Ben Woodfinden: Are you angry enough?

Ideas are good, but a movement that mistakes fury and boorishness for principles will not win a general election. A reply to Howard Anglin.

(Andrew Carrick Gow, ‘House of Commons, 1628–1629, Speaker Finch Held by Holles and Valentine’, 1912.)

Last week, I tweeted out something that had been sitting in my drafts for probably a month. The timing was misjudged on my part, because it ended up being used across media as an example of online conservative infighting. What was specifically jumped upon was that I said ‘I look at all sorts of conservative camps and factions right now and I see intellectual poverty everywhere.’ Howard Anglin, a friend whom I deeply respect and admire both personally and intellectually, and consider something of a mentor, wrote in Without Diminishment in response to this. What follows is my response to him, and, to be clear, I want conservatives to be willing to engage in more of this kind of civil and serious debate, which is definitely not just two people slinging insults at each other.

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Anglin reads my lament as a complaint that the right has no ideas. I will fully concede that this was somewhat sloppy and did not convey what I was trying to get at. If you were offended or disappointed by this, I apologise, and this piece is a fully fleshed-out clarification of what I actually meant. Anglin is fully correct, and I agree, that ‘No, the challenge for Canadian conservatives is not ideas. We’ve never had it so good’. There are more conservative journals of ideas in this country than at any point in my lifetime; I read most of the ones he lists, and I help edit one he was kind enough to mention. I wouldn’t change a word of his inventory.

But the supply of ideas was never the thing keeping me up. What I should have written, and what I’m writing now, is that our ideas are largely divorced from our actual politics and nowhere near power, and that the machinery by which good thinking is supposed to become winning politics is broken in ways a longer reading list does not fix. Howard says the challenge is corralling the best ideas into platforms and eventually into government, and then he says, and I want to quote him fairly, that ‘that’s the easy part’.

That is where we part company. If it is easy, I see few signs we’re succeeding, and this is where my cynicism comes from.

Let me start with an example of where I think translating ideas into practice is working well, and it isn’t on the Conservative side. The pipeline that turns ideas into policy in this country is working fine. It just isn’t running through us. Build Canada, the non-partisan platform of tech founders publishing crisp memos on growth and the machinery of the state, has watched its ideas land squarely in Mark Carney’s government, which lifted one of its proposals more or less wholesale and even kept the branding, calling the thing the Build Canada Exchange.

Eric Lombardi, founder of More Neighbours Toronto and one of the sharpest housing minds we have, is now campaigning for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party. Good ideas for fixing this country, and the talented people who hold them, are not a unique conservative possession. And right now the ones being enacted, and some of the best people carrying them, are doing it under a Liberal banner. Say what you will about this Liberal government, and I’m sure plenty of Conservatives will disagree, but they are doing plenty of big things (and promising but failing to deliver on many others). They are moving on pipelines and defence spending, and making good appointments to the Supreme Court that were unthinkable eighteen months ago. That is the whole point.

You do not get to reshape a country from the op-ed page or the seminar room. You get to do it from government, which is why the ideas and the winning were never separable projects to be pursued in sequence, first the thinking and later the power, but the same project, and a conservatism that treats the winning as secondary and not intertwined with the ideas will have limited opportunities to actually implement them. That should trouble a bullish conservative far more than any shortage of journals ever could, because it is the translation problem in its purest form: the ideas exist, the pipeline exists, and we are not the ones in positions to use it.

So why can’t we? Start with how conservatives in this country actually fight. We do not, for the most part, actually fight with each other over ideas. We fight over cliques and personalities and who is aligned with whom, and reach for ideas afterwards to dress up quarrels that were really about status. Look at the BC Conservative leadership race that just wrapped, which Howard and I both worked on, both of us for Caroline Elliott’s campaign. On policy prescription, we put out a very detailed and comprehensive set of policies across a swathe of issues, but we weren’t unique in this (which isn’t a bad thing necessarily): the candidates largely agreed on most policy questions. You could have swapped their platforms and changed almost nothing. And yet the contest was bitter and tribal and personal, because the dividing lines had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with factions and cliques. When the ideas are held in common and the knives come out anyway, the fight was never about ideas.

Elliott, whom I have nothing but affection and admiration for, and who I think should be one of the people who represent the future of the Conservative movement in Canada, was branded by her opponents as a sell-out and a Liberal. Not over a single position she held, not over an idea of hers anyone could name as insufficiently conservative, but because she had hired a few people some conservatives dislike. And as close as it was, it was probably the reason we lost, because conservative psychodrama convinced enough voting members that their vote could not go to Caroline. It’s a small example, but it captures the disease exactly: we now assign ideological identity by association and vibe rather than conviction, and a person can be read out of the movement without a single one of their actual beliefs ever being examined.

