True Allegiance and The Liberal Party’s Politics of Fear

The Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, the last true Conservative and the last patriot of the true Canada, to serve as Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion, in a speech given early in the premiership of the first Trudeau, remarked how he could remember a time when one could disagree with the Prime Minister without being considered a bigot. The implication, of course, was that this was no longer the case. The speech is included in the collection published by Macmillan of Canada in 1972 under the title Those Things We Treasure. This book, along with John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, should be required reading for every Canadian. The latter is a philosophical defence of the Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy against the rival republicanisms of the United States and the Soviet Union, and a warning to Canadians about how our system had been compromised and undermined in the Mackenzie King years. Diefenbaker’s book was a timely protest against how the actions of Pierre Trudeau were further undermining that system as well and also the traditional freedoms of Canadians and the culture of political civility associated with it.

At the time the Chief made the remark alluded to above the progressive tactic of smearing opponents on the right with the label “racist” was fairly new. It would soon become the standard progressive response to any criticism from the right and has been so beaten to death over the decades that in the last few years, progressives, finding that people have become desensitized to the word “racist”, have been turning to stronger terms like “white supremacist.” Milo Yiannopoulos in a recent interview with David Horowitz remarked:


When somebody calls you a racist, this is far worse than somebody who casually drops the N word, cause when you call somebody that name, the only person who looks bad is you. Whereas, when you call somebody a racist, you are creating a set of obligations for them to defend themselves, which will, whatever they do, indelibly associate their name with that crime. Way worse.


This is very true and it is worse yet to call somebody a “white supremacist” for this expression suggests an organized, ideological, form of racism and not merely prejudiced thoughts and attitudes.

Unsurprisingly, the Liberal Party of Canada and its leader, swamped by the mire of the SNC-Lavalin Scandal and sinking in the polls with the next Dominion election only months away, has fallen back in desperation on this updated version of their old tactics. They have been issuing demands that Andrew Scheer denounce “white supremacy” and “white nationalism.” They have continued to make these demands even after Scheer had complied with them. Scheer, in my opinion, ought not to have complied. The implication of such demands is that Scheer is under a presumption of guilt of sympathizing or collaborating with neo-Nazism until he proves otherwise by making a sufficient denunciation, and that those who make these demands have the right to decide when the denunciation is sufficient. Arrogant, bullying, demands of this sort ought neither to be acknowledged nor complied with. Especially when coming from someone against whom charges of ties to extremists of a different sort, Sikh separatists, are far more sustainable, having generated an international incident two years ago and just now resurfaced with the Liberal government’s redaction of last year’s terrorism report.

The other implication of these demands is that white supremacism is a significant problem in Canada and a realistic threat to our civilization. This is total bunk, a fact which nobody knows better than the Liberals themselves. It was a Liberal government in 1977, the government led by the father of the present Prime Minister, that passed the Canadian Human Rights Act after selling the Act to the public, with the assistance of the media, by generating a fear that Nazism was on the verge of being reborn here on Canadian soil. This had been facilitated by the formation of the Canadian Nazi Party which contained, maybe, one actual disciple of Adolf Hitler. It otherwise consisted of agents provocateurs supplied by the government and by private activist organizations that had an interest in seeing this legislation passed. There was not the slightest possibility of this group, or any white supremacist group, establishing a Fourth Reich in Canada but the manufactured, bogus, threat of such was used by the Liberals and their allies, to pass a bill which, despite its title, did nothing to protect the lives, property, and freedoms of people under the jurisdiction of Canadian law from the threat of abusive state power, but instead authorized state meddling in all sorts of private interactions and imported, from the Soviet system, thought police and tribunals which, since the media, except for a brief time about a decade ago when it felt its own liberty threatened, has largely refrained from criticizing or even reporting their doings, have been effectually allowed to function as secret police and tribunals. It was this system set up by the Canadian Human Rights Act, and not the phony “Nazi menace” invented to dupe the public into supporting it, which was and is the real threat to our freedom and order, civilization and way of life.

The Liberals also know as well as anyone else that the Conservative Party is not a front for white supremacists and that Andrew Scheer is not a crypto-neo-Nazi. If anything they are pathetically progressive and liberal on all issues pertaining to race and ethnicity, not only when compared to the Conservatives of a century ago, but to the Liberals and socialists of that era as well. The noise to the contrary, that the Grits are currently generating, is, of course, intended as a distraction from the scandal that has been engulfing them, but it is also an example of the very “politics of fear and division” which they accused the previous Conservative government of in the last Dominion election.

Let me speak now for a moment to anyone who might sincerely believe that we have a serious problem with white supremacism in this country. I have two things that I would say to such a person.

First, if ideological racism and racial nationalism are serious problems in the world today, then it is all ideological racism and all racial nationalisms which are the problems and not just white supremacism. As Stephen Roney recently put it:

To denounce “white supremacy” as a stand-alone item is to imply that other forms of racial supremacy are fine: black supremacy, Asian supremacy, Muslim supremacy, aboriginal supremacy. The problem is not with supremacy, then; it is with whites. That is extreme racism. And should be called out as such.


Indeed, and to further demonstrate the point that this paranoid obsession with one particular form of racial supremacy amounts to extreme racism in itself, I will draw your attention to the hysteria that was generated on campuses across North America late last year, including the campus of the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg, by the appearance of posters containing one simple phrase “It’s OK to be white.” The posters were widely condemned as conveying a “white supremacist” message, but if this slogan is “white supremacist”, then to not be a “white supremacist” one must hold that “It’s NOT OK to be white.” Taking that position amounts to racial hatred against white people.

Since the first Trudeau premiership the Liberal Party has conducted an aggressive campaign to drum racism out of Canada, a campaign that has been enthusiastically supported by the media, the academic establishment, the other progressive parties, and yes, even the Conservative Party in both its old and new incarnations, but this campaign, which has only ever seriously targeted white racism has in reality promoted anti-white racism. They have managed to get away with this for so long because anyone who has dared to point it out and speak out against it has been smeared with a lot of nasty labels, such as “white supremacist.” This is the very essence of the “politics of fear and division”, Liberal Party style, and it is about time that Canadians stop giving in to these bullying tactics and send the Grits and other progressives the clear message, that as long as they insist on a non-tolerance policy towards racial prejudice on the part of whites their own promotion of anti-white bigotry will receive the exact same treatment. Or, alternately, we could follow David Warren’s more amusing suggestion:


We need a National Bigotry Day, in which for twenty-four hours we can all find relief from the Political Correctors. And laugh at each other, scoff taunt and mock, because (have you noticed?) all of us deserve it.


