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Americans tend to make fun of their northern neighbour – that is, when they think of Canada at all. “Blame Canada!” Kyle’s mom sings in the movie South Park. And the American political writer Michael Kinsley once challenged readers to suggest a more boring headline than “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative”. None of this, however, deters former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. In his new book, Right Here, Right Now, Harper has some advice for American conservatives struggling with how to deal with populism and Donald Trump: be more like us.
Harper’s argument is that the forces underpinning populist sentiment are real and here to stay. Conservatives in America – and by implication, elsewhere – must either adapt or cede power to the “liberal Left”. I’ve long admired Harper, and have argued for nearly a decade with my fellow American conservatives in favour of the very points he makes. Yet, as he notes, American conservatism continues to look on Canada’s less doctrinaire conservatism as lukewarm socialism.
Two years after Trump easily swept aside 16 Republican primary opponents and blasted through the Democrats’ vaunted Midwestern ‘blue wall’ to seize the White House, conservatives remain in denial about why he won – and largely refuse to acknowledge the moral legitimacy of his supporters’ demands. Trump’s desire for a large infrastructure building program has gone nowhere, and Republicans otherwise supine before him roar with dismay at his deviations from free-trade orthodoxy. Now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggests that cutting pensions and government-funded health care are next on the agenda, notwithstanding the President’s clear campaign promise that he would not do that.
Harper’s calm and reasoned arguments against this narrow Republican position present an entirely different notion of what it means to be conservative. Edmund Burke is Harper’s intellectual lodestar; he subscribes to the argument that conservatism is as much a disposition as a set of ideas. As a result, Harper sees a way to respond to current concerns and challenges that seems to elude most American conservatives.
Populism and Trump arose, Harper suggests, because “the world of globalization is not working for many of our own people”. Trump is right to contend that mass illegal immigration and poor trade deals have reduced many working people’s incomes and cost millions of jobs. At the same time, Harper heartily agrees with Goodhart’s ‘Anywheres’ versus ‘Somewheres’ analysis that elites who are economically and socially connected across the globe have lost touch with their fellow citizens whose worldviews and lives remain highly dependent upon the nation state. Conservatives, he argues, must back the Somewheres in this struggle and “be the champions for working men, women, and families in the twenty-first century”.
To do that, American conservatives need to be more like the Canadian Conservative Party Harper led – less beholden to ideology. He notes that Canada experienced levels of immigration as high as America and signed a host of free-trade deals during his tenure, but Canadians have not suffered income declines or massive job losses like Americans, nor have they turned against immigration. Indeed, Canada stands out as perhaps the only major advanced economy that does not have a significant populist movement, either of the Corbynite Left or the Trumpist Right. That, he says, is due to his government’s choices.
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