This points to the deeper corruption in how we sort friend from enemy. Increasingly the thing that certifies you as properly conservative is not what you believe but how you perform. Are you angry enough? Bombastic enough, contemptuous of the right enemies, willing to say the outrageous thing? Temperament has become the loyalty test. Being boorish and abrasive now reads as conservative, whilst civility and an even temper read as vaguely Liberal, and a great many conservatives have internalised this without noticing that it is nonsense. There is nothing in a raised voice that makes a person more conservative in substance, and nothing in good manners that makes them less. These are dispositions, not convictions, and treating them as convictions is one of the clearest ways the online turn is quietly remaking the movement, because the medium rewards the abrasive pole and punishes the measured one, and over time the incentive becomes the identity.

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Someone can hold thoroughly conservative views and be written off as a squish for expressing them substantively, civilly and calmly, whilst someone with barely a coherent thought in his head sails through on pure aggression, because he sounds the way the algorithm has taught us a conservative is supposed to sound. Style has eaten substance. A movement that mistakes anger for principle will keep elevating its loudest members and keep wondering why it can’t win a general election.

So then how did we get here, when the ideas are genuinely good and plentiful? This is where Howard’s advice, ‘get off Twitter’, is correct but beside the point. The online-ification of conservative politics, and politics more broadly, is doing something to us, and I’ve come to the view that it’s deeper and less avoidable than we tend to admit. Everyone knows social media rewards the dumb fight, the public airing of grievance, the dunk that clears a thousand likes. None of this is original, but two things get missed.

The first is that you cannot opt out of it by personal virtue. Andrey Mir, writing in Michael Cuenco and I’s new journal, the 2067 Journal, reaches back to Marshall McLuhan to make exactly this point. When an opponent told McLuhan he wasn’t affected by television because he didn’t own one, McLuhan answered that the man would ‘merely suffer the consequences of TV without enjoying it’.

The medium is an environment, not a tool you pick up and set down. You can quit the platform and still live entirely inside the incentives it creates, because everyone you are trying to persuade, and everyone competing to lead alongside you, is still swimming in it. Media, social media especially (McLuhan was ahead of his time), as Mir puts it, retribalise us, collapsing the distance between everyone and turning politics into McLuhan’s global village, which McLuhan himself warned is a place of maximal involvement in everybody else’s business and very little peace. That is our conservative online ecosystem, and it isn’t going anywhere. Short of a Butlerian jihad against the machines, the world is moving further into this, not out of it, and any theory of conservative renewal that depends on everyone logging off is a theory for a world that no longer exists. Future leadership races especially, and eventually, I suspect, elections more broadly, will be defined by who wins and caters to the online world.

There’s a second, uglier effect. The same medium that manufactures the pointless fights also hands megaphones to genuine fools. Every movement has always carried its cranks, but the old gatekeeping, for all its sins, mostly kept the crank ranting at his kitchen table. Now he has a platform, an audience, and in the worst cases more reach than people who have thought about the problems for a living. This is not a complaint about tone, nor a defence of often overly confident and misplaced expertise. It’s a strategic one. These voices are a cancer on the project of winning, because they define us in the public mind by our stupidest members and crowd out the people doing serious work. This world sorts for engagement, not ideas.

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Now, all of that describes dysfunction, and Anglin could fairly say I’ve spent a lot of words confirming his point that our problem is translation and tactics rather than ideas. Fine. But I don’t think it’s merely tactical, and here are the two places where the intellectual work itself is genuinely unfinished, where we haven’t done the thinking, let alone the translating.

The first is that we still don’t know how to love this country out loud. I wrote a long piece years ago arguing that Canadian conservatism carries a real strain of self-loathing, an anti-nationalism that makes conservatives sound like people who don’t much like Canada, and nothing since has changed my mind. The resurgence of Canadian patriotism, however facile and shallow so much of the ‘elbows up’ sentiment turned out to be, has made this plain. Part of the reason is that the conservatism we imported is not really ours. Graft American small-government ideology onto Canada and you sound like an American tourist appalled by the place, the sort for whom our health care is socialism and the whole country a mild case of Soviet Canuckistan. Harper himself once called Canada ‘a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term’, a line that dogged him for years precisely because it is what the Laurentian class most wants conservatives to sound like: people sneering at the country from the outside. The Liberals have owned the flag since they replaced it with one that is exclusively in their own colours, in no small part because we kept handing it to them.