The second thing I would say is that if ideological racism and racial nationalism are serious problems in the world today, then the solutions, if there are any, are not be sought in modern and progressive thought. Nationalism – all nationalism, not merely the racial kind – and ideological racism are themselves the products of the Modern Age’s departure from royal monarchism in the political sphere and from orthodox, catholic, Christianity in the spiritual and religious sphere. When in the twentieth century progressives came to reject these offspring of the Modern Age, racism and nationalism, at least for white, Western people, and to regard them as problems, the solution they devised was one-world, globalism, the ideal of a world without borders, in which capitalism and socialism converge, and the flow of goods and people is completely unimpeded. This “solution” proved to be worse than the problem, and in rejection of it populist, nationalist, movements have been springing up all across the Western world to defy the globalist consensus between mainstream liberal and conservative parties. These, it must be added, are no more solutions to the problem of globalism, than globalism was a solution to the problems of racism and nationalism. Neither is the solution to the other because the real problem is the modern thinking that lies beneath both and to address this problem we need truly reactionary thinking that looks back to the older tradition, to royal monarchy and orthodox Christianity.

In a royal monarchy, sovereign authority is vested in a person, and is hereditary, passed down from ancestors to descendants. This is the very embodiment of the accumulated wisdom of the ancients that men in modern times have foolishly thrown away. Whereas Lockean liberalism declared voluntary individual contract to be the basis of society, the ancients knew that families were the building blocks of communities and societies, and that the sovereign authority in a state could not rest upon a contractual foundation, but was an extension of the natural authority of father and mother in the home, through the patriarchs and matriarchs of the extended kin group, to the kings and queens of the realm. The reigning monarch, by holding the sovereign authority in trust, is a symbol of stability and continuity, which are essential to order, which in turn is essential to true freedom, and is an example to the generation living in the present day, of the debt owed to generations past, to conserve what they have left, for generations yet to come. The hereditary nature of the office, derided as archaic and unfair by its democratic and republican foes, is what allows the monarch to be a unifying symbol in a way no elected politician ever could. Furthermore, the monarch as that symbol of unity, gives government a personal face. These last two aspects of the office make it the essential and necessary counter to two of the most obnoxious characteristics of the modern state, the endless factionalism promoted both by government by elected assembly and by meritocratic individualism, and the faceless inhumanity of bureaucracy.

As the symbol of unity and the personal face of the state, the royal monarch is the object of the natural allegiance of her subjects and the sworn allegiance of state ministers and immigrants. When a country is united by its loyal allegiance to the person of the royal monarch, that place as the object of loyalty, cannot be filled by abstract ideas. Filling that place with abstract ideas, is precisely what the liberals of the Modern Age, in rebellion against their kings, set out to do. The most popular such idea was that of “the people.” The liberals had either rejected or forgotten the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, who taught that democracy was the parent of tyranny which was the opposite of true kingship, and the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” begat tyranny on a scale the world had never before seen in the England of the Cromwellian Protectorate, the France of the Reign of Terror, and the Soviet Union and all subsequent People’s Republics. Nationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and spread throughout the Western world in the nineteenth, was originally a form of this left-wing, rebellion against royal monarchy which defined “the people” for whom the revolutionaries claimed to speak as “the nation”, i.e., a people united by blood, language, history, and culture. (1) The Third Reich, which would never have had the opportunity to rise had the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg thrones not been emptied, defined “the people” in more explicitly racial terms, but otherwise was not significantly different from these other regimes. It would make far more sense to look to what these regimes had in common as an explanation of their common industrial scale brutality than to single out what set the Third Reich apart as the sole reason for its specific atrocities.

Before the Modern Age, what we now call Western Civilization was called Christendom, and in Christian civilization it was acknowledged that there is an allegiance which men owe that is higher even than that which they owe to their king or queen, and that is the allegiance owed to God, the Creator and Sovereign Ruler of all that is. Orthodox Christianity has called itself “catholic” since the earliest centuries. The ancient baptismal Creed confesses faith in “the holy catholic church” and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in “one holy, catholic, and Apostolic church.” The third of the three ancient Creeds begins by saying “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the catholic faith.” The word “catholic” means “universal”, making it both ironic and inappropriate, that it is used today as a denominational label, but that is the subject matter for another essay. The early church chose this word to designate both itself and its faith both because it was an appropriate designation for the entire church worldwide as distinguished from the church in a particular location and because of the universal nature of the church and her mission.

Jesus, before His Ascension, commissioned His Apostles with the words “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28: ), and “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), and told them that “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). When the promise of the coming of the Holy Ghost was fulfilled, as recorded by St. Luke in the next chapter of Acts, the Apostles preached the Gospel to the multitude of Jews who had come from all over the known world to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost – the Old Covenant Feast commemorating the giving of the Law not the Christian Feast of the same name commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost – and each heard in his own tongue. (2) Eight chapters later, St. Peter was sent to proclaim the Gospel to the first Gentile convert, Cornelius and five chapters after that there were so many Gentile converts that the Apostolic Council met in Jerusalem to address the question of whether they would be required to be circumcised and to follow the diet and rituals of the Mosaic Law. It was ruled that these, which had been given in the Old Covenant to keep national Israel distinct and separate from her idolatrous neighbours, were not to hinder the unity of the new transnational spiritual commonwealth that was the church under the New Covenant. This was a point that St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, would emphasize throughout his epistles. St. John, in his apocalyptic vision, heard the twenty-four elders, representing the church in heaven, singing the new song “Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.” (Rev. 5:9-10) All people, orthodox Christianity teaches, are brothers because of our common descent from Adam, and out of this natural brotherhood, which since the Fall has carried the curse of Original Sin, all people are called by the Gospel, to believe and be baptized into the new spiritual brotherhood established by the Second Adam, Christ.

