THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
As Friedrich Nietzsche
foresaw, the desire to destroy the past and begin history
anew would require, as modernism’s final stage, the
“transvaluation of values,” in which everything once
thought to be virtuous—piety, family loyalty, personal
uprightness, patriotism, self-reliance—would be turned
into vices. Throughout history, human values have
primarily been centered in family, religion, and country,
and those institutions had to be destroyed if a “new
humanity” were to be created.
Thus modernism extols every
kind of sexual “liberation,” which nullifies the
family; a skeptical, “value free,” and
“scientific” spirit, which nullifies religion; and
universalism, which nullifies loyalty to one’s country.
Thus, it portrays the family as the source of pathology
and abuse, and condemns both religion and patriotism as
either hypocritical or dangerously fanatical. The ideal
modernist is a militant religious skeptic who renounces
both family ties and loyalty to country and submits
instead to an abstract ideal of modernism’s new world.
—James
Hitchcock
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.50 p.m., July 15, 2004►
HOLDING PATTERN
I have been preoccupied of late with actual paying
work, and The Ambler has suffered as a result. Not
out of the woods yet, but I expect to hear today the
answer to a proposal which will determine immediately
whether this enterprise continues or ends. Here's hoping.
The CBC today broadcast my commentary on the future of
the Conservative Party. You can read it here.
Better still, you can click on the Real Player icon and
hear the dulcet tones of my "radio voice."
It is pointless to claim that
Canada is a "socially
liberal nation" when social liberalism
is the only flavour our political parties are prepared to
offer. Canada is like an ice cream stand that offers only
vanilla. Of course, if you offer only one flavour, 100 per
cent of your customers will be forced to choose it. Those,
however, who prefer chocolate or strawberry are out of
luck... [More]
One of John O'Sullivan's laws is "An organization
that is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing
over time." The Conservative Party became left-wing
directly after its inception. Now it proposes to become
even more so. Those conservatives who support it deserve
exactly what they get. Canada needs a new party, one not
directed by members of the liberal elite.
If possible, regular programming will resume shortly.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.45 a.m., July 8, 2004►
THE MATING CALL OF THE LOSER
It seems to me a barren
thing, this Conservatism—an unhappy crossbreed, the mule
of politics that engenders nothing.
—Benjamin Disraeli
There’s really no secret to winning elections. All
you have to do is get more people on your side than the
other guys have on theirs. Divide and conquer. It’s that
simple. The Liberals know this. Brian Mulroney knew it.
But not Canada’s right-wing losers: the Reform Party,
the Canadian Alliance, the Conservative Party. They always
have some excuse: the media doesn’t like us; Ontario
doesn’t like us; Albertans are discriminated against.
Boo hoo.
So run against the media then. Stop picking leaders
from Alberta. Give Ontario a choice, not an echo. The
Liberals succeed time and again in making majorities
(absolute or effective) from a coalition of minorities:
civil servants, the Court Party and other academics, rent
seekers, ethnics, divorced and never-married mothers, Big
Businessmen, the gay lobby, the "helping
professions," turncoat Francophones (to name a few).
The Liberal coalition is, broadly speaking, revolutionary
and parasitic. It comprises one vision of Canada. Who
speaks for the other Canada? No one. Is there perhaps an
opportunity here? Of course there bloody well is. But
Canada’s Right, so called, considers it infra dig
or shameful or something to graze
where the grass is—to fashion
majorities from the majority. It would rather seek the
goodwill of its enemies than win. The Conservatives
aren’t called the Stupid Party for nothing.
In politics, the electorate is always right. If you
can’t live with that, don’t let the doorknob hit your
ass on the way out. Learn to cultivate your garden, or go
and raise llamas. You won’t be missed. Spare us your
talk of "reform": proportional representation
and other magic bullets. Anyone who believes the solution
to the "democratic deficit" is even stronger
parties and bureaucracies is beyond stupid. Step forward, Andrew
Coyne. Ever notice that the advocates of PR
rarely tout the political virtues of, say, Belgium, Italy
and Israel?
Of course if PR did come to Canada, there’d be fewer
scandals. "Adscam"? We would never have heard
about it. But that was small beer. Surely Canadians can
aim higher. There is so much we can learn from the
Continentals—grand larceny, political murder,
institutionalized child rape. And the exciting possibility
that after a PR-induced proliferation of special-interest
parties the balance of power in the House of Commons would
be held by the Christian Heritage Party. Are you ready for
that, Coyne?
