All posts in U.S. politics

Terror of terrorism and the Second Amendment: Whatever became of the indomitable American spirit?

by David Climenhaga on May 6, 2013 in Gun Laws, National Rifle Association, Terrorism, U.S. politics with 12 Comments

The indomitable American spirit personified above. Whatever became of it? Below: Bogie as Philip Marlowe, with gun; the leader of another English-speaking country refusing to knuckle under to the Luftwaffe, also with gun.

We have learned, courtesy the news media, that membership in the National Rifle Association has surged past five million souls since the Sandy Hook Massacre of little children in Connecticut last December.

It would seem that a significant minority of our American cousins will let nothing stand in the way of their right to massive firepower, which they insist is protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

That’s not actually what the Second Amendment says, mind, but it turns out that American Constitutional literalists are a lot like American Biblical literalists – they’re inclined to pick and choose what to be literal about.

And so, in the case of the Second Amendment, they take literally the bit that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and ignore the other part of the same sentence that says, “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.”

Asking that we cast our minds to more suitable horrifying events from the NRA’s point of view, during the NRA’s national convention last weekend in Houston CEO Wayne LaPierre posed this rhetorical question about the bombing at the Boston Marathon on April 15: “How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?”

That’s an interesting question, actually, given what the significant number of Bostonians who do exercise their Second Amendment rights in fact did when the U.S., Massachusetts and Boston authorities for all intents and purposes declared martial law because a single armed and dangerous criminal was on the loose in the hours after the bombings.

Indeed, there are serious questions raised by this spectacularly disproportionate state response to a terrorist attack and the passive willingness of a significant subgroup of the United States’ supposedly fiercely independent population, including many NRA members, not merely to go along with it, but to heap adulation on the people who imposed martial law on them.

We know that Americans aren’t particularly bothered by routine gun violence – even when it escalates to truly horrifying levels – as long as it is perpetrated by criminals or police.

Raymond Chandler – creator of Philip Marlowe, the Ur detective of American noir fiction – famously commented on this phenomenon through Marlowe’s voice. See all the criminals in Los Angeles locked up? Marlowe responds: “You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way.”

So why this evident American terror of terrorism?

Taken beyond the confines of the greater Boston metropolitan area, surely the reaction of Bostonians, armed and otherwise, exposes some of our most fondly held myths about the nature of Western society.

For martial law it was, and the actual presumed threat that kept at least a million people locked in their houses without access to emergency supplies of baby formula, toilet paper, beer or even cold pizza was that if they ventured outside, the paramilitary police in the streets would have shot them down like dogs, or at least like the single homicidal teenager they were looking for.

Even if there had been many more terrorists – or even the remote possibility of more – the response of the authorities seems preposterous.

After all, modern urban societies have muddled through mass aerial bombings by the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, not to mention terrorist and criminal attacks with much higher casualty rates that this one, without cheerfully succumbing to a complete social and commercial lockdown.

Indeed, the tendency of human beings to pull together and refuse to knuckle under to terrorists, criminals and air forces is well known. So surely there must be cities on this planet where the population would have simply refused to co-operate with an attempt by the authorities to declare martial law because one – albeit homicidal – criminal was on the loose!

Texas, we are told, is the heart of the supposedly fiercely burning American spirit. So if the terrorist attack on April 15 (three dead, 183 injured) had been in Texas and the industrial accident two days later (14 dead, approximately 200 injured) had been in Massachusetts, would the citizens of Houston, host to the NRA convention, have remained meekly indoors?

The answer is almost certainly yes. If it had been Toronto or Sydney, Australia? Probably yes again. Montreal or Athens? Maybe, maybe not – a troubling thought for those of us old enough to have been raised on the indulgent notion that no one was more resistant to tyranny or indomitably independent than the English-speaking peoples.

Kabul, Mogadishu, Beirut or Tel Aviv? Well, apparently not.

But in Boston, as the New Yorker’s John Cassidy pointed out, two benighted post-adolescent bombers achieved something that was “beyond Emperor Hirohito and Hitler. They stopped the Greyhound.”

What was the financial cost of giving in to terror – or, at least, giving in to a single incident of criminality – this way? Immediately after the attacks, the Washington Post estimated lost commercial activity alone in the area at about $250 million to $333 million a day. That, of course, ignored the no doubt staggering expense of the massive paramilitary dragnet as it moved through the Boston region.

