If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
I think it’s worth considering whether Justin Trudeau’s entire career as Canada’s PM has been the Liberal Party’s dead cat bounce.
I’ve long thought Jean Chretien destroyed the Liberal Party by making the party structure dictatorial, entirely top-down, the leader getting to choose or refuse local candidates. This might have been convenient for the leader, but it cut the party off from the grassroots. No surprise that it drifted away from any base over the years, and began to listen only to echoes and its own elites.
That almost already killed it under Ignatieff. It was running on fumes. It has to take a bit of time to kill what had become the Natural Governing Party. That implies a lot of inertia. Even so, choosing Trudeau as leader looked like a desperation move, to keep those yellow dog Grit instincts alive by evoking the sainted memory of his father.
About a generation seems right for the death throes of such a large cultural artefact. You need a full generation of new voters to break the spell. Chretien left office in 2003.
And Trudeau the Lesser never did that well. He lost the popular vote in all but his first election, when he was a novelty and could make the matrons swoon. Against Scheer and O’Toole, both of whom chose the appalling strategy of trying to sell themselves as just like Trudeau. As soon as Canadians were offered, with Poilievre, a clear alternative, the wheels came off the little red bandwagon.
When it works, it works, but the life of a centrist party is always precarious. Maybe more suited to the Canadian temperament than most others, but it can easily be squeezed into oblivion by any passionate disagreement between left and right. The British Liberal Party died, as any real contender, in the 1920s. In Canada, centrist parties have been squeezed out in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
I predict that Justin Trudeau or the federal Liberal Party without him will lose the next election. Nor can they save themselves with any new leader. And I predict they will never return to power.
A certain sister of my acquaintance worries if she is guilty of the sin of pride. For usually, when she goes out to eat at some restaurant, she concludes she could have cooked the meal better herself at home. How likely is that?
Fairly likely, in fact. There is a reason so many restaurants offer “home cooked meals,” or call themselves “Mom’s.”
In the real world, it is hard to judge whether your idea that you could do better than some professional is a matter of pride, or simply true. Somebody, in the end, has to be the world’s best chef; and he cannot be accused of pride for thinking so.
Many people are falsely accused of pride out of envy. Anyone who is especially good at anything will be accused of pride. It is a way for those less competent to cope. I realized this back in the days of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian PM. He was constantly being accused of arrogance. It was obvious to me that he was not arrogant; he was just a lot smarter than the journalists questioning him, and was not prepared to pretend he was stupid for their benefit. Why does he have any such obligation?
And this, pretending to be dumb, is a difficult skill to master. Ronald Reagan pulled it off—but he was a trained actor. Donald Trump pulls it off, despite his Ivy League education, and it is the secret to his political success. In Canada, Jean Chretien had the knack, or Ralph Klein. Michael Ignatieff went down to defeat because he hadf not learned it. People hate those more competent than themselves, and will want to hurt them. Most often by calling them proud or arrogant.
But Adam could easily be accused of pride had he refused to take his wife’s advice and eat the damned apple. How dare he assume he knew better than she?
So people are about equally likely to underestimate or to overestimate their abilities, to be too proud of them or not proud enough of them, because the opinions of those around them are not a reliable measure.
We know in our hearts that this sort of pride, confidence in your own abilities, is not sinful. I remember some friend remarking kindly to my grandmother, “you must be proud of your children.” And I winced at her answer: “Of course not. Pride is a sin!” We know in our hearts that was a nasty bit of Pharisaism. Of course one should be proud of one’s legitimate accomplishments, and those of one’s children, or one’s nation. There is a passage in Yeats:
For Parnell was a proud man, No prouder trod the ground, And a proud man's a lovely man, So pass the bottle round.
We know pride, personal dignity, is a good. It is a form of integrity. The misunderstanding that Christian morality rejects this has been a common enough cause of souls going astray, making it seem a “slave morality,” in Nietzsche’s term.
