Prime Minister Stephen Harper tries just to stifle his worst instincts. Warning: Canadian prime ministers may not be exactly as illustrated. If you’re too young to get this, just don’t worry about it. It’s pretty obscure anyway. Below: Richard Nixon, back in the days when there was only a Commie under every bed. Mr. Harper as we’ve come to love him.Just the other day, it was said by one of the usual suspects in one of the usual places that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada now sees itself as having inherited the mantle of the country’s “natural governing party” from the woebegone Liberals.
It is certainly true that this could happen if the dice roll the Conservatives’ way, as so far they have. But this potential outcome notwithstanding, the so-called Conservatives – who despite their honourable history are nowadays neither really conservative nor truly a national 
party – face considerable roadblocks to their great ambition.
Chief among these are the radical and intolerant nature of their own political base and their nearly complete lack of support in one of the key regions of the country. For despite having many more moderate supporters, they remain the party of the hate-filled, Internet trolling, union-hating, fear-mongering, gun-loving, homophobic, anti-abortion, loony right as well as of corporate greed, and they have little support in Quebec outside a few reconstituted separatists.
Consider the United States as an illustration of the fate that may await the Canadian Conservatives if they cannot overcome their baser nature and also build meaningful support in French-speaking Canada – both goals that are within the grasp of the party, but which will not come particularly easily to them.
In the U.S., Democratic Party President Barack Obama may very well be reelected – despite his profound lack of success on the economic front and his betrayal of his own key supporters on a wide range of issues.
Why? Simply because the Republican Party has forfeited its role in the modern era as America’s natural governing party, which it has enjoyed since the inception of Richard Nixon’s divisive but effective Southern Strategy in the late 1960s. It has done so by moving consistently to the right to the point where it is on the verge of becoming the Treason Party of the United States. All this the Republicans did to themselves without facing the danger of alienating voters in a part of the country that speaks another language, for the simple reason no such region exists – yet…
To a significant degree, Prime Minister Harper’s Tea Party of Canada still appeals most to essentially the same minority of voters, and managed to form a majority government by successfully keeping those supporters in check at the same time as it moved its policy platform back toward the middle. Add to that strategy a waning and still discredited Liberal Party and a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time NDP, and they were able to achieve their goal.
Having done so, however, the question is whether they can overcome the radicalism of their own core and the extremist instincts of Mr. Harper himself to really become a natural governing party. In other words, they need to get their trolls under control – and some of those trolls are pretty well placed!
The conundrum for the Conservatives is that to become the natural governing party, they need to be a moderate party that hews to the centre – even if they try to ease the centre to the right. But if they succeed at staying near the centre line, they risk losing their most loyal supporters – perhaps to a national version of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance party, as indeed has happened once before.
One senses the PM understands this strategically, but can’t quite achieve it viscerally, in his gut. Indeed, for a vivid example of the PM’s own instincts at play, consider his warning yesterday in an on-line CBC retrospective on the 911 attacks that there may be an “Islamicist” in a suicide vest hiding under each of our beds. Please!
So, we shall see. If the Conservatives truly become the natural governing party, it may not as bad a thing as some of us fear. After all, they will have had to moderate their worst instincts to achieve that goal.
And if they don’t, well, there’s another party waiting in the wings – one with support in Quebec and fewer lunatic trolls among its fringes – almost ready to play that starring role.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.
very tongue in cheek…loved it because it was smack on!
I couldn't watch the Glorious Leader's "media opportunity" with Pastor Mansbridge yesterday. Even my normally strong stomach has its limits.
By stating that Islamicism is the greatest threat to Canadian security, Harper shows that he hasn't got a clue what is happening in Canada.
I think it may be the Cons' unmistakeable resemblance to Vogons that makes me doubt they could ever be the natural governing party of anything that most humans would want to be a part of.
Vogons are described as mindlessly bureaucratic, aggressive, having 'as much sex appeal as a road accident' and the writers of 'the third worst poetry in the universe'. They are employed as the galactic government's bureaucrats.
Even Archie Bunker's blathering is starting to look sane and reasonable compared to this tripe.
Gosh, didn't Harper and the rest of NATO just finish backing a group of Islamists in Libya?
Harper is smoking a hash pipe, or on crack. The biggest threat to Canadian security is his hapless spending and welfared cash to banks and corporations. Our financial security and stability of our economy is our biggest threat. The biggest threat to Canadian security is a boogeyman created by Harper to distract, divert and get polarize people to hate a certain ethnic group of people. He has do this fear mongering to keep his nutjobs and neo-con gimps in their cages.
It might work for a while, but after a while, it will just alienate a whole bunch of voters and the bring the Liberals back to power. The best thing he can do agains the Liberals, is become a Liberal himself. If he tosses his nutjobs under the bus, it will certainly cement him as the best PM ever and make him a natural governing party. The nutjob gimps in the Conservative party are not that huge in numbers. Its a calculated risk that will definintely work in his favor to keep power, if he wishes it.
Romnac you are absolutely right but you have to remember that Libyan Islamists have oil and economic opportunities for those who fill the Tory's coffers. People like Harper see big differences between the useless North Korean communists and the pockets full of money chinese communists and those differences are certainly not political beliefs, principles or moral values.
The word 'Islamicist' didn't sit quite right in the ear.
I couldn't find any reference to or definition of it before it dropped, pearl-like, from the Harper lips.
Re Ronmac – you might like this article by Pepe Escobar, if you haven't seen it already.
So, exactly, who or what has Canada helped to establish in Libya?
How al-Qaeda got to rule in Tripoli
"His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him.
Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter – once again – that wilderness of mirrors that is the 'war on terror', as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) 'humanitarian' intervention in Libya."
Very interesting Filostrato. I did not know about this. Thank you for the info. I am not surprised anyway, I probably would be right to say that in todays' world anything that can take us to what the neo-cons call economic opportunites is fair game. If we cannot change this political environment soon I will be very sorry for the generations to come. Jane Jacobs was right when she predicted another Dark Age.
This Libya thing is a puzzler. I starting to think the real target is China, getting control of the oil fields to block Chinese access (much like Japan during WW2).
Romnac I think you are going somewhere with that China hipoteses. The Chinese have already dominated most of South Africa so you may very well be very right.Not much oil in the South other than Angola but lots of the other basic resources so the control of the North is a pretty good bet for oil as well. Harper in my view is just trying to get the brownie points in the International community and so helping along whatever the rest of Nato is strategizing. He wants to beat Trudeau Internationally but just does not have it.