The cost to the American self image? Well, probably minimal, as Westerners generally are known to be highly resistant to critical self awareness, let alone to possessing a healthy sense of irony. Said U.S. President Barack Obama: “… A bomb can’t beat us. That’s why we don’t hunker down. That’s why we don’t cower in fear.” And the U.S. media reported it straight up, apparently missing the incongruity entirely.

So in the United States we have a population made up of tens of millions of individuals who won’t give up or restrict in any way their vast personal arsenals, many of them in congress over the weekend in Houston, apparently willing to sit timorously in their basements while an army outside searched for a single 19-year-old!

These are the same people who will tolerate repeated massacres in schools and shopping malls to hang onto their weapons lest they’re needed to repel foreign invaders or topple their own government, should it grow tyrannical. Or so they say.

They try manfully to elect politicians who will defend their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. They turn up at political rallies waving assault rifles to prove this point.

The NRA’s newly elected national president, James Porter, on Friday extolled these gunpeople as “the fighters for freedom … the protectors.”

So what did “the protectors” do when the authorities seemingly took leave of their senses and shut down the core of a metropolitan of 4.6 million people to hunt for one bad man with a gun?

They hunkered down in their basements, fragile and frightened, on the say-so of the Mayor of Beantown and the governor of the Codfish State. Turning the words of President Obama on their head, they cowered in fear.

What’s wrong with this picture? Whatever became of the indomitable American spirit?

And what, pray, do these people need their Second Amendment for, anyway? They’re well armed, but they don’t have the courage of their supposed convictions to step outside. They’ve already surrendered!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Freedom from gun terror: why understanding American history can help keep Canadians sane

by David Climenhaga on January 11, 2013 in American History, Canadian Politics, Gun Laws, U.S. politics with 9 Comments

An American militia in 1773 … before they were well regulated and illustrating why they needed to be. Most militia units, said Gen. George Washington, were “totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill.” Below: President Washington; President Thomas Jefferson.

One of the effects of the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook last year is that – slowly, slowly, ever so slowly – gun control is coming to the U.S.A.

The sheer lunacy of the substantial cohort of firearms-proliferation advocates and their politically influential organizations in the United States after the massacre of six-year-olds on the anniversary of the death of George Washington has effectively driven forward increasingly mainstream efforts to impose some sanity and order on gun sales within our large and noisy neighbor’s borders.

One useful aspect of this harsh debate has been the exposure of a popular misreading of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, that “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

It is simply nonsense to suggest, as has become the conventional wisdom in the circles that advocate gun proliferation, that the intention of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic was to encourage the placement of a firearm in every household as a tool to enable the overthrow of the state should tyranny take root.

This is a preposterous and perverse – and in many cases, quite intentional – misreading of the intention of the Fathers, which is quite clear on the face of the words of the Second Amendment.

Indeed, the purpose of the Second Amendment, which took effect on Dec. 15, 1791, with the other nine amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, was the preservation of the nation and its government, tyrannical or not.

That is not to say the Founders favoured tyranny, and least of the monarchial sort. But since the new United States had both powerful enemies encamped right upon its doorstep – and that would be here in Canada, my fellow citizens – and an instinctive distrust of standing armies based in the circumstances of its birth, the Fathers deemed it necessary to possess a well-regulated militia to ensure the security of their new nation. The secondary clause of the Amendment defines the mechanism for making the militia effective – principally, to ensure its swift mobilization and deployment in the event of a threat to the new country.

That aristocratic old federalist and tax-raiser George Washington, of all people, would laugh through his wooden teeth at the suggestion the new Republic needed to be populated by an armed rabble that could rise up on a moment’s notice and overthrow its government, which in the late 18th Century was made up of people some of us might dismiss in 2012 as “the 1 per cent.”

By the way, the quote frequently attributed to Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence adopted in 1776 and the third president of the Republic, to the effect that weapons in the hands of the population are “a last resort to protect themselves from tyranny in government,” is a misattribution, a fiction.

This is an important historical distinction for Canadians to understand because we hear it so often from our own weapons proliferation advocates and their Canadian gun organizations. Often, this false claim about the intentions of the Founders of the American Republic is stated as if it were required for the preservation of a free state, or even a universal human right, that ought to be, or had better be, imitated in Canada.

So it is helpful for us Canadians to know that it is a gross misreading of history, as risible on the dark side of the Medicine Line as it is here in our more peaceful Dominion.

