Michael Bonner: Against Andrew Coyne-ism

Rejoice, for the age of the intellectual pygmies and their cultural wrecking ball is ending, writes Guest Contributor Michael Bonner.

(Woodstock, 1969. Photo credit: Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell.)

Dr. Michael Bonner is a political consultant, historian, and author.

In their own minds, they invented rebellion; they stopped a war; and they discovered sex. The latter phenomenon, they still believe, was quite unknown in former ages. So were drug-taking, vulgarity, and poor hygiene. These, as it was believed, were the means of ‘finding oneself’, and there was no more important task in life. Automobiles were likewise a singular obsession, and the Good Life meant not only driving but also eating, attending films, and copulating in cars.

They were an unusually forthright lot, who were apparently well educated, but who nevertheless espoused many absurd and contradictory notions. Their parents, who had gone to war to fight Nazis, were themselves branded as fascists by their own children. They professed to revolt against money and materialism; and yet, when they came of age, these were their primary interests. They were the generation that attended Woodstock in defiance of a flu pandemic, and were later the most assiduous followers of Covid-19 restrictions.

At the frightening name of Woodstock, it will be obvious who I mean. The Boomers were born to the men and women who had endured the privations of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and everything in between. It is the Boomers who prove the adage whereby good times make weak men and weak men make hard times. They disliked the ease and prosperity into which they were born, and sought to erode them. The 20^th-century fear of Soviet subversion or nuclear annihilation was therefore misplaced. For where the Soviets failed, the Boomers triumphed, leaving our culture and our politics in ruins. They are still at it, as the gravitational field of their huge demographic mass continues to distort our politics. Worst of all, the Boomers’ peculiar vision of personal freedom, norm-busting, and individualism at any cost now passes for conservatism.

Does this Boomer conservatism have any luminaries or pundits? In Canada, it has one and he towers over his acolytes and opponents alike as a learned giant among intellectual pygmies. Or rather, that is how Andrew Coyne undoubtedly imagines himself. So great a spokesman of the Boomer conservative mentality is Coyne that the entire movement could be named after him: Andrew Coyne-ism.

Who has not heard of Andrew Coyne? He is now a columnist with The Globe and Mail and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National. He wrote for the National Post and once edited its editorial and comment section, but resigned in 2015 during the federal election. The cause was a dispute with executives over the rejection of a column composed for election day, in which Coyne failed to endorse the Conservatives. Coyne described the dispute as an unwelcome intervention that threatened his editorial independence, stating on Twitter that he could not allow the precedent to stand and needed to protect his reputation as a columnist.

That incident is a microcosm of the problem. One may fairly complain, as Coyne did, that the Harper Tories failed to please every member of their coalition equally, though such a thing is rarely possible. But the rest of Coyne’s complaints concerned a ‘bullying, sneering culture’ of ‘the low brow and the lower brow’. The imperfection of policy merely annoyed him, but he hated the Conservatives’ tone. They were not sufficiently respectful, they traded in insults and did not agree that ‘learning and science are to be valued, not derided’, apparently. In contrast, ‘a politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed’ was ‘the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau’.

Trudeau: a paragon of civility? Surely some other Trudeau is meant, not the opposition MP who called the Minister of the Environment a ‘piece of shit’. Not the man who, at a ‘ladies' night’ campaign event, was asked which country he most admired and said it was China’s ‘basic dictatorship’. Not the man who announced that the excitement of a political campaign amounted to ‘pizza, sex, and all sorts of fun things’. Not the man who mused about such subjects as ‘making Quebec a country’ if Canada were to become too conservative and the need to put Quebeckers in charge of our ‘community and socio-democratic agenda’ — whatever that means. Not the man who once halted an interview with a French-Canadian journalist in order to demonstrate the right way to fall down a flight of stairs. I pass over the more lurid stories of groping a reporter’s buttocks, wearing blackface, and singing the ‘Banana Boat’ song.

Alas, it is the same Trudeau. Nevertheless, Andrew Coyne-ism can excuse all such behaviour along with the decade of sanctimonious bullying and decline that followed it. For none of it is as bad as the wishes and worldview of the mostly rural, western, and blue-collar Conservative base. Such people are too angry and too vulgar for their own good. Including them within the benefits of Confederation must be rigorously circumscribed, and allowing them to shape public policy cannot be allowed at all.

Right-believing conservatives of the Andrew Coyne school profess to care only about markets and economies: ‘ambitious, market-oriented changes…tax reform, deregulation, privatisation and so on’, as Coyne once wrote. Everything else is a culture war, apparently. Worrying about moral derangement, social decomposition, crime, anomie — such things are for idiots. Instead, we ought to preoccupy ourselves with such obvious policies as mass immigration so large and so rapid as to raise our population to 100 million. Apart from the usual free-market nostrums, no other subject seems to interest Andrew Coyne. He has written of it constantly over the past twenty years, most recently in mid-summer when everyone else began to breathe a sigh of relief at a finally diminishing number of newcomers. The theory of unrestrained growth in immigration, which has been promoted aggressively by the Century Initiative, seems especially dear to the heart of Andrew Coyne, who blithely ignores all concerns as to the nature of our new, gigantic country or what its new inhabitants would believe in.

But those are genuine worries for the present moment, not only for the imaginary future. And they are all the more alarming in the face of Boomer liberalism’s invincible insistence upon personal freedom. In their minds, they still inhabit a world of paternal authority centred on the nuclear family, as depicted in Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. The familial and social bonds, even the hereditary culture, of the 1950s stifled them, and they still rejoice at their effacement. They cannot see how little is left now, and view the demolition as unfinished. The disorder brought by the quest for freedom can, in their minds, only be remedied by more freedom: more deregulation, more immigration, more license, and a more aggressive war on norms and culture. Hence the incoherent insistence upon the primacy of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as the sole and obligatory touchstone of Canadian nationalism. Only a libertarian constitution and the judges who interpret it can unite us, we are constantly told.

I need not point out the absurdity of transforming a piece of legislation into a national identity. And passing the wreckage of our culture to courts and jurists is a sad announcement of failure. But such are the lineaments of Andrew Coyne-ism, though this is not the final stage of Boomer conservatism. Andrew Coyne-ism sees the mission of conservatives as the preservation of classical liberalism, which he summarises rather flippantly as ‘Locke and Smith and Hume and all that’. But the man is his own easiest dupe. The allergy to culture and the perpetual quest for financial and social deregulation will destroy ‘all that’ too. And amidst the Boomer Ragnarök, which is now upon us, their children intend to fight the culture war to the end and win. Then they will have the melancholy task of rebuilding the world that the Boomers destroyed.

Dr Michael Bonner is the author of ‘In Defence of Civilization’, and the upcoming ‘The Crisis of Liberalism’. He is a former Director of Policy within the Government of Ontario.