In royal monarchy, our sovereign is the personal object of our civil allegiance. In orthodox Christianity, Christ as the head of the “one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic church” which transcends all boundaries of tribe, race, and nation, is the personal object of our spiritual allegiance. When our civil and spiritual allegiance both belong to the right personal object, they cannot be claimed by the false substitute of the Modern Age, the people, in any of its various guises – race, nation, working class, the whole of humanity, etc. Only thus can we avoid the pitfalls of nationalism and racism, without falling into the opposite pits of one-world, globalism and the virulent anti-white racism that wears the mask of anti-racism.

Canada, although a century younger than the United States and thus founded well in to the Modern Age, because she was built upon the foundation of Loyalism rather than nationalism, was established as a parliamentary monarchy and as an explicitly Christian rather than a secular country. We retain our royal monarchy and our Christianity to this day, if only in the most outward, nominal, and ceremonial ways, despite the Liberal Party’s having done their worst to eliminate these things, and these outward trappings of Christian civilization are the signposts pointing the way back to our true civil and spiritual allegiance, should we ever find the courage and the character to take it.

(1) The American and French Revolutions were arguably the first nationalist movements. The word “nationalism” only goes back to the nineteenth century, but the phenomenon it designates goes back to the previous century. The American Revolutionaries called themselves “patriots,” using “patriotism” with all the connotations of nationalism, but patriotism is a much older concept which simply means “love of country.” Dr. Johnson argued, in both The Patriot (1774) and in conversation recorded by Boswell, that the patriotism espoused by the American rebels was false and hypocritical. Had the word been around to be used at the time he might have said that it was nationalism rather than patriotism.

(2) It has been observed that the miracle of the first Whitsunday was a reversal of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, the event through which God divided the human race into different tribes and nations. This does not make the agenda of one-world, borderless, globalism somehow “Christian.” Christ told Pilate that His kingdom was “not of this world”, meaning, not that it was located on Mars or some other planet, but that it was an eternal and spiritual rather than a temporal and civil commonwealth and that is not in political competition with any of the latter. It is only in that spiritual kingdom, the Church, that the effect of Babel is reversed. Progressive, one-world, borderless, globalism is a manifestation of the same human arrogance that brought about the divine judgement at Babel in the first place.

Seeing Through the Unions

On Wednesday, June 26th, 2013, the Canadian Senate passed Bill C-304, a bill striking Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act from law. This was cause for rejoicing because Section 13 was a terrible law, one which enabled individuals so inclined, to drag Canadian citizens before specially appointed tribunals where they would not enjoy the protections of the regular court system, and prosecute them for nothing more than their words. (1) The Senate, in voting to approve Bill C-304 and get rid of this odious law, clearly did the right thing. Whether or not another decision they made on that same day was also right is far more open to question.

The other decision was regarding Bill C-377. (2) The actual title of this bill is “An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (requirements for labour organizations)” but it is better known as the “Union Transparency Act”. Like Bill C-304, Bill C-377 is a private member’s bill. Russell Hiebert, the Conservative MP who represents South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale in British Columbia introduced it in the House of Commons in December, 2011. Unlike Bill C-304, this bill was backed by the Harper government. The bill is, as its title indicates, a proposed amendment to the Income Tax Act, one which would require labour unions – which qualify for tax exemption under the Income Tax Act – to report all of their spending above $5,000 and the salaries and benefits of union leaders above $100,000 to the Canada Revenue Agency which would make the information available to the public.

The Senate’s decision was to pass a series of amendments to the bill. The bill, with the amendments, must now return to the House of Commons which will have to decide whether to accept or reject the amendments. If the amendments are accepted, unions will only have to report spending above $150,000 and salaries above $444,000, and only unions with a membership of over 50,000 will be affected. The amendments, in other words, nullify the bill.

So what are we to make of this?

Bill C-377 was drawn up to address a real need. Labour unions are workers’ associations organized for the purpose of negotiating labour contracts with employers. Their activities are supported by dues paid by their members. In Canada, these dues are 100% deductible from a union member’s taxable income. (3) The unions themselves are tax-exempt. Canadian labour law allows for contracts that make union membership a condition of employment. It also allows for contracts that make the payment of union dues mandatory for all employees whether they are union members or not. (4) This is supposedly to prevent free riders – non-union employees who benefit from union negotiations without paying the costs of union membership.

In their tax exempt status and the tax advantages given to their contributors unions are similar to charities. Charitable donations, however, are purely voluntary. In their legal power to compel contributions from their members and even employees who are not members, they are more like the government. Yet they are legally less accountable for how they spend their funds than either charities or the government.

The law requires charities to make their financial records available to the Canada Revenue Agency and holds charities, as tax exempt organizations, accountable to the public. (5) Unions have the same tax exempt status as charities. Union members receive tax advantages for the dues they are required to pay, just as those who voluntarily contribute to charities receive tax advantages, albeit of a different kind. Those who pay union dues receive a full tax deduction, whereas those who donate to charities receive a partial tax credit.(6) Yet unions are only required by the Canadian Labour Code and provincial labour legislation to report their finances to their own members, and even then what is required by the law is far short of full disclosure.

Unions should be held more accountable than charities not less. Charities are organizations that do benevolent work, to serve others. The law gives them tax exempt status because this work is deemed to be of benefit to the public. Unions, by contrast, exist only to serve their own interests. That is their very nature. Unions are formed by workers for the purpose of getting higher wages, better hours, better benefits, and better working conditions for themselves. In this unions are similar to businesses. Businesses are built up and operated for the purpose of earning a profit for their owners.

Now there is nothing wrong with a worker’s desire for higher wages and better working conditions. Nor is there anything wrong with a businessman’s wish to turn a profit. The latter, however, is routinely condemned as selfishness by the kind of self-proclaimed “enlightened” intellectuals who typically act as cheerleaders for the unions. Nobody has ever suggested that a business should be given tax-exempt status. Yet businesses, to achieve their end of earning profits for their owners, must do so by providing the public with goods and services they desire at a price they can afford. Unions, on the other hand, achieve their goal of higher wages and better benefits for workers by threatening their employers with labour strikes. When they follow through with these threats – which they cannot avoid doing from time to time if they wish the threats to remain effective – it is not just their employers who suffer but the public as well. (7) It would seem that a better case could be made for making businesses tax exempt than for making unions tax exempt.

