You are correct, a conservative victory is just Liberal lite, a tardy version of the same destructive ideology of freedom against any and all culture. As Frank Wright calls it, “ the mire of delimited desire”.
Poilievre will at least put a break on the managerial state.
But there is one other significant consequence . The conservatives will be able to keep Alberta in Canada; the liberals and Carney will pour gasoline on the separatist fire in Alberta.
Combine that with a Parti Quebecois victory in the 26 provincial election and separatist forces will have momentum. Trump’s potshots, a Quebec referendum, Alberta’s furry, I fear a liberal victory on Monday is the death knell for O’Canada.
Really formidable, it’s existential. But Grant was right, we are indistinguishable from y’all.
Liberalism obviates nationalism in general, which Grant said would lead to the collapse of Canada as Canada would become indistinguishable from the empire. Eventually, it would lead to a simple question : Why Canada?
Now 60 years later, Mr Carney, a globalist banker environmentalist, the apotheosis of liberal internationalism, is going to be elected to fix the problems he and his ilk created. Oh Canada!
Euthanasia anyone; hemlock, with the side order of OxyContin?
Here’s Alberta’s sales pitch on why separation: outside of Canada we would be the richest jurisdiction in North America. That has legs.
Here’s Quebec sales pitch on separation: it’s now or never, mass immigration, look at all these people with year-round tans wandering our streets. Québécois brethren: Je me souviens!
And then for comic relief, Trump the irrepressible, sniping from the peanut gallery: perfection.
Momentum’s a bugger, and liberals love buggery: I say Canada 50/50.
I've been waiting for years for Prof. Deneen to write about Canadian Politics! Resubscribed just for this article - and I'd love follow-up pieces in the future as the political landscape continues to change, as it undoubtedly will, regardless of what occurs tonight.
In my first article (now deleted) I wrote about this - how for a large swath of the Canadian population (Most notably Liberal homeowning boomers), Canadian identity *is* to be the left-liberal foil to America's right-liberalism. To be the 'angel' on America's shoulder showing them the way things could be if they just escaped the influence of those backward country bumpkins. Hence the promise of American Liberals every election to 'move to Canada'. Going to urban public schools, I witnessed the subtle contempt for American-style 'conservatism' implicit in basically every law and politics related course. Of course, this is somewhat justified when it comes to the negative aspects of it (The Bush wars, for-profit healthcare & prisons, etc), but it also, obviously, entails a disdain for social conservatism.
Both Trudeaus, especially the latter, absolutely loved being viewed as the enlightened counterpart to America. In fact, if you read every action of Trudeau Jr. as being solely motivated by the desire to gain the admiration of American liberal elites, everything starts to make sense.
The Trudeauian 'post-national nationalism' which still completely dominates the nation's psyche (even when 'conservatives' are elected, they have to promise not to touch any of the left-liberal sacred cows) is at this point the only obvious way for Canadians to feel something akin to patriotism or national pride (along with gratuitous amounts of Canadian flags, the meaning of which is left undefined). I suspect this is largely for fear of the elephant in the room, namely that without an ideological identity, Canada has no other identity to speak of other than as a politically convenient (until it's not) alliance of disparate regions with their own distinct (and themselves rapidly fading) regional cultures. Take an already geographically diverse nation, with radically different-minded settlers depending on the region, and add a policy of officially discouraging the assimilation of newcomers, and there's not much of a nationwide social fabric to speak of.
That's why I only see two futures for Canada as a united nation - 1. Our national identity continues to be primarily ideological rather than cultural, but (as Grant alluded to) as America's Postliberal counterpart, rather than it's left-liberal counterpart. It is, again, sadly Ironic that this is largely how Canada was founded - a combination of the culturally and socially conservative Quebecois, Immigrants who wanted a stable, peaceable life, and even American colonists who didn't want to join in with the revolutionary yahoos and their new-fangled ideas - and yet today, this tradition is far more visibly present in the US than in Canada. 2. If we don't have a unified national identity, the best we could hope for is a radical decentralization, wherein the Federal government essentially becomes just a necessary evil for the various regions that would otherwise operate mostly autonomously, but aren't economically powerful enough to justify becoming their own separate nations. As it stands, however, Canada is considerably *more* centralized than the US, making the country more brittle and prone to breaking in national unity crises.
If the conservative party loses tonight, it will largely be because it is percieved, somewhat correctly, as being more 'American', as in right-liberal. Despite Poilievre's encouraging populist-coded rhetoric (and even a few good policy shifts in that direction), it's clear from any investigation into his background that he is a hardcore individualist, bordering on libertarian. He won the leadership race for the Conservative party largely by selling policies libertarians could support with rhetoric populists could support, and that's largely how he continues to operate. It's remarkably clever, and probably the best shot the awkward coalition that is the Conservative Party will ever have at gaining power again - without, that is, developing a remotely coherent ideology. If they lose for the fourth time in a row tonight, even after the Liberal party has ravaged and harrowed the country for the last decade, making nearly every concievable metric of social and economic wellbeing dramatically worse, hopefully they'll get the message that they actually need to advance a coherent view of human nature and a good society, or else the other parties will continue to advance their own views of such things (which they are certainly not shy about doing), unimpeded, until the end of time, or, more realistically, the end of Canada.
The Canadian reaction to Trump isn’t ideologically incoherent. It’s not ideological at all. Trump is ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt. Any person of common sense, whatever their political philosophy, can see that - it’s on full display every day. The simple explanation is that, liberal or illiberal, Canadians find Trump repellant.
Fantastic thank you for doing that.
