Geoff Russ: A conservative vision of statecraft is nothing to fear

Public power always serves a moral vision, and conservatives must be equipped for the cultural arms race to use it.

(Sword and Dagger Fight, John Pettie.)

With all considerable due respect to Jesse Kline, he has offered conservatives a rigged choice in his November 27 column critiquing the new right.

The National Post’s deputy comment editor has asserted that the right must embrace a libertarian utopia of “freedom”, or tumble down the rocky slope where “European fascism” and authoritarianism lie. Mr. Kline champions the former choice and has placed the new right next to the latter.

That misses the mark both in analysis and as a matter of ideological discipline.

Take Kline’s history. He wrote that conservatives who “embraced big government as a blunt instrument” include the aforementioned European fascists and former Alberta premier William Aberhart, and that their governments and economic theories were consigned to the infamous “dustbin of history”.

If those experiments are in the “dustbin”, at least they were part of history. Libertarianism has never produced a single functioning polity to be judged at all.

Had Kline asked whom the new right admires among the 20th century’s great leaders, he might have received Charles de Gaulle of France as an answer.

De Gaulle was one of the greatest conservative figures of the 20th century. He rallied the Free French Forces in the Second World War and fought back against the worst fascists the world has ever seen. He rewrote the French constitution and brought about the Fifth Republic with a strong executive.

De Gaulle also created the Ministry of Culture in 1959, with the intent of defending and projecting France’s civilisation. His government strengthened the military to safeguard France’s autonomy, ordered the construction of grand projects like nuclear power plants, and helped rebuild the French nation. He believed France was a great country, and that it must remain so.

Kline will find no fascism in de Gaulle, only democratic statecraft in the service of the common good.

Kline warns of the danger of splitting the Canadian right between the libertarians, who have apparently monopolised the ideal of “freedom”, and the young and hungry new right. Implying that the latter are akin to Mao or Mussolini will not endear them to a fusionist alliance. In any case, France did not descend into fascism during de Gaulle’s government or in the decades since.

Canada has its own tradition of nation-builders and visionary statesmen, from Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester, to Sir John A. Macdonald and John Diefenbaker. These were not men who feared the use of the state; they sought to use it well. Is Kline so bold as to call these men the cousins of European fascism too? It is not outside democratic or conservative norms to preserve Canadian civilisation in the modern day against the global forces of homogenisation and national erasure.

The strong, nationalist governments of men like Macdonald, de Gaulle and Diefenbaker were not libertarian in any sense of the word, but they existed. Libertarianism, by contrast, lives in think-tanks and thrilling novels, not in constitutional law or serious history. Even those states that libertarians praise, such as Switzerland or Singapore, are awash in public schools, welfare, and state-run housing. In the 1970s, Chile became a laboratory of libertarian economics, but at the point of a gun under the dictator Augusto Pinochet.

On culture, Kline warns that the use of the state by conservatives will lead to a “cultural arms race” and invokes Mao and the Chinese Cultural Revolution as precedent. In the same breath, he then admits that Justin Trudeau uses “the strong arm of government to reshape institutions, handicap the energy industry, denigrate historical figures and bury our cultural heritage”, because “he could” and because “government has grown so large”.

The culture war is already upon us, and conservatives should not be expected to unilaterally disarm. Kline insists that culture is “largely altered from the bottom up” in the universities, NGOs and corporate HR departments, while the state is just a latecomer. That is only half true, perhaps less.

Most social movements do begin on campus, but are swiftly amplified, funded and then entrenched by courts, Crown corporations, granting councils, curriculum writers and museum boards. A serious conservatism would take that apparatus and ask not whether culture should be shaped from above, but who will be doing the shaping, and towards what ends.

If national memory is abandoned to algorithms and the market, there is no neutrality. The de facto ministries of culture will end up being Silicon Valley, Netflix and DEI-compliant multinationals. Serious nations curate their own stories through their representative institutions, and do not lease that task out to Disney or treat the National Film Board and national museums as dispensable luxuries.