This ludicrous claim is cynically tolerated – even encouraged – by the profoundly un-conservative and un-Canadian government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the contemptible reasons it has proved to be an effective wedge issue to pry votes in some areas away from the opposition and as a fund-raising tool.

This course of action was made more tempting to him, no doubt, by the fact that Canadian weapons-proliferation advocates are well organized and lobby effectively – thanks to advice and subsidies from their wealthy and experienced allies in the U.S. firearms industry and its political arm, the National Rifle Association, and advocacy from home-grown right-wing groups like the Fraser Institute.

However, for those of us who recognize the need for sanity in the face of anti-social efforts to encourage the proliferation of firearms in our country, this should be cause for hope, not despair.

Because, for all their blustering repetition of the American firearms lobby’s vicious logorrhea, advocates of gun proliferation in Canada have to know that this is simply a different country, with a different history and a different Constitution. And that is not going to change, Mr. Harper’s best efforts notwithstanding.

Our Canadian Constitutional arrangements in particular mean that restrictions on gun proliferation are not merely desirable, they are quite possible.

There is no Second Amendment here to be perversely misinterpreted by “conservative” Supreme Court jurists, and there is a Constitutional guarantee of Peace, Order and Good Government, or at least the circumstances to enable the latter. As for the frantic claims of the gun nuts that they have a Common Law right to be armed to the teeth with assault weapons, they are codswallop.

So in that sense, the wording of the U.S. Constitution and the naïve fictions used to justify its intentional misinterpretation within the United States have no relevance whatsoever in Canada beyond questions of political action.

And the political question, my friends, can be won by advocates of sane regulation and responsible measures to impose reasonable restrictions on the proliferation and nature of firearms available in Canada.

There was a certain amount of triumphalism in gun-proliferation advocacy circles – some of it seen for a time in the comments section of this blog* – after the Harper Government passed legislation eliminating the national rifle and shotgun registry and vandalizing the data already gathered under its aegis.

This was just the start, many proliferation advocates boasted, and they would be going on to achieve much more. For a moment, with Liberal leadership candidate Justin Trudeau’s craven surrender to their not-so-awesome political clout, it may have seemed to some of us as if they were right.

But that is not so. On this side of the border it is simply a question of political will. Our Constitution makes sane limits on firearms proliferation eminently achievable if we choose to exercise that will. This means organizing ourselves as effectively as the proliferation advocates, of course, but this is hardly an insurmountable task. And remember, in politics, a wedge can work more ways than one.

Indeed, the victories under Mr. Harper’s destructive rule by those who would see Canada terrorized by guns like the United States should spur us to seek solutions that are more permanent and more difficult to dismantle than mere registration.

*NOTE: The ban on comments and abuse by firearms proliferation advocates and their ilk remains in effect at this site. You “gun nuts” have the support of the cabinet and government of the land, so go peddle your rage and hysteria elsewhere.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Potted history: why the winter of 2012 feels like the summer of ’73

by David Climenhaga on November 29, 2012 in Alberta Politics, U.S. politics with 4 Comments

Richard Nixon after his overwhelming 1972 re-election victory. Below: George McGovern, Alison Redford.

Here in Alberta’s icy capital, the winter of 2012 is starting to feel like the summer of ’73.

If you’re an Alberta Progressive Conservative, this is not a good thing.

Let me explain. In the spring and summer of 1972, Richard Nixon, a Republican, was running for re-election as president of the United States.

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested in the wee hours breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.

On Nov. 11, 1972, Mr. Nixon was re-elected by a crushing landslide that swept away his peacenik Democratic opponent, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota. Sen. McGovern died at 90 in Sioux Falls, S.D., just 40 days ago.

But it turned out that those five fellows at the Watergate had something to do with Mr. Nixon’s campaign strategy. The rest, as they say, is history.

And so the summer of ’73 became the Summer of Watergate. Like the proverbial Chinese water torture, barely a day passed without a scandalous new story on the front pages that connected the dots back to that “third-rate burglary,” as Ronald Ziegler, Mr. Nixon’s press secretary, bitterly characterized the incident at the Watergate.

Even here in Canada, the grim parade of stories had their cumulative effect, the results of which – with 20/20 hindsight – now seem inevitable.

There was speculation not long after Mr. Nixon was finally driven from office in August 1974, and has been ever since, that the removal of this Republican, who on his domestic record was surprisingly liberal, had the hallmarks of a coup.