Unions are also like businesses in that they have a tendency to get involved in politics. Note that the law forbids registered, tax exempt, charitable organizations from getting involved in partisan politics. (8) Businesses and unions both contribute to political parties and campaigns and both lobby government for legislation that they would like to see pass and against legislation they would like to see defeated. Businesses and unions both have legitimate political interests. The government, through its power to tax and legislate, can make it easier or harder for a business to operate and earn a profit. Businesses would naturally prefer that it do the former rather than the latter. There are also laws governing such things as wages, workers’ safety and other workplace conditions, and the whole labour negotiation process. Unions, which exist to be advocates for workers, would understandably want these laws to be written in the way that benefits their workers the most. Here again, the legitimate political interests of businesses and unions are both intrinsically selfish. Contrary to the thinking of the kind of people who identify themselves as progressive or forward thinking, the businessman’s selfish desire to see laws enacted which make it easier for him to run his business and turn a profit is no more selfish or less legitimate than a union leader’s wish for laws that raise wages or improve the union’s bargaining power at the negotiation table.

Alas, unions and businesses have yet one more similarity. The involvement of both in politics extends far beyond the legitimate interests described above. Often these political activities are harmful to the public good.

Back in the eighteenth century, Scottish liberal philosopher Adam Smith noted the tendency of businesses to conspire to raise prices against the good of the public. (9) The extent to which they are able to do this, however, has always been limited by the fact that they can only raise prices so high before they become prohibitive to sales and injure the businesses themselves. In the last seventy years or so, a far greater threat to the public good has been posed by large corporations operating across national borders and hence known as multinational or transnational corporations. These corporations have been working with major world governments to integrate the markets of the world into regional markets and ultimately one big global market. A global market creates greater fluidity for capital, resources and labour, allowing transnational corporations to move these things around the planet and thus avoid strict accountability to the laws of any one nation. This harms the public good of all nations involved. (10)

Unions are no better. If anything they are much worse. They have a long history of throwing their weight behind political causes that either have nothing to do with their role as workers’ advocacy organizations, are harmful to the public good, or both. In 1921, the Communist International founded a Canadian branch of the Party that had just seized power in Russia and which would be responsible for so much death, suffering, and misery in Russia, China, Cambodia, and throughout the world in the twentieth century. (11) In the 1920s, 1930s, and into the early years of the Cold War, there was a close relationship between the Communist Party and the more radical Canadian labour unions. Many of the leaders of the Communist Party had been union organizers and the Party infiltrated the leadership of several existing labour unions and organized others. (12) Communism, out of power, is a subversive and revolutionary movement, and in power is a totalitarian system that produces universal slavery and misery. Although the history of this era is often written in a way that portrays the Communist movement as the innocent victims of a paranoid “Red Scare” promoted by Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, and the RCMP, the government had good reason to be concerned about the Communist movement. To the extent that they cooperated with Communism the labour unions were clearly working against the good of Canada.

Labour unions were also involved in the founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in 1932 and its successor the New Democratic Party in 1961. The CCF was a socialist party. It differed from Communism in that its modus operandi was to work within the system legally and that it was built upon a Christian heresy, the social gospel, rather than the atheistic, materialistic, philosophy of Marxism. Otherwise there was little difference. It wanted the government to take ownership of major industries and to take responsibility for providing material security for all Canadians from the cradle to the grave. To this day, in every federal election, the NDP tells us how it, if elected, would expand government social programs and benefits. It never tells us where it will get the money to pay for all this. Either it will have to raise taxes, destroying the illusion that the benefits it offers are “free” or it will have to borrow the money, which in the sort run will create inflation and in the long run will end up bankrupting the country. Either way, higher taxes or inflation and national bankruptcy, the people that will be hurt the most will be the working classes for whom the NDP and its union supporters claim to speak. Just this year the NDP government of Manitoba raised the provincial sales tax, despite a law requiring them to call a referendum before doing so. Those who are hurt the most by this are those who are least able to afford an extra one percent tax on their purchases, the poor and the working classes.

The NDP continues to portray itself as the working man’s party and continues to receive the support of the labour unions. Yet the policies it supports are frequently those that would harm the working classes. Take its immigration policy for example. (13) In the last federal election, the NDP promised that if elected it would speed up the immigration application process, streamline the recognition of foreign professional credentials, and devote more federal funding to the settling of new immigrants. All of these actions would have the effect of bringing more immigrants into the country and into the Canadian labour market faster. One of the effects of this would be to depress wages. This is clearly against the interests of Canadian workers. (14)

The NDP is a radically feminist party. (15) Feminism, which insists that women and men should compete with each other in the same labour market and regards the role of wife/mother/homemaker as an instrument of male oppression, like liberal immigration, depresses wages by expanding the labour supply. This creates the situation in which getting an outside job ceases to be an option for working class wives and mothers and becomes a necessity, as two incomes are now needed to make ends meet. This is harmful to the working class family because they must now rely upon others – such as public day care centres, television, and, heaven forbid their children’s peers – to raise their children for them. That is assuming that they have children. The NDP is also in favour of abortion on demand. Indeed, it takes the strongest stand in favour of legal, state-funded, abortion, of all the political parties. (16) It believes that abortion is a fundamental human right. Its candidates are not allowed to dissent from the party line on this subject and it apparently does not believe anyone else should be allowed to dissent either. (17)

These NDP policies are harmful to the working class. They are also harmful to the country as a whole. In a healthy country, the laws support strong families, in which parents with strong marriages, raise the children who will become the next generation. It is only a very unhealthy country that allows and even pays for its children to be killed while yet unborn, that encourages or even forces mothers to join fathers in the labour force and leave those children that weren’t aborted to be raised by others, and which brings in masses of immigrants to replace the children that were not born, to depress wages further, and to keep the Ponzi scheme of socialist social programs going a little while longer. The policies the NDP supports are bad for Canada. This is the party that recently demanded that a man born in Canada but raised in Pakistan be brought back into our country and made eligible for release back into the public even though he was captured fighting against Canada and her allies on behalf of a terrorist organization in Afghanistan. (18) But then, what else would you expect from a party that each election year insults the Canadian public by offering to buy us all sorts of “free” goodies with our own money in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to form the government in Parliament, despite displaying utter contempt for that body and the tradition upon which it stands, by officially supporting the abolition of one of the three institutions that comprise its key elements, the Senate, (19) while the party’s members, such as Pat Martin, privately champion the severance of Parliament from another of those key elements, the monarchy.

