EKOS Politics has a poll from Thursday of last week that shows the Conservatives and the Liberals in a statistical tie in terms of current voter intentions. While an election isn’t immanent and so I’d be careful about putting money down on these numbers, it is a pretty remarkable turn of events given that Harper and the Conservatives were in majority government territory as recently as October of last year.

As EKOS President Frank Graves notes,

For those who have been speculating as to whether Canadians really care about the ‘obscure’ issue of prorogation the evidence is now incontrovertible[.] Canadians have noticed, they do care and this is having a very negative impact on Conservative fortunes.”

The past couple of months have just been an utter PR nightmare for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and there inability to address Canadians on issues of import in regards to their government is as much a condemnation as anything else they’ve bungled lately. What I find most interesting is that throughout the Afghan detainee scandal and the prorogation of Parliament, Harper et al have seemed to rely on this notion that “average Canadians” don’t care about these issues and the more they lean on that messaging, the more it hurts them.

As Graves notes further in the release, this hasn’t resulted in a noticeable electoral boon to the Liberals, which Graves attributes as a “comfort” to Harper. I disagree, not insofar as I think that this polling indicates an immanent Liberal resurgence, but rather because I don’t think this trend is a blip on the Conservative’s radar. It seems clear that many Canadians feel as though they have been treated with disregard and contempt by their governing party and that sentiment in unlikely to fade given that Harper’s movements over the past two months have, by my lights, belied a contemptible attitude towards his fellow Canadians.

In short, the PR disaster here is less about mis-messaging on key issues as it is about communicating what Harper actually thinks on those issues vis-a-vis his fellow Canadians.

In that regard, I think Harper and the Conservatives have a much more daunting hurdle to clear here than a lot of Canadian analysts are acknowledging. That’s true in no small part because it seems as though a decent chunk of Canadians get the sincerity of that messaging and are honestly offended by it. But those same Canadians aren’t headed in the Liberal’s direction in droves and so a clear alternative has yet to emerge from the frey.

That being the case, I think the NDP need to figure out what it’s going to do in the proceeding months to convince Canadians that they are that alternative and so the next little while is pretty key for them. The NDP has been faced with these moments before and has yet to really capitalize on them, so I have little evidence for being optimistic about their chances — but a chance I do believe they have.

My own advice would be to stop tacking to the centre in an attempt to wear as an off-white version of the Liberals. Canada is honestly lacking a left-of-centre party with some soul, integrity and an air of trustworthiness. The Liberals like to sell themselves as such, except that no one is yet buying the “soul” “integrity” and “trustworthy” parts just yet. Such a strategy might not lead anywhere near forming government territory, but then, neither has anything else the NDP has done to date.

What it might do, though, is break that rouhgly 15% barrier with which the Party has been struggling for years, which would be a step in the right direction for the NDP and, concurrently, Canadians, I think. What I’d really like to see the NDP do is take the first step in dropping the pantomime of political posturing around what the various parties think Canadians want and just be the parties they are. We have a multi-party system for a reason, it’s time the major parties acknowledged that fact.

By Kyle (of Vogue Republic)

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

[Read more →]

It’s interesting to watch how conservatives and liberals treat each other.  How they categorize one another.  I’ve tried to distinguish between the two – since it seems they each have different methods of dehumanizing the other side.  I’ve boiled it down to the title of this post: caricatures and demons.

Conservatives demonize liberals, and liberals caricaturize conservatives.  And perhaps I’m picking at nits with this, but there does seem to be a difference between the two.

In popular conservative myth, liberals “hate America” and long for some neo-Stalinist socialism.  Liberals are painted as weak and yet entirely capable of running a massive state/media coup of the nation in order to redistribute wealth and impose draconian regulations and taxation on honest, hard-working Americans.  And the motivation for this?  Dread “multi-culturalism” and America hatred for hatred’s sake.

Liberals, on the other hand, act as though the loudest and most verbose of their critics in fact represent not only the conservative movement, but the very philosophy upon which conservatism draws.  Certainly the phrase “conservatism is dead” is second only to its younger cousin “rock is dead” in frequency of use.  And second, only because “rock is dead” makes for a far better t-shirt.  This supposition is drawn, often as not, from a caricaturization of the movement or philosophy based mainly on its chest-thumping class of pundits.  If Rush Limbaugh is a conservative, after all, then certainly this is how all conservatives must be – ergo, conservatism is dead.  (Man cannot live on Rush alone, after all!) [Read more →]

I decided on my blogging break that I spend too much time focused on US politics and not enough time on the state of affairs in my own backyard. So I’ve decided to start a series with running commentary on Canadian politics as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s — though commenter Katherine had, a while back, opined for a Canadian League, and other Gents have expressed interest. [Read more →]

Reading Andrew’s take down of the inimitable Michael Goldfarb today (apparently Fridays are Michael Goldfarb Day for me), I was struck with an insight about why I find myself so much more drawn to closely analyzing the goings on of American conservatism than American liberalism.

