Shawn Whatley: Beyond the yellow line of liberalism
Canada needs a conservatism of its own with deep intellectual and cultural footing, and leaders to voice it, writes Guest Contributor Shawn Whatley.
Dr. Shawn Whatley is a physician and author.
Until two years ago, policy issues fell to either side of the same road, a road divided by a yellow line of liberalism.
On the right lies economic freedom, decreased regulation, and limited government. On the left lies social freedom, special interests, and central management. Both sides shared the same tarmac. Left- and right-liberals hold the same presuppositions about progress, reason, and science.
In this sense, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper linked arms across the line and yelled, “Onward, ho!” while leading the governments of the United States and Canada. They were fellow travellers on the same road.
But the pavement has ended. We are being forced to change our minds.
The 2008 global financial crisis, the 2015–16 migrant crisis, Brexit and President Trump’s first election in 2016, COVID policies in spring 2020, Black Lives Matter “peaceful protests” in 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the “explosion” of gender dysphoria, the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, and the celebrations that followed have ended the status quo.
Events have forced us to look for answers beyond old assumptions.
Life’s biggest events only make sense in retrospect. For example, marriage changes your life, but you only see it after the fact. Wedding vows are uttered in ignorance, even if it’s not your first time. Babies turn life upside down, but you remain clueless about the extent of delightful disruption until years later.
In the same way, societal changes only make sense after the fact. Transitions from one era to the next happen without our full understanding. Each era captures a basic frame of mind, a broad social consciousness. Violence often marks the change, and the change only becomes clear in retrospect.
Sometime over the last two years, we entered the twenty-first century, a century that ended as it began, in violence. The Great War (WWI, 1914-1919) fractured the political and social assumptions of the “long 19th century” before it, which had begun with its own violence in the French Revolution.
Our new era, the start of the twenty-first century, changes everything. Old assumptions about domestic and foreign policy are being revisited. Nothing is settled. The arc of history played a trick and did not end after all.
The “arc of history” and the “end of history” function as memes inside both left- and right-liberalism. They assume a Hegelian understanding of time: it does not loop or repeat, it progresses forward as we prune away bad ideas.
This was made famous by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, though others had said the same. Political debate had ended with the fall of Soviet Communism. Socialism, communism, fascism, and conservatism had expired. Liberalism was all that remained, the last man standing.
If we look around in Canadian politics, liberalism certainly appears triumphant. Canada has three federal parties: far-left-liberal (NDP), left-liberal (Liberal Party of Canada), and right-liberal (Conservative Party of Canada). The NDP eschews old-style socialism of brotherhood, union solidarity, and working-class values. It is solidly left-liberal: individualistic, cosmopolitan, and rich.
The Liberals promise technocratic competence while presiding over stagnation, and the Conservatives tout market fixes while skirting around first principles of culture and nationhood.
In fairness, the CPC built a “big tent” by including traditionalists, (greying) Tories, and social conservatives. And in fairness to Harper, he did highlight the need for Conservatives to focus on “values questions” and cultural conservatism in a speech at Civitas in 2003. But by the time the new CPC emerged, its principles and policy platform pivoted on a triumphant right-liberalism.
It was a consensus that worked in an easier world, but it fails in a harder one.
We cannot blame political parties themselves for assuming the hegemony of liberalism. Political staffers simply try to capture the ideas already ascendant in society. They follow the polls and rarely lead with novel ideas of their own. Canada’s postwar liberal consensus captured what the American author Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950:
“It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction … But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and ecclesiastical examples, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
Professor Louis Hartz leveraged Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas” into a book, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, 1955. Hartz explained that there simply is no other tradition in America besides liberalism.
Although Hartz has few followers today, the Canadian philosopher Gad Horowitz amplified Hartz’s ideas and taught that Canada is nothing but a fragment of English liberal thought, frozen in time by early settlers.
Fragment Theory, or the “Hartz-Horowitz theory”, is still taught to political science students as the explanation of everything about Canadian political thought. The historian Donald Creighton referred to it as the “authorised version” of Canadian history.
Despite being a Tory himself, George Grant largely agreed when he pointed to the Canadian “primal spirit” as one formed by a Protestant faith faced with a harsh and inhospitable landscape. Early Canadians needed to survive Canadian winters.
Francis Bacon’s anti-Aristotelian science offered the means to conquer nature. Armed with science, colonists also clung to Calvinist Protestantism: an anti-Aristotelian creed focused on individual conversion, not intellectual contemplation.
Although Grant famously lamented the fact of liberalism, he agreed with Horowitz. Absent a British conservatism, Canada risked becoming nothing but liberalism through and through and ceasing to exist as a country distinct from America.
If Grant and Horowitz are right, then Canada faces a dire future indeed. The liberal road forward has ended. More liberalism cannot fix problems caused by liberalism.
Some older liberals cling to a fixed, false belief in Reaganism as a cure for every political problem, but it cannot save us now. Our test is not taking place in 1984, but right now as 2025 winds down.
Faced with seemingly insurmountable problems of collapsed fertility rates, immigration failure, drug addiction and crime, not to mention challenges with access to health care, politicised education curricula, and weaponised HR departments, we have two choices.
One choice offers a dark, but very real, path towards will, power, and a Nietzschean übermensch: manliness and courage; strength, contest, spirit. The term “fascism” has lost most of its meaning through overuse as a social slur. But the mid-twentieth-century phenomenon warrants study as a warning for today.
The objective must not be order without truths, or strength without virtue that flatters grievances and destroys institutions so that nothing is left to pass down. Any such hollow proposal ought to be rejected.
We probably won’t see an identical neo-pagan, bundle-of-sticks, ethno-nationalism, but we could see people turn to the basic animating assumptions, will, power, and contest. They remain perennial temptations of the human heart. The antidote is not more liberalism, but ordered liberty that is inspired by inheritance.
Fortunately, we have another option. It offers almost a thousand years of trial and error upon which to draw and another thousand years of roots going back to early Greece and Rome. We need to rediscover the wisdom of an intellectual conservatism and apply it anew to our current era.
Despite what liberals tell you, conservatism is not just aristocracy, unearned privilege, and unaccountable authority. Intellectual or cultural conservatism cannot be reduced to European conservatism.
Roger Scruton, the late English philosopher, said that conservatism is a “work of rescue.” Conservatism, properly understood, looks different depending on where you find it.
Canada is in desperate need of finding its own version of conservatism with deep intellectual and cultural footing. Scruton based culture on a shared set of manners and beliefs, not ethnicity; race has nothing to do with it.
Conservatives need to articulate a political vision that reflects what most Canadians already know to be true. Most Canadians have a sense about enduring principles and permanent things. They simply need leaders with courage to voice them. They need leaders who will be honest about the attachments we have inherited and who are willing to call us to live lives ordered by those attachments.
History ends many things. In this sense, the end of history thesis has led to the end of liberalism itself. This is not because liberalism failed, but because it succeeded.. This requires more than one essay to prove and unpack. But don’t let that distract us from the stark choice we face now.
The road painted with the yellow line of liberalism has ended. We must now choose a different path. Intellectual conservatism offers the best option. Who will lead us forward?
Shawn Whatley’s interest in politics stems from several decades in medical politics. He is a Past President of Civitas Canada and of the Ontario Medical Association. He is a Senior Fellow for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and author of When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing, 2020. Check out his podcast on Substack, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
