Justin Trudeau apes dad

Pierre Trudeau’s reputation as a battling liberal intellectual is an impregnable pan-Canadian memory. It will outlast Montréal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport and is as imposing as Mount Pierre Elliott Trudeau in British Columbia. It has been a spur and, often, a crutch for a generation of Liberal politicians.

Now his son will try something Dad never tried: run an election against a conservative incumbent on behalf of liberty.

Justin Trudeau’s prepared speech for the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada asserts immediately that it’s “time Liberals took back liberty” and concludes 40 minutes later on an optimistic note: “If we resist the urge to impose our personal beliefs upon our fellow citizens … we get back Canada in return.”

Only a Canadian Liberal, in third place, could suggest that Canada has gone missing, that liberty can be both the brand of Canada and the brand of his political Party as well.   

Most high-minded speeches are diminished by partisanship. This speech is propped up by its extravagant hostility toward the government of the day. Pundits report in whispers that the speech was in the works for months and that it reflects intense electoral calculation as well as Trudeau’s rising personal alarm about the vulnerable state of liberty in Harperland.

That Trudeau’s accusations are taken seriously isn’t a tribute to the morning logic of his beautifully written speech but the bile within our politics and punditry toward the Harper government. As he spoke, Trudeau ducks any discussion of legislation that does affect our liberties, legislation that is actually being worked on in committee, by working MPs. According to the same quality of dot-connecting employed by paranoids on the left now as well as the right, Harper’s hidden agenda, apparently, isn’t neo-liberal but neo-fascist.

The notion that successful applicants for Canadian citizenship should show their faces at their citizenship ceremonies is a betrayal of Canada’s brand and is unleashing dark impulses in the citizenry worthy of a drama class but nowhere else.

Our globally renowned liberal Constitution does grandfather Aboriginal treaty rights and certain regulated educational rights for Catholics. However, it doesn’t favor any god, cult, collectivity or tribal practice. We are—and we are seen to be—a rather godless sectarian country by friends and foe alike.

Surely, Muslim immigrants aren’t coming here to enrich their faith. They expect to enjoy, yes, reasonable accommodation. And they keep applying for residence and citizenship by the tens of thousands on that basis.

Plausibility applies in “core value” elections as well as elections decided on such pedestrian grounds as middle-class concerns about the future and executive competence.

Pierre Trudeau, by the way, won his three majorities by promising to be tough on disruptive Western decentralists, weak-kneed federalists, and Quebec nationalists and separatists—and, lest we forget, by promising to not raise taxes on gasoline or introduce wage and price controls. His opponents were caricatured as wobbly and less competent, not less committed to liberty than he was.  

Signs of division — and life — in liberal thinking?

Within the last week, retired Ontario Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan and retiring liberal champion and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg openly abandoned hard liberal pieties on the political power of public sector unions and the wisdom of public ownership of giant public utilities.

Alongside the fine-grain speculation over the feelings of mad men on the right, is it not also interesting that liberals are starting to question the validity of core liberal policy in Canada and the United States?

It’s holiday season and we’re all worn down by scandal. Still, something big is happening: after years of dining out on conservative extremism, intelligent liberals are now questioning their loftiest sound bites. Bloomberg’s concerns about “a labor-electoral complex” may not, immediately, contaminate Hillary Clinton’s meticulous campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. However, Dwight Duncan’s twitter below may seriously complicate Premier Kathleen Wynne’s plans — and prospects — in an Ontario election within the next 6 months:

“OPG [Ontario Power Generation] should be privatized. Market discipline will be much more effective at addressing the problems than political oversight.”

Brutes and nihilists are expected to complain about crown corporations. It’s news, however, when a leading liberal acknowledges aloud that these institutions will not always serve liberal ends.

Ontarians want to be interesting but never consciously vote for radicals. So, Liberals have told Ontarians for over decade that Ontario conservatives are radicals. You see: some 15 years ago, they actually tried to organize a competitive, private electricity industry. They ran out of luck — and nerve. But their intention at that time has been used to demonize them ever since.