In addition to the Communist movement and the CCF/ NDP, Canadian labour unions have been involved with various other highly questionable political causes. Some, such as the mammoth Public Service Alliance of Canada have supported separatist parties, like the Parti Quebecois, (20) which exist to tear the country apart.

Then there is the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. For years it has been involved in pro-Palestinian activism. (21) CUPW has declared its support for an international boycott against Israel and demanded that the Canadian government increase its humanitarian aid to Palestine. This may very well be the most bizarre example of a union’s extracurricular political activities. At least PSAC, in supporting the PQ, maintained that it did so because they liked what the party had to offer their workers. There is no plausible connection between the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the rights and labour contracts of Canadian postal workers. Heck, one has to really wrack one’s brain to think up even an implausible connection.

Although the Palestinian cause is utterly irrelevant to the Canadian postal worker, in whose name CUPW purports to speak, the fact that CUPW, a tax exempt union, is supporting this cause is relevant to the taxpaying Canadian public. Whatever arguments might be made in favour of either side in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the fact is that for decades the Palestinians’ self-appointed leaders sought to advance their cause by means of terrorism, and that seven years ago, when given the chance to choose their own leaders, the Palestinians voted Hamas, an even more extreme terrorist organization than the PLO, into power. Hamas continues to cling to power in the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, Palestinian terrorist groups frequently have connections with the terrorist groups that have targeted other Western countries, including the UK, Canada, and the USA. Is it really appropriate that a tax exempt organization, representing the employees of a Crown corporation, is taking up this kind of cause and demanding that the government turn over Canadian tax dollars in aid to Palestine?

To summarize what we have seen so far, labour unions receive at least as many tax benefits as charitable organizations even though their basic reason for existence is to get more for themselves, rather than to give to others in a way that benefits the public. Unlike charities they are held accountable only to their own membership and not the public despite being heavily involved in the kind of political activities other tax exempt organizations are forbidden to participate in, some of which are highly dubious.

This is what Bill C-377 was designed to address.

I think that from what we have seen, the main goal of Bill C-377 was a good one. There is clearly a need for labour unions to be made more accountable for their actions and, if possible, to behave more responsibly. Having said that, that does not necessarily mean the bill was the right way to go about accomplishing that goal.

Section 94.3 of the Canada Labour Code (22) forbids an employer from refusing to hire, firing, suspending, transferring or otherwise discriminating against a person because of his membership in a union or involvement in union activity. Suppose that a bill were put forward that proposed to amend the Canada Labour Code to include a Section 94.4, forbidding employers from discriminating against someone because he is not a member of a union and does not pay union dues. Would not such a bill go much further towards striking at the heart of the problem with unions than a bill requiring unions to turn over their records to the Canada Revenue Agency?

Such an amendment would, of course, require other labour laws to be tweaked. If the rule against discrimination were made to run both ways there could be no more requirements that someone join the union or pay union dues in order to keep his job. It would have the same basic effect as the “Right to Work” laws that various American states have passed.

This after all is the real problem, that unions have the power to force membership or dues on workers as conditions of their employment. If that power were taken away and union membership was made to be completely voluntary the unions would have to act more responsibly in order to retain their membership. They would automatically be more accountable to their membership which would leave only the matter of their accountability to the general public because of their tax exempt status. A much simpler amendment to the Income Tax Act, bringing the accountability requirements of labour unions in line with those on other tax exempt organizations, could accomplish this.

This would avoid what I see to be the major drawback to Bill C-377, namely, the dangerous precedent set by altering the tax code for the purpose of “getting” somebody.

This drawback does not seem to have been the main reason the Senate nullified the bill. Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, who led the Senate in passing the amendments, argued that the bill was flawed in that it was unconstitutional, that it violates the constitution, by placing under federal authority what the British North America Act assigned to the jurisdiction of the provinces. (23) While the Senator’s concern for preventing the federal government from usurping the constitutional authority of the provinces is most laudable his application of this worthy principle in this case does raise a question or two.

If an amendment to the Income Tax Act requiring labour unions to report financial transactions to the Canada Revenue Agency violates the constitutional assignation of unions to the jurisdiction of the provinces, why is their having been exempted from paying income tax in the first place considered to be constitutional? Furthermore, if bill really does violate sections 91 and 92 of the BNA, the Senate’s amendments do nothing to change that. Would not the appropriate action, if the Senator truly believed the bill to violate the constitution, be to reject the bill altogether?

The Senator also objected to the bill on the grounds that it would require labour unions to disclose information at a lower level than is required of any of the employers with which they negotiate. This, he maintains, would be unfair. While I can see why he would think this, I don’t agree, and would argue that if anything, the bill would correct an already existing imbalance in the state of labour negotiations that is in favour of the unions.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of Senator Segal’s position, he convinced a majority in the upper chamber to vote with him. The bill is now back in the hands of the House of Commons and we will have to wait until they sit again this fall to see what they will do with it.

(1) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2013/06/a-long-awaited-day-has-come-at-last.html

(2) http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&DocId=5942377&File=24#1

(3) What this means is that if you have a net income of $40,000 a year, and pay $5,000 in union dues a year, the full amount of your union dues will be deducted from your income before taxes are calculated, so that you will only pay taxes on $35,000.

(4) This is called the “Rand Formula” after Ivan Rand, the Supreme Court Justice who thought up the idiotic idea in 1946.