William Blake taught the essential measure: “humble before God, not before men.” That is the only test. To be humble before the next guy you talk to has an even chance of being an idolatry. But one must always submit to the wisdom and the justice of God. You kneel to God; you do not kneel to tyrants, or your fellow man. You pray for guidance and for perspective.
The root of the current drive for censorship, “deplatforming,” cancel culture, and unfriending, which has destroyed so many lives and so many relationships, is simple and obvious. Too many people are lying; especially people in power. You never want to silence anything you believe is untrue. There is no drive to censor the claim that the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth. Conversely, you never want to end debate if you believe you are telling the truth. If you discover the earth goes around the sun, contrary to what others have assumed, your instinct is not to suppress the field of astronomy. It is to publish, present your arguments, and take the win.
Therefore, what we are not permitted to say is a reliable indicator of what is true.
An obvious current example is the drive to criminalize any claim that the Indian Residential schools in Canada were not genocidal, or that there are no mass graves of students.
I suppose I’d better not proceed to other examples. It is, after all, taking a risk. But you can find them for yourself.
Once one becomes committed to any one lie, there is a multiplier effect: truth in general begins to look threatening. You will want to restrict speech as a matter of principle. .Who knows otherwise what might slip out?
And underlying the commitment to a lie is a growing popular philosophy that we are gods and can decide for ourselves what we want to be true.
A thing what went around the internet some time ago: women asking their husbands and boyfriends how often they think of the Roman Empire. And being shocked to hear that men commonly think of it every day.
This is a good illustration of the difference between the male and female minds. We have, thanks to feminism, spent decades pretending that men and women are the same but for a few specific body parts. Otherwise feminism collapses: there may then be a good reason why there are more men in engineering, say, or higher management, and more women in nursing or secretarial positions.
Men think of the Roman Empire often, because it is the foundation of our civilization. Most notably, it is when and where Christianity emerged; but we also owe to the Romans much of our legal system, our languages, our writing system, our calendar, our customs, our political structures.
And men spontaneously take responsibility for keeping things on course, for society as a whole. Forget the Roman Empire, and we forget where we came from and where we are going. The ship drifts aimlessly onto the shoals.
Women do not have such worries. For them, he personal is the only political.
This is also why men can read maps, and women get lost. I used to do a little test in my classes: first, I would ask all the women, and only the women, to point North. They would have no idea. Then I would ask the men. Most would be able to do so.
Men have an internal compass in all matters, not just geography, pointing to absolute terms of reference. Women lack this. Exploring, women navigate by visible landmarks and asking directions. Their perceptions are purely situational and relative. Men will navigate by compass direction and absolute distances.
It is all of course designed this way, by God or nature, so than men and women are compatible; so they can form a permanent, mutually supporting union to nurture children. The man leads, and the women is the perfect “help-meet,” as Genesis prescribes.
Men are better in maths, and gravitate to maths, because math deals in absolutes. Women are better in language, and gravitate to language, because language is all about synchronizing with others.
As a result, it is a fundamental error to put women in leadership positions. With rare exceptions, they will almost immediately lose sight of the mandate and wander down primrose paths to unpredictable destinations. Their job may be to sell beer; instead, they will devote the company’s advertising budget to something like promoting transgenderism; or nicer offices for the staff.
To put women in leadership positions is, therefore, a way for any organization, nation or civilization to self-destruct.
This is of course why Saint Paul said women should keep silence in church. The Buddha similarly resisted allowing women to become mendicants, saying the dharma would deteriorate twice as fast as a result.
As always, there is something to be said for the wisdom of the ages.
Here’s a cheerful thought. Our current leaders seem to be the least competent and most corrupt in modern times. The elites seem to have gone mad. And yet—I have never been one to admire politicians. Those I genuinely admired in the past could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Bryce Mackasey, Eugene McCarthy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Men of genuine principle.
Yet there are suddenly a lot of public figures out there I genuinely admire, and would vote for with enthusiasm: Pierre Poilievre, J.D. Vance, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard.
I may be culturally prejudiced here. One thing I notice is that most of these figures are Irish and Catholic. All except Tulsi Gabbard.
