The Really Stupid Party

 

Much can be explained by a simple premise: the left is stupid, and the right is smart.

This is more or less understood, at least by the right, in such sayings as “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.” 

Conservatives think the average leftist is naïve, not evil. Therefore, they tend to be more tolerant. The left thinks the right is not stupid, but evil. Therefore they will fight no holds barred.

One might object that the left is favoured by the expert class and by the professions. By the better educated. University faculties are all leftist. So surely this is the smarter side?

It does not follow. One cannot, after all, fail more than a relatively small number of students in any programme; especially when they are paying large amounts of money for the course. Necessarily,  therefore, academics are geared towards those of average intelligence. Granted that a somewhat higher level of intelligence will allow one to get through with less effort; but there is a ceiling. Too smart, and the plodding pace of instruction will, literally, drive one to distraction. The too-intelligent will lose interest, lose concentration, fail or drop out.

Education at all levels is essentially obedience school. Can you follow directions and submit to authority?

This might sound like sour grapes; but it is not. It is the observation of someone holding multiple certificates and degrees.

A better clue to who it smarter is who favours meritocracy. Obviously, the smartest will prefer meritocracy, on average, because it is in their self-interest.

That would be the right. The left wants equity. 

In a similar vein, quite visibly, really good-looking women tend to be conservative. Leftist women are rarely as attractive. It makes sense.

Successful politicians sometimes play dumb and folksy. Trump does; George W. Bush did. Reagan did. Ralph Klein did; Mike Harris did; Jean Chretien did. This is just good politics; it shows their intelligence. People often resent those more intelligent than they are. 

But notice that these supposedly dumb politicians are the very ones who manage to achieve a great deal of their agenda. The proof is in the pudding: they are smart.

By comparison, Democratic leaders seem genuinely dumb: Kamala Harris, the senile Joe Biden, John Fetterman. How is it they cannot put forward more impressive intellects?

Because intelligent people rarely join their party.

Canada’s Liberals do not have the same problem—but this is because they are the “Natural Governing Party.” They will attract top talent for purely cynical reasons: because they are the likeliest path to power. This is due to tribal rather than ideological voting, notably in Quebec. In the US, similarly, voting used to be more tribal, not ideological. In those days one did encounter more capable Democratic candidates.

The best proof that the left is dumb is that their basic ideological premise is dumb. They believe that government is protection from greedy and bullying capitalists, corporations and religious groups. It does not occur to them that governments or government bureaucrats could also be greedy or power-hungry.

And not even just as likely. We have a natural protection against greedy or power-hungry corporations: we can choose not to buy. We have no such protection from government. We cannot choose not to pay our taxes, or obey the law.

An amusing recent example: the NDP’s recent campaign blaming inflation on corporate greed. Their proof that Loblaw’s was price-gouging was that you could buy the same items for less in Dollarama. So why couldn’t they simply shop at Dollarama?

Even if the NDP leadership was smart enough to realize this, they were counting on their constituency not to see it.

Are the Times Still A'Changin'?

 

I recently inadvertently uncovered the essential difference between right wing and left wing perceptions. 

In a poetry group, I was given Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A’Changin’” as a prompt.

My immediate thought was that, if that song is still relevant today, times have been a-changin’ since at least 1964. Over sixty years. And yet, all the things we wanted changed then seem still to be with us, or back with us, or many claim are still with us—notably those on the left, so I thought this point was uncontroversial. We have endless foreign wars; we have rogue government; we have continuing racism and discrimination. 

The only difference, I thought, is that we now lack the same enthusiasm for change that we had back in the Sixties. Nobody is singing any longer. Which stands to reason, after sixty years barking up the same tree. We are exhausted; we need transcendence.

I wrote a prose poem to this effect. I read it to another poetry group to which I belong. I thought my sense would be universally shared, among those who knew the original song. 

I was wrong. Most folks who style themselves poets these days are leftists, and from them I got, unexpectedly, immediate pushback.

First, according to the left, the arts today, including most specifically popular music, are just as vital and vibrant and popular today as they have ever been. The quality of art is a constant, regardless of time and place.

So there was nothing special going on in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties, nor in Haight-Ashbury in the later Sixties, nor in Paris in the 1920s, nor in English poetry during the Romantic era, or Italian painting and sculpture during the Renaissance, or English drama during the Elizabethan era. The perception that it is so is all just prejudice.

I id not expect this; I would have thought the assertion mad. It is as if there is no such thing as quality in art, no standards. 

Yet this actually makes sense from a left-wing perspective. It is consistent and in fact seems to follow necessarily from their contention that all cultures are equal. Moreover, that all women are equally beautiful. 

It then seems necessarily so that eras in a culture must also be equal. Indeed, one could extend this: the works of all artists are equal, so that one chooses for a gallery or a publication only for proper ethnic representation. Which is pretty much how it works these days. I would see a decline in quality as a result; to the left, apparently, this is not possible. 

But that was not the strongest objection. The leftists in the group also objected to the assertion that we are facing all the same problems, in essence, that we did in 1964. 

They must believe this, I suppose--despite also insisting often that nothing has really improved in non-white lives since the days of slavery, indeed since the days when European empires controlled the world. Despite the contradiction, the inexorability of social progress is after all the core of their belief system as “progressives.” The left-wing agenda is to them after all, as an article of faith, the “right side of history.” Even if that left-wing agenda once included such failed ideas as prohibition, eugenics, pacifism in the face of Nazism, or segregation. Progress has to be a given.

“At least,” one fellow insisted, “You have to agree that society has become more tolerant.”

This floored me. Growing intolerance is my strongest impression. Back in 1964 there was no political correctness, no deplatforming, no cancel culture, no shouting down the other side. The Fifties saw blacklisting under McCarthyism. The Sixties had thrown off that yoke. Now we have it worse than in the Fifties. 

You might cite sexual freedom. After all, nowadays men can walk around wearing women’s clothes. But this is not the whole story. Things were freer for heterosexuals then. The Sixties have been called “The Golden Age of Porn.” Now that is largely shut down by fears of disease, “me too” and the like. And the growing legal requirement to pretend that men are women is, for 99% of the population, a decrease, not an increase, in freedom and tolerance.

You might point to the civil rights movement. But that was a fight for the 1950s. It was already capstoned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the year the song came out. I recall Martin Luther King adjusting his program accordingly, to focus on poverty instead of race; that war was won. Since then, the movement seems to have been in the opposite direction: towards greater segregation, now often by black demand; in most recent years, greater hostility among the races; and even a higher poverty rate among black families. If whites are more tolerant of BIPOCS, BIPOCS are less tolerant of whites. There seems an even greater and more clearly binary us-them divide than ever.

And antisemitism is now at a level I would not have imagined possible after WWII.

It feels absurd even citing these matters—they seem obvious. 

Yet apparently they are invisible to the left.