It frays that liberal accusation — to say the least — to read that the former Liberal government’s illustrious minister of both Energy and Finance believes that OPG, one of the largest electricity generation companies in North America, should now operate and sell its power as a private company.

A crippling fear of a long word — “redistribution”

On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, John Harwood presented a lurid picture of what scares the best liberal marketers since the New Deal. Obama’s White House is afraid that voters will learn now what history will surely note: Obamacare is a big deal because it actually does redistribute health benefits and costs among Americans.

Liberals and social democrats may or may not be better parents, lovers, and poets than conservatives. On this continent, however, they’re certainly more sensitive about the words they decide to use in politics.

Universal health insurance, as Harwood points out, will redistribute purchasing power from those with substantial pre-tax incomes, robust health, no family responsibilities, and no blemishes on their health records to other Americans with modest or no taxable income, with risky health profiles, and with kids to worry about. Also, it levels insurance premiums for men and women, at the expense of men who never get pregnant. It waters down the exorbitant privilege that seniors have enjoyed as automatic recipients of "socialized" medicine.

Obamacare is defensible on grounds of fairness, and politically. As with social insurance and unemployment insurance, it will probably elect future politicians committed to making it work and will defeat statewide and national politicians who’d wish it away. If Obamacare survives the next couple of years and becomes another feature of the status quo, it could be a winner for liberals. But getting there means change — and change requires “redistribution.”

However, Democrat power broker William M. Daley has laid down the law:

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

Norman Mailer (in his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, I think) sneered that a liberal would rather “jack off at a beautiful thought than have a dubious fuck with a mean woman.”

Little did he know.

Liberals love the idea that politics can change things for the better. They even admit publicly that they believe in public power. They just can’t seem to spit out the mean words that accurately describe what all productive governments do: redistribute resources, alter market rules, and provide new benefits to some individuals — but not to everyone, equally, at the same time.

Harwood ends his piece with a cringingly fatuous defense of Obamacare by its author, Barack Obama:

“Understand this is not a redistribution argument,” the President told his audience then. “This is not about taking from rich people to give to poor people. This is about us together making investments in our country so everybody’s got a fair shot.”

Actually, social justice and the amelioration of pain are only incidentally good investments. They’re more affordable in affluent societies. They’re done, however, for reasons of conscience and fellowship and are financed by levying taxes and charges, whether by brand-name liberals or conservatives.

Not being truthful about what government does weakens the credibility of reformers on any number of fine causes. Calling for a "price" on carbon, insisting that we need universal public daycare, enriching public pensions, and even fiddling with taxes all involve championing some individuals and not others.

Governments can’t do anything worthwhile without creating winners and losers.

The most philistine Republican will at least utter in public the big words he or she uses in private. He or she will take advice from expensive wordsmiths, but won’t hide words they especially like: private enterprise, profit, capitalism, states-rights, and liberty, for instance.  

Barack Obama better secure a decent record of liberal accomplishment, if only to excuse his consistent unwillingness to restore liberal-friendly words in American politics.

Charter of popular values: rejecting America and Canada’s liberal revolution

Quebec Premier Pauline Marois’s proposal that the people of Quebec gather round and write a legal Charter of Popular Quebec Values feels creepy for a good reason: it is literally anti-liberal. Liberal societies protect weak political ideas and peaceful minorities, not the Behemoth.

Rural, unilingual, and traditional Francophones might be able to squeak a Charter of Values into law. However, it’s really not conceivable that Quebec separatism can be advanced by campaigns that not only drive away "the others" but also put in serious doubt Quebec’s future as a liberal society. Without a cosmopolitan and liberal base, an independence movement on this liberal continent is doomed.

(Mounting a campaign of provocation against the rest of Canada is futile. Stephen Harper needn’t and won’t escalate. Besides, he just hasn’t got the charisma to radicalize his opponents in any part of the country.)

