It is that culture that, more than anything, was responsible for their defeat. To be sure, the party ran a terrible campaign — listless, directionless, divisive — but the campaign was a product of the same culture, and in any case the election was lost long before the campaign began. It wasn’t the economy that condemned them to just 32 per cent of the vote (second-worst, for the parties of the right, since 1968), and it wasn’t their policies. It was what the party, at its most senior levels, had become: the values, the attitudes, the way it talked, how it acted, its overall approach to politics and government, all of which betrayed a deep, unrelenting, almost poisonous cynicism.
It is unclear whether the party understands what has just happened to it, or rather what it has just done to itself: for seldom was a loss more self-inflicted. The post mortems in the press are full of the inevitable anonymous finger pointing about divisions within the campaign team, or the failings of their voter identification model, or the lack of adequate screening of candidates.
It isn’t about that. Nor is it about some inescapable 10-year timetable that dictates voter fatigue with incumbents. It isn’t even about Stephen Harper, at least in the trivial sense that people “just didn’t like” him. It’s true that Harper is not the warmest person you’re liable to meet. But Canadians did elect him, more than once, until he and his party made their presence in power intolerable.
Only four years ago, indeed, it appeared the country was on the verge of a realignment; the new Conservative coalition, of the West and Ontario, seemed built to last. That the Tories should have thrown it all away since then is a remarkable testament to what arrogance, paranoia and an obsession with control can do. There have been worse defeats, it is true: the party has a base to rebuild on. But unless the culture changes, it should not count on being returned to power any time soon.
We should be clear where the roots of that culture lie. The nastiness of Tory politics under Harper, the mindless partisanship, the throttling of backbench MPs, are not outgrowths of conservatism. They were born, rather, of its repudiation: of the decision to sterilize the new party of any ideological convictions, the better (it was supposed) to remove any obstacle to its electability.
Politics fills a vacuum: in the absence of substantive differences with your opponents, partisanship takes its place. If, what is more, a party no longer stands for much as a party, then its policies will default to whatever the leader decides. And the leader, having been given that power and that assignment — win at all costs — can tolerate no deviations from MPs still under the impression that the party harbours some lingering principles.
There has been much talk of how Red Tories were made to feel unwelcome in the party. But the truth is no sort of conservative could really feel the Harper government represented them: not fiscal conservatives, $150 billion in debt later; not social conservatives, forbidden even to say the word “abortion”; certainly not old-time Reformers, the sort of people who went into politics to make governments and leaders more accountable, not less.
The only party faction that was really served was the yahoo faction, the “toxic Tories” as a friend calls them, to whom this government truckled and whose loyalty was rewarded in turn. MPs who were willing to say the opposite of what they believed, or believe the opposite of the facts, were promoted; those who were not found themselves out of cabinet, or indeed out of the party.
The people around Harper, always convinced of their own cleverness, grew drunk on their own cynicism. Having made the initial compromise with their principles — on policy — they found the next much easier, and the next, until they became contemptuous of anything resembling a principle, or anyone still able to discern a line — political, personal, ethical — he would not cross.
All criticism only confirmed the rightness of their position: the press were out to get them, the bureaucracy was out to get them, the courts were out to get them — and the academics were even worse. Within the party, the circle of loyalty grew narrower and narrower, even as the party itself left broader and broader swaths of society outside it: the young, the university-educated, women, even the minorities it had been so eager to court.
The damage that has been done is far greater than this defeat. It isn’t just the Conservatives who have lost favour with the public: it’s conservatism. It has been so long since Conservatives put forward any bold or radical policy ideas, they have gotten out of the habit; not having heard ideas from that quarter for so long, the public may be forgiven for concluding either that they don’t exist, or that they are so far beyond the pale as not to be worth considering.
Conservatives need to rediscover what it is they stand for, and having done so, stand for it. At the same time, they need to sever themselves from the bullying, sneering culture of the Harperites, of the low brow and the lower blow. It should not be exclusively a liberal or left-wing idea that opponents are to be treated with respect, not insults; that learning and science are to be valued, not derided; that politics should bring people together rather than divide them. Yet, incredibly, that is where we have come to.
A politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed: If I’m not mistaken, that is the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau.
Original Article
Source: news.nationalpost.com/
Author: Andrew Coyne
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