One possible explanation for the strangely destructive behaviour of elites over the last few years is that they have calculated, rightly or wrongly, that with AI emerging, they simply do not need people any longer to do their bidding. The vast mass of humanity becomes excess baggage. Why not kill them off and have a better view from the cottage?
There is an obvious oxymoron in Donald Trump appearing as the “people’s champion,” defender of the little guy against the establishment. He is a famously rich man, the son of a rich man, a TV celebrity. Surely if anyone is part of the establishment, it is Donald Trump?
The anomaly is yet more dramatic in the case of Elon Musk: the world’s richest man has supposedly become our saviour against the forces of government and corporate censorship.
Or RFK Jr. Kennedy is a maverick bucking the establishment? He is, after all, the American equivalent of royalty.
Surely we are being played? Surely this is all a sham, controlled opposition? How can we trust these guys to go against their class interest?
No; there is reason here. These are the only people who can stand against the machine.
Jefferson, the inventor of American democracy, argued that it relied on the bulk of Americans being freeholders, “yeoman farmers.” That meant they were not too dependent on the system; they were relatively able to resist authority without losing their livelihood. They could bar their front gate and still feed and shelter their family.
Especially if armed. It has been cogently argued that democracy emerged first in England because of the invention of the English longbow. It meant every English yeoman had a weapon that could pierce a suit of armour. The local nobleman could not run roughshod over his hearth. He needed to negotiate consent.
It has been observed that nations generally become functioning democracies at about the point when the GDP per capita reaches 10,000 USD. At that level, a bourgeoisie has usually developed with enough independent resources to go to the mattresses against an authoritarian government, and stand a better than even chance of winning.
In present days we have an elite, an essentially fascist coalition of government and big business, trying to hold power and extent their control through the new technologies. They can and will destroy the career and livelihood of anyone who breaks ranks and opposes them. They can and will “deplatform,” revoke licenses, refuse to graduate, prosecute capriciously or selectively, get you fired, attack your marriage, seize your children, take your house, send for “reeducation,” seize or freeze your assets, for dissent.
As Jefferson foresaw, but with raised stakes, the only people who can stand up against this are those so wealthy, so popular, or, in the case of women, so beautiful, that they can’t be crushed: the Joe Rogans, the Scott Adamses, the J.K. Rowlings, the Tulsi Gabbards, the Kennedys, the Trumps, the Musks.
Even they are taking a great risk. They may miscalculate. The powers were able to take out Conrad Black. They took out John McAfee. They may have taken out Alex Jones. They are trying to assassinate Donald Trump.
This shows how high the stakes are.
And this is a reason we must reject governments and political parties determined to go after “the rich”; just as we must fear governments and political parties that go after religion and the church. Whatever their faults, we actually need the richest among us to protect our freedoms.
At about the same time he is promoting the heresy of indifferentism, Pope Francis has also said that he cannot choose between the evils of Trump’s platform and that of Harris in the current US presidential election.
“Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don't know. Both are against life, be it the one that kicks out migrants, or the one that kills children."
This is a clear example of false moral equivalence. Francis is saying that to expel an intruder from your home is morally equivalent to murder.
This is obviously wrong; it amounts to an attempt to justify abortion.
Is it even wrong in the slightest to resist illegal immigration or to deport migrants?
Acts 17: 26 says it is God’s plan that nations and peoples have borders:
“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.”
One doesn’t have the right to immigrate any more than one has the right to live in another man’s home.
It is not plausible that Francis does not know this.
It is increasingly obvious that in our times we are fighting a war of good versus evil. The masks are off, and it is no longer a matter of people of good will coming to different conclusions.
Pope Francis just said the following to the children in Singapore:
“All religions are paths to reach God. They are—to make a comparison—like different languages, different dialects, to get there. But God is God for everyone. If you start to fight saying 'my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn't', where will this lead us? There is only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christians; they are different ways to God."
This is, straight up, the heresy of indifferentism. It is not plausible that the Pope does not understand this. The Pope is a heretic.
