberal one so there are ideas of social order that are not conservative.

Grant’s determination to present a conservative side to socialism, even though Marxists and socialists regard themselves as progressive, would seem to be behind his reluctance to acknowledge a conservative idea of freedom and non-conservative concepts of order. The evils in capitalism were clear to Grant. The pursuit of the economic integration of the North American continent on the part of corporate capitalists was the biggest threat to Canadian cultural and political independence. Capitalism was the instrument of progress, the system that most effectively accomplished technological change, obliterating traditions and what was left of the classical concepts of social order and the common good, in the process. Grant’s indictment of corporate capitalism rings true, for the most part, especially today, fifty years later where in virtually every cultural battle the large corporations can be found lined up against tradition, religion, and morality.

The evils of capitalism do not prove socialism to be good, however, nor does showing capitalism to be progressive thereby prove socialism to be conservative. The idea that rejecting capitalism means embracing socialism to some degree or another reflects the assumptions that capitalism and socialism are the only possibilities and that they are polar opposites of each other. These assumptions were widely held in the Cold War era in which Lament was written but have since been discredited by history. With the end of the arms race, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the break-up of the Soviet Union, American capitalism was triumphant and socialist parties around the world from Tony Blair’s New Labour to the Communist Party of Red China began to accept neo-liberal market economics. If socialists were now adopting the market policies of their conqueror, capitalism, that capitalism had already adopted most of the policies of socialism. It has been noted that the ten measures advocated by Marx and Engels in the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto, such as “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and the “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” have almost all been implemented in the United States and the other Western democracies. Dr. Tomislav Sunic has remarked that “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West” (4) Capitalism and socialism have clearly converged and, I would argue, that this indicates they were never truly polar opposites to begin with, but two sides to the same coin.

Grant was not oblivious to the fact of this convergence. Note that he rests his case that the United Sates is “a dynamic empire spearheading the age of progress” on the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election. Goldwater, who stood for the older small town, small business version of American liberal capitalism, with the backing of the besieged regional culture in the South, was defeated, Grant argued, by the same forces that defeated Diefenbaker in 1963, the capitalist corporations behind the new liberalism of Kennedy and Johnson. The newer liberalism of Kennedy and Johnson, incorporated a much greater degree of socialism into its capitalism than the older classical liberalism of Goldwater, and it was this newer liberalism that had the corporate power behind it.

Today, this corporate-backed synthesis of capitalism and socialism is, even more so than it was fifty years ago, the dominant power in the world, and the extent to which it has rolled over local cultures, ancient traditions, and venerable institutions in Canada and the United States alike is much more advanced than it was then. Some might say that this makes Grant’s book irrelevant and out-of-date. I would suggest, however, that it is even more reason for us to contemplate the distinction he makes between what is necessary in the sense of being unavoidable due to the forces of history and what is good, to question the assumed goodness of the dynamic changes going on all around us, and to look back to the classical pre-modern, ideas that Grant loved and which were embodied in the older traditions of our country, to find a truer vision of goodness.

Happy Dominion Day!
God save the Queen!




(1) George Parkin Grant, Lament For a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, (Toronto: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1978, 1989).
(2) Ron Dart, Lament For a Nation: Then and Now, (New York: American Anglican Press, 2015).
(3) John C. Farthing, Judith Robinson (ed), Freedom Wears a Crown, (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957).
(4) Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, (Book Surge Publishing, 2007), p. 34.

GTN Tory Classics No. 3: Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory

The term Pyrrhic victory comes from Pyrrhus of Epirus, a 3rd Century BC Greek king who fought against Rome. At the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, he led a coalition army against a Roman army of about equal strength. The battle lasted for two days and in the end Rome was routed, but Pyrrhus lost a huge portion of his own army in the process. After the battle, Pyrrhus is said to have remarked "One more such victory, and we shall be undone". A Pyrrhic victory is a victory won at a cost so high it means the ruin of the victor as well.

I wrote the essay that followed for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this essay I argue that the West won the Cold War against Communism at the price of becoming Communist ourselves. This essay also argues against the widely held but foolish idea that "Communism in theory" is noble and good and unrelated to the actual experience of 20th Century Communism.


Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory?


By Gerry T. Neal
October 20, 2009

This November 9th will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The significance of that historical event cannot be exaggerated. It marked the beginning of the end of the global conflict that had been raging since the end of World War II between the two superpowers that had emerged from that War to take the place of the great European powers that had been decimated by the World Wars. Two years after the East German guards abandoned the check stops and allowed free access through the gates of the wall the Soviet Union was no more.

Did the end of the Cold War mean that we had won and Communism had lost? Or was the “victory” of the West a Pyrrhic victory? In his 2007 book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Post-Modern Age, Dr. Tomislav Sunic pointed out that in Europe some authors had made the observation that “communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”. Is this in fact the case?

