John Bull McGregor Fires a Warning Shot

In my 29 January essay, The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration, I said this of the Alberta separatists:

 

All that I have to say about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.

 

The results of the Alberta referendum on Monday have, I believe, proved my judgement to be sound on this point.  There were ten questions, the relevant one being the tenth, which read:

 

Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?

 

In the end, Alberta voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Dominion, with a little over three-quarters voting to remain and a little under a quarter voting for pursuing the path of separation.

 

The referendum and the separatists calling for it had been heavily promoted by the neo-conservative media.  The same people who, rightly, have decried the war which progressives have been waging against the memory and legacy of, among others, our first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, have been the loudest cheerleaders of a movement aimed at undoing that legacy, defeating the Confederation Project that Macdonald spearheaded, and breaking up the Dominion he and the other Fathers of Confederation fought so hard to build.  Canadian neo-conservatives are in no danger of succumbing to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hobgoblin, with or without the oft-dropped “foolish”.

 

It was with much amusement that I read the headline of the article by Clayton DeMaine reporting the results on Juno News, the neo-conservative e-zine on Substack founded and edited by Candice Malcom and Keeane Bexte.  The headline read “Nearly 1 in 4 Albertans Vote Against Staying in Canada.”  Bravo.  If there is an agency somewhere that hands out awards for spinning your side’s loss as a win, this surely deserves at least a nomination.

 

When I refer to such people as neo-conservatives, note that I am using the word in its Canadian sense.  The American sense of the word is more familiar.  In the United States the term neo-conservative refers to the most hawkish element of the Republican Party, those who believe in a Pax Americana in which the United States is the world’s policeman, perpetually toppling regimes that they supported up to yesterday, in order to keep the world safe for democracy, capitalism, and Israel, not necessarily in that order.  In Canada, neo-conservative refers to those who say they are conservatives, small or big c, but give to this term its contemporary American meaning rather than its traditional Canadian meaning.   As a further point of clarification, it is Canadian neo-conservatives of the small-c variety, especially the alternative media and social media types, rather than those of the big-C variety (i.e. the Conservative Party, its members and supporters) who have been cheering on the Alberta separatist movement.

 

Traditional Canadian conservatism is the more legitimate type.  The United States was built on the foundation of classical (Lockean) liberalism and its two parties are not the equivalent of the Canadian Conservative and Liberal parties.  If there is any direct correspondence between American and Canadian parties it is between the American Republican party and the Canadian Liberal party, both of which are descended from seventeenth century Whiggery.  The United States neither had nor wanted a “conservatism” at the national level until the middle of the twentieth century. 

 

Canada was founded on her older, more traditional and more legitimate, conservatism.  The original English Canadians were the Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution.  Their conservatism was that of Great Britain, modified by the acceptance of some early Modern innovations but still recognizably descended from the seventeenth century Toryism that opposed the Puritan Whiggery that was the ancestor of classical liberalism and the American, French and eventually Bolshevik Revolutions.  French Canada, which having been ceded to the British Crown shortly before the American Revolution and thereby avoided going through the French Revolution that followed on its heels, was less Modern and more traditional than English Canada prior to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.  When the two worked together in Confederation in the 1860s to form the Dominion of Canada, it was in order to build a country that did not throw away her past in revolution, that adapted the time-tested institutions of parliamentary government under a reigning royal monarchy that she inherited to her situation rather than inventing new ones, and that tried to hold on to the older idea that there are virtues higher than those of commerce and industry and that it is the pursuit of these rather than the other that is the foundation of civilization.