(5) http://www.educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/rules-registered-charities-must-follow

(6) The difference between a tax credit and a tax deduction is that a tax credit is taken off of your total tax bill whereas a tax deduction is taken off of your taxable income before taxes are calculated as described above in note three. Therefore, if you have a tax credit and a tax deduction of equal size, the former will reduce your total tax bill by a larger amount than the latter. Say, for example, you have a $40,000 income. That would place you in the 15% tax bracket, giving you a tax bill of $6,000. A $500 tax credit would reduce your tax bill to $5,500. A tax deduction of $500 would reduce your tax bill to $5,925. A tax deduction can reduce your tax bill in an additional way, however. If your income were above $43,561, a tax deduction equal to or larger than the amount by which your income is over $43,561 would keep you from being bumped into the next tax bracket and having to pay 22% on everything you earned over $43,561, increasing the overall amount by which the deduction reduces your tax bill. This would still not reduce your total tax bill by the same amount as a tax credit of equal size. While a tax credit gives you a better tax break than a tax deduction of the same size, in comparing union dues and charitable donations you also have to remember that you do not get near as large a credit for charitable donations as you get a deduction for union dues. You get a 100% deduction for your union dues. Your charitable donations give you a tax credit of 16% on the first $200 and 29% on everything above that, up to a cap of 75% of your taxable income.

(7) If teachers go on strike, it is not the school board that suffers the most, but the students – although this is a bad example because the students probably won’t see it that way. If public transport workers go on strike, it is not the city that suffers the most but everybody who relies upon busses to get to work, to school, or the store. If hospital staff go on strike it is not the Health Authority that suffers but those who need healthcare.

(8) See note 5.

(9) “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (1776),Book One, Chapter Ten, Part Two, paragraph 82.

(10) The harm is multifaceted. For countries like Canada and the United States, globalism means a loss of jobs and productive capital as transnational corporations remove these to other countries with a larger, and hence cheaper, labour supply and/or less burdensome laws and the depression of wages as large numbers of immigrants are brought in to the domestic labour market. It also undermines the national sovereignty and identity of every country involved, erodes social capital, atomizing societies and dissolving communities.

(11) For an extensive description of the evils of Communism see Stéphane Courtois, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999) a translation of a work, by European scholars, originally published in French in 1997.

(12) http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/communist-party-of-canada

(13) See sections 4.3 and 4.4 of the NDP Policy Book: http://xfer.ndp.ca/2013/policybook/2013-04-17-PolicyBook_E.pdf Note that 4.4 b) calls for an annual immigration level of one percent. If we calculate one percent from Canada’s 2011 population of 34.48 million, this would mean 344,800 immigrants per year. This is a little under 100,000 more immigrants per year than we are already taking in.

(14) NDP Immigration Critic Jinny Sims has rightly criticized the temporary worker program of the present Conservative government for bringing in thousands of workers, at time of high unemployment, driving wages down and sending money out of the country. http://www.ndp.ca/news/immigration-policy-should-build-stronger-canada-not-exploit-vulnerable Her own party’s immigration policies, however, would do the exact same thing on a larger scale, with the possible exception of sending money out of the country.

(15) See Section 6.1 of the NDP Policy Book.

(16) See Section 6.1. (d) of the NDP Policy Book.

(17) http://www.ndp.ca/news/statement-ndp-caucus-rejection-motion-m-312

(18) http://eyecrazy.blogspot.ca/2012/05/tin-foil-tom-mulcairs-ndp-khadr-good.html

(19) See Section 5 of the NDP Policy Book.

(20) http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2012/09/04/20168536.html

(21) http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/10/12/jonathan-kay-cupws-radical-politics-and-anti-israel-bigotry-are-a-disgrace-to-letter-carriers/

(22) http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/L-2/

(23) http://www.cbc.ca/player/AudioMobile/The+180/ID/2392865462/

Populism Part Three: Treacherous Elites

In Part One I explained why I don’t like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and why, although I agree with many of the specific policies they support, I don’t much care for the populist “Tea Party”. In Part Two I objected to the core concept of modern democracy – that the will of the people is sovereign – as being a version of “might makes right” and to populism – the kind of movement which attempts to gain influence by the strength of numbers through accusing elites of betraying the public interest – because it unleashes the violence and domination through force which is inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty. Not wishing to be entirely negative, I have briefly mentioned a few of the things I, a traditional Tory, support. These include the classical idea that good government consists of harmonizing the good of the whole with the good of the parts and balancing the good of the individual with the good of the community, the good of the few with the good of the many an idea enshrined in the concept of a mixed constitution, of which the British/Canadian parliamentary monarchy is the outstanding example. Populism, which makes the democratic “will of the people” the dominant principle, is the enemy of the harmony and balance enshrined in our tradition of parliamentary monarchy.

There is a question, however, which needs to be asked. If populism is defined as a movement which purports to speak for “the people” against “the elite” and accuses the elite of betraying or conspiring against the public good, what should our response be when the populist is right about the elites?

This is very important question. Elites are easy targets for ridicule, attack, and outright scapegoating. This is partially due to the fact that the numbers of the elite are by definition few. It is also due to the fact that there is a widespread if ethically wrongheaded notion that it is “fair game” to attack the very rich, the very powerful, the very skilled, and the very strong in ways that would be considered unfair and even bullying if done to the poor and the weak. For this reason, we would do well to take populist accusations against elites with a grain of salt. In doing so, however, we must not fall into the mistake of thinking that elites can never be guilty of the accusations populists level against them.

This is especially important today because we live in an era in which evidence of elite betrayal abounds on every side. An obvious example can be seen in the way several large banks and corporations, which were on the verge of failing three years ago when the American economy did a nosedive following the bust of the housing bubble, asked for and received bailout money from the American government, then turned around and gave large bonuses to their executives, even while laying off thousands of employees.

As annoying as this example of collusion between arrogant economic and political elites to enrich themselves at the expense of the public is it is by no means the worst example of elite betrayal. Other examples include the inflation tax, the outsourcing of jobs, the mass importation of immigrants, the attack on traditional moral values and culture, and the loss of national identity and sovereignty due to official multiculturalism policies and the construction of a new world order.

