STAGE III - BULLY POPULISM: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON ROTARY DIAL
By the 1970s, the business set were in a pickle. The post-war boom had plateaued and government regulation, unions, and taxes were eating into potential profits. The religious set was also in a quandary - church attendance was dwindling, Scopes and Roe vs. Wade had tested church vs. state; people were into self-help, and you just couldn't indoctrinate people into hating themselves for having sex like the old days, and Trudeau, Sr. made it clear that "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." The racist quarter had never been lower - biological racism had been debunked, jews had their own state, society was much more integrated, and it just wasn't cool to be racist anymore. The "long, hot, summer of 1967” in the US, dovetailed into worldwide protests in 1968, and while the specific causes varied they had the effect of bringing social unrest into the mainstream. It was now more of a civic duty to disrupt than to conform. Through the irrationality and vanity of the First and Second World Wars, and the utter cruelty shown in them and in Vietnam, on the streets of Belfast, Detroit, and Alabama, governments and related institutions had really lost all moral authority and a deep-seated suspicion and cynicism set in. Shamed conservative Nixon, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Tet Offensive and Mi Lai, Kent State and '68 showed America what it really was, while Trudeaumania, Expo, and the Olympics was showing sleepy little Canada what it could be. One hundred-plus years after 1848, affirmation of constitutionalism was in the air. Conservative political parties became "your grandfather's party" - a white-washed cabal of grumpy stalwarts and their female and token familiars - religious zealots on the social spectrum, and corporate plutocrats on the fiscal side. A portion of their base had been co-opted into centrist liberal parties, like the Democrats in the US or the Liberal Party in Canada, the remainder of which led to conservative parties of strange bedfellows, one laying in the wet spot mouthing out the Toronto Sun, the other on Egyptian cotton drinking in the Wall Street Journal, finding common cause against a liberal tide that had landed ashore in recent decades.
The left, with their "now you know how it feels" attitude towards average whites leaves them with the notion that if politics is beset by the Clintons and the Bushes, who continually screw them over and never seem to enact real change, and society has abandoned them, they would rather burn the whole thing to the ground than accept the status quo, and Donald Trump speaks the language of Götterdämerung.
There are two simple facets of an electoral system that belie the real complexity of the societies that they represent - it does not matter why one votes for a candidate - a vote is a vote; and when one opts for a candidate for one reason, one gets all that they stand for in tow. Religious conservatives, feudal business interests, and average Joe and Jane White held all cards in the socio-political game but in the time period between the upheavals of 1848 and the latter 20th century watched a fluctuating but general, both perceived and real, deletion of their authority. As much as social liberals had pushed for society-wide adoption of progressive policies, the conservative set had to push back to maintain or regain their hegemony. Seeing the writing on the wall, conservative groups exploited the notion of the electorate stated above as a way to win elections to push through their agenda and they found their demographic amongst the Archie Bunker set. "I love the poorly educated," professed Donald Trump during the 2016 election, to which the throngs proudly cheered. A silver-spooned huckster pontificating upon the righteousness of ignorance could not be bettered as an encapsulation of the current conservative movement.
In 1971, The Toronto Telegram rebranded itself as the The Toronto Sun. In this unabashedly small-c conservative tabloid modelled after British rags, which adopted the laconic bombastic adjective-filled language of populist white outrage and working-class discontentment - "good" people got their hands dirty, watched sports, and looked at boobies, and everyone else was elitist, scum, or elitist scum. Immigrants took jobs and lived off welfare and social liberals were pinko-commie hippies who took ginkgo and barbecued tofu. The tenor of The Toronto Sun is part and parcel of the neoconservative messaging of Rupert Murdoch's global voice whose praetorian guard fight the good fight at Fox News, and tip their hats to the likes of Don Cherry and Rush Limbaugh, propping up white, anglo-christian disenfranchisement and propagate the encampment of social conservatives who have drunken the fiscal conservative Kool-aid. How the oligarchs and plutocrats managed to bring their historical enemies (labour unions, blue collar workers) to subscribe to their world-view, which is undoubtedly the most masterful conspiracy of propaganda in world history, required a herculean organization of cash, cronyism, affirmative action, deregulation, and attrition. Convincing the now disenfranchised working class whites that their lowered social status, disengagement from the economy, and decline in living standard (perceived or real) was somehow the result of an atheistic, heathenistic, multiculti, totalitarian, ivory-towered cabal of liberal elites bred the current entrenchment of the single-issue voter who would rather burn the whole thing down than give in to those who have destroyed "The Dream". The reality being that vulture capitalists, corporate stock market slaves, and neo-feudalist business interests have been systematically hollowing out the democratic and industrial structures that have buoyed the Western standard of living for the past century in order to channel the world's wealth towards their bottom lines and they have successfully convinced a portion of the voting public to support it.
