No Canadian Tea Party

Those who paint the rise of Canada's right as a "tea party" movement are missing the point.

For months now, I’ve been reading a lot of “punditry” about the alleged influence of the U.S. tea party movement on Canadian politics. Out East, at least, this hysterical yammer probably reached its nadir last fall with the election of Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto. Never mind the endless cheap shots about the man’s girth and reputed coarseness of manner; much of this “analysis” darkly hinted that the Ford phenomenon was somehow propelled by the fascist rabble agitating things south of the border.

This may have been inevitable: Consider the equally fatuous commentary about the tea partiers from within the rarefied ranks of the U.S. commentariat itself. A while back, for example, I attended a speech by New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore. Lepore was promoting her book on the subject entitled The Whites of Their Eyes – itself a sufficiently loaded title to give you an immediate sense of her take on all this without having to so much as crack the spine. In a nutshell, here’s her thesis: The tea partiers wave the U.S. Constitution about with a kind of religious fervour (which is true enough – it’s the flippin’ U.S. Constitution). This therefore makes all tea partiers a horde of religious nutjobs. It then follows that the tea partiers have corrupted the secular principles upon which the constitution is based, and that, as a consequence, they are all utterly offside with the predominant narrative of U.S. political culture, and are therefore a bunch of dangerous, ignorant oafs – or worse.

Now, leave aside the fact that the original Boston Tea Party was rooted in a thoroughly secular, legitimate, and principled proposition best expressed by the slogan, “No taxation without representation” – a notion that anchors U.S. political culture to this very day. Set aside, too, the reality that movements like this one stand a good chance of being hijacked by genuine crackpots for their own purposes, as often happens when a civil, mainstream political movement offers a platform for crazies to exploit (see anarchist mayhem versus perfectly harmless labour movement parades, G20).

None of this changes the point, which speaks more to Lepore’s own prejudices than those of her subject: The tea party does not cut against the grain of American history at all, but rather against the thoroughly distorted “truths” expounded by the cosseted chatterers of the leftist academy.

Segue to Toronto, circa 2010: An overweight “loser” in a bad suit from the benighted suburbs is inexplicably elected mayor, and the End Times are upon us, judging by the foaming reaction of a number of columnists who shall not be named here if I’m ever to see this thing published. According to such columnists, it has nothing to do with the overwhelming frustration of Toronto citizens terrified by swarms of beady-eyed panhandlers while jammed in endless traffic as the trash piles up in neighbourhood parks and councillors throw themselves star-studded “retirement parties” on our coin, while the ticket-taker snoozes at the kiosk on a filthy subway platform. Heavens, no! It’s all about reactionary “white rage” and – get this – the general coarsening of the civic square. And it’s all fuelled by those dreadful American tea partiers thrashing about down there, waving their bullet-riddled Old Testaments!

(As an aside, readers of such drivel who might have been inclined to agree with Ford – never mind actually vote for the man – were themselves left feeling tarred by this torrent of nonsense, an “unintended consequence,” as they say, of insulting huge swaths of the electorate that only served to push this uncouth troll across the finish line ... )

Now Gaia forbid, goes this line of discourse, that such an insurrection by the great unwashed might now threaten the Natural OrderTM up the street at the Ontario Legislature, where Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is daily thrashed in the press for appealing to “Ontario families.” Never mind the fact that this admittedly exclusionary phrase is a common talking point for both Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. No, it’s this Hudak fellow who seeks to appeal to our savage impulses with all that sinister talk of reducing the size and cost of public administration and generally nudging government out of the nanny-state racket.

And don’t get me started about the federal scene, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already been inextricably linked, in a book that not long ago generated acres of newsprint, to the imminent onset of raining fishes, snow in the Sinai, and all manner of Freemasonry and secret handshakes. (See Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor, if you please ... )

Prime Minister Harper. Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Hudak. Saskatchewan/CCF Heartland Premier Brad Wall (who, incidentally, is the most popular provincial leader in the country by a wide margin). Toronto Mayor Ford. Wherever will it end? What could possibly be next? How about former member of the National Assembly of Quebec for the Parti Québécois François Legault, who unabashedly bills himself “a businessman first” while decrying his province’s lingering embrace of victimhood, never mind bankruptcy? According to the polls, he would command a majority tomorrow with no platform, no party organization, no fundraising apparatus, and no slate of candidates. Another corporatist humiliation!

Where does all this place the centre in our political life today? In my view, it depends on how hard the leftist commentariat seeks to slander and marginalize those on the right. Locate that supposedly “reactionary” point on the pendulum of our public conversation, and that’s where you’ll find “the new centre.”

Origin
Source: The Mark