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers that I have no sympathies whatsoever with Canadian neo-conservatism no matter how often their views on such-and-such a particular issue may happen to line up with my own.  My long time wish for my country, Canada, is a restoration based on the principles of Confederation in 1867, and for Canadian conservatism that it would remember and recover its roots, preferably bringing into itself more of the Toryism from which it is descended.  These are moves in the opposite direction to that the neo-conservatives desire.  David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neo-conservative is a conservative who has also lost his memory.  As someone who both by instinct and by application of the principles of orthodox Christianity is a royalist and monarchist rather than a worshiper of the Modern idol of liberal democracy, I call myself  a Tory rather than a conservative and am also quite comfortable with the self-application of the term reactionary.  As someone who calls himself a patriot rather than a nationalist and knows that true patriotism is a natural love of country akin to love for one’s family rather than the internal compulsion to see one’s country through the eyes of an ideal of “greatness” I see no reason why the stupid things that the Liberals have done while in power should lessen my love of Canada. I naturally, therefore, have no sympathies with those who are incapable of criticizing the Liberals without turning it into an opportunity to condemn our country in the process and who wish to throw away our country’s older, better, more authentic conservatism for the latest model of the American conservatism that is less than a century old and whose roots run no deeper than Modern liberalism.  Especially when they wish to do so at this moment in history when American conservatism has been captured from within by a movement, MAGA, which has betrayed the promise and potential it showed at its start about a decade and a half ago and rapidly become a cult that idolatrously worships its thuggish leader even as he degenerates into more and more of a caricature of what his enemies have thought him to be all along on a daily basis. 

 

Had the Canadian neo-conservatives been more interested in our country’s own traditional Tory conservatism they might have been familiar with Stephen Leacock who in 1937 published a book entitled My Discovery of the West.  In this Governor General’s Award winning book, an account of a lecture tour he had given in western Canada after his retirement from McGill University the previous year, he wrote the following:

 

It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor.  His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.

 

 

Had they read this with any degree of comprehension they might not have been so quick to pin their hopes of undoing Confederation, tearing Canada apart, and fulfilling the nineteenth century American dream of Manifest Destiny on a separatist referendum in Alberta.

 

God Save the King!

Conservatism and Neo-conservatism

For at least the last forty years if you were to have asked a self-described conservative living in North America what conservatism was all about the answer you would have received would have been that it is about small government, low taxes, freedom, free markets, free trade, tough laws and sentences for violent crimes and a strong military. If the conservative you were talking to happened to remember he might have added the defence of the nuclear family and a traditional Christian morality and way of life.

In my country, Canada, conservatism was originally about much more than this. Canada is a country that was founded within the British Empire in the Victorian era and which developed her national sovereignty within the British family of nations without severing ties to the Crown and Britain, the way our republican neighbour to the south had, and as such inherited from the older country, the older kind of conservatism known as Toryism. Toryism was about monarchy, the institutional church, and government for the common good of a national society envisioned as an organic whole that includes past and future generations, not merely those present among us today. I have been a conservative of this older type, a Tory, my entire life.

There has been much talk in recent years of “neo-conservatism”. What is meant by this term is somewhat different in Canada and the United States, although in both countries it refers to either the espousing as conservative of ideas that were once considered liberal, the profession of conservatism by former liberals, or both.

In the United States, the term refers to a very specific group of people and a set of ideas with which they were associated. The original neoconservatives had been members of the group known as the “New York Intellectuals”, which consisted mainly of second generation, Jewish Americans who had studied either at City College of New York, Columbia University, or both in the period between the World Wars and who in that same period espoused politics that ranged from New Deal liberalism to far-left Trotskyism. After the Second World War many of these became Cold War liberals, i.e., liberals who strongly supported the West in the fight against Soviet Communism, and of these many realigned with the right in the 1960s and 1970s, to become the “neo-conservatives”. The best known among these were Norman Podhoretz, who edited the journal Commentary for decades, his wife Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, also a journalist, and his wife, historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb. It was Kristol who famously defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality.” As “neoconservatives” these continued to look upon the New Deal welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, the early stages of second wave feminism, and other such causes they had espoused as liberals favourably, but it is their outlook on geopolitics that is their most notable distinctive.

