Andrew Coyne: Conservatives brought down by their own cynicism
When people come to recall the Harper government, the face they remember first may not be his. It may be one of the people he appointed to speak for him — his parliamentary secretaries, Dean Del Mastro, Paul Calandra and Pierre Poilievre. Two of the three are departed from public life, but their faces — cunning, caustic, old before their time — are burned into the public mind, glowing symbols of the culture that took hold at the top of the Conservative party.
It is that culture that, more than anything, was responsible for their defeat. To be sure, the party ran a terrible campaign — listless, directionless, divisive — but the campaign was a product of the same culture, and in any case the election was lost long before the campaign began. It wasn’t the economy that condemned them to just 32 per cent of the vote (second-worst, for the parties of the right, since 1968), and it wasn’t their policies. It was what the party, at its most senior levels, had become: the values, the attitudes, the way it talked, how it acted, its overall approach to politics and government, all of which betrayed a deep, unrelenting, almost poisonous cynicism.
We should be clear where the roots of that culture lie. The nastiness of Tory politics under Harper, the mindless partisanship, the throttling of backbench MPs, are not outgrowths of conservatism. They were born, rather, of its repudiation: of the decision to sterilize the new party of any ideological convictions, the better (it was supposed) to remove any obstacle to its electability.
All criticism only confirmed the rightness of their position: the press were out to get them, the bureaucracy was out to get them, the courts were out to get them — and the academics were even worse. Within the party, the circle of loyalty grew narrower and narrower, even as the party itself left broader and broader swaths of society outside it: the young, the university-educated, women, even the minorities it had been so eager to court.
The damage that has been done is far greater than this defeat. It isn’t just the Conservatives who have lost favour with the public: it’s conservatism. It has been so long since Conservatives put forward any bold or radical policy ideas, they have gotten out of the habit; not having heard ideas from that quarter for so long, the public may be forgiven for concluding either that they don’t exist, or that they are so far beyond the pale as not to be worth considering.
Andrew Coyne: Conservatives brought down by their own cynicism | National Post
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