Of course one is Catholic because one is convinced that Catholicism has more of the truth than other religions. Otherwise what is the point of having a Church? What is the point of having a Pope? What is the point of Christianity? Why didn’t we all remain pagans or Jews? Were the martyrs just bigoted fools to die for the faith?
Yes, all religions are paths to God, and all major religions are largely true. Given a good God, it must be so. It must be possible to get there as a Hindu or a Jew, with sincerity and effort. That is the doctrine of invincible ignorance. But consider the different religions as paths up a mountain. Not all paths up a mountain are equally straight. Not all paths get you all the way, even if they go in the same general direction. Some paths will prove to be impasssible higher up.
The analogy of language, which Francis uses, suggests all paths are equally serviceable; for that is the general view among linguists about languages. Thery all do the job. No one dares say English is a better language than French.
Moreover, the teaching of the Church has always been, “no salvation outside (or without) the Church.” And Jesus said “no one comes to the father except through me.” Francis must reconcile his claims with these doctrines, and I do not believe he can. He cannot be indifferent to truth claims.
Donald Trump’s great talent as a politician and a leader is that he does. It is like magic. Pierre Poilievre does too.
Lots of people have criticized Trump for saying, during the recent debate, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs, and family pets. Kamala Harris laughed at him in split screen as he said it. The moderator stepped in to deny it was happening. Warren Kinsella and Ben Shapiro and many others saw this as a serious misstep by Trump. Kinsella said it made Trump look ridiculous.
I think we see, even just a couple of days later, how smart the reference was. It is all over the Internet, in song, meme, and dance.
The best way to make a point is with an image. The best image to make a point is a dramatic one; a shocking one or a ridiculous one. Trump knows this.
People who do not understand rhetoric, repelled by the shocking image, object to it instinctively. It makes them uncomfortable. Hence the blowback from the moderator, Shapiro, or Kinsella. “You can’t say that!”
It is not the rhetorician’s job to make anyone feel comfortable. Comfortable is boring and forgettable. It is to get his point across.
The image of foreign-looking people eating family pets is perfect because it makes people very uncomfortable. The more so because it has a strong emotional pull. People love their pets, usually more than other people. Good writers know that the perfect way to make a reader sympathize with their character forever is to show them being kind to a cat or dog in the opening pages. Or to make the reader hate a character, show them kicking a dog.
Trump may also have, at a blow, won back all the childless cat ladies.
And we have the video, in split screen, of Harris laughing at the claim. She’s laughing at cats and dogs being killed and eaten? She has identified herself in many minds as the villain.
And the name of the town is Springfield? The same as in The Simpsons—a name chosen because every state in the union has a town named Springfield. It is perfectly generic. And Ohio? It is everyone’s home town.
This could happen you, member of the audience, any day now. Your dear pet Mittens or Snoopy is not safe.
True or not, it is a perfect image to express the growing general alarm over high levels of immigration and lack of assimilation. It crystallizes it and fixes it in the mind.
Along with all the memes and TikTok videos, It has also set off a general investigation all over the internet to find out if the claim is true—making the issue of mass immigration the focus of discussion for days or weeks to come.
And pulling up lots of evidence that it is indeed true.
As the evidence piles up that it is true, the image of Harris laughing at it looks like callousness. She doesn’t care. She’s fine with people killing Fido. And the moderators too are shown to be the bad guys.
Trump is great at this. His image of a wall across the southern border was similar. Give people a concrete image: a wall. Build the wall.
So is the story of his showing the leader of the Taliban a photo of his own house. Make it concrete, make it visual, make it dramatic. Trump understand this. People think and especially people feel in images.
Trump also knows enough to repeat basic points, rather than getting bogged down in details. Political wonks object to this; to lack of details. But rhetoricians and ad men know the way to convince is to stress one point—the “unique selling proposition.” Too much detail, too many reasons, loses the sale.
We ought to use the wisdom of rhetoric the classroom as well. We deliberately reject it there, and in doing so we are missing completely the essence of educating, which is to make the lesson memorable. What you do not remember, you have not learned. Teachers and educational bureaucrats instead instictively reject anything that might make a lesson memorable. They keep everything as bland and forgettable as possible.