To my mind, the left is trapped back in 1964, and cannot get out.

To be fair, when I held firm to my opinion, even without getting into detail or citing evidence, the leftists in the group seemed to back down.

They had to, I suppose. All opinions, after all, are equal. [sic]

On the Role of Government

 

Xerxes, my friend to my far left, has opined that he does not know clearly what the proper role of government is. He says he wants it to be “scientist, always searching for a fuller understanding. Teacher, conveying wisdom. Priest, upholding a vision of what we can be. Mother, nurturing and caring for those less able to look after themselves.” In other words, all things to all people. One thinks of Mussolini’s formulation: “Everything within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.” 

That is where current leftist thought is; current “mainstream” leftist thought.

He begins with a tale of a group of friends, who regularly meet to debate about Donald Trump.

Isn’t it odd, unnatural, that the main topic of discussion among a group of Canadian friends would be a guy who is not in our country, not some important writer or philosopher, and not in power anywhere? This speaks of obsession.

And it is clear who is obsessed, isn’t it?

“Three of us think Trump is a poo-pile of all the worst traits of humanity.”

That is literally to say that Trump is at least as bad as Hitler, as Mao or Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, or the Marquis de Sade—"the worst traits of all humanity” must be at least this bad.

This is not a rational position. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I am confident, on the other hand, that Xerxes’s characterization of the one Trump supporter in the group is a straw man: “Trump is the Messiah, come back to straighten out a broken and misguided world.” 

Nobody, even his strongest supporters, thinks of Trump in that way. This is necessarily so, because people on the right do not look to government to solve their or the world’s problems. They see its role as clearly defined. There is no room in contemporary “right-wing” politics for a messianic figure or a man on a white horse.

The right has a clear understanding of the role of government. It is limited, and so their expectations of their leaders are limited. 

It is the left that follows politics as a religion or as a substitute for religion, able to create heaven on earth. Recall the ink spent on Barack Obama being a “light worker.” “Hope and Change.” Remember Kennedy “charisma.” I recall posters of Jimmy Carter in 1976 adorned with a halo and the slogan “JC will Save America.” 

Justin Trudeau arrived in Liberal Ottawa as such a man on a white horse.

Ask any actual Trump supporter, and they will inevitably say something like, “I was sceptical, or didn’t like Trump at first; but I like that he did X or says Y. That won me over. But I also wish he wouldn’t/hadn’t/wasn’t Z.” Fill in the blanks, and it works as well for Pierre Poilievre, or Maxime Bernier, or Nigel Farage, or any leader on the right of the spectrum. There are always reservations on the right.

The proper role of government is summarized in the US Declaration of Independence: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

This is the charter of liberal democracy per se. It is actually as old as Athens and the Greek city states. One might disagree with it, but one is at least obliged to address it, and say why. In the older formulation that appears in the BNA Act, as old at least as the Roman Empire, governments exist to keep the peace. We can ask governments to do more, with the general consent of the governed. Such as a “social safety net.”

No room for a Messiah here. Expecting a political Messiah or government to save you is also of course anti-Christian, and by definition following the antichrist.

Not to mention, it is fascism. It is the Fuhrer principle.

Government should NOT be better informed than the people it governs, not be scientist, or expert, because it must be with the consent of the governed. They must have all available information in order to consent. This is why we must have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of information. Government must not know anything the people do not know.

Government must be ethical, but is not there to enforce ethics on others. 

Xerxes thinks the problem is that nobody can agree on what is right and wrong. That is false. Ethics are not complicated: they are the same everywhere, utterly unmysterious, and can be summed up in a sentence, or a choice of sentences: do unto others as you would have them do to you. Or, as Kant expressed it, all others must be treated as ends, not means. Or, act as you could wish all others to act. Each formulation amounts to the same thing, and the principle is in most cases easy to apply. 

That said, governments do not exist to enforce morality. That would be a limit on human freedom. Freedom is required for morality itself. If one acts only under compulsion, by government or by another person, one loses all ability to act morally, because one has lost freedom of choice. That is why Adam and Eve were left free to eat the apple.

Governments are there only to protect your rights from infringement by your neighbour—or from those invading from further afield. “Your right to swing your fist ends where your neighbour’s nose begins.” 

A moral government honours, and stays within, this mandate.

“I do not believe anyone has a divine right to rule over others,” Xerxes adds, waving his flag on the dungheap of liberty. 

Here he is surely pulverizing the sun-bleached skeleton of a very deceased horse. Yes, some European monarchs briefly tried to push the idea, around the time of the Reformation, but always in opposition to the religious authorities, at least in the Catholic Church; I cannot vouch for Martin Luther. It is a pagan doctrine, that of the God-King, as in Japan or ancient Egypt.

The Devil always tries to complicate; the devil loves words like “nuance.” Make the ways straight.

Why We Can No Longer Get Along

 

Acceptable

Unacceptable.

Years ago, on an email list that shall remain nameless, I expressed some dissatisfaction with the government interfering in some way in free markets. This in a resolutely left-wing milieu.

There was no immediate backlash. Instead, they wanted to know if I was a Randite, a follower of Ayn Rand.

It was when I objected to Rand’s philosophy as immoral that the backlash began. Had I been an objectivist, it seems it would still have been okay.

So the issue that divides the left and right is not really free markets vs. collectivism, or big government vs small government, as one might have imagined.

Similarly, when people learn I am a vegetarian, their first question is whether it is for health reasons. Why is this the inevitable question? Why does it matter?

Because people do not resent vegetarians if they do it for health reasons. If they do it for moral reasons, I can attest, another’s vegetarianism is indeed resented.

Along the same lines, why do so many object so much to members of minority religions evangelizing them at their door? At a minimum, the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Salvation Army do it of good heart; they want your fellowship, and are trying to save you from Hell. What could be a greater kindness?

The problem is that a growing number of people have very guilty consciences. Those who have a guilty conscience will hate anyone bringing up the subject of right and wrong. They will even hate anyone who acts morally.

To the point of crucifixion.

This explains the current breakdown in civil discourse. The US even seems to be barrelling toward civil war.

The same principle can explain the eternal persecution of the Jews. The Jews, after all, invented/discovered ethical monotheism. They personify and embody The Moral Law.

It also explains the familiar saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Which those who have lived to my age can generally attest is true. Good people will appreciate a good deed; but many bad people will want to hurt you for it.

And it explains why it is those who were most favourably disposed towards Canada’s Indians, Sir John A. Macdonald, Edgerton Ryerson, the Catholic Church, are now so defamed and their statues toppled; in America or Britain, those who were most openly against slavery, like Thomas Jefferson or Sir Henry Dundas, are those condemned as slavers—and not the advocates of slavery.

The usual charge against all moralists, as in these cases, is “hypocrisy.” Which does not apply here at all. . Hypocrisy means holding others to a higher standard than oneself. Believing in and advocating morality is not a claim of personal sinlessness. It is those who old moralists to a higher standard than themselves for believing in the importance of morality who are hypocrites.