Fast forward to 2012, with Alison Redford, a surprisingly Progressive Conservative on some counts unexpectedly chosen as the leader of that party in the fall of 2011, securely re-elected as the Premier of Alberta in the spring with a comfortable 61-seat majority in the Legislature.

But the election was not as comfortable a one as her party’s seat total suggests. Ms. Redford’s principal opposition came from the market-fundamentalist Wildrose Party, which draws inspiration and ideas from the American right all the way back to Mr. Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which was only laid to rest south of the Medicine Line earlier this month by demographics and President Barack Obama.

As Alberta’s spring election campaign progressed, it increasingly appeared that the Wildrose Party was in a position to form a majority government, but at the last minute – frightened by the outbursts of some Wildrose candidates who drew attention to just how far to the right their party stood – voters flowed back to Ms. Redford’s comfortably familiar PCs.

Wildrose strategists, tied to the Republican-inspired federal Conservatives of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, were shocked at first by the way their victory had turned to ashes, but quickly regrouped.

Off the record, they admit frankly their strategy from now to election day 2016 will be to relentlessly paint the Redford Conservatives as corrupt – a tactic that worked for them during the campaign, only faltering in its last hours. It worked because the arrogance and entitlement of a party in power for more than 40 years gave the accusations a whiff of authenticity.

Wildrose strategist Tom Flanagan, who is no dummy no matter what you think of his views, says there will be no far-right bozo eruptions next time to save the day for the Tories. “The lesson for the future,” he recently told the Globe and Mail, “message discipline.”

The aggressive Wildrose tactics, combined with a new drumbeat of little scandals reported principally by CBC Edmonton’s investigative reporting team led by journalist Charles Rusnell, who seems to have become modern Alberta’s answer to the Washington Post’s Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, has in the words of blogger Dave Cournoyer “stunned the Tories into a stammer.”

Their responses to the series of accusations and scandals emanating from the CBC sound rattled and lame. Cabinet members run from interviews with the media, then have public temper tantrums when the stories don’t go their way.

The PCs’ unwillingness to have a thorough public air-clearing over accusations that physicians were intimidated, that public employees improperly donated public funds to the Conservative party, that one of those public employees was the premier’s sister, that outrageous expenses were incurred by health officials and no one blinked, and now that the premier herself may have had a role in selecting a law firm where her ex-husband worked for a potentially enormously lucrative government contract add up to a destructive drip, drip, drip of revelations.

Premier Redford sounded persuasive to me when she stood up in the Legislature to deny the latest allegations she was in a conflict of interest when she, or someone, chose her ex’s law firm to litigate the government’s fight with Big Tobacco – which, as alert readers will recall, has a committed friend and advocate in Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith.

Premier Redford stated yesterday: “When the decision was made by the government of Alberta as to who to retain on this file, I was not the justice minister, I was not a member of cabinet, I was an MLA running to be the leader of this party.”

But the drumbeat of corrosive accusations, even when they are effectively parried, is having its toll – and that is what so strongly reminds me in the winter of 2012 of the summer of ’73.

Will Ms. Redford, too progressive on too many files for the comfort of the people with their hands on the levers, be hounded from office as Mr. Nixon was?

Are some of the people doing the hounding, inside and outside Wildrose ranks, former Conservatives who have benefited from the same too-comfortable way political business has been conducted for too long in Alberta?

Just asking.

Regardless of the answers, Ms. Redford is going to have to sharpen up her game if she wishes to survive.

She might look to the sage advice of Mark Twain, the 19th Century American author who counselled those who find themselves in situations like hers to tell the truth: “It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

U.S. pot decriminalization: will B.C.’s economy go up in smoke?

by David Climenhaga on November 16, 2012 in Contraband, Trade, U.S. politics with 1 Comment

Smugglers sneak B.C. bud ashore in Washington State. Below: Typical pot smugglers’ accoutrements. Actual Canadian marijuana smugglers may not appear exactly as illustrated.

If we Albertans want a hint of what it may be like when the oil runs out – or is replaced by cold fusion or something – all we may have to do is watch what happens next door in British Columbia in the months ahead.

Back in October 2010 I twisted up the lyrics of Leonard Cohen and opined, “Decriminalization is coming … to the U.S.A.” That is, outright legalization of marijuana use for recreational purposes, not just a half-cured law allowing pot to be smoked for medical reasons.