The American neoconservatives believe that American style liberal democracy is the birthright of everyone on the planet and that the United States has a duty to guarantee that birthright, by offering military assistance and protection to countries that have liberal democracy, fighting against and toppling the enemies of liberal democracy, and bringing liberal democracy to countries that do not yet enjoy it. For this reason, the neoconservatives believe, the United States must continue to maintain a military presence throughout the world, as the world’s policeman. This vision of a Pax Americana is rooted in liberalism, having antecedents in the war aims of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its most utopian articulation, that of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man envisions all of human history as having led up to universal capitalism and democracy and is simply the latest manifestation of the Whig theory of history.

The American kind of neo-conservatism has come under much heavy criticism during the last thirteen years for its influential role, during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, in leading the United States into the disastrous War in Iraq. While most of this criticism is well-deserved, those making the criticism seldom understand the nature of the problem with the neoconservative view of geopolitics. Critics on the left, inevitably maintain that all the neoconservative talk about spreading democracy, protecting the rights of women, and such claptrap, is just a thin veil masking the lust to grab power and resources for the United States, or the large corporations that to people of this mindset are the real powers behind the American government, from which it is assumed on the left that the neoconservative enthusiasm for war arises. In reality, however, it is precisely because the neoconservatives are true believers, in Eric Hoffer’s meaning of that expression, in democracy, human rights, liberalism, and basically all the same ideals that their critics on the left hold dear, that they feel that it is imperative that these American liberal values be exported universally.

In Canada, the word neo-conservatism is often used interchangeably with conservatism, in reference to the conservatism described in the first paragraph. The intent of this usage is to contrast what has been called conservatism for the last forty years or so, with the older Toryism. Red Tories in particular like to use the word in this way. Red Tories are people who, like myself, are High Tories of the older royalist, institutional church, and common good-of-the-organic-whole variety, but who, unlike myself, have avowed sympathies with socialism, feminism, pacifism, and other left-of-centre causes for which I have nothing but disdain and contempt. The Red Tories are quite right in saying that much of what is called conservatism today is what was called liberalism a hundred years ago, but I cannot help but observe the irony of the fact that this offered as criticism by those whose Toryism is modified by an adjective that alludes to their espousal of ideals that have also sprung from the modern well of liberalism and much more recently than the capitalism of the neoconservatives. Liberalism is not like a fine wine that has improved with age – it is more like milk that has long passed its expiry date, and been left out in the sun.

At times these attempts to distinguish Canadian neo-conservatism from the older tradition can be exaggerated in a way that can be quite misleading and which distorts the nature of the older Toryism. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear Red Tories say that the older Toryism was the opposite of what is called conservatism today. Think about what that suggests regarding the first items mentioned in the description of conservatism in the first paragraph – small government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade. (1) There is a grain of truth in this when it comes to free trade – the older Toryism espoused protectionism – but if we were to accept the assertion that the older conservatism was the opposite of today’s conservatism, we would have to conclude that it was opposed to freedom and stood for big government, high taxes, and a centrally planned and bureaucratically administered economy. This, however, is laughable nonsense. Indeed, as I have frequently pointed out, the older “throne and altar” Toryism, ought to be regarded as being more favourable to small government and low taxes than contemporary North American conservatism. Toryism was born out of the defence of royal sovereign authority against those who wished to wrest it away from the Crown and to vest all power in elected legislative assemblies. The opponents of the original Tories declared themselves to be on the side of “liberty” against tyranny, but the history of the last four centuries tells us another story. What that history tells us is that the more the Crown’s authority was limited and the power of the elected assembly augmented, the larger and more intrusive government became, while taxes grew both exponentially and astronomically. (2)

With regards to freedom, the difference between the older Toryism and the classical liberalism that much of modern conservatism resembles was not that the latter supported freedom while the former opposed and feared it. It was rather a disagreement about the nature of freedom. The classical liberals equated liberty with the sovereignty of the individual, argued that the function of government was to protect liberty so defined, and declared that only democratic governments, in which each individual participates at least through his elected representative, can so protect the liberty that is individual sovereignty. By contrast, the Tory view of freedom, grounded in the thought of classical antiquity, was explained by the martyred King Charles I, in his final speech before his execution, when he declared that the liberty and freedom of the people consist in their having from their government “those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own” rather than “having share in government”.

