Eye View 

by David Charbonneau

U.S. right wing: too much anger, too little focus

April 29, 2010

Progressive conservatives in Canada will have to look outside North America if they want to form a majority government.

The conservative movement in the U.S. is in shambles. There's no lack of anger on talk-radio or Fox TV but the rant has created more heat than light. David Frum, speechwriter for past President G.W. Bush, despairs at the direction that his Republican Party is going. "Is U.S. conservatism going to be a philosophy of government or an industry of cultural dissent?" lamented the Canadian-born Frum on CBC radio. "We have generated this talk-show radio and TV industry that flourishes on confrontation, alienation and anger."

Anger does not anchor a political movement and neither do protests by the Tea Party. Not the genteel group that the name suggests, they get their name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773 whose principal aim was to protest taxation without representation. Angry Tea Party protestors rallied in the thousands against President Obama's health care act.

"They are working themselves into a lather," said Frum, "especially when Obama is using the same ideas that the Republicans put forward a decade ago." For his attempts to rebuild conservatism, Frum was unceremoniously dumped from the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute.

Regrettably for conservatives, fury inhibits novel thinking. The Tea Party is not a new party but simply angry old men according to a poll by the New York Times. Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters are mainly Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. What motivates aging, white middle-class Americans to take to the streets? The overwhelming majority of Tea Party supporters say President Obama favours the poor and blacks at their expense. Middle-class America sees their prominence being eroded with no credible party to take up their plight.

There have been no new conservative ideas in the U.S. since President Regan called for lower taxes and small government. Americans have bought into the idea of small government even when it impacts them adversely. When reflecting about the contraction of biting the hand that feeds her, Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, California was at a loss for words. "That's a conundrum, isn't it? I don't know what to say. Maybe I don't want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security."

 

It's a conundrum in Canada as well especially when Prime Minister Harper preaches small government but practices the largest debt in Canadian history. Ostensibly his goal is to carry the principles of Alberta to the national scene.

Except that Alberta is not the land small government. "These are the clichés that many people, particularly in Alberta, hold dear, especially in the era of record-busting deficits," says business reporter Derek DeCloet for the Globe and Mail. In reality, Alberta has the biggest government of Canada's largest provinces. Alberta spent $10,000 on every man, woman and child, more than Ontario, B.C. and Quebec. "We've been living in kind of a fool's paradise," says Roger Gibbins, president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation in Calgary. "The rhetoric of the government is all about small government and low taxes. The reality is all about big spending."

No, North American conservative thinking is a dead-end street because it fails to recognize the reality of people's daily lives.

Britain is bubbling with new right-wing ideas. Phillip Blond is making waves in Britain's Conservative Party as he tries to unseat the ruling labour Party in the upcoming election. Blond uses left-wing rhetoric but his roots are Tory blue. "Free-market neoliberalism has created a tiny elite and turned the working class into losers with no power to control their lives. Monopoly capitalism has atomized us into a society of lonely consumers isolated from a big, monolithic, uncaring state."

Old ideology has a new context. It resonates with Britain's middle class who, like those in the U.S., are facing a decline in their standard of living, erosion of wages and growing debt. We are "living in a modern-day version of serfdom, where the working classes and even the middle classes are living in dependency to the banks," warns Blond. Like the Tea Party, he is nostalgic about small government. He plans to break up big government and large enterprises into worker-owned co-operatives.

Sure, it's idealistic but at least it channels anger into a political movement, something lacking on this side of the Atlantic.

 David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca
 





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