The inflation tax is an effect of the expansion of the money supply. When the money supply is expanded the value of money per unit decreases relative to the goods and services which can be purchased with money. Since takes a while for the market to adjust to the expansion of the currency the first people to use the new money – governments and banks – are able to spend the new money when it has the purchasing power per unit of the old currency. As it circulates it loses purchasing power - and so does the money in your wallet and in your bank account. This amounts to a transfer of wealth from you to politicians and bankers.

The erosion of the value of our money and savings which is inflation is most noticeable to people when prices of consumer goods which everybody purchases on a regular basis begin to rise. If these prices do not rise – and even go down – it will take longer for people to notice that their money is not worth as much as it used to be. There are ways of keeping the prices of consumer goods down in periods of inflation. You could find a way of increasing production for example. Or you could move your factory to somewhere where there is an abundant supply of cheap labour and few regulations. Or you could import an abundant supply of cheap labour into your own country.

The first option is the best. In the right set of circumstances a businessman can introduce new technology which speeds up and increases production in his factory by so much that he can lower his price per unit, while increasing both his overall profit and the wages of his workers.(1) There are limits, however, to when and where you can do this. In recent decades corporations have opted for the other two methods with the help of governments who have made free trade agreements and passed liberal immigration policies. Academic elites have joined political and economic elites in this because if there is one area where “capitalists” and “socialists” come together it is in support of free trade and liberal immigration.

Liberal immigration policies tend not to be received well by the people of the country whose government introduces them. And for good reason. Such polices look suspiciously like an attempt to put into practice Bertolt Brecht’s bad joke about “dissolving the old people and electing a new one”. (2) To prevent widespread discontent with large scale immigration from threatening the entire program the political, academic, and media elites have engaged in a decades long campaign of positive and negative propaganda. The positive propaganda in favour of multiculturalism presents “diversity” as a good to be desired for its own sake. The negative propaganda uses terms like “racism” and “xenophobia” to intimidate critics of wide scale immigration and multiculturalism.

Here is how the negative propaganda works. To most people the term “racism” conveys the meaning of an irrational dislike of somebody else for no reason other than that his skin colour is different from your own. Similarly, the term “xenophobia” means an irrational fear of strangers, of people who are different from you. When the government, schools, and media constantly use these terms to explain away opposition to liberal immigration and multiculturalism they are taking what is in fact a perfectly healthy, normal, and rational way of thinking and pathologizing it, i.e., declaring it to be a mental disorder. Thus the fact that people have an entirely legitimate right to be concerned that their government is actively trying to replace them, their children, and their grandchildren with immigrants is buried under mountains of abusive name-calling.

This proved to be so successful a method of silencing criticism that it was used elsewhere. All of a sudden, all sorts of ordinary, rational ideas were now given nasty labels and treated as mental defects. Do you believe that the most fundamental division of labour among human beings, between women who bear and raise children and men who protect and provide for them, arises naturally out of the simple biological fact that women are the ones who get pregnant and not out of an all-male conspiracy to oppress all women? If so, you are a “sexist” or a “male chauvinist”. Do you believe that the fact that men have external tube-shaped genitals and women have genitals that are openings which are the right size and shape to put the male genitals in and the fact that doing so is the means of propagation of the species means that men are made for women and women for men? Then you are now a “homophobe” or a “heterosexist”. At least in the eyes of the elites in charge of the news and entertainment media, the educational system, and the state.

To summarize the charges so far, the actions of banking and political elites have eroded peoples’ savings through inflation but corporate elites have kept prices relatively low by outsourcing jobs and importing cheap labour with the help of laws passed and treaties signed by political elites while academic and media elites have, with the support and backing of the other elites, attempted to sell this to people in the ideological package of “multiculturalism” and have browbeaten those who weren’t buying with accusations of “racism”. The actions of the elites in each of these cases is an unjustifiable betrayal of the common good of the societies to which the elites belong

What would motivate elites to turn against their own societies in this way?

Christopher Lasch, who was professor of history of the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, in his final book wrote that the American “privileged classes” had:

[R]emoved themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure—of business, entertainment, information, and “information retrieval”—make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline. (3)

This is also true of the elites of other Western countries. It is notable that the decades in which everything described above has taken place saw the integration of economies on a continental (Common Market, NAFTA) and global (GATT, WTO) scale and the establishment of quasi-governmental bodies at the global level (the UN, the International Court, etc). While the kind of conspiracy theory that suggests that this 20th and 21st Century movement towards a new world order is entirely the result of plotting carried out in secretive meetings of the ultra-elite should be regarded as overly simplistic at best it would be erring in the opposite direction to absolve the elites of all active complicity in this new direction history has taken. The idea that the emerging new order on the global scale might be the means of achieving utopian goals such as world peace and universal prosperity is a vision far more common among the elites than among other people. Hence the transfer of elite loyalty that Lasch noticed, from particular communities, societies, and countries to this new international order.

Having pointed out several ways in which elites – political, academic, economic, etc. – have betrayed the common good of our societies, and offered the transfer of elite loyalty to the emerging international order as an explanation, this leaves us with the question of how to respond. I phrase it that way rather than “what to do about it” because I am not such an optimist as to assume that something can be done about it.

Populism, at least in the sense we have been looking at of a mass movement demanding that the will of the people be met, is not the answer. In parts one and two, we saw how populism and the concept of popular sovereignty are threats to prescriptive, constitutional order. Yet our objection to the new world order and the actions of the elites described above is based upon the fact that these things also threaten the constitutional order and common good of our societies. To use the one to fight the other is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.

In the previous essay I distinguished between two senses of the word “democracy”. There is modern democracy, which knows of no mixture with other principles or elements, but which insists upon the will of the people being absolutely sovereign. There is also however, the kind of democracy in which the constitution prescribes that elected representatives of the people participate in the governing of the country alongside aristocratic and royal elements. In this kind of constitution, democracy is balanced by other principles which are just as important, and is one element of many.

It is the idea that the “will of the people” is sovereign which is the problem with modern democracy and it is this idea which makes populism a dangerous movement and a threat to constitutional order. Is a populism conceivable that does not include this element? A populism which confronts elite misdoings by insisting, not that the “will of the people” be submitted to, but that their rights within the established order be respected and not violated?