Proportional representation means permanent rule by the
Government Party. Proportional representation means
politicians never having to say they’re sorry. What’s
not to like?
But let’s hear from some of the PR boosters.
Power to the Parties
Proportional representation advocates claim that
first-past-the-post is unfair and undemocratic
Kevin Michael Grace
The Report, July 9, 2001
Proportional representation is
the metric system of politics: another European nostrum.
Canada's policy wonks say it is past time PR was
instituted here. According to a recent
poll, PR is supported by solid majorities
in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. It is perhaps
only the self-interest of Canada's victorious political
parties that keeps PR out. For that, however, Canadians
who believe in smaller government should be grateful.
PR is also the mating call of
the loser. Joe Clark told the Vancouver Sun,
"PR would provide an access in to the really bright
people we need in our system.'' MP Jason Kenney told the National
Post, "We believe strongly that the current
system effectively disenfranchises the majority of
Canadians." So what is wrong with the traditional
system of first-past-the-post (FPP)? Well, like the
British imperial system of weights and measures, FPP is
old. And that makes it bad. Kenney has described FPP as
"designed in and for 16th-century England [and] not
relevant to a complex modern democratic federation like
Canada."
Apparently, Western Canadians
agree. The Canada West Foundation asked 3,256 of them
whether "Canada should replace the present electoral
system with an electoral system based on proportional
representation—that is, a system that distributes seats
to each party according to its share of the popular
vote." Seventy percent of westerners answered in the
affirmative; so did 75% of British Columbians.
Significantly, however, the poll was taken before the May
16 B.C. provincial election [Liberals 77 seats, NDP 2]:
when B.C. was still seething under an NDP government which
had received 3% less of the popular vote in 1996 than the
B.C. Liberals.
It is also arguable that
people do not know what PR is. PR systems (and there are
many) can be extraordinarily complicated, and, after all,
FPP does distribute seats to each party according to its
share of the popular vote in each individual riding. Under
FPP, parties routinely receive many more or fewer seats
than they would based simply on their aggregate vote
totals.
To Nick Loenen, former Socred
MLA and board member of Fair
Voting B.C., FPP is simply unfair. Under
PR, he argues, "Voters would get what they vote for.
What passes for democracy in Canada is primitive."
Fair Voting B.C. does not advocate any particular PR
regime, but Loenen prefers the single transferable vote (STV).
STV is one of the two major PR families. The other is
simple PR. (The STV or weighted ballot can be used
non-proportionally. This is called the alternative vote
[AV]; it is the regime preferred by University of Calgary
political science professor Tom Flanagan.)
[Editor's note: Prof.
Flanagan has longer served as consigliere to
Stephen Harper. After the 1997 election they published an essay
arguing that "modernizing Canadian politics"
through PR "might be the key to Canada's survival as
a nation." They rejected the option of giving the
voters a choice, reckoning that "experience shows
that a monolithic conservative party is unworkable."
This begs the question, as Canada as never had a modern
conservative party, "monolithic" (whatever that
means) or otherwise. But it explains why any
Harper-Flanagan led party would perforce be
"conservative" in name only.]
Loenen explains that under STV
provincial voters in a city like Surrey, B.C., would
select, say, five MLAs from a list of candidates (usually
selected directly by party officials) by ranking them from
first to fifth. If no candidate received a majority of
first choices, then subsequent choices would be added as
many times as necessary to produce a majority favourite.
Under STV, ridings as we know them would disappear, as
would nomination meetings. But, wouldn't you know it;
there are many variations of STV. Loenen says, "Most
countries have different [PR] systems and for very good
reason." PR, he concludes, results in happier voters
and more diligent representatives because it removes the
"curse" of vote-splitting: "What happens
under the present system is if you mark one X, you are
expressing 100% agreement for that platform, and you're
saying you reject all the others." Votes for losing
candidates, he insists, are "wasted."
Loenen argues, as does the
Canadian Alliance, that the federal system is unfair
because a majority of voters consistently rejects the
Liberals, yet the Liberals consistently win majorities. In
a paper written for the Institute for
Research on Public Policy, Prof. Flanagan rejects this
claim: "Although they command only about 40% of the
vote in a five-party contest...polling data on voters'
second choices make it clear that none of the other four
parties could come close to beating the Liberals in a
two-party contest. In that sense, the fact that
first-past-the-post voting gives the Liberals over half
the seats with only 40% of the popular vote is not really
unfair."