Now, thanks to two propositions in separate U.S. states in the Nov. 6 election, that day with all its consequences good and bad is a step closer. Possibly a big step.

On Nov. 6, electors in both Colorado and Washington State, the latter of which neighbours British Columbia and has experienced crime and other impacts associated with the British Columbia marijuana industry shipping its product across the relatively porous B.C.-Washington border, voted to allow adults to possess and use small amounts of the drug for recreational purposes.

These votes do not mean non-medical marijuana decriminalization is a fait accompli south of the Medicine Line. Everyone is waiting now to see what the U.S. federal government’s Department of Justice will try to assert federal supremacy over drug laws (a problem, since the U.S. Constitution gives responsibility for criminal law to the states) and keep the ban against the weed in place.

But voter attitudes speak loudly. So, whatever the U.S. government does, and however long the process takes, decriminalization of marijuana really is coming to the U.S.A. – probably more quickly than Canadians imagine.

After all, when the people move far enough on this issue to make recreational use of pot socially acceptable, the wishes of the strange coalition of illegal drug producers and the military-enforcement complex will be quickly brushed aside by politicians with the idea of a completely new and extremely bounteous source of tax revenue in their sights. Anyway, the enforcers can soon be turned from enforcing prohibition to enforcing tax violations, and who listens to criminals anyway?

But when legalization arrives Stateside, it really will be an economic disaster for British Columbia, which seems to depend almost as heavily on the covert marijuana trade as a Middle Eastern or Latin American narco state. And the success of the trade, in turn, depends on the prohibition of the drug in its principal market.

Really, B.C. grows far more marijuana than its own citizens could smoke if every one of them took up the habit. And why would Americans take the risks of smuggling a substance across an international frontier that will quickly be available right at home in the Good Ole U.S.A.?

So if the decisions by Colorado and Washington voters somehow stand and are quickly implemented, it will soon be apparent that civilization did not end in a pot-induced frenzy, or grind to a halt in a bud-based stupor for that matter. At that point, bet on it that other states will start to follow suit and the huge U.S. market will quickly go up in smoke.

If decriminalization comes, some experts have estimated the decline in the price that can be fetched for export marijuana from Canada will be about 80 per cent. And while it may come as a surprise to the vast majority of Canadians who don’t buy or use illegal drugs of any kind, that will cause economic hardship for B.C. because the province has become hooked on pot production as an economic driver.

Estimates of what this completely illegal industry built up in increments over the past 40 years is actually worth to the B.C. economy continue to be all over the map because there are precious few records and it generates no tax revenue on which estimates can be based. But even the low-end numbers are big, with current estimates starting at around $6 billion a year and rising as high as $24 billion, almost double the $13-billion legal revenue generated by B.C.’s forest industry.

Some regions of British Columbia, particularly the Kootenays, depend particularly heavily on the trade. But as has been said here before, if you live anywhere in B.C., you benefit from it whether or not you have any involvement in the illegal industry behind it. If you are a retailer, a real estate salesperson of just a homeowner, or merely a participant in the economy, you depend in part on pot profits – and pot stays profitable because of prohibition in the United States.

Why do you think house prices have remained high and stable throughout Western Canada, especially B.C., even during the time they were collapsing in the United States? Untaxed profits from the drug trade certainly helped.

If you are a government that collects sales taxes or a municipality, especially in communities that would otherwise be recession-bound, you also benefit.

So what comes next may provide a useful example to Albertans who may have wondered what might happen if the international price of oil suddenly fell to, say, $25 a barrel.

The end of the B.C. pot economy would also, ironically, deprive the Conservative federal government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper of a wedge issue it has used effectively against politicians with more generous spirits and more sensible economic philosophies than the harsh dogma of neoliberalism.

After all, faced with American pot legalization, Canadians will have little choice but to follow suit and legalize the substance to capture the huge potential tax revenues, as we do with tobacco and alcohol.

For the time being, though, the many beneficiaries of B.C.’s marijuana industry and the province’s homeowners may wish to join theo-conservative supporters of the Harper regime on their knees praying to the Almighty for the U.S. government to somehow block the U.S. legalization of pot!

Republican failure shows conservative parties must adapt, like Alberta PCs, or die

by David Climenhaga on November 8, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, U.S. politics with 7 Comments

Psychological/political portraits of Stephen Harper and Barack Obama by Edmonton artist William Prettie. Used with permission.