What was or is Communism? It was an ideology and a movement dedicated to bringing about a global revolution on the part of the working class that would establish an egalitarian society. It’s roots lay in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century philosopher whose ideas inspired the French Revolution which became the template for revolutionary movements that popped up all over continental Europe in the early 19th Century. One of those revolutionary organizations, the Communist League, commissioned German economist Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels to write a manifesto outlining the aims of their movement. The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in London in 1848. Less than a century later a party known as the Bolsheviks, dedicated to the ideology of Communism, seized control of the state in Russia, and turned the old Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Under the leadership of tyrants like Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Communist Russia established a brutal system of totalitarian rule. Freedom to worship was severely curtailed by the officially atheist state. Artificial famines were created to inflict mass starvation and suffering upon the Ukrainians. A class of peasant known as the “kulaks” were made the official scapegoat of the Soviet state and targeted for persecution. Forced labor camps were set up all across the USSR. Long before Hitler came to power in Germany the Bolsheviks had set a record for state cruelty and oppression that the Nazis, brutal as they were, would never be able to top. It would, however, arguably be topped by the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong who in 1949 had driven out the Chinese Nationalists and conquered mainland China.

Show trials, Potemkin villages, concentration camps, artificial famines, mass executions of entire classes of people deemed to be enemies of “the people” because of their education, wealth, or religion, these were what Communism looked like in practice wherever it reared its ugly head, whether in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot or Cuba under Castro. The whole time this was going on, smug, ivory-tower, leftist intellectuals in America, Canada, the UK and Europe stuck their noses in the air at anyone who considered Communism to be a serious threat to human freedom and happiness.

These sort of things, we were told by leftist academics and Hollywood actors, are not what Communism is really about. Communism is really about equality and sharing and being fair to people. Only those with unearned wealth and power which they jealously guard for themselves while unfeelingly leaving other people to suffer could possibly be opposed to Communism.

Alright then. Lets look at Communism in theory.

The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels set forth the ideas and aims of the Communist Party, was a short document. It outlined Marx’s distinct view of history as progressing through a series of conflicts between oppressor classes and oppressed classes and his prediction that the next revolution, on the part of the proletariat (industrial working class), would lead to the abolition of private property (the root of all evil in Marx’s theory) and the establishment of a society where everything is owned in common and people contribute to the best of their ability and in accordance with their needs. In their second chapter, entitled “Proletarians and Communists”, Marx and Engels put forth a 10-point agenda for the Communist movement to achieve its goals.

What is interesting about this agenda is that 3 of the points have been completely accomplished in Western societies. The second point is “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, the fifth point is “Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” and the tenth point is “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc”.

Note that each of these points is a step towards statism. An income tax is a direct tax on the incomes of people that requires people to give detailed information about their employment and income to the government and which cannot be established apart from an intrusive government tax agency that keeps records on people and has the power to audit people like Revenue Canada or the IRS. When that tax is “progressive or graduated” that means that the government is telling certain people they are making too much money and so the government will take a larger share from them than from others. This tax was established in the United States in 1913 and in Canada in 1917.

A central bank is a tool for the government and bankers working in collusion with the government to confiscate everybody’s wealth without them actually coming up to you and saying “you have saved such-and-such an amount of money over the years, we are now going to take it away from you”. The Federal Reserve System was established in the United States the same year as the income tax and the Bank of Canada was established in the 1934.

Universal public education takes the responsibility for and control of the education of the young away from their parents and places it in the hands of the central state. When schools are paid for and controlled by the central government they become instruments whereby that government can undermine the authority of parents, churches, and other social institutions through state indoctrination. As of late, the public schools seem to be doing far more of that, than teaching kids to read, write, and do math, and imparting to them a basic knowledge of the literature and history of their society and of the world at large.

The other seven points of the Marx/Engels agenda have not been fulfilled so conspicuously and completely but with our estate taxes and government bureaucracies like the CRTC and FCC, and the ministries and departments of transport, it can be said of many of them that they are fulfilled in spirit if not in the letter.

The leftist academics might pipe in at this point and say “See, that proves our point, you can have Marx and Engels without the Gulag, and the killing fields, and the terror famine, and the Great Leap Forward”.

Lets take another look around us then. We don’t have apparatchiks but we do have self-important sycophantic bureaucrats galore. We don’t have yes/no elections on candidates from a single party. We get to chose between various brands of the same party so as to get the policies of Jack Layton under the label of Stephen Harper. We don’t have secret police knocking on our doors in the middle of the night and dragging us away because we have written scurrilous verse about our Leader. We do, however, have Human Rights Commissions, which investigate our actions and words to make sure they measure up to official human rights ideology and which summon us to trials where we are not entitled to legal counsel but where we can face penalties of up to $50 000 and life-time gag orders if we are convicted for just posting words on the internet. There are people in jails across Western Europe whose only crime was to question aspects of the historical account of the Holocaust. Instead of re-education we have “sensitivity training”.

What we don’t seem to have any more are the prescriptive Rights of Englishmen under English Common Law, whereby we are free to do whatever we want if it is not a crime clearly proscribed by law. The Common Law Rights of Englishmen further protected us by insisting that we, if detained by the state, have a right to be immediately presented with the charges against us, to have a judge rule on our detainment, to a trial before a jury of our peers, and if convicted to appeal our case up to Her Majesty herself. Apparently “human rights” trump those rights.

These all seem to have fallen by the wayside as our government has pursued the goals of progress, equality and “human rights”. It looks like Communism, whether in its stark, ugly, naked form in the USSR or Red China, or dressed up to look pretty in Canada and the United States, is simply incompatible with the long-standing British tradition of liberty.

If we value that tradition of liberty, maybe it is time we started asking our politicians to give it back to us, and to get rid of all the Communist innovations they have smuggled in over the last century. Otherwise, the West’s victory over Communism of 20 years ago, is a Pyrrhic victory indeed.