Back in the Seventies, the US government funded a massive survey to find which teaching techniques might improve results in the public schools. I think twenty different approaches were approved, and tested against each other and against a control group, in classrooms all over the US. All but one of the new techniques came from the Ed Schools, the educational experts. And all of them failed—all actually did worse than the control group. They were positively harmful. The one that turned out to be better, “ Direct Instruction,” was developed not by an Ed School, but by an advertising man.
But this was ignored. The results of the massive study were buried. The ed schools and the ed establishment were too powerful. We went with the methods proven to fail.
I hear Direct Instruction is currently being introduced in the Philippines, however. I have had my own students in Qatar, who have experienced it, demand it. I suspect it is being used elsewhere in Asia.
Another example of the value of rhetoric in education: you may have heard of Khan Academy. Short videos online that explain concepts in the school curriculum. It started with math, but now includes a variety of subjects. Everyone now seems to be using it.
Salman Khan, who created it, is an advertising man. He knows how to present.
While the usual public school classroom just has students break into small groups and stare at one another.
Today is 9-11. Everyone remembers where they were on this day in 2001. It is one of the great inflection points in modern history, a day on which the world changed. Before 9-11, Muslim terrorism was not a thing. There was no Department of Homeland Security. Boarding a plane or crossing the US border was a relatively simple process. There were not metal detectors everywhere.
I have seen the argument recently that 9 – 11 inspired the new aggressive atheism. It gave many the ides that religion, or “extremism,” or believing in anything, was the root of all evil.
It also threw globalism in to reverse. Opening all doors to foreign influence and foreign cultures turned out to mean something more than a wider selection of restaurants and colourful ethnic dances in the multiculturalism festival.
And of course it led to a generation of war, in Afghainstan and Iraq.
I noticed that before 9-11, everyone was opposed to honouring soldiers and the military. After 9-11, soldiers were heroes.
What other such inflection points have there been in my own lifetime?
The first one has to be the Kennedy assassination. That seemed like the death of an era in which America was universally admired. Europe had messed up badly, but America was the great hope. The war was won, we had defeated the dragon. Sure, there was the Soviet Union, and the overhanging threat of nuclear war. But we at least had confidence in who the angels were, and who the devils were, and some evidence that angels win in the end.
The Kennedy assassination ended all that. Evil had won after all.
One almost immediate result was the death of the folk boom. Folk music was too innocent, optimistic, and socially engaged. In came the angrier and more self-centred electric music, the Beatles and the Stones and Blonde on Blonde. In came the drugs and the idea of turning on and dropping out: we gave up on “the system” and trusting authorities.
The other great inflection point was the fall of the Berlin Wall; 1989. Although this was mostly a symbol for the more drawn-out collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The bipolar world we had taken for granted was suddenly gone. People rather absurdly declared the “end of history.”
Lesser inflection points are perhaps the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1980, corresponding with the release of the Iran hostages; that is certainly an event burned into my memory. Perhaps by the same token the election of Trump in 2016. Perhaps the election of Pope Francis in 2013; perhaps that of John Paul II in 1978. Perhaps the War in the Falklands, which established Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady and signalled the returned vitality of Britain.
And perhaps too, although it was a couple of years instead of a day, the Covid pandemic. People any more tend to date things pre-Covid or post-Covid, the way they used to date things either pre-9/11 or post-9/11.
Everybody is expecting Donald Trump to win he big debate this evening. I think this is dangerous for Trump. Expectations for him ae too high. Harris will have to be really awful to be seen to have lost.
To begin with, this debate will naturally automatically be compared with the last one, against Biden. So if Harris can avoid actually drooling on stage, she will look good by comparison.
Harris has a reputation as a bad debater, because of her epic failure against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. This low expectation is automatically to her advantage: success in these debates is usually about exceeding expectations. And the low expectations may be unwarranted. Harris did well enough in a VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020; there is no reason to think ger skills have declined since then. And she is a lawyer and experienced prosecutor: the skills needed for that are debating skills.