I fear a pending housing crisis in hell.

The Mississauga Byelection

 

Look! The very heavens are turning Liberal red!

The results of the recent byelection in Mississauga were disappointing for all of us who think Justin Trudeau must go. The Liberals actually increased their share of the vote, winning an absolute majority.

The most striking thing was the collapse of the NDP vote. It has halved since the last election. This explains the Liberal success: votes moving from the NDP.

Nationwide, according to the conventional wisdom, this is bad news for the Conservatives. They count on the Liberals and the NDP splitting the vote on the left to allow them to come up the middle, the Conservative vote traditionally stalling  in the thirties.

It is worse news, of course, for the NDP. It makes them unlikely to want to force an election any time soon.

But it also suggests a lack of vitality on the left. The NDP has always been a ginger group, pushing the discussion toward the left. They were a place to park a protest vote, and feel virtuous. Every election was a “moral victory.” And their presence has supported the Liberals as the safe middle ground.

Their collapse, and the increasing inability to distinguish themselves and their platform from the Liberals, suggests that the left has lost the moral high ground. Voting left is no longer about principle. It is perhaps about fear of change, perhaps about power and self-interest for your client group. There are no more moral victories. That is a bad portent over the longer term. Moral authority is important. Ask Dr. Martin Luther King. Ask Gandhi. Ask O’Connell.

The NDP has abandoned the working class. The unions are moving to the Conservatives. Now you only vote NDP, or Liberal, to maintain the status quo. The attack on conventional sexual morality, the adamant support for abortion, the seeming grooming of children in the schools, the encouragement of racial division, the lies and suppressions during the Covid crisis, have begun to trouble the average conscience. 

Folks are apparently not ready to make the big move yet, from left to right. They still fear the unknown, and the neighbours they have always been told are racists and Nazis. But this swelling of the Liberal ranks looks like a bubble about to pop. 

Facing uncertainty, confused, people will huddle towards the known and familiar while they try to decide what to do.

The Distinction between Republicans and Democrats: Two Views

 

The Political Zoo: Courtesy of Pew Research

Friend Xerxes introduces me to the work of Jonathan Haidt, who defines the innate tendencies of “liberals” and “conservatives.” Haidt found that what he called “liberal” voters were mainly influenced by two social values: “fairness” and “care”. Haidt’s “conservatives” had three core values: authority, purity, and loyalty.

Haidt’s analysis makes some sense, but not if you try to identify his “conservative” and “liberal” with current political parties in either the US or Canada. What Haidt calls “liberal” is really the Marxist-socialist position, and closer to classic conservatism than to classic liberalism. For “conservative,” Haidt is indeed describing the classic conservative position, but the modern Republican party, or the Conservative party in Canada, is actually more classically liberal. 

Pretty confusing, granted. Politics, as George Orwell noted, is largely about falsifying terms to get away with murder. We need to keep the terms straight to prevent this.

The modern Republican party is no respecter of authority. It is in more or less open rebellion against the “elites.” So too with Poilievre ‘s Conservatives in Canada. It is the Democrats, or the Liberals in Canada, who regularly appeal to authority and oppose questioning it. “Follow the science.” Don’t doubt the integrity of the mainstream media. Don’t doubt the integrity of the academics, or the climate scientists, or the teachers and ed schools; of the professions generally.

Purity? Nobody believes in racial purity as a value, but last time anyone did, it was the Democrats. Or, in Canada, the Liberals and Clear Grits. It is also the Democrats who are concerned with ideological purity: with “political correctness.” Political views in the Conservative or Republican parties are much more diverse, and diversity is much better tolerated.

If by “purity” Haidt actually means morality, he is right that morality is a classic conservative value, and it is also a modern Republican and Canadian Conservative value; and not a Democratic or Liberal value. Fair enough. But Christian morality is not “purity.” It is acknowledgement and remorse for sin when committed, not never sinning, and especially not claiming to have never sinned. Innocence ended in the Garden.

Loyalty? The Republican primary voters in 2016 rejected loyalty to their party leaders in nominating Trump. They were supposed to vote for Jeb Bush. In Canada, the Conservatives have ousted two leaders in about four years. Look, too, at the Conservatives in Britain.

By contrast, the Democratic primary voters obediently accepted the backroom deal to hand the nomination to Biden, four years after accepting the backroom deal handing the nomination to Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party has always been the party of machine politics, party bosses, and client groups who will vote for a yellow dog out of party loyalty. Or are expected to, out of group loyalty, or “you ain’t black.” 

Haidt does not seem to even be aware of classic liberal values, but those are the values of the modern Republicans or Canadian Conservatives: freedom, the rights of the individual, free markets, equality. He misses half the political equation.

The Times, They Are A'Changing

 

Rather abruptly,  I realize I no longer get into those flame wars I used to encounter endlessly online. A large part of this, no doubt, is that just about everybody woke has unfriended me by now. But that cannot be the total explanation. Not all of them have, and those who used to post madness to the general universe on Facebook no longer seem to; at least not nearly so often.

I think the realization is beginning to seep in, among many or most of those who have always followed the orthodox and accepted politically correct positions as a matter of course, that they have been had. They have lost their confidence in the moral superiority of their views. They have lost confidence in the defensibility of their views. They are beginning to fear they are being laughed at.

I see a parallel shift on the right. In clips from political debates in the current US congressional elections, I hear Republicans speaking out assertively when they previously seemed to fudge or apologize for their positions. A few years ago, the only candidate who talked like that was Newt Gingrich. I see the same thing in Canada’s parliamentary question period under Poilievre.

The pendulum is in swing.

Us and Them

 

A leftist friend posts this cartoon on Facebook, with the caption “the public good vs. individual liberty.”

It’s been bugging me. No doubt because it looks superficially true. The right stresses individual liberty. The left stresses group identity. This looks from a distance like selfishness. Individual = self = selfishness.

Nevertheless, conservatives consistently give more to charity, do more volunteer work, and are more likely to belong to voluntary associations—think churches. In other words, they care more about community than the left. The left may speak of “community,” but they generally mean people they do not know who share the same interests. Here “community” is a euphemism for “tribe” or “special interest group.”

Selfishness has nothing to do with individualism. Stressing one’s individualism necessarily sets one apart from the “other.” But, equally, stressing one’s group identity necessarily sets one apart from “them,” the non-members of your group. Either is potentially selfish. But it is easier to be selfish in a group, because the group consensus can drown out the voice of conscience. And group selfishness can do much more harm than an individual. Think the Nazis, the Fascists, Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot and the Killing Fields…

Epic Fails

 

In Canadian federal politics, unfortunately, often the Conservative leaders also lack records of accomplishment.