This too shall pass…

Now and then throughout history, as with Whigs and Communists, international political-ideological movements of enormous influence wither and disappear, often quite suddenly. It is rarely their call.

Neoconservatives – or neoliberals, call them what you will – embodied in the modern American Republican Party led into Tuesday’s United States presidential election by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are now showing just such signs of fading into history.

It is said here that the Canadian neoliberals of Stephen Harper’s so-called Conservative Party of Canada – tied at the apron strings as they are to the American Republicans – will not be far behind them.

Out of tune with the demographic realities of the United States, dominated by an extremist “Tea Party” rump of racists, homophobes, misogynists and market fundamentalists enamoured of a deeply destructive economic program and a nihilistic political strategy of obstructionism, a strong case can be made that Tuesday’s reelection of Barack Obama, a very-small-l-liberal president with a weak economic record in his first term, may have been the last hurrah for this crowd.

Backed as they are by big money and deeply cynical strategic minds, there continue to be many reasons to fear the post-election defiance of the increasingly marginalized Republicans as they shout that they’ll be back, and with brighter and better leaders than the hapless former Massachusetts governor and his pathologically lying vice-presidential sidekick from Wisconsin.

And like a cornered rattlesnake, they will still be dangerous. As Jonathan Martin wrote in Politico a few days before the election, quoting an unnamed Republican backroom operative, the party’s loss of Tuesday’s main event means its candidate in 2016 “will certainly be a card-carrying movement conservative with a track record to match.”

But that would be precisely the wrong strategy for the American Republicans, certain to speed them toward the dustbin of history.

“If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn’t conservative enough I’m going to go nuts,” Sen. Lindsay Graham was quoted saying in Mr. Martin’s story. “We’re not losing 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough,” said the South Carolina senator, who blamed shifting demographics without much context for the party’s looming troubles.

Four years with the American economy on the rebound – a likely condition on which Mr. Obama’s forthcoming policies may or may not have much actual influence – will augur well for the term-limited president’s constitutionally inevitable Democratic successor. If elected, whomever that candidate turns out to be, his or her challenger will be the third consecutive Republican defeated by the Democratic presidential candidate.

Inevitably, another centrist democratic president presiding over a buoyant economy with a philosophy that government has an important role to play will be one more nail in the coffin of the international philosophy of hard-line fiscal discipline that animates modern neoliberalism – be it Republican, Conservative or Wildrose in flavour.

As we all know, in politics as in other enterprises, the smart money follows the candidate with the best chance of winning, and so what the New Yorker’s Nicolas Lemann called in his election post-mortem “an increasingly unlikely coalition of business interests and social-issue populists” will surely begin to unravel.

And so it will in Canada too, as contributors and strategists observe the downward spiral of the American Republicans that inspire the Reform Party-dominated Canadian Conservatives under Mr. Harper.

Demographic trends in Canada are not precisely the same as in the United States, but with American cultural influence looming large and a population traditionally more in tune with social democratic concepts and programs, making Canada a place where “European style” is not necessarily an insult, it can be argued Conservative backers and voters here too will grow increasingly wary of Mr. Harper’s Americanized fiscal fantasies.

Indeed, Conservative parties everywhere face the prospect of having to adapt to new realities, and if they do not, they will die.

Survival means moving back toward the centre – precisely where the Tea Party driven American Republicans and the Reform Party derived Canadian Conservatives are disinclined to go.

Ironically, it is here in conservative Alberta that a conservative political party facing similar demographic and social realities (caused in this case by a decades-long influx of newcomers from more liberal parts of Canada) hit upon a formula that works in the form of softer, more centrist rhetoric and a genuine move to the centre on social policies.

The Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford are still a market-oriented party of business, as suits their corporate backers, but their success at the polls against the wild-eyed Tea Partiers of the Wildrose Party illuminates the best hope for a future for conservatives, be they American Republicans or Canadian Tories.

But those national parties are now so dominated by their radical wings that such a progression is unlikely – and thus their demise is probably inevitable.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Message to Canada’s media: OK guys, you can stop campaigning for that Romney guy now …

by David Climenhaga on November 7, 2012 in Media, U.S. politics with 6 Comments

Romney Defeats Obama! U.S. President Barack Obama – perhaps not exactly as illustrated – holds up a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail after his election victory last night. Or something like that.