Canada’s government puts the Queen of Canada on its stamps and Quebec’s Government puts “Je me souviens” on its license plates. Otherwise, Canadians overwhelmingly want their governments to be as republican as Boston, as secular as Washington, and at least as liberal as San Francisco.

The Pope’s political authority in Quebec ended in the 17th century, and the inexorable passing of British conservatism was effectively sealed in the next century, in the liberal revolution of 1776.

North Americans divide over borders, official languages, and the merits of living in federal states. They cherish, however, their liberal Bill of Rights and the equally liberal Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Since the 1960s, all winning separatist politicians in Quebec insisted that they were liberationists, not reactionaries. They claimed, simply, that Quebeckers could use the tools of a modern liberal state more effectively if they had a national government of their own. 

Marois’s mandate from her party, and her only chance to advance their ambitious cause, is to govern at least as well as her neighbors, and embrace — along with our currency and North American open markets — either the Canadian or the American (or both) charters of individual rights.  

Terrorism, sociology, and personal freedom

It’s human to look for connections. We do it when we hear that a friend has cancer. And we do it every time an individual—or two brothers in Boston—go out and succeed in killing total strangers. Raising concern for the “root” causes of violence if you’re a Canadian Liberal, or the possibility of bureaucratic negligence if you’re an American Republican, is unsurprising; it’s human nature, it sounds constructive, and it is widely associated with analytical and sophisticated thinking.  

Nevertheless, liberal-minded people as well as libertarians should actually be comforted by Barack Obama and Stephen Harper’s focus on the crime of terrorism and the resolve of their governments to punish those individuals found guilty of willfully taking their politics out on the lives of others.

Harper’s complaint about “practicing sociology” was partisan and, consequently, politically untimely. And Obama’s reluctance to talk about “radical Islamists” is being exploited by his opponents. Nevertheless, is it reasonable—and, more importantly, is it safe—to imply that the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 just might not have happened: if our national governments paid greater attention to minority-group individuals, their politics, and their grievances, or, on the other hand, if they more aggressively monitored edgy individuals and damned extreme rhetoric and radical movements?

Should our governments connect what people think and how they express themselves peacefully—in a free society—with acts of premeditated violence?

The implications of choosing "yes" are not any safer than lashing out emotionally.

Should we contemplate shifting our alliances in the Middle East in the hope of mollifying potential domestic terrorists? If America drives some individuals crazy, should Canada try to be less American? Should all of us be less hostile toward the political and religious points of view we despise in order to avoid terrorist violence?

In democracies, minorities—gays and French Canadians, for instance—can persuade majorities to retreat from and surrender old policies by persuading them that those old policies are unjust. Is terrorism simply politics on speed?

Senator Lindsey Graham wonders whether the US security behemoth “let its guard down” in Boston because it did nothing about the Tsarnaev brothers even though the older brother, Tamerlan, had already said hateful things on YouTube about living in a nation of “Christian infidels.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a profile of his younger brother, Dzhokhar. It found hints of a “dark side”; a smart, promising, popular 19-year-old who’d, nevertheless, “alluded to disaffection with his American life and the American mind-set.”

Keep digging. He may also be hooked on Wire and Mad Men.

Should Obama and Harper hire more sociologists, political psychologists, and computer engineers to daily monitor the private utterances and activities of a far higher percentage of American radicals and landed immigrants? If radical Islamist thinking causes middle-class North Americans to commit murder, do we make radical political utterances a crime too?

In a free country, a young man needn’t mask his “dark side.” Our governments shouldn’t be told by us to respect our privacy and, at the same, be expected to know what everyone is thinking—if they don't happen to think like us.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent a lifetime struggling to understand how individuals decide to commit cold-blooded murder. We shouldn’t ask our politicians, their scientists, or their unbelievably powerful computers to try to figure us out now.