As the situation in the US gets worse, I ponder: is it just me, or why isn’t it obvious to everyone that left-wing policies make things generally worse, seem even deliberately destructive, while right-wing policies seem to turn out better for nearly everyone?

I think of Margaret Thatcher turning the UK around after years under Labour governments. I think of Regan turning things around after Carter and winning the Cold War. I think of Rudy Giuliani turning NYC around after decades of the entire city being thought of as a no-go zone—and how quickly things are going back to rack under a Democratic administration. I think of how much better things seemed to be in Canada under Harper than under Justin Trudeau, or how quickly things went sour in Ontario when Bob Rae’s NDP got in, after decades of solid government under the PCs.

And now we see things sliding quickly under Biden, after general good times under Trump. Can’t others see this?

It seems to me as well that Republican candidates for office generally have solid records of accomplishment when they run. Democratic candidates have in comparison relatively scanty resumes. Bill Clinton was governor of the relatively small state of Arkansas, and had lost his first bid for re-election. Barack Obama was a first-term senator. Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa primary and briefly looked like the best bet to be the Democratic presidential nominee after only being mayor of South Bend, Indiana—population 100,000. And with no striking accomplishments in that office. Justin Trudeau was a high school drama teacher.

By comparison, Trump, although without political experience, had built a business empire. Mitt Romney had rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics, and managed to get elected governor as a Republican in the nation’s bluest state. Boris Johnson had been a popular mayor of London, famously a leftist electorate. John McCain had been a senator for 22 years, and was a war hero.

The Democrats seem to have a chronic problem here. Each primary season, they seem to lack candidates with actual records of accomplishment. 

This may be explained by the simple fact that leftist policies do not work. They go for the fresh face at least in part because any familiar faces are probably discredited by a record of failure.

Why do people persist in voting for parties and policies that do not work?

You can fool some of the people all of the time. Not infrequently, it is enough of them to form an electoral plurality. 

The Democrats and the left elsewhere concentrate on looking good, not on doing good. They promise people free stuff.

Parties and Ideologies: Who's Who at the Zoo

Your conservative candidate.

As we get close to the Canadian federal election, pal Xerxes laments that party labels are no longer meaningful. Nobody seems ideologically consistent.

Certainly true; in electoral politics, things easily get elastic. Ideology probably matters less than getting on the right side of an issue identified by recent polling.

But some of the confusion can be clarified by realizing that the various parties have come to be mislabeled. The conservative party in Canada is the Liberals; the liberal party is the Conservatives.

Xerxes writes:

“In a leaders’ debate this week, the Greens came across as more conservative than the Conservatives -- at least the Greens are trying to conserve something.”

Exactly right. “Conservatism” automatically means “conservation.” Conservatives in the true sense have always been the political group that cared about preserving the natural environment, as a shared heritage. It was Teddy Roosevelt who created the national parks in the US, and Sir John A Macdonald in Canada. For many years, the head of the World Wildlife Fund was Prince Phillip. It is an intrinsic part of the conservative philosophy to conserve nature. Animal rights, too, tends to be a natural conservative concern; today it is represented by the Greens. 

Your liberal candidate.

The Greens, in other words, are indeed a conservative party. But recently these ideas have been identified as leftist.

Not that liberals would be opposed to a clean environment. But they would generally prefer to leave such things to market forces and non-government initiatives—it is not a core mandate of government.

“The supposedly socialist NDP isn’t threatening to nationalize anything. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, has already nationalized a pipeline.”

Exactly. Nationalizing a pipeline—direct government involvement in the market—is against liberal principles. It might be Marxist; but would fit as well with traditional conservative values. Conservatism holds the national interest to be part of government’s mandate, wherever that leads; so this justifies such government intrusions in the market. Just as it justified Conservative government involvement in building the old CPR. Or Disraeli getting the British Tory Government to build the Suez Canal, or Roosevelt the US Republican administration to build the Panama Canal. A classically conservative act.

And that is exactly the rationale the Liberal are using—the classic conservative one.

The NDP has been deliberately mislabeled from the start. It is or was, indeed, as Xerxes says, a socialist party. Not Stalinist, but democratic Marxist, after Bernstein. “New Democratic Party” is a fudge, for a party that should more clearly have been named “Socialist” or “Social Democratic.”

Xerxes is right too that, properly, it should therefore be calling for nationalization of the means of production. But when did it last do that?

Strip this out, and what is left is another conservative party, with the same platform as the Liberals. Or, given that it now apparently believes in leaving the means of production in private hands, while heavily regulating it to enforce national goals, perhaps the NDP is closer to being Canada’s fascist party. 

Your fascist candidate.

Still Marxist, then—Mussolini was a Marxist.

Xerxes:

“Conservatives may be opposed to government, in principle. But if elected, they have never declined to become a government themselves.”

Xerxes does not understand liberalism. What he describes here is anarchism. Liberalism is not against government, but sees government as having a specific mandate. It can therefore be either too big or too small.

Xerxes:

“In practice, when conservatives govern [sic—he means Conservatives, with the capital letter], they don’t reduce government. At least, not much. They divert tax resources to different areas. To more rigorous law enforcement, for example. To bailing out banks, or carmakers, considered too big to fail. And to the military. Currently, I read, the U.S. government uses 20% of its total budget to pay for its war equipment and personnel -- all tax funded.”

This illustrates the liberal understanding of government’s mandate: it is to protect the rights of citizens. Accordingly, expenditure on law enforcement and the military are legitimate.

Bailing out carmakers or banks, on the other hand, is not legitimate. While, granted, Conservative governments in Canada, and Republican administrations in the US, have resorted to such bailouts, they are more reluctant to do so than the Liberals or the Democrats. They at least lean more liberal. Witness the Liberal Party’s longstanding support of Bombardier, or SNC-Lavalin, let alone the pipeline purchase. Or Obama’s wholesale bailout of GM in the US, opposed by Romney and the Republicans.

Let’s clarify definitions.

Conservatives will generally prefer a bigger, more intrusive government. Bill Davis’s Ontario Tories were still classically conservative. Conservatism, following Burke, sees the state as an organic entity, more or less on the model of a family. “Paternalistic government” is baked into the mix. Government can be as big as seems useful.

Liberalism, on the other hand, as the name implies, starts from the premise of liberty--that is, the rights of the sovereign individual. Government has a specific and defined role, the protection of rights, and may not legitimately overstep these bounds. The US Declaration of Independence is a good primer here.

And surely by this you can see that the current Canadian Conservative party is liberal, and the Canadian Liberal Party is conservative.

The first and critical shift in the proper naming of names probably came with the New Deal in the US, and King’s copycat initiatives in Canada. In the early years of the Great Depression, the traditional political theories seemed to have failed. In desperation, and directly against the platforms they had run on, FDR and King reached for any new ideas that might be around. Most prominent among them were, of course, Marxism and fascism. This was the New Deal.

