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.