Anyone who happens to think that the liberal doctrine is more conducive to personal freedom than that of the Tory it is invited to look around him today. The idea of freedom as individual sovereignty is now being taken to the nth degree, with even such constraints on that sovereignty as those of nature and reality itself no longer recognized as valid. Thus, for example, gender is now being declared to be something that the individual decides for himself – or herself – or itself – or whatever! By consequence, liberalism is now declaring such self-determination of gender to be a right of the individual, which is to say something that belongs to the essence of the individual’s sovereignty. Since in liberal theory, the rights of the individual are what law and government exist to protect, the consequence of this will inevitably be that the legislatures and courts, will impose legal restrictions on what we can think, say or do, in order to protect such a “right”. The more the individual is declared to be sovereign, the more new “rights” are discovered, the more laws restricting our thoughts, speech, and actions are passed, so that what is called “freedom” today, often resembles a soft form of totalitarian tyranny. (3)

Contemporary conservatism, or what is called in Canada neo-conservatism, ought not to be faulted by Tories of the older tradition merely for being in favour of small government, low taxes, and freedom. It merits criticism for defining conservatism by such things, rather than by monarchy, institutional religion, the common good of the organic whole, and by such things as continuity, tradition, and established order for which the older Toryism stood, and which, as Roger Scruton argued in The Meaning of Conservatism, provide the necessary context for any real freedom to exist and flourish in a civilized society. There was nothing wrong with Canadian neo-conservatism's opposition to Canadians being taxed to death, overregulated, and treated as wards of a nanny state and it was for these things that this High Tory voted for and even took out membership in the neoconservative Reform Party in the 1990s. Where Canadian neo-conservatism did deserve censure was over the anti-patriotic contempt for Canada and wish that she was “more like the United States” that could far too often be found in its ranks, as well as the liberal equation of democracy with freedom and legitimate and accountable government evident in its wish to turn the Senate into an elected body which was such a marked contrast with the way the older Canadian Toryism defended our Westminster parliamentary monarchy, including the Senate, correctly perceiving that it and our traditional rights and freedoms, stood and fell together. (4) It was over these things that I walked away from the Canadian Alliance prior to the completion of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003.

(1) It is even less accurate to say that the older Toryism was the opposite of the other items mentioned in the first paragraph, although here too there are important distinctions to be drawn. The family that the older Toryism defended, for example, was not just the nuclear unit, but a larger, multigenerational, kinship group, headed by a patriarch. Also, the older Toryism tended to look to the organized Church for what “a traditional Christian morality and way of life” meant, while contemporary conservatism is more likely to be influenced by personal interpretations of the Scriptures.

(2) It was not uncommon in the last century for such High Tories as Anthony Burgess, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robertson Davies (as Samuel Marchbanks) to avow both a feudal, medieval royalism and an attitude of anarchistic contempt for the gargantuan, overregulating body that is the modern bureaucratic state in the same breathe, a sentiment which I heartily share.

(3) That liberalism was a doctrine that loudly proclaimed its faith in freedom while containing within itself the seeds of totalitarian tyranny was not something that was only evident after it had been brought to its apex in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Puritan progenitors of the first liberals, the Whigs, denounced the “tyranny” of the House of Stuart and proclaimed themselves to be on the side of liberty, but when they had seized power for themselves, made it illegal to participate in sports, games, and other amusements on Sundays after church, closed inns, alehouses and theatres, and banned the celebration of Christmas and Easter. In the century prior to that, the first Puritans, in the name of defending Christian liberty against “popish tyranny”, demanded that all practices that were part of the pre-Reformation tradition but which could not be shown to be explicitly authorized in Scripture should be forbidden, while Richard Hooker, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued on the contrary, that Christians ought to be free to observe, whatever practices of the pre-Reformation tradition could not be shown to be explicitly condemned in Scriptures. Hooker’s thinking, which helped lay a foundation for both a distinctive Anglican theology and Toryism, to any rational person, allowed a greater amount of freedom than that of the Puritans which eventually gave birth to liberalism.

(4) See, for example, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).