Trump has a reputation for being deadly in debate. But he can’t use his best weapons against Harris: the sharp put-downs. Because Harris is a woman, and a minority woman at that, she gets special privilege. You can’t punch a woman hard, or you look like a bully. This is the reason I thought the Democrats should have gone with Tulsi Gabbard in 2020: Trump is weakest against a woman. Granted, he was able to debate Hillary Clinton effectively; but nobody really believes Hillary Clinton is a woman.
So I expect Harris to at least hold her own.
Trump’s hope must be that she chokes under the pressure. There are signs she has trouble handling pressure. But they can dope her up, can’t they?
Jagmeet Singh just pulled the plug on the NDP-Liberal pseudo-coalition.
This is as I predicted: he had to cancel it a decent interval before the next scheduled election, in order to give voters any reason to vote NDP instead of Liberal. He will now, to prove his bona fides, need to vote against the Liberals now in any plausible no-confidence motions.
This need not bring down the Liberal government. They could be kept in power by the BQ without the NDP.
But given the current polling, it probably will. The latest seat projections show the BQ becoming the official opposition, and both they and the NDP picking up 16 seats. So everyone but the Liberals has an incentive to force an election now.
I said some time ago that the only hope for America, and for the West, was a religious revival. It was for God to step in.
I think he’s doing it.
Apparently, according to recent polling, the proportion of Christians is growing again in the US, and the proportion of atheists declining. This reverses a trend since the 1960s.
We are seeing celebrity after celebrity publicly convert: Candace Owens, Joe Rogan (partly), Jordan Peterson, Stuart Brand, Ayan Hirsi Ali.
I think this is largely a reaction to Islamism. People are coming to realize that the values of liberal democracy and human rights have a specifically Christian foundation, and that secular humanism has no response to Islamism. Christianity is the only adequate response.
It is also a reaction to the New Atheism. Inadvertently, Dawkins and the horsemen reintroduced the arguments for the excistence of God by reviving the argument explicitly. Making more people aware that the arguments for God’s existence are philosophically stronger than the case for atheism. We have seen a renaissance in Christian apologetics.
At the same time, the msterialist attempt to discredit religion and replace it with the great god Science is collapsing. Darwinian evolution seems no longer tenable; it was with Darwin that the notion began that religion and science were opposed. Physics now argues for a beginning to the universe and a design. Life could not have happened by chance. The social sciences, most directly invented as a replacement for religion, are being discredited, partly by the scandal of unreproducible results, partly because of the growing problems of addiction and mental illness since we handed our souls over to this approach, partly because they are so obviously at variance now with common sense and the physical senses as, for example, to endorse transgenderism. The collapse of the Covid coverups adds further momentum to the retreat from the scientistic idol.
Also at the same time, it is increasingly evident, I think, to the conscience of the average man and woman, that the world is dividing into camps of good and evil; and religion is on the side of good, irreligion evil. That polarization is shown recently by the swing of honest leftists like Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Jimmy Dore, and RFK Jr. over to the right, where they find themselves hobnobbing with the religious.
That this all seems to be happening at once suggests the hand of the divine. Even before noticing that new and powerful evidence is coming out that the Shroud of Turin is authentic, and that its authenticity was deliberately suppressed by the secularists back in the 1980s. And eucharistic miracles are popping up all over, and uncorrupt corpses.
Not to mention Trump’s miraculous survival of an assassination attempt, eerily reminiscent of one Washington survived at the nation’s founding.
The latest theme among commentators is how Kamala Harris is now winning the US Presidential election. Right-wing commentators are alarmed, and are saying the Trump campaign is on the back foot.
I think this is largely driven by the need to have something new to talk about. And this is just the inevitable bump of excitement any candidate gets when they are nominated.
I expect the next story to be how the Harris campaign is crashing and burning. That should hit by election day.
People are not focused on Harris and Walz yet. There is so much material there for opp research and memes. And the Trump campaign has lots of money to put it out.