The deeper trouble with the borrowed model is that it does not fit the country. A conservatism worth the name takes the actual place seriously, and our country is vast, its people thinly dispersed, spread in ribbons in a harsh and beautiful environment. To build a nation that is glued together in our vast half of the continent requires a more active and robust state than many conservatives are likely to be comfortable admitting. Canadian conservatives of old understood this.

The railways and the public infrastructure are necessities of the place in which we live. You do not settle and hold a landmass this size without some degree of state intervention, and pretending otherwise is not conservatism but a kind of cosplay. Our geography and our history necessitate a more expansive state than imported ideology can account for, and a distinctly Canadian conservatism has to begin by admitting that rather than treating it as an embarrassment to be tax-cut away. This does not mean surrendering to the Laurentian settlement. It means conserving what is actually here and building it out on our own terms instead of running a knock-off of a conservatism designed for a different country with a different map.

And yet the way out isn’t a mystery, because Harper found it. The same man who read Brimelow and absorbed all that western alienation went on to become a genuinely national leader. He ended speeches with ‘God Bless Canada’, restored the Royal prefix to the navy and air force, put the government’s weight behind the bicentenary of the War of 1812, and in 2011 ran the best campaign of his career against Michael Ignatieff by painting the Liberal as the deracinated one, the man ‘just visiting’ from Harvard, and the Conservatives as the party that actually loved the place. That was the only federal majority conservatives have won in more than three decades, and it was won partly on patriotism, or at least convincing enough Canadians that Conservatives also love our country.

Alberta separatism, with a referendum on a referendum coming this autumn, is the same wound reopened from the other end, a conservatism so alienated from the national project that walking away starts to sound like the grown-up position. The places Anglin names, Without Diminishment above all, and, yes, 2067 Journal (although 2067 isn’t so much a conservative journal as a generational one, open to heterodox voices on the right precisely because we take the young-versus-old divide, not the left-versus-right one, to be the political and material reality conservatism still hasn’t caught up to) are doing some of the imaginative work of describing a Canada worth conserving and a True North patriotism that is neither imported anti-Americanism nor progressive pieties in a Team Canada jersey. But it sits in the journals. It has not been infused into the movement or into the people who lead it, and until it is we will keep ceding the most powerful emotion in politics to the other side.

The second unfinished problem is the gap between our rhetoric about how much this country has declined in the last decade or so and what we propose to do to fix these problems. But you cannot paint pictures of Soviet breadlines outside the food banks, warn that a generation has been locked out of the basic promise of a middle-class life, insist that we are sliding into a managerial decline that benefits a small class of people clustered in the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor, and then hand them a modest tax adjustment and vague discussion of red-tape review as the cure. We have serious challenges, and they require bold solutions.

Perhaps the deepest version of this, which I argued in The Hub around the Winds of Change anniversary, is that conservatives in this country learned to win office without ever taking power. Harper governed for the better part of a decade, and the regime, the senior bureaucracy, the courts, the CBC, the universities, the whole Laurentian apparatus that sets the boundaries of respectable opinion, emerged from it essentially intact and essentially progressive. We got the government and never touched the country. If the diagnosis really is existential, then a marginal platform is not the only inadequacy; the deeper one is a conservatism that occupies the state for a term and leaves the machine that actually runs it exactly as it found it. Matching the rhetoric would mean being willing to govern like you meant it, and we never have.

So I’ll end where Anglin began, with the choice between bullish and bleak, and refuse it. In response to the charges of fatalism that many of his critics levelled at him, George Grant once wrote that ‘regret is not an adequate stance for living and is an impossible stance for philosophy’. Anglin is right that the ideas are here and my despair is premature and a little indulgent. But having the ideas was never the hard part, and we are failing the hard part in specific, nameable ways.

The raw material for a serious conservative politics does exist, in the publications he listed, in plenty of other voices, and, this is the uncomfortable part, in people and places well outside our own tent. The task, the only task that has ever mattered, is dragging it out of the journals and into the arena, and building people who can carry it there and take power rather than merely hold office. That isn’t a reason to cheer up. It’s a reason to get to work, which is a different thing, and the better one.

Ben Woodfinden is co-founder of the 2067 Journal and writes a weekly column for the National Post. He is a Senior Advisor at Meredith Boessenkool & Phillips, a PhD candidate in political science at McGill, and previously served as Director of Communications to Pierre Poilievre.

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