Andrew writes,

When you are a propagandist, these caveats – and the whole idea of thinking out loud in order to understand a foreign culture better – are anathema. And that’s why you end up shutling between “journalism” and being a spokesman for party campaigns.

There is a complete and utter lack of fear present in Andrew’s analysis about calling out the hypocrisies that he perceives as active within a movement and a party in which he was once fairly heavily invested.  I believe completely that such such ruthlessness, so long as it is carried out with an spirit of constructivism, is badly needed in America’s current political discourse.

Of course, Andrew isn’t the only one engaging this mission by any stretch of the imagination, and while he remains one of my favourite bloggers and thinkers, he isn’t even necessarily the most effective at it, either. What Andrew and other dissident conservatives are, though — at least to my mind — are honest brokers in the process who stand to unleash a certain kind of fire power on a sinking ship that by many accounts refuses to acknowledge the rising water line of its situation (that ship, I should add, is as much the conservative movement as it is the GOP, if not more so). [Read more →]

Mark, via Robert Stacy McCain, provides an incredibly smart analysis of the relationship and current problems between liberals and libertarians. I am inclined to believe that Mark’s analysis is quite correct, but that if libertarians are smart they’ll ignore it and find a way of growing their relationship with liberals in the coming years.

What I think that Mark, and by extension Robert Stacy McCain, assumes is that any relationship between liberals and libertarians must be one of agreement and consensus on issues such that Ross Douthat cast between the two camps in the Clinton years. Allowing a slightly more vituperative tone than I generally assume, it doesn’t wholly surprise me to see McCain assuming that agreement is the only basis for productive political relationship given his entrenched Palin support. While it is perhaps not true of all Palin supporters, it is true of enough that divergence from party line (full-throated support) became grounds in the ideological litmus test for dismissal. In other words, for Palin supporting movement conservatives it seemed as though the watch word in political relationship became obedience.

That unwillingness to find room for, house, or actively encourage dissent and debate in favour of purely partisan posturing sadly seems to have leeched into the way in which House and Senat conservatives see their role unfolding over the next 2-4 four years. By declaring a pre-emptive war on Obama based on their need to see his administration and liberals generally fail, even if that involves an ever greater decline of the country itself, Republicans have essentially abdicated their role in providing a thoughtful opposition to the liberal majority thereby placing a good deal of their rhetoric in question by at least a sizable proportion of the country (though not all by any means). As Andrew Sullivan suggests, the calling card of movement conservatism seems to have become party, not country, first.

That oppositional void stands to be effectively filled by libertarians as the watchdog against the very real liberal overreach to which Mark points. Not only is such watchdogism a role that libertarians are uniquely positioned to fulfill at this point in time, it also happens to be a badly needed element to the intelligent functioning of a republic like America. Mark writes,

Rather than consider ways of achieving liberal ends (which are usually shared by liberals and libertarians alike) that may have incorporated libertarian thinking or were at the very least highly targeted, progressive politicians have been choosing extraordinarily broad and intrusive means of achieving those ends.  This is not to say that those politicians ever really cared what libertarians thought; only that this route of action has undermined any possibility of a significant percentage of libertarians (again broadly defined as fiscally conservative and socially liberal) becoming intermediate-to-long-term members of the Dem coaltion.

Contra to Mark’s suggestion, I think the only real way for libertarians to effectively exert a cautionary force is to flood the Democratic party and drive the internal debate on the best way forward. The continued corruption of the Republican brand has effectively shuttered routes through the GOP as a means of applying pushback and the libertarians to which Mark refers are likely to be conflicted about such routes at the best of times. Third party routes have consistently resulted in rhetorical laryngitus and romantic as the notion may strike many, libertarians who are serious about assuming control of a meaningful political lever will have to accept the bitter balance of strategy and principle.

What remains then, at least to my mind, is a relationship of “friendly antagonism” with liberals and progressives within the Democratic Party itself. Thouhg perhaps deeply counter intutitive, this route provides the best overall outcome for everyone involved, save perhaps Republicans. Libertarians are able to assume an influential position in American politics that may eventually provide them with the kind of critical legitimacy to make a future third party run anything more than a flight of fancy. Liberals and Democrats, though they might not be inclined to see it this way, benefit from an overall strengthening of their Party and the options they present to the country through the only factor that has ever strengthenedpolitical parties: principled dissent. And the country benefits from ideological juxtaposition and discussion that is grounded in sincerity and first principles, rather than partisan jockeying and power politics.

Of course, few sane betting men would lay money down on my wager and I don’t fool myself into beliveing that the above is an even remotely likely outcome. But here at the League I’m tend to be in the business of beneficial possibilities, as much as predictive pronouncements — and all wagers are of a gentlemanly nature.