These questions are not mere exercises in semantics. When a movement is built on the idea that the will of the people is absolute and must be obeyed there are no limits to what the movement will demand. The will of the people must be provided by the leaders of the movement – for the people have no will of their own – and populist movements of this nature are the means by which one elite, deriving its strength from its skills in rhetorical manipulation of the masses, challenges another which derives its strength from its wealth. In such wars of the elites, the good of the community is likely to fall by the wayside.

When a popular movement is based upon the idea that a community and a society is established for the common good – the good of all its members – and is therefore based upon a set of mutually understood and respected rights, privileges and obligations between the individuals and the groups which make up the community, there are limits to what the movement can demand. When it charges elites with betraying the common good and demands that the rights of the people be respected it must itself respect the tradition and constitution to which it is appealing.

It is the common people who are hurt the most when the social and moral order of a society collapses. It is the common people who are most dependent upon the security and stability an established, permanent order provides. When law and order breaks down and crime rates soar it is not the elites who are the primary victims – it is people in the middle and especially the lower classes. When traditional morality comes under attack, illegitimacy rates soar, and marriages break up, it is again the lower classes who are hit the hardest because these things are major contributors to multi-generational poverty.

Yet in spite of all of this, populist movements which purport to speak for the common people against the elites, frequently embrace revolutionary rhetoric and conceive of themselves as being against the established order of society.

Populism, because of its revolutionary potential, is naturally a left-wing phenomenon. There have been right-wing populist movements in the 20th Century, but the kind of popular movement I am suggesting here must be something different. It would have to have a populist element – it is challenging the elites after all – but this cannot be the dominant element. It must be a very small-p populist, conservatism, rather than a right-wing populism.

Exactly what such a movement will look like in actual practice is something that remains to be hammered out. It will require a great deal of serious thought as to what exactly a counter-revolution, Maistre’s “opposite of a revolution” looks like. All of this is outside of the scope of this essay, as is the question of whether such a movement could possibly succeed. (4) We must not confuse the categories of “that which it is possible to succeed in” and “that which is worth doing”, however. Fighting for what is left of our civilization and the moral and social order it is built upon, is always worth doing, even if doing so permanently relegates us to the realm of what the late Samuel Francis, borrowing an expression from Leonard Cohen, called “beautiful losers”.

(1) Lets say you own a factory that employs 10 people and produces 500 units of product a day. That is 50 units of product per employee. You sell the product at $15 a unit receiving a total of $7, 500 for a days worth of product. You pay your employees $150 a day each, which works out to $18.75 per hour or $3 per unit of product. In total you pay them $1,500 a day, and you have $1,500 of other expenses a day. This leaves you with $4,500 profit per day. Now, imagine someone invents a machine that increases the productivity of your plant by 300%. Your factory now produces 1,500 units of product a day. You lower the price of your product to $10 a unit. You are now receiving $15,000 for a days worth of product. You triple the wages of your employees to $450 a day each which brings your payroll up to $4,500 a day. The cost of purchasing and running the machine causes your other expenses to go up to $2,000 a day. Your profit is now $8,500 a day. You have increased your profit, while becoming an unusually generous factory owner who pays his workers $56.25 an hour, and cutting the cost of your product at the same time.

While the numbers I placed into the hypothetical example above are absurd fictions the point remains valid. Under the right circumstances, through increasing productivity, you can make profits and wages go up while lowering the price of your product. This does not mean, of course, that it can be done under any circumstances, with any product. The great blindness of many present day liberal (capitalist) economists has been their belief that man’s science and technology will solve every problem and continue to lead us into a future of ever increasing prosperity for everyone.

(2) Bertolt Brecht was a 20th Century German poet and playwright of Marxist convictions. After the Soviets and the East Germans suppressed a popular uprising through force, he wrote a poem entitled “The Solution”, the English version of which can be read here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-solution/ . The final sentence of the poem, the question “Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?” is for obvious reasons, widely quoted among opponents of present day, large scale, liberal immigration.

(3) Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) p. 45. In this book, which was completed while the author was dying and published shortly after his death, the author argues for a number of ideals, such as egalitarianism which I do not share, some of which I consider to be quite foolish, and against some principles, such as the principle of hierarchy which I would regard as essential to a functioning civilized society. He approvingly quotes Orestes Brownson’s call for the abolition of hereditary property on the grounds that it is incompatible with democracy. Lasch (and Brownson) may very well be right about this but the abolition of inheritance is even more incompatible with Lasch’s own view of the family as a “haven in a heartless world”. One of the main concepts of The Revolt of the Elites is that meritocracy and the ideal of “social mobility” are responsible for sidetracking America from its original vision of egalitarian democracy. What these concepts actually do, Lasch argues, is give the elites the idea that they are wealthy on the basis of their personal merit alone and therefore are under no obligation to contribute to the common good. While there is some truth to this, I, who do not believe equality to be desirable in anything other than a right to justice from before the law, would argue for social mobility precisely for the reason that it helps validate a stratified society, which is desirable for other reasons. Despite all this, Lasch’s argument that the detachment of current elites from any sense of belonging and loyalty to their societies has led to their support for liberal moral, social and cultural agendas that are against the common good of their societies, is a helpful one.

(4) Full consideration of this question must involve thought about the very nature of history itself. Modern thinking about history has been dominated by the concept of progress in various forms, from the Marxist view of history as a constant struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” destined to culminate in the classless, property-less, society of communism, to the Whig history of theory in which events are constantly moving towards universal, peaceful, liberal democracy. George Grant, in Philosophy in the Mass Age, described how this concept of progress arose through the secularization of the Christian view, inherited from the Hebrew, of history as time given meaning as the flow of events towards ends determined by God. In the modern concept of progress, man has replaced God as the determiner of the ends of history. To believers in this doctrine, it is foolishness to resist the flow of history, and wickedness to attempt to move against the flow. This is the doctrine held by the elites who are overseeing the dismantling of traditional, Western civilization and the construction of the new global order. While I do not accept the doctrine of progress, especially where it identifies historical inevitability with justice (“it has to happen this way therefore you are wrong to oppose it”) a mere negation is not enough. What is needed is an alternative understanding of history.