Prof. Flanagan admits that the
AV system he supports punishes reform parties (because
they are nobody's second choice) and even that AV would
(currently) give the Liberals more seats. Still, he likes
AV because it would reduce regional and linguistic
tensions and would force opposition parties into forming
broad-based coalitions. In the absence of electoral
reform, he argues, the Liberals could rule Canada
indefinitely.
Prof. Flanagan is thoughtful
as always, but many PR advocates manifest a typical
attribute of the true believer: a refusal to credit
heretics with good faith. When University of Toronto
political science emeritus professor Peter Russell is
reminded of some of PR's failures—unprecedented
corruption in Germany and outright gangsterism in Italy,
constitutional crisis in New Zealand and perpetual
single-issue-party blackmail in Israel—he replies
exasperatedly, "I can match any example you give with
one from first-past-the-post. I'm not interested in
scoring debating points."
There is, however, a growing
body of empirical evidence on PR. University of Calgary
economics professor Ken McKenzie, who is preparing a
paper on this subject for the C.D. Howe
Institute, reports that under PR, "The research
suggests you'll see an increase in total government
spending as a percentage of gross domestic product."
Furthermore, since PR governments are usually coalitions
with significant representation in all regions and among
all classes, "We may expect the configuration of the
mix of spending to change: perhaps more spending on broad
public goods, social programs that benefit broad groups of
individuals and regions as opposed to spending that
benefits more narrowly-defined groups and regions. [And we
might expect] a move to broader based taxes, maybe more
reliance on the GST as opposed to the income tax."
Finally, PR regimes are likely to be less accountable than
FPP regimes, since electors usually do not choose
representatives individually, but the political parties
assign them.
Loenen is bullish about PR in
B.C. A June 6 Fair Voting B.C. press release noted,
"In his inaugural speech...Premier Gordon Campbell
reiterated his government's commitment to creating a
Citizens' Assembly on electoral reform that will make
recommendations...and... place [them] to British
Columbians in a referendum." But then Britain's
Labour Party, which was kept out of office until 1997 by
vote-splitting, made a similar promise. After their first
landslide victory, they changed their minds. It is hardly
surprising.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.45 a.m., July 8, 2004►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Stalin liked
theatre as he pondered the "lists," night after
night. He would hesitate over a name, teasing; then he
might say to his henchman, Yezhov,
head of the NKVD
(who would be a victim too), "No, we won’t touch
the wife of Mayakovsky"
and lift his pen nib. And with Pasternak
too: the theatrical hesitation, the poised nib; then,
"Let this cloud-dweller be." He assured a
historian, Yuri Steklov, that he was safe, patting him
affectionately on the back, only a few hours before the
"raven" came for him in the night. Sheer
theatrical brilliancy! A gift for black comedy!
He didn’t need to be
present to create a comedy. Once he called up the head of
the music bureaucracy and said, "I greatly enjoyed
the broadcast of Yudina playing the Mozart
Concerto No. 23; was it recorded?"
"Of course." "Then send it to my
dacha." But there was no recording; the concert had
been live. The terrified producer got Marya
Yudina and the orchestra and conductor into
a recording studio straightaway, to record through the
night. Everyone except Yudina was shaking with fright;
they were already dead men. The first conductor collapsed;
a replacement was trembling so badly he confused the
players; only a third conductor was in any shape to finish
the concerto, and the recording was completed by the
morning. A single copy. It was rushed to Stalin.
Soon after, Yudina received
an envelope with twenty thousand rubles. She was told it
came by order of Stalin. She wrote to him:
I thank you, Josif
Vissarionovich, for your aid. I will pray for you day and
night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before
the people and the country. The Lord is merciful, and
He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the church that I
attend.
She was a good woman; at the
opposite pole from a woman in Kiev who denounced around
eight thousand people, most of whom died. Nikita
Khrushchev recalled that the sidewalks emptied as she
walked through the city. People sought to avoid her gaze.
Surprisingly, nothing bad
happened to Yudina. Stalin may have thought she had acted
so crazily she must be a holy fool and therefore to be
left well alone. He was also capable of admiring courage.
Let her go on playing for him, praying for him.
—D.M. Thomas, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn: A Century In His Life
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.52 a.m., July 6, 2004►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Negative ads, I can't resist
blurting, are not objectionable, they're not even
negative. They're either informative or misleading, like
positive ads.
—Rick
Salutin
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.25 a.m., July 5, 2004►
