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Andrew Coyne on Harper's know-nothing conservatism

King of Kensington

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Interesting piece...but he's a little too kind to the current GOP.

That trend was clear even before the census debacle. But this latest outbreak of Tory truculence has accelerated the decline. Others have tried, without success, to puzzle out what on Earth the Conservatives could have been thinking. Playing to the base? But what evidence is there that anyone, outside of a small hard core of libertarians, holds any hostility to the census? A plot to starve lefty activist groups of factual ammunition? But census data is presumably of equal use to all causes, left or right.

I think my colleague John Geddes came closest in his piece last week. It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war.

You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites†and “intellectuals.†In the partial dismantling of the census, we reach the final stage: not just hostile to experts, but to knowledge.

It’s an old game, in some respects. There are echoes of the Republican “NASCAR dad†strategy, mixed with the High Tories’ instinctive distrust of new ideas and technocratic monkeying about. Not for nothing did the British Conservatives once glory in the title of the Stupid Party, and the Harper Conservatives seem content to wear the label as well.

But there’s something different going on here. The intellectuals that conservatives generally rail against are those they disagree with. But the Harper Conservatives are just as hostile to the interventions of experts on what one might suppose to be their own side. The decision to cut the GST, rather than income taxes, was made in defiance not of radical economists, but of the orthodox free-market variety. Having jettisoned principle for expediency, the Tories came to regard the “purist†in their own ranks with every bit as much disdain as any lefty egghead—more, actually.

The result is a uniquely nasty, know-nothing strain of conservatism. The Thatcher Tories, unlike their forebears, weren’t anti-intellectual: her cabinet contained some of Britain’s most fertile social and political minds. Ronald Reagan, though hardly an intellectual, did not demonize expert opinion, or pit the educated classes against the rest. Even today’s Republican party, as know-nothing as it sometimes appears, relies heavily on a network of think tanks to provide it with intellectual heft. Only in Canada have expertise and ideas been so brutally cast aside. On the level of principle, this is appalling. A society that holds education and expertise in contempt, no less than one that disdains commerce or entrepreneurship, is dying. To whip up popular hostility to intellectuals is to invite the public to jump on its own funeral pyre.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/08/17/a-know-nothing-strain-of-conservatism/
 
Yeah, the Conservative regime is anti-intellectual just like the former Nazi and Khmer Rouge regimes. Conservatives planning billions in prison expansion in the face of declining crime rates - I wonder what for?
 
It's interesting... I guess his key point is that while the conservative movement in other countries has (or *used to have*) some intellectual elements behind it, in Canada it doesn't.

I think we can surmise that this was due to the old Progressive Conservative party being supplanted by the Reform-Alliance movement. And now we see this disdain towards knowledge at the local level - witness Rob Ford's success. Perhaps Torontonians have gotten used to the "know-nothing Conservatism" due to 4 years of Harper! A chilling thought.
 
I don't know if I'd classify Harper as more anti-intellectual than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party though. For all this talk about Harper being an Alberta cowboy, he still comes across as a bit of WASP Toronto of old (he did grow up in Leaside after all), not very bombastic. He seems like he'd be more comfortable in a think tank than at a gun rally.
 
Well, Sarah Palin isn't the face of the Republicans in the US. Though it would seem that she's getting close, with Tea Partiers taking up an ever growing portion of the right. Still, I'd almost call her a revolutionary figure rather than a politician. Harper's a pretty standard politician, albeit one with contempt for the democratic process and fair reasoning.
 
Andrew Coyne losing faith in Harper is quite a statement, since he is one of the very few smart columnists left that still champions free market Neo Conservatism. To me, it suggests that the CPC doesn't have many intellectual supporters left and will increasingly be the party of rage-filled yokels. Why are the Liberals asleep at the switch right now?
 
What'd be David Frum's take, by comparison? (Esp. given his recent travails viz. the US Republicans)
 
I follow Coyne pretty closely, and I'd say he's not really a Harper-style conservative. And he has been pretty unimpressed with Harper for some time.
 

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