But admitting that these new approaches were either Bolshevik or fascist was not going to play well in Medicine Hat or Peoria. “Liberal” was a safer label for electoral purposes; especially after the Second World War. It was a “new liberalism.”

True liberals, precisely because their own philosophy was diametrically opposed, were over time forced out of the Liberal Party, and the Democrats, and needed a new home. They found it by default in the conservative parties, and over a longer period they came to dominate them. 

He never identified his party as "conservative."

Manning’s Reform Party was pretty classically liberal, and was bizarrely branded as to the right of the Tories. Then they managed a hostile takeover. Any traditional conservatives who linger in the Conservative Party are now, erroneously, called “Red Tories.”

The Republican Part in the US similarly flipped over to liberalism with Ronald Reagan. The UK Tories flipped from conservative to liberal with Margaret Thatcher. At about the same time, by merger with the Social Democrats, the UK Liberals tipped over from liberal to conservative or Marxist.

Now the average Canadian large-l Liberal is even prone to call authentic liberals “fascists.” Although their human rights - individual liberties philosophy is probably the point on the political spectrum most diametrically opposed to Fascism. You want fascism, your best bet is the NDP.

Xerxes continues:

“Small-l liberals [sic] … focus on big corporations as the enemy. With good reason.”

This is a small-c conservative position. Conservatism, seeing society as organic, always suspects the profit motive. Government is best left to those whose eyes are not habitually focused on the balance sheet—traditionally an idle ruling class freed from financial concerns and schooled to the job, more recently a credentialed professional elite. Who are supposedly, if less convincingly, above caring about their own financial interests.

Mere tradesmen are always to be scorned. They do not have the proper breeding for the job.

One can see this underlying classism starkly in left-wing reactions to Donald Trump. He is a mere tradesman, lacking proper breeding. Much of the visceral hatred on the left for Richard Nixon or for Joe McCarthy was the same: they were not gentlemen. The problem was always style more than substance.

Over recent decades, this conservative distain for “the trades” has conveniently merged with Marxist theory, which blames our failure to achieve an earthly paradise on a bourgeois or “capitalist” class. Which may or may not actually exist in a meaningful sense.

If the wrath of the modern left is directed towards “big corporations” instead of the older “rich capitalists,” this is no doubt for two practical reasons. Firstly, such highly visible rich capitalists on the original Marxist model as we have tend to be Liberals and Democrats: the Zuckerbergs, Brins, Gateses, Bezoses, and so forth. They have, naturally enough, gravitated to the conservative side of the spectrum, which tends to preserve existing social structures and so existing privilege. 

The old Marxist stereotype of the "capitalist." Usually ethnically Jewish...

But, as they never tire of saying, a corporation is not a person. It is a vague entity. It has no public face. Politicians can attack “big corporations,” and sustain the illusion that no actual people are hurt. They are the perfect scapegoat.

Of course, in reality, a corporation is people. You further tax or shut down a corporation, and real people do indeed get hurt or pay: shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the community. But this is only the same sleight of hand politicians always use by promising to spend more money here and there—the money always comes out of same other people’s pockets.

But this is also dishonest in another way. Behind this façade, as noted above, the Liberals and Democrats are consistently more closely allied with the big corporations and their interests than are the Conservatives or the Republicans: SNC Lavalin, General Motors, Amazon, Google, Solyndra, and so on.

The Decriminalization of Dissent

The classical method of "cutting people off."

My left-listing friend Xerxes just surprised me by coming out against censorship, against unfriending in social media, and against shouting down speakers with whom you disagree. This would seem to buck the trend on the left, of demanding ever-increasing and ever-more-stringent censorship.

His may be only one voice. Or this may be a symptom that the left has gone too far, and that the “Just Walk Away” movement is spreading. Gag reflexes may be kicking in.

Xerxes writes of receiving offensive emails:

“You have these friends, see, who keep sending you emails filled with racist slurs against Muslims, abortionists, ‘Indians’ (they still use that term), Hindus, Asians, and immigrants in general.”

And he ponders:

“Should you cut them off? Block their emails? Terminate the friendship?”

But concludes:

“Isolating persons with whom we disagree simply amplifies the echo chamber they live in.”

There are a lot of problems here. But in a backhanded, incoherent way, he seems to recognize that something has gone wrong. He’s just not clear yet whodunit.

To begin, note that he speaks of “racist slurs” against abortionists. You may have noticed that abortionists are not actually a race.

Neither are Muslims, Hindus, or immigrants.

So he is using the term “racism” incorrectly.

This might be trivial, if it is simply a matter of saying “racism” when he meant “prejudice.” But that does not work either. It is hard to see how one would be prejudiced against abortionists. To call someone an “abortionist” is to say they have performed a specific act. What then is one pre-judging? If it is a matter of saying that the act is wrong, that is not a prejudice, but a “judice”— a moral judgement.

It looks as though Xerxes is still simply using the term “racism” to refer to views or political positions with which he disagrees.

Now, the thought that you should “cut someone off” and end a friendship simply because you disagree with them seems self-evidently wrong. Let’s look at his justification:

“Should you cut them off? Block their emails? Terminate the friendship?
Or do you try to reason with them? Prove their so-called facts incorrect? Point out the flaws in their logic?
That might work if they reached their views as a reasoned conviction. But that’s unlikely. More likely, they’re regurgitating cultural memes they’ve accepted without any conscious analysis.”

That is, he says it is impossible to reason with them because they are only repeating things they have heard, and have never thought about.

But that is an obvious non sequitur. If they hold their opinions from ignorance, it is commonly held that people are capable of both thinking and learning. Entire schools have been founded on this premise. If this were the issue, it is the perfect argument for continuing the dialogue. They are misinformed; you inform them.

So whatever the real reason Xerxes and the left previously wanted to censor, deplatform, and silence dissenting views, and still does at some level, this cannot be it. And since this claim is so obviously through-the-looking-glass, I think we can assume that the real reason is discreditable. Otherwise nobody would be able to convince themselves of something so absurd. This is what psychology calls “denial.”

I think he hints at the real reason with his conclusion. It is as though truth is beginning to dawn.

“Isolating persons with whom we disagree simply amplifies the echo chamber they live in.”

Now, who is isolating themselves, the friends who send him the emails, or him, if he “cuts them off”?

This is where the left, and the clerisy who presume they rule the rest of us, have been living. And they are perhaps, if Xerxes is an indication, now beginning to realize it.

In a list of oddly random complaints, as though he does not want to look at the issue too directly, Xerxes then expresses dissatisfaction with “various right-and/or-left-wing advocacy groups who shout down speakers they don’t approve of...”

The next thing he needs to realize, of course, is that it has been exclusively left-wing groups doing this. That’s too much, no doubt, for now.

But I sense a shift in the wind. Sometimes you don’t need a weatherman.

Klavan Unchained

Andrew Klavan really came out smoking yesterday. He says the left has gone mad.

