From overseas: lessons, and reasons for hope
We’ve come a long distance from the Third Way. In the 1990s, a new generation of left-of-centre figures replaced the conservatives who had dominated the 1980s. Bill Clinton defeated a worn-out George Bush in the White House. A stumbling John Major lost power to the young and dynamic Tony Blair. Corpulent Helmut Kohl gave way to sleek, mediagenic Gerhard Schroeder. And while nobody would describe Canada’s Jean Chrétien as dynamic or mediagenic, his triumph in 1993 confirmed an apparent global electoral trend away from the right.
Nearly a decade later, the pendulum has swung back. Another George Bush holds the White House, this time backed by a Republican House and Senate — concentrating more power in Republican hands than at any time since 1953. Bush’s most important allies, Tony Blair, Australia’s John Howard and Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, have all won smashing reelections.
But when the history of this period comes to be written, the short-term pendulum swings of politics will surely look a lot less important than the long-term intellectual trend of the times. Consider:
Oil prices have shot up as high as US$70 per barrel. In the 1970s, most of the big democracies responded to rising oil prices and inflation by imposing some kind of price controls. Have you heard anybody even mention such an idea today? Not for 100 years has the consensus in favour of market prices held as powerful a hold as it does today.
Throughout the world, nations are moving away from government-guaranteed pensions to individual retirement accounts: Poland, Chile, Britain and China are some of the countries leading the way.
In 1980, four- fifths of humanity lived in closed and controlled economies. Today, while the work of reform remains partial and unfinished, four-fifths of humanity has joined the free-trading global economy.
In North America, the number of abortions performed each year has dropped by about 20% from the level of the 1980s. Crime is declining. Home ownership has reached an all- time high. In the United States, divorce rates have stabilized and the proportion of women working outside the home has actually dipped since 1998: the first time that has happened since 1900. The United States is now the only developed country with a birth rate high enough to replace the existing population — higher than China’s, as a matter of interest.
The point is not that the right wins all the arguments. The right often loses. But when it loses, it loses to fear of change and the force of inertia. It does not lose to the ideas of the left, because the left no longer has any.
All of this may sound strange to Canadian ears. True, by the usual measures of political science, Canada looks like a society that ought to be receptive to the ideological right. Almost two- thirds of Canadian households own their own homes, only slightly less than in the United States. Canada’s public sector is the third- smallest in the G-10 on a percapita basis, after the United States and Japan. Canadians rank second in gun ownership, again after the United States. Private ownership of stocks and bonds is widespread, unionization is low and church attendance is relatively high. The average Canadian works some 1,750 hours per year, 300 hours more per year than the average French or German worker — the third-longest working year of any advanced democracy after the United States and Australia.
Yet property-owning, church- attending, hard-working Canada has the least competitive centre-right party of any major industrial country.
The United States has had a Republican president for 33 of the 60 years since 1945. Britain has had Conservative prime ministers for 40 of those 60 years. Australia has been ruled from the centreright for 40 of the 60 postwar years.
Of the eight German chancellors since 1949, five have been conservatives, including the two longest-serving, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. ( This analysis includes Angela Merkel, assuming she takes office.) All but one of the five presidents of the Fifth French Republic have likewise come from the more conservative party. Italy’s Christian Democrats and now Forza Italia have ruled nearly uninterrupted since 1947; the misnamed Liberal Democratic party has dominated Japan since the end of the American occupation in 1955 — and indeed has just won one of the biggest victories in its history.
By comparison, Canada’s Conservative party has been shut out of power at the federal level since 1993 and has held power for a grand total of 16 of the 60 years since the end of the Second World War. Even now, with the Liberals pummelled by the worst political scandal in the country’s modern history, the Conservatives can count on the votes of only about one in four Canadians. Perhaps the only other major democratic country in which the right- of- centre party has performed so consistently poorly is Sweden.
Some will say that Canada’s Conservatives score so poorly because Canada is a fundamentally left- wing nation. Yet at the provincial level, those left-wing Canadians have elected and re-elected leaders like Mike Harris and Ralph Klein.
These provincial victories are not small facts. If Canadians truly prefer high taxes to low taxes, grants to opportunities, and permissiveness to law enforcement, why are they so often willing to elect and re- elect premiers who offer them just the opposite?
The tough truth is that the troubles of the federal Conservatives in Canada tell us much more about Canadian federalism than about Canadian Conservatism.
The federal Conservatives lose elections not because Canadians want an expensive government, but because Canada is a divided nation. Right-of-centre parties are at bottom nationalist parties. They are the parties voters turn to in times of war or danger, the parties they trust to defend the nation, its culture, its unity.
Canada, though, is a country with two national identities, not one. And a very great many people in the more numerous Canadian nation — the one that speaks English — fear that too overt an expression of their national identity will drive the other nation — the one that speaks French — to secede. And so over the past four decades, Canada has changed its flag and its national anthem. It has ceased teaching its history and obliterated the memory of its heroes and its battles. Patriotic Canadians have over the years absorbed the lesson that the best way to protect their nation is by eliminating their own nationhood.
In such a political environment, conservatives will always be suspect. Where would the U. S. Republicans be — or the British Conservatives or the French Gaullists or John Howard’s Australian Liberals — if the rules of the political game required them to agree that America, Britain, France or Australia were defined only by tolerance and diversity — and that the only things that could be called distinctively American, British, French or Australian were a set of malfunctioning social programs? Under those conditions, those triumphant parties would be just as sickly as the Canadian Conservatives.
The crisis of Canadian conservatism is the crisis of the Canadian nation. The challenge for Canadian conservatism is the challenge of the Canadian nation. And if in the end, there is no hope for one — then there won’t be any hope for the other either.