Maybe they just missed it that we don’t get a vote.

Most Canadians don’t get to vote, that is, in the U.S. presidential election.

How else can we explain the Canadian mainstream media’s relentless campaign leading up to yesterday’s U.S. presidential vote to get Canadians to cast their nonexistent ballots for Willard “Mittens” Romney, the Republican candidate?

In case you missed it, President Barack Obama defeated Mr. Romney in that presidential contest last night, saving it from going down in history the U.S. pestilential election.

“Is U.S. polling guru Nate Silver going to have egg on his face?” the Globe and Mail asked plaintively as the minutes ticked down to decision time south of the Medicine Line, which thanks to Mr. Obama’s re-election still has some form of medicine for most of the 99%. Since the polling guru in question had bet on an Obama win, the answer to that poser in a Globe headline was, uh, sorry, no egg…

“Why Obama doesn’t deserve to win,” Globe columnist Margaret Wente, one of those double-overhead-camshaft Canadian Americans who get to vote down there, schooled us in a particularly dimwitted column three days ago in which she quoted “my friend Jim.” (That is, her friend Jim, not mine, who being a union rep I’m pretty sure would have voted for Obama. Also, my friend Jim actually exists and I can prove it!)

“Obama is, in fact, a lefty, and given a free hand we really would become a debt-laden, sinking, entitlement-heavy, socialist basket case,” said “Jim,” according to Ms. Wente, and let me remind readers that it’s not nice to refer to him as her “imaginary friend.”

Indeed, the Globe’s horserace analysis with barely a mention of that Electoral College thingy got so bad that I tried to make it go away by repeatedly opening stories so Canada’s National Website would tell me I’d used up my monthly quota and blissfully lock me out. It did. Tell me that it had, that is. But it kept letting me open the stories. What’s with that? I have no willpower. Can’t someone make it go away?

The CBC – which members of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Neo-Liberal Party of Canada love to hate – was nevertheless almost as bad, with Cross Country Right-Wing Trash Talk Radio with Rex Murphy spending Sunday afternoon getting his brother’s yahoo buddy to explain to us for painfully endless minutes why we’d be smart to vote for Mr. Romney … even though, like we mentioned, most of us don’t have a vote.

Well, at least with the radio if you get sick of the Canadian media explaining why you should support the Republicans’ sales closer – which the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz nicely summarized as “zero tolerance toward disaster relief combined with a more easygoing attitude about rape” – you can push the button and listen to golden oldies or something!

Of course, the usual suspects over at Sun News Network wore their hearts on their sleeves all week, like the delightful Ezra “When Poll’s Unspun, it Looks Like Romney Won” Levant. Last night Mr. Levant was moaning less poetically about the End of America, but have faith, he’ll get over it when President Obama ethically OKs the Keystone XL Pipeline to Texas.

I hate to say it, but the National Pest, founded by Lord Tubby Black himself to turn us all into little Americans back in the day before he had his moment on the bumpy road to Damascus or Coleman or wherever it was and proclaimed himself “an unambiguous leftist in justice,” actually covered the run-up to the election more like a grownup media operation.

You get the picture, and if you’re anything like me, you haven’t been able to tune it out for days.

Now, presumably, the Canadian media will turn to close analysis of the popular vote down south, and explain to us that President Obama doesn’t really have a mandate, so we’d better get that Northern Gateway opened right quick and that 31-year sovereignty association deal with the People’s Capitalistic Republic of China signed off by the weekend. (If Mr. Romney had won with a similar popular vote, they would have told us to “get over it.”)

Indeed, the trendsetting Lord Black – taking a short break from asserting the doubtful proposition that “no reader could possibly be more bored with the subject of my late legal travails than I” – was beginning the exploration of this very theme last evening.

You can’t bring on those paywalls fast enough, if you ask me!

Meanwhile, about that American election? Thank God for small favours!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

As goes California, so goes the nation!

by David Climenhaga on July 25, 2012 in Canadian Politics, U.S. politics with 9 Comments

The Beach Boys, now, and, below, then. Below them, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, then and now. As goes California, so goes Canada?

As goes California, so goes the nation – the nation in the normal scheme of things being what the world knows as the Good Ole U.S.A.

For many practical reasons that all of us instinctively understand up here north of the 49th Parallel, and even in those parts of Canada south of the 49th, as goes California, so goes Canada too.