Trump is relatively restrained so far at attacking Harris. His tack is just that she is too radically left-wing. I think he is right. Because she is a woman and of darker skin tone, the minute he says anything mocking, as he does so well, he will be declared a racist, a sexist, and a bully. It is best to hold back and let her destroy herself. And let the independent commentators and meme makers do the rest.
An old saying has it that a happy family is the responsibility of the wife. There is perhaps wisdom in this. We know, that in North America, for example, women are far more likely than men to initiate a divorce.
This also seems to be the wisdom of the ages as reflected in myth. It is Eve, after all, who upsets the happy family situation in Eden. It is Delilah. It is Pandora in Greek myth who opens the box. Or Psyche who turns on the light.
This is also the common wisdom of fairy tales. The problem usually comes with the introduction to the family of a wicked mother, or stepmother—not a father or stepfather. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel.
Women intrinsically have greater power in the family, because they are the ones in control of the premises: they are, in the traditional arrangement, always there. The father and husband is more in the role of a guest. They are also in more constant and intimate contact with the children. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. If they want to use this power, they can easily alienate the children from their partner.
It is also, broadly, feminism, the women’s movement, that is responsible for the current collapse of the North American family.
It follows, if there is a dysfunctional family, “cherchez la femme.” Most often it is because a mother plays favourites. Granted, there are cases of abusive husbands. But logic and the wisdom of the ages suggests that it is more often the wife and mother, even if this is covert, behind the scenes. Every Narcissus needs his Echo. Men are like dogs. They tend naturally to adore women and seek to make them happy.
Aristotle notes that tyrannies establish themselves when a government suppresses all centres of power or authority in a society other than itself. This allows the ruler to dictate without opposition.
Aside from governments that directly suppress opposition movements, we should, therefore, beware a government that is opposed to private enterprise or the wealthy. We should fear a government that is unfriendly to organized religion. We should beware a government that seems to be deliberately impoverishing its own people, for this gives them less time or resources to form opposition movements. We should fear governments bringing in large groups of foreigners. That reduces democratic controls and controls of social traditions and conventions on their actions. We should indeed fear any government hostile to local cultural traditions and conventions—these are checks on their power. We should suspect any government that begins to tinker with elections. We should beware a federal government that seeks to reduce or the powers of local authorities within a federation. We should beware a government that seems to want to control or suppress independent media.
And there you have the Trudeau Liberal platform; and that of the modern left generally.
The stock markets are crashing today. People are talking major recession. To follow Covid lockdowns, rampant inflation, and war in Europe.
If they are right, this should be the final nail in the coffins of Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US, and Justin Trudeau in Canada. They were set to lose anyway, but this could be historic, like RB Bennet or Herbert Hoover in their day. The left might be discredited for a generation. It may also be lucky for Farage in the UK and LePen in France that they were snookered, in part by political machinations, in the recent elections: that leaves the left holding this bag.
Meantime, in his most recent column, written before today’s news from the world’s stock markets, Xerxes the leftist columnist already comes out hard against “the system.” He quotes left-wing Anglo-Irish blogger Paul Kingsnorth: “We like to believe that we live in independent nation states run by leaders of our choosing, but this is a mirage designed to disguise the reality: The Machine is a giant, global, digitized web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think.”
Strikingly, this is exactly what the right is saying. This is just what Trump and Farage and Poilievre have been saying. To be fair, it is not just the left that has shifted. A few years ago, the right would have resisted blaming transnational corporations. Not any more. Both left and right are now alarmed at elite powerbrokers and the trend to globalization.
Of course, in the recent past, as soon as some leftist raises this alarm, he is declared by the left to be “far right”—see RFK, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. But even if this continues, if the shadowy elites sustain their control over the Democratic Party or the Liberals and NDP, the end result will be the same. The people are uniting against the powers that be.
Kingsworth and Xerxes think the problem is that things are getting more complicated due to technology, so that there is a greater distance between the elites and the common people. I think the exact opposite is happening: the new technology is levelling things, removing the need for an elite, and all its advantages. And making it easier for he people to seize control.
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