The same thought has occurred to me. Things the left is saying now would surely be considered delusional if suggested by any lone individual, say, five years ago. And they are not just saying these things: they are demanding and requiring unanimous consent to them.

A sure sign they know themselves these things are not true.

I think things may be at or beyond a tipping point.

Evolution and Entropy

Kilometre zero, in front of Notre Dame.

My left-wing friend Xerxes has written a column that, although it does not address it directly, perhaps gives some insight into the celebrations on the left of the destruction wrought on Notre Dame de Paris.

In short, he opines that the universe is based on two great principles, evolution and entropy. Evolution is good, entropy is evil. Science is evolution, religion is entropy. Science is good; religion is bad.

The implicit message is also that all change is good, and leads to progress. All that already exists, then, is bad and no doubt should be burned to the basement.

The problems with this line of thinking are so many it is hard to see where to begin.

Let’s start with the first concept mentioned, evolution. Xerxes argues that evolution leads inexorably to greater complexity. He associates this with Darwin’s theory. “Evolution evolves” “to adapt to altered environments.” “Evolution always moves towards greater complexity, more specialized roles. It never moves backwards.”

This is not supported by Darwin’s theory. Evolution, to begin with, clearly does not always move towards more specialized roles. The evolution of humans has moved in the opposite direction. Humans are generalists. The same is true of some other species.

There is, moreover, nothing in Darwin’s theory that should direct evolution to greater complexity over time. Actually the opposite: an engineer will always go with the simplest mechanism to perform the needed task. Fewer moving parts favours survivability, and so Darwinian evolution should on balance move from complexity to simplicity.

Nevertheless, what we all see in reality is the reverse: creation as a whole indeed seems to be moving over time towards greater complexity and, more importantly, greater consciousness. This includes the inanimate universe, to which the Darwinian theory of evolution simply does not apply.

Which amounts, really, to prima facie empirical proof of the existence of God.

I am less confident about discussing entropy. Biology is more my bag than physics. I suspect when Xerxes says entropy, what he really means is inertia. After all, his criticism of religion seems to be that it is too committed to order and stasis, not that it is dissolving into random disorder. And according to the theory of entropy, all change, being irreversible, is actually decay, a loss of energy that can never be recovered. Yet his argument is pro-change.

But if he means inertia, is it right to equate the lack of change with evil, or even indeed in simple terms with lack of progress? Only if change is always good. We know it is not. Our most dramatic physical examples of rapid change do not suggest creation or advancement to greater complexity, but destruction: a nuclear explosion, a wildfire, a hurricane, a corrosive acid. In terms of creation/destruction, inertia seems the lesser of two evils. If nothing new comes into being, what already is, is preserved. The opposite state of extreme change is chaos, in which nothing is.

Many of our highest values imply a lack of change, inertia. We value diamonds, gold, iron, true love, honesty, and Christmas precisely because they do not change.

So where are we? Evolution in the Darwinian sense is neither good nor evil. Evolution in the sense of creativity, of moving towards greater consciousness, is good. But inertia is not the opposite force. And inertia is not the same as either destruction or evil. And Xerxes seems to have the positions of science and religion reversed. Science cannot account for evolution in this sense; it knows only entropy. Religion can account for both.

Both science and religion change and build—evolve. Both are creative forces. Science changes more rapidly than religion. That is not evidence that it is more creative. Greater change does not equate to creativity, because as we have seen change can be either creative or destructive. The true measure of creativity—evolution if you prefer--is the fruits over time. “By their fruits you shall know them.” What human endeavour has been producing the most enduring and compelling artifacts in the three great fields that are the goals of all human endeavor: the Good, the True, the Beautiful?

It seems to me religion wins that competition knees down. To begin with, science cannot touch on two of those three values at all. Science has produced nothing in terms of morality, on which it is scrupulously disinterested. It is amoral. Its influence on beauty is indirect and ambiguous. It has generated technology that might then be employed to create art. It has at the same time generated the technologies Blake called “dark Satanic mills,” those others call aesthetically soulless, “Stalinist,” and some that others call “pollution” or “pillaging the earth”: plagues of ugliness, because of its general lack of interest in aesthetics. Its successes have been in material comfort.

Philosophers like Popper have argued that science also cannot establish truth, our third value. It only disproves, never proves. All its claims are provisional.

That makes it, although of obvious practical value, on balance, not terribly creative. A bit of a treadmill. A provisional, but not clearly an ultimate, good.

Religion, by contrast, has given us Notre Dame de Paris. And the civilization that surrounds it.

My Leftist Political Views

There has been a lot of crazy talk of late about everybody and his Aunt Matilda being suddenly “far right.” And of the far right and alt-right as being a dangerous and growing movement. So they say of Gavin MacInnes, and he has been banned from Patreon for his supposedly intolerable thoughts. So they say of Sargon of Akkad, and he too is now banned by Patreon. Yet to me, their views have seemed pretty centrist. MacInnes is just a comedian who tends to say things that are refreshingly politically incorrect, who is himself married to a native Indian woman; and Sargon is a  moderate liberal. Similarly, Jordan Peterson, or Lindsay Shepherd, both of whom always thought of themselves as on the left, have found themselves declared to be thought leaders for the far right.

Ok, so I did this test online, of my own views. It’s at Political Compass.

Turns out I am myself almost as close to the exact centre of the spectrum as I could be. Tending slightly to the libertarian and the left. Not on the right, let alone far right or alt-right. On the left.

But then, I watched Sargon of Akkad do the same test in a YouTube video, and he came out not that differently: somewhat more libertarian than me, and a bit over on the right, but still close to the centre.

So what gives? Is their compass broken?

Apparently not. The same site evaluates political parties, and it actually puts me to the left of the Canadian Conservatives or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton.

I think the contemporary left must be so out of touch that they are branding views in the political centre and even on the moderate left now as “far right,” and, worse, trying to silence them.

And one of the reasons they are trying to silence dissent is precisely how reasonable this dissent is. They do not want people to hear these voices, because they would be too likely to agree with them. In the meantime, largely as a result, the average submissive low-information voter has a completely false idea of what the right is actually saying.

It amount to an attempted coup. I hope for all of us they do not succeed.

The Left Is Not about Community

A left-leaning friend who shall this time remain nameless wrote a column, which I understood as offering the proposition that the left was all about “community,” while the right was all about “individualism.” I sent him an email arguing that the premise was false, and he wrote back only the simple sentence “No, I didn't say that.”

Rereading, I still think that is exactly what he said. He wrote, for example, “The alternative to community is individualism.” So far, so good--but it sets up the opposition. Then: “The right tends to takes a vigilante response. If you don’t like something, you take individual action against it -- the lone gunman who shoots up a newspaper, a night club, a concert, a school.” “By contrast, the so-called left knows that it needs government to control the corporations it doesn’t trust. So it has to take collective action.” “So the characteristic of the left is that it organizes.”