You are correct, a conservative victory is just Liberal lite, a tardy version of the same destructive ideology of freedom against any and all culture. As Frank Wright calls it, “ the mire of delimited desire”.
Poilievre will at least put a break on the managerial state.
But there is one other significant consequence . The conservatives will be able to keep Alberta in Canada; the liberals and Carney will pour gasoline on the separatist fire in Alberta.
Combine that with a Parti Quebecois victory in the 26 provincial election and separatist forces will have momentum. Trump’s potshots, a Quebec referendum, Alberta’s furry, I fear a liberal victory on Monday is the death knell for O’Canada.
Really formidable, it’s existential. But Grant was right, we are indistinguishable from y’all.
Liberalism obviates nationalism in general, which Grant said would lead to the collapse of Canada as Canada would become indistinguishable from the empire. Eventually, it would lead to a simple question : Why Canada?
Now 60 years later, Mr Carney, a globalist banker environmentalist, the apotheosis of liberal internationalism, is going to be elected to fix the problems he and his ilk created. Oh Canada!
Euthanasia anyone; hemlock, with the side order of OxyContin?
Here’s Alberta’s sales pitch on why separation: outside of Canada we would be the richest jurisdiction in North America. That has legs.
Here’s Quebec sales pitch on separation: it’s now or never, mass immigration, look at all these people with year-round tans wandering our streets. Québécois brethren: Je me souviens!
And then for comic relief, Trump the irrepressible, sniping from the peanut gallery: perfection.
Momentum’s a bugger, and liberals love buggery: I say Canada 50/50.
I've been waiting for years for Prof. Deneen to write about Canadian Politics! Resubscribed just for this article - and I'd love follow-up pieces in the future as the political landscape continues to change, as it undoubtedly will, regardless of what occurs tonight.
In my first article (now deleted) I wrote about this - how for a large swath of the Canadian population (Most notably Liberal homeowning boomers), Canadian identity *is* to be the left-liberal foil to America's right-liberalism. To be the 'angel' on America's shoulder showing them the way things could be if they just escaped the influence of those backward country bumpkins. Hence the promise of American Liberals every election to 'move to Canada'. Going to urban public schools, I witnessed the subtle contempt for American-style 'conservatism' implicit in basically every law and politics related course. Of course, this is somewhat justified when it comes to the negative aspects of it (The Bush wars, for-profit healthcare & prisons, etc), but it also, obviously, entails a disdain for social conservatism.
Both Trudeaus, especially the latter, absolutely loved being viewed as the enlightened counterpart to America. In fact, if you read every action of Trudeau Jr. as being solely motivated by the desire to gain the admiration of American liberal elites, everything starts to make sense.
The Trudeauian 'post-national nationalism' which still completely dominates the nation's psyche (even when 'conservatives' are elected, they have to promise not to touch any of the left-liberal sacred cows) is at this point the only obvious way for Canadians to feel something akin to patriotism or national pride (along with gratuitous amounts of Canadian flags, the meaning of which is left undefined). I suspect this is largely for fear of the elephant in the room, namely that without an ideological identity, Canada has no other identity to speak of other than as a politically convenient (until it's not) alliance of disparate regions with their own distinct (and themselves rapidly fading) regional cultures. Take an already geographically diverse nation, with radically different-minded settlers depending on the region, and add a policy of officially discouraging the assimilation of newcomers, and there's not much of a nationwide social fabric to speak of.
That's why I only see two futures for Canada as a united nation - 1. Our national identity continues to be primarily ideological rather than cultural, but (as Grant alluded to) as America's Postliberal counterpart, rather than it's left-liberal counterpart. It is, again, sadly Ironic that this is largely how Canada was founded - a combination of the culturally and socially conservative Quebecois, Immigrants who wanted a stable, peaceable life, and even American colonists who didn't want to join in with the revolutionary yahoos and their new-fangled ideas - and yet today, this tradition is far more visibly present in the US than in Canada. 2. If we don't have a unified national identity, the best we could hope for is a radical decentralization, wherein the Federal government essentially becomes just a necessary evil for the various regions that would otherwise operate mostly autonomously, but aren't economically powerful enough to justify becoming their own separate nations. As it stands, however, Canada is considerably *more* centralized than the US, making the country more brittle and prone to breaking in national unity crises.
If the conservative party loses tonight, it will largely be because it is percieved, somewhat correctly, as being more 'American', as in right-liberal. Despite Poilievre's encouraging populist-coded rhetoric (and even a few good policy shifts in that direction), it's clear from any investigation into his background that he is a hardcore individualist, bordering on libertarian. He won the leadership race for the Conservative party largely by selling policies libertarians could support with rhetoric populists could support, and that's largely how he continues to operate. It's remarkably clever, and probably the best shot the awkward coalition that is the Conservative Party will ever have at gaining power again - without, that is, developing a remotely coherent ideology. If they lose for the fourth time in a row tonight, even after the Liberal party has ravaged and harrowed the country for the last decade, making nearly every concievable metric of social and economic wellbeing dramatically worse, hopefully they'll get the message that they actually need to advance a coherent view of human nature and a good society, or else the other parties will continue to advance their own views of such things (which they are certainly not shy about doing), unimpeded, until the end of time, or, more realistically, the end of Canada.
Well said. Heres to hoping for " a coherent view of human nature and a good society".
The Canadian reaction to Trump isn’t ideologically incoherent. It’s not ideological at all. Trump is ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt. Any person of common sense, whatever their political philosophy, can see that - it’s on full display every day. The simple explanation is that, liberal or illiberal, Canadians find Trump repellant.