Conservative thunder was stolen by centrist liberal parties in the US and Canada in the '90s. The Chrétien Liberals enacted an austerity policy throughout the decade despite wide-ranging complaints about deficient government services which paid for a surplus budget and reduced debt and was widely given credit for insulating Canada from the 2008 financial crisis, but they had the good sense not to buy into George Bush Jr.'s farce in Iraq which solidified the Liberal's street-cred as social liberals, but no one had any delusions about the Liberal Party's big business, free-trade, financial elitist proclivities, and they were eventually voted out due to the so-called "Ad-scam" scandal. Bill Clinton, while paying lip-service to liberal street-cred, signed just about any conservative economic policy that they threw in front of him, which included the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a long-salivated-for sapping of the legislative castle walls, which led directly to the self-same financial crisis of 2008, after which the neoconservative anti-government free-market vanguards stood in line for a $700-billion handout and paid themselves bonuses which revealed them to be nothing more than the greedy sociopaths that everyone knew them to be. The corollary being that the big business, free-trade, fiscal responsibility facet of conservatism was no longer strictly within a conservative's purview and conservative parties were not particularly good at it anyway as they justified mounting debt in the US to expand the military and bail out banks but called slashing social programs "fiscal responsibility". Ronald Reagan left the US under a crippling debt, which was exacerbated by G.W. Bush's wars, and continued by the Democrat, Obama; Mulroney was a big business free-trader and made no surpluses except in the unemployment lines from workers displaced from manufacturing; Stephen Harper ran ten solid years of deficits and only managed to fudge the books long enough to lose the 2015 election in a thinly veiled slight-of-hand 3, while the Liberals won on promising to run a deficit, the electorate perhaps feeling that no governments balance the books so they may as well get something out of it. Centrist parties having peeled off the business class while throwing money and lip-service at socially liberal causes left conservative factions with an oddball congregation of libertarian right wing business interests like the Koch brothers, small and anti-government ideologues, anti-immigration working class whites who feel they being sold down the river to liberal interests, and religious zealots. Conservatives, who once represented the mainstream, are pooling what are now fringe partisan groups and drawing support from increasingly marginalised sectors of society.
Progressive Conservative and their splinter group, Reform - one being paradoxical cognitive dissonance and the other an energised euphemism for "revert" and an antonym of conserve - are a clear indication that conservatives are swimming against the tide in that they have to announce that they are the conservatives of change - the two factions eventually re-merged. Conservative parties in Canada have struggled to define themselves over the past decades, with rebranding and mergers, while they managed to come together under Stephen Harper and form government, their base is a dwindling demographic in Canada and representative of values that few Canadians hold, but as our election results indicate, you don't need a lot of Canadians to win an election. The 2015 Conservative Party election campaign was beset by mean-spirited dog-whistling, mud-slinging, and schlocky sound bites about things that many Canadians found to be anti-democratic, antithetical to Canadians values, and ideological kink rather than sound government policy. Calling in Lynton Crosby, throwing around phrases like "old-stock Canadians" and "Barbaric Cultural Practices", and reckless spending gimmicks spoke directly to their base of boutique partisans, but not to the larger cross section of the Canadian electorate. Looking at the line-up of the last Conservative Party leadership debate, it looked like the entirety of a high school's extracurricular programme had all booked the same room - a hodgepodge of nerd-table outcasts whose only Venn intersection was "not Liberal" - Maxime Bernier: a libertarian in it for the small government; Kevin O'Leary: a Trumpian blow hard self-promoter who doesn't speak French, nor even live in Canada, and didn't care because he had no intention of seeing the campaign through; a slew of Harper era cast-offs who had no chance of winning a general election (with the exception of Rona Ambrose who was ineligible); Kellie Leitch, who was best described as weird, and who ran on a "damned elites" and "Canadian values" platform, yet spouted, "please understand that I do have 22 letters at the end of my name. I'm not an idiot," (Herald), and then put out a most-wincingly awkward campaign video. The winning slot went to überweiss-horse candidate, Andrew Sheer - the devil in dimples to the liberal set, Harper-light to pundits, and a Catholic social-conservative more comfortable on the set of Rebel Media than the CBC. Populism in the West is the angry-white guy's narrative and as the Conservative Party continues to attempt to gather the various factions of right-wing discontentment under their umbrella, they will continually be associated with those that "feel"(Gingrich) their facts.