I refer, of course, to the steep downward spiral in which the Republican Party finds itself in that large and populous West Coast state – a place big enough to be a leading nation all on its own and home, arguably to the American image, if not the American soul.

In the Republicans’ troubles in California, it is said here, we see a reflection of the coming decline of Canada’s Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Since the days when we started reading about Philip Marlowe, the chivalrous shamus, patrolling the mean streets of the City of Angels for 35 dollars a day and expenses, we’ve understood that social trends good and evil often originate on the West Coast of the United States. From there, they make their way insidiously and frequently invidiously throughout the world.

The worst trends and the best are likely to stop off here in Canada – we are close, after all – well before they show up in the souk in Marrakech or even the Ginza in Tokyo.

And so it was soon after Ronald R. Reagan, former B movie actor and California governor with a shaky grip on reality, became president of the United States that the Republicanization of everything Canadian seemingly began. This unfortunate trend led in time to the reverse takeover by the Reform Party of the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, which traced its roots all the way back to our first prime minister, the great patriot John A. Macdonald.

The Reform Party, which should have been called the American Party of Canada, was then led by the Chief Americanizer himself, the scratchy voiced Preston Manning. Its adherents loved everything American except America’s good ideas. If Sir John could see what’s become of his patriotic old party since the Invasion of the Party Snatchers in 2003, he’d be spinning in his grave so rapidly he’d be throwing up wisps of unholy smoke!

But in the seeds of the Republican Party’s great success, the self-interested enthusiasms of its ideological elite and its willingness to adopt any tactic, no matter how unethical, to win, were also the beginnings of its current troubles.

That is, it had the natural inclination of all ideological political parties toward seeking perfection and the resulting tendency to put quasi-theological notions ahead of ideas that actually work.

Even now we see these same diminishing ideological returns at work in the Post-Reform-Party Canadian Conservatives under Mr. Harper – a party now based more than loosely on the American Republican model.

With this in mind, understanding where California’s Republicans are now headed is useful to plotting the near-future trajectory of our own Conservatives – and where the California Repugs are going is straight south, metaphorically speaking, not to Mexico.

In an interesting feature last Sunday, the New York Times chronicled the startling decline of the Golden State’s Republicans, and delves into the causes of it.

The Times quotes U.S. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the lower house of the U.S. Congress, who says of his state’s party: “We are at a lower point than we’ve ever been.” This notwithstanding the fact the state is in deep economic trouble (in part because California is only one Greece-like state in the American currency union) and Democrats are in power, and hence in a position to take the blame.

How low is that? “It’s no longer a statewide party,” says a veteran Republican consultant. “They are down to 30 percent, which makes it impossible to win a statewide election. You just can’t get enough crossover voters.” (Remember, this is a “two-party system,” so 30 per cent is not the magic number it can be in Canada with multiple parties.)

“They have alienated large swaths of voters,” he said. “They have become too doctrinaire on the social issues. It’s become a cult.”

If this doesn’t sound familiar to Canadians, it should. Because this is exactly the path to ideological reductio ad absurdum the Harper Conservatives and their provincial branches like Alberta’s Wildrose Party are heading down. Witness the recent attacks on Conservative moderates by party extremists over federal dollars being spent on a tourist trap for Chinese visitors honoring a Communist surgeon.

“The institution of the California Republican Party, I would argue, has effectively collapsed,” says another Republican consultant quoted by the Times. “The Republican Party in the state institutionally has become a small ideological club that is basically in the business of hunting out heretics. When you look at the population growth, the actual party is shrinking. It’s becoming more white. It’s becoming older.”

Hunting out heretics? Well, Canadian Conservatives are still good at collecting money from corporate donors – something that according to the Times’s sources, the California Republicans are getting worse at. But give them time…

The California conservatives, the Times’s sources say, are identified with the wrong side of a series of issues that put them well outside the evolving American mainstream – immigration, the environment, abortion and gay rights – not to mention the wrong side of the continent’s demographic trends.

Add to that list a sane level of gun control, and you have a portrait of the Harper Conservatives – back up microscopically in one recent poll, but still describing a long downward trajectory.

If democracy continues to function in Canada – and with Stephen Harper at the helm, that premise cannot be taken as assumed – the Conservative movement will continue to be left behind by Canadians, just as Californians are leaving the Republican Party in their wake.

The Beach Boys are back together. Jerry Brown is Governor again. And Stephen Harper is finished – just you watch!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.