Even if it was not, it is certainly what I have heard many times from those on the left: the left is about community, the right is about individualism. Consider Obama's statement that “government is just our word for things we choose to do together.” 

The subtext, of course, is that “individualism” really means “selfishness.” With a mental image of the cartoon “greedy capitalist.”

"Organized big business interests."

I suspect that my friend's response really reveals that my points in rebuttal to this claim were strong enough that he did not feel able to counter them. So I think they may be worth posting here.

Because the premise is wrong. Edmund Burke, for example, was all about community and people helping one another in human solidarity. And he is considered a founder figure to most modern conservatives.

“Seems to me your association of community with the left and individualism with the right does not work on several levels. Beginning with the fact that you are quoting the ideal of Canada as a community of communities from Joe Clark, who was overall on the right of the Canadian spectrum. The response of the Liberals, the party to his left, at the time, was, in rough translation, 'like hell it is.' Note that small towns, real communities, “with lots of face to face interaction,” also actually tend to vote on the right; the big cities are more likely to be jammed with leftists, and leftists are more likely to congregate in the big cities. Where nobody knows one another. It would seem that either the right values community more than the left, or communities see their own values in the right more than the left.

Leftist ideologue?

I think Robert Reich [whom my friend quoted on this] is closer to the mark when he says that the right trusts corporations more than government, and the left trusts government more than corporations. The left thinks government is necessary to restrain corporations. The right thinks private enterprise is necessary to restrain government. But either a government or a corporation is a community in the basic sense. Neither is an individual. The essential difference is not community versus individual, but that a corporation is, for all participants, basically and theoretically a voluntary association, while being subject to a government is, by and large, a forced association—you can move, but within limits. That is a different issue, voluntary or forced, not community or individual. Or perhaps it is not. I think it could be argued that no forced association is a real community, on the grounds that any real community is based on love, not power.

You also mention, as examples of community, churches. Right. Perfect example. But any number of polls show that, the more people are involved in a local church, the more likely they are to vote on the right, and vice versa. I believe this is true as well of just about all other voluntary associations: service clubs like Rotary, amateur sports associations, charity groups, Scout troops, and so on. Think about it. Strong evidence that, in fact, community matters to the right, and not to the left.

You almost seem to suggest that the right is somehow in support of lone gunmen. That is, of course, outrageous. To begin with, lone shooters are themselves no more likely to be from the political right than from the political left. Indeed, I think historically, the left would predominate on that score. Sacco and Vanzetti were not Republicans. I guess you admit that in saying their politics do not matter. Second, it is the right, generally, that calls for more police and stricter law enforcement, presumably to prevent just such things. The left seems generally down on law enforcement agencies of all kinds. There are now calls on the left, for example, to abolish ICE. The right also tends to support tougher penalties for such crimes.

I suspect you are basing your claim here solely on the US issue of gun rights. This is not correct: the right's argument here is that more guns in private possession will prevent such incidents, or end them more quickly; it is not meant to promote them.

Again, the emphasis on 'law and order,' traditionally heard from the right, is the political position diametrically opposite to 'vigilante action.' Which, therefore, is probably more properly assigned to the left. Isn't it the left who are always talking about 'taking it to the streets'? And surely we are seeing just such “vigilante action” currently down south, with groups like Antifa resorting to violence in support of their preferred politics. No doubt factions on the right are capable of such misbehaviour at times as well; but that is not what we are seeing most often currently.

Perhaps there is a valid distinction to be made, and perhaps you are making it, in saying that the left organizes around single issues; perhaps indeed there is a contrast here. The left organizes around single political issues; that does seem to be right. The right, by contrast, organizes not primarily for politics, but for community. Churches, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, and service associations do not exist for political purposes. The left is by this standard again more individualistic: they live as individuals and apart except in the case of some common political interest. Not sure whether this holds up, but it looks right.

At the same time, it is important to point out that “community” is not without its own problems. Whenever you define any group as a community, you are also, automatically, defining everyone else as “other.” Nazi Germany was profoundly communitarian, as was Pol Pot's Kampuchea or Mao's China or Karadzik's Serbian Bosnia. So was the KKK.

Community Barbeque

It does seem that the left currently is far more favourable toward such “group identities,” such divisions into opposing factions, than the right. I do not think this is a good thing. And I do not think these are real communities, because they divide as much as unite people.

This is one vital reason why voluntary associations, like corporations, are better than enforced associations, like governments. The former is about love; the latter is about power. Keeping membership voluntary—on both sides—tends to prevent such problems. Because the “other” can become “one of us.” Note too that by this definition, the KKK, although non-governmental, or the Nazi party, were not voluntary associations: blacks or Jews or Catholics or immigrants could not join."

Some Ideas Are Just Bad Ideas

Antifa debating their position.

Good news seems to be coming thick and fast. The day before yesterday, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince reportedly made an agreement with the Vatican to allow the building of Christian churches.

With that, and now that women can drive, it almost makes me want to be back in the Kingdom.

Except that the money is no longer there. The price of oil is still way down. The US is now on track to be the world’s top exporter of oil. Aside from prompting KSA to open to the world, this chokes off funding to radical Islamic movements. It also cuts the funding that has enabled Vladimir Putin to engage in his foreign adventures in Syria and the Ukraine.

Before he was elected, Trump promised that, if they chose him, Americans would win so much, they would get tired of winning. Big talking blowhard, right?

Incredibly, he actually seems on track with that promise.

It is not just foreign affairs—although, in foreign affairs, we also have North Korea just recently calling suddenly for denuclearization and reunification. That’s quite a shift. And ISIS is now all but gone in Syria and Iraq.

Everyone has been worrying about traditional jobs all disappearing; it looks inevitable, giving the emerging technologies. Yet US unemployment just dropped to 3.9%, lowest since 2000. The biggest drop was among blacks and Hispanics.

Can Trump really be that good? It seems more likely that, in fact, Obama was that bad.

In her day Margaret Thatcher boldly said that the ideas of the left are “simply wrong.” On the evidence, it looks as though she was right, and is still right. The positions of the left are almost systematically wrong, naive, or unrealistic. For example, to take a recent example, believing that carbon taxes, by raising the cost of carbon, would mean we use less of it. Yet raising the minimum wage could have no effect on levels of employment. Or believing that one’s “gender” is purely a matter of choice, yet gender discrimination is real and a serious problem. After all, nobody chooses his or her gender...

It doesn’t seem just a matter of opinion, on which reasonable, moral, and sharp minds can differ. It seems to be logical nonsense and objectively demonstrable.

For thirty years, Ontario was run by a Tory provincial government, and Ontario government bonds were blue chip. In those days, we would grumble about blue laws, rent controls, and unnecessary government regulation; but there was no question at least that the place was well run from a managerial perspective. The provincial finances were always in blue chip territory. Then the Liberals got in, followed a cycle later by the NDP, and the provincial finances rapidly went sour. Now Ontario is a have-not province, with a staggering public debt.