STAGE IV: GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
'"He [Trump]'s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides," he stated. "But everybody — the press and everybody's going, 'Oh, well, that's racist,' and they're making a big hoodoo out of it. Just f***ing get over it. It's a sad time in history,"' (Hainey) quoth that laconic sayer of sooth, Clint Eastwood. One would have to be pretty white and pretty male to believe that it is a sad time in history. One reason being that for those that it is actually sad for, it is not history but the only struggle they have ever known; another reason being that only white males had it good in the past; and a third reason being that for non-whites, things are looking up. Outside of the West, Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades, and in defiance of James Baldwin's prediction the US elected a black president; In the West, women are sitting at the heads of countries, provinces, legislatures, companies, and families and are eclipsing males at education level; many secular rights have been tested in the courts - same-sex marriage, legalization of marijuana, abortion, freedom from discrimination - and the door to conciliation with colonised peoples has been opened. While our society may have a long way to go with these matters, "just f***ing get over it" is a solution only the most entrenched white male patriarch would come up with because all of these advancements are done at the expense of white-male authority and comfort and they have a chauvinistic lack of empathy toward the sufferings of others and one would have to consider these changes as positive in order to support them.
Accordingly, white maledom is being assailed from all sides in our culture. That which was in Clint Eastwood's hey-day presented as the quintessential heroic archetype - John Wayne brashly keeping the red scalpers at bay, or a debonair womanizing James Bond fighting the first-world good fight in nefarious and exotic lands; the hard-working journeyman throwing hay bales into a pick-up, bringing home bacon to a loving family - is being rebranded as a violent racist misogynistic hick. No one who feels they are doing right by themselves and those they care about consider themselves to be bad people, but we are calling them just that. MRAs (men's rights activist groups) complaints ring hollow because they garner little sympathy from those that have been subject to white patriarchy for centuries. Feeling attacked for practicing their culture and reflecting its mainstream values, disenfranchised whites have bivouacked and garrisoned their outposts behind populist politicians, right-wing media outlets like Rebel Media and Breitbart, and Reddit and Facebook groups - "just f***ing get over it indeed" replies the progressive vanguard.
Pressure further to changing social mores is economic disenfranchisement. The hollowing of the industrial and manufacturing core of Western economies has left those who could once rely upon stable and meaningful factory work eccentric to a technocratic and skills-based society. So-called "rust-belt" communities in the US that were once thriving comfortable suburban areas find people left out of the American Dream. Workplaces where once immigrants, non-whites, and woman were not being welcomed have not only become integrated, but have at the same time largely disappeared from Western communities. It is a shock to the white system to arrive in the new millennium only to find that the factory floor, the farm, the mine, that have stood as the bulwark against obscurity and as the gateway to middle-class comfort for generations have dwindled. Meanwhile, immigrants' children, women, and elitist white traitors have moved on to well-paying skilled work in the service economy while those that didn't seem to get the message that their world was changing, scramble for minimum wage at Walmart. It is no wonder that Donald Trump's message is to "Make America Great Again" and "we're gonna bring those jobs back!" and he went on about re-opening coal mines, and that the go-to populist message is "damned elites/foreigners/immigrants/government/bitches/gays/brown people". There are communities in the US that have replaced the American Dream for guns and fentanyl and populist talking heads at Fox and in the White House are speaking directly to those who feel hard done by. Canada has some built-in relief valves that the US has forgone. Quality public education, healthcare, and largely affordable post-secondary education has allowed the transition into the current stage of globalisation to proceed more smoothly, and while Canadians voted resoundingly against the dog-whistling populism of the Harper Conservatives in the 2016 election, that has not insulated Canada from populist discontentment.