In matters of policy, Kline pins many of our ills on government monopoly and state planning, which he says can be remedied by “genuine school choice”, private health care, and a “state too small to subjugate”.

What are the best examples of school choice in Canada right now? Alberta has its rightly admired charter schools, such as Calgary Classical Academy and Connect Charter School.

Alberta’s charter school system has been praised for fostering school choice by the Montreal Economic Institute, a dedicated pro-free-market think-tank. Those same schools receive millions of dollars in funding from the Alberta government, follow provincial curricula and are subject to ministerial oversight. It is a promising model of educational pluralism, but they are not libertarian.

However, nowhere is the gap between reality and libertarian fantasies more painful than in prostitution and hard drugs, two causes that Kline himself and his ideological confederates are committed to liberalising.

Kline has previously proposed to treat prostitution as another legitimate market item, and advocates for legalising narcotics, alongside fellow libertarians like Matt Bufton. What is the story in countries like the Netherlands that liberalised prostitution?

The sad truth is that it professionalised and expanded coercion, turning the Netherlands into a hub of human trafficking and the exploitation of migrant women. In the American state of Nevada, where prostitution is also legal, the brothels are being hit with legal action alleging abuse and trafficking, which was covered up by officials of the state government.

Legalisation did not shrink the size of the government in the Netherlands either. Instead, it multiplied it.

Amsterdam’s red-light districts are managed by legions of bureaucratic inspectors, licensing boards, health officers and law enforcement. As with the expansion of any right, in this case the right to buy and sell sex, a bureaucracy grows to manage, tax and contain it. Libertarianism promises a smaller state and delivers a busier one with fewer moral constraints.

On the subject of drugs, the libertarian “harm principle”, meaning that an action should be illegal only if somebody else gets hurt, collapses under the weight of fentanyl, one of the deadliest street drugs in history. The law must intervene, because the harm of injected lethal opioids goes beyond the user.

In the United States alone, hundreds of thousands of children have lost parents to drug overdoses in the past decade. As for the failed “safe supply” movement in Canada, this again can only increase the size of the state to produce non-toxic drugs and distribute them, turning the government into a drug dealer.

These young lives are horribly disfigured by a “choice” they did not make. The law cannot serenely watch as children are left fatherless or motherless in the name of autonomy. There is no moral high ground to be had here, only a decision that those with weaker wills are an acceptable sacrifice for ideology.

Kline also invoked George Will in his column. Will is a writer and former adviser to Ronald Reagan, and Statecraft as Soulcraft is arguably Will’s best-known book. In it, Will advocates for the role of the state in crafting good citizens. Will wrote that the law itself teaches, and that laws cement morality and make a statement about the society that a people want to live in.

A state that treats fentanyl and prostitution as mere consumer goods will be one that reflects who Canadians are. Our own history is one marked by Sabbath closures, obscenity laws, immigration controls, marriage norms and restrictions on vices like gambling, not libertine social licence.

In the closing of his column, Kline praised the values that made this country prosperous, “the rule of law, private property, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and democracy.”

Those are noble classical liberal goods, but they are not the whole inheritance. What of loyalty, Christian ethics, Anglo-French civilisation and, as espoused by the former prime minister Stephen Harper, the spirit of ordered liberty? Were these not also values and inheritances that made Canada prosperous?

The true choice is not between “free minds, free markets and personal liberty” and some mythical contest to see who is “the better authoritarian.” Right now, the debate is between a brand of politics that pretends the state can ever remain neutral while courts, corporations and universities reshape Canada, and another that acknowledges and respects that public power always serves a moral vision, and must be reclaimed for one that puts history, identity and families first.

Why should conservatives worship an abstract cosmology of maximised freedom that has never built a country, while the Canada we actually inherited is hacked to bits? Simply shrinking from the duty of statecraft is abdication dressed up as virtue.

Conservatives do not have to pretend that this is all they should offer to Canadians.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.