The same phenomenon is seen across the US: there is a reason why the rust belt is in decline, and industries have all been moving to the sun belt. Check which party has been in power at the city and state level in either case for the past forty years.

Or look what happened to New York City when they finally, after many years, elected a relatively right-wing Republican mayor in Rudy Guiliani. The turnaround seemed almost miraculous―like Trump.

I offer an illustration that effected me personally. I was in Ontario, doing quite well as a technical writer and editor, running my own business, when, in 1990, the NDP government came in. They passed a law requiring that any company in the province with more than 50 employees must employ a certain percentage of women. This in an economy that was, due to other NDP policies, already contracting.

This made Ontario businesses in general less efficient and less competitive—employees could no longer be hired on merit. But it was especially devastating in my profession and in my industry. As everyone probably knows, qualified and talented female programmers, engineers, and technologists are thin on the ground. Yet high-tech firms had to somehow meet these quotas without getting wiped out by competition from elsewhere in the fast-moving, intensely competitive high-tech market.

The solution was obvious: take all technical writing in-house, and hire only women to do it. Given that women have, on average, better verbal skills than men, this was the one area where they were least likely to put the firm at a critical competitive disadvantage.

As a result, overnight, by government fiat, the field of technical writing in Ontario became open only to women.

I had to either change career or move. As it happened, I did both.

A terrible financial and personal loss for me; but also, a terrible loss of talent, competitiveness, and expertise to the provincial economy.

This largely explains political correctness. If you have good arguments, you welcome public debate. When you know your arguments and your policies cannot withstand scrutiny, you want to avoid any public debate.

How Extremist Are You?

I just took this opinion survey from CBC, and was a bit surprised to find myself right in the centre among all respondents. You might like to try.

Surprised, because I think Jordan Peterson, for the most part, is speaking common sense, and I think Milo Yiannopoulos is funny and inoffensive. Yet I am reliably told by professors at WLU that they are both just like Hitler.

My ranking might be skewed left by some of the questions. For example:

Agree or disagree: 

Canadians have a unique set of values that set them apart from the rest of the world.

My guess is that, had I answered “strongly agree,” their algorithm would put me over on the right. However, I must strongly disagree. There is no such thing as “Canadian values.” That is an offensive term, as offensive as speaking of “Aryan values.” Values are universal, or they are nothing. If values differ, for example, it would be impossible to objectively judge “Canadian values” as better than any other arbitrary set of values: Nazi values, perhaps. People either have values, or they do not. On the whole, in world terms, I say Canadians are unusually moral people. But that is not the question that the survey asked.

All immigrants can retain their cultural identities without being any less Canadian.

I had to somewhat agree. I suspect the algorithm puts that on the left. But I think it is true. Look, for example, at Leonard Cohen or Mordecai Richler: essential Canadian writers, but also deeply Jewish in their identities. And it is not just Jews who can do it. Dennis T. Patrick Sears is both a deeply Canadian, and a distinctly Irish, writer. There is a way to be both ethnically distinct and entirely Canadian. I has to do with not seeing your particular ethnicity as opposed to and isolated from the mainstream, but as a facet of it. Nothing is more truly Canadian than this tendency. We really are a mosaic, and it is our necessary destiny, thanks to French Canada. It is this tendency to get along and feel united in our diversity that we seem to be losing.

University and college officials should have the right to ban people with extreme views from speaking on campus.

I had to somewhat agree, which probably threw me towards the left again. The issue is religious schools, and the problem is not “extreme views.” There is no such thing, properly speaking, as an “extreme view,” and to the extent that there is, these are the very views you want to hear on a university campus: new and unfamiliar ideas. But a school with a religious charter must have the right to find certain views unacceptable, if they are heresy for that religion. Otherwise there is no meaning to the concept of a “religious school.” So it is necessary for religious freedom to allow such restrictions. Even if not religious, if a school has some statement of principles in its charter, it seems proper too for its officials to prohibit speakers who differ from these principles from using campus facilities. Support for the UN, universal human rights, liberal democracy, for example. Freedom of speech is not thereby infringed, because students have implicitly signed on to those principles by choosing voluntarily to attend the institution.

This would not apply in the recent controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University. There is nothing in WLU's charter or mission statement that would prevent the discussion of any issue current in the wider polis. In this case, the views were simply banned as an exercise of arbitrary power by a group of officials imposing their own views, in a public university.

Road signs across Canada should always be written in both English and French.

I have to strongly agree. This probably got me tagged as on the left. But the one part of Canada where this is not currently true is Quebec. I cannot fathom the attitude of those who object to seeing the other language on a sign or a cereal box. Doing so seems to me to simply fall in the category of common courtesy and neighbourliness. You ought to want to encourage it if only to promote tourism. Who does it harm?

Indigenous Peoples in Canada should be free to govern themselves.

I have to agree again, which again probably puts me on the left. Indigenous people have the same right to govern themselves that everyone has. They do this, in the first place, by participating in Canadian elections. They have the additional right to associate and to set up rules among themselves, just as anyone does by, for example, joining a Rotary Club. This is freedom of association. Nobody should stop them if they so desire. They even have the theoretical right to declare independence and become sovereign, just as we recognize that Quebec has this right. It would be a self-inflicted catastrophe for them if they did, but they have the right.

By the same token—and this is more important, but this question is not asked—every individual Indian equally has the right to walk away from any form of aboriginal government, and not suffer a loss of rights for it. Such associations, within Canada, must be voluntary—freedom of association. This is the pressing issue currently.

Francophones and Anglophones should be able to receive public services in their own language anywhere in Canada.

I had to somewhat agree. They ought to be able to receive services from the federal government in their own language. It seems to me impractical to expect services from provincial and municipal governments in either language where numbers do not warrant it.

On other questions, however, it seems to me I should register as on the right: no, we owe no more to the natives; no, it is not important to have more visible minorities in senior positions; I am “very proud” of Canada's history. No, rich provinces should not share with poor provinces (there is such a thing as moving for work). Yes, the effects of climate change are exaggerated. No there has been no cultural genocide of native people in Canada. No, people who were born male but identify as female should not be allowed to use women's washrooms (at least, not without some objective standard, like a surgical change or a change of status on their birth certificate; but such qualifications were not allowed by the question). No, people should not be allowed to cover their faces for religious reasons when receiving public services—but only because nobody has to cover their face for a religious reason. The claim that Islam does is a scam, and allowing it is only too likely to enable scams. Arab countries do not allow it, and we should not. If any religion did require this, the matter would be different. No quotas for women; quotas for women are discriminatory, as are quotas for “visible minorities.” No, white privilege is not a thing.

I begin to suspect that Canadians as a whole are not nearly as leftist as we are claimed to be, or as our “elites.”