It is easy for left-wing progressives to dismiss conservative populism as anti-intellectual simple-minded bullies who have been duped by plutocratic business interests into conflating their social discontentment with right-wing business aims and hawkish military stances. What is the relationship between climate change denial and anti-muslim feelings? How do pro-life and anti-immigration find alignment in one's world view? What affinity does a unionized labourer have with a libertarian small-government business mogul? Fundamentally these do not and have none. Right wing values are an odd hodgepodge of disparate and self-defeating viewpoints. Many union members vote Conservative for its social conservatism but get its union-busting and free-trading along with it - or vote conservatively for its stance on abortion but get its opposition to public healthcare and education in tow. The only unifying element is that these issues are attributed to government overreach and encroachment upon one's personal interests and/or beliefs. The wall that conservatives crash upon when it comes to many socially conservative viewpoints is that they are not tested by governments but in the Supreme Courts, and governments are as subject to them as anyone is. The outrage over the Kahdr settlement of late is a case in point. Blame was foisted onto the government and the Prime Minister directly despite the fact that it was a Supreme Court decision, and for most who opposed it saw Khadr as a war criminal and that it was caving to bleeding-heart liberal sympathies. The same could be said about the Citizens United decision in the US, which was a right wing victory as has lead in large part to the current state of electoral politics that conservatives rail against. The argument that the Supreme Court and the government are two separate branches of our governmental system is irrespective of right-wing sentiments and is an intellectual distinction that does not make "concerned citizens" feel better. The same logic applies to the myriad other significant progressive victories - legalization of marijuana, right-to-die, abortion, same-sex marriage, anti-discrimination, et al. Liberal constitutions are a legal and social technology that allow for freedoms and protections that the conservative and liberal-minded alike are not comfortable with except where it suits them. That conservatives view the government as having been co-opted by left-wing liberal snowflakes that have given in to leftist and socialistic lobbying and special interest groups is a trope deep in the heart of modern conservatism. The solution is to win elections and establish mandates as sanctified by the electorate. In the US this is done by gerrymandering and super-PACs, in Canada this is done by waiting for Canadians to get tired of the Liberals.
Conservative politics has become by its nature reactionary and populist. It is the movement of the Fords and the Trumps, and like all populism it speaks to a disaffected and disenfranchised sector of the population - disenfranchised being a complicated word because it can include those who in fact are so and those who merely perceive themselves to be eccentric to the dominant social narrative. It can therefore not win popular favour in liberal constitutional states because that would require the relinquishment of hard won rights. As a movement it must then garner support by classically populist means: creating enemies both foreign and domestic, conjuring scapegoats (a religious and/or ethnic minority has always worked well), being proactive and energetic (slogans and memes in the imperative), and ultimately making threats (Götterdämmerung).
The mistake on the left has been to underestimate the extent to which angry white sentiment has been fuelled. Not content to uproot the horrors of colonialist white attitudes in the form of current institutional racism and historical atrocities, the left has resorted to analysing facial gestures, splicing etymology, and throwing around words like "privilege" in an attempt to extirpate white patriarchy from the culture, and has gone further to flat out insult people who may in fact be struggling. Hindsight reveals that Hillary Clinton lost the election through her "basket of deplorables" comment. In the only salient explanation of Trump's election as President, Victor Davis Hanson explains that while many people who support Trump may not agree with everything he says, but value his willingness to say it, which is the common utterance when media types attempt to ridicule Trump's supporters ignorance by interviewing them. The left, with their "now you know how it feels" attitude towards average whites leaves them with the notion that if politics is beset by the Clintons and the Bushes, who continually screw them over and never seem to enact real change, and society has abandoned them, they would rather burn the whole thing to the ground than accept the status quo, and Donald Trump speaks the language of Götterdämerung.
Referenced & Cited Sources
Hainey, Michael. http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a46893/double-trouble-clint-and-scott-eastwood/ AUG 3, 2016. Web.
https://www.cnet.com/news/success-atari-e-t-games-found-in-new-mexico-dump/
Roth Jonathan P. "War and World History." The Great Courses. Audio. 2009.
Rapport, Mike. "1848: Year of Revolution." Basic Books, 2010. Print.
Duncan, Mike. "Revolutions: 4:19 The History of Haiti." Podcast. April, 2016.
https://fee.org/articles/what-is-neoliberalism-anyway/
Prince Arthur Herald. http://princearthurherald.com/en/politics-2/7594. Web. 01/13/2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Sun
Gingrich, Newt. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/08/05/newt-gingrich-exemplifies-just-how-unscientific-america-is/#35a935695e47; https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/12/01/gingrich-camerota-crime-stats-newday.cnn
Further Reading
https://thewalrus.ca/how-to-save-the-conservative-party/
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/18/who-are-old-stock-canadians.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-harper-debate-1.3233785
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/old-stock-canadians-stephen-harper-identity-politics-1.3234386
https://books.google.ca/books?id=WUVdAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA525&lpg=PA525&dq=cases+of+resistance+to+the+printing+press&source=bl&ots=fAIqiQJHOA&sig=5yeJdO2cRVz56mmAcO6GPztPC8Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjzxsr85fLVAhVB4YMKHWbVBi4Q6AEIVzAH#v=onepage&q=cases%20of%20resistance%20to%20the%20printing%20press&f=false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_press
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/02/dont_touch_that_dial.html
https://secureimages.teach12.com/CourseGuideBooks/DG8870_Z1S8P9.pdf
CNN:
Gingrich, Newt. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/08/05/newt-gingrich-exemplifies-just-how-unscientific-america-is/#35a935695e47; https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/12/01/gingrich-camerota-crime-stats-newday.cnn