A comprehensive rebuttal to a largely incomprehensible column is a waste of time, but Jesse Kline’s contribution to a debate sparked by a galère of young conservative writers over the proper role of the state is ripe for fisking. Because Kline’s piece runs to almost 2,000 words—the Ruby Tuesday’s salad bar of word salads—to save time I’ll forgo the customary throat-clearing introduction and jump right in. Kline’s words are in pull quotes; my brief and sometimes not-so-brief responses are interlineated below.
Let’s go:
Anyone who lived through the 1990s and early 2000s knows that when the Canadian right is divided, electoral success is next to impossible to achieve. Yet a new movement — largely driven by younger people and adopting some of the views espoused by big-government loving, free-market skeptical MAGA Republicans — is threatening to do just that.
Well, we’re not off to a good start. Not two sentences in and Kline is already smearing his opponents with the MAGA label. How long can it be before Godwin’s Law kicks in? Let’s start the clock.
As then-Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper noted back in 2003, the conservative movement in Canada has long rested on an alliance between “the economic and social conservative sides.” But if you listen to people on the so-called new right — also known as “national conservatism” or “postliberalism” — it was always a marriage of convenience rather than shared ideology.
Note that Harper was warning about a partisan divide on the Right, not calling for the stifling of debate within one party, let alone more broadly among conservatives. So far, Kline hasn’t identified a problem. Debates between libertarians and conservatives are nothing new, and political parties are always marriages of convenience, and typically polygamous marriages or, more often, an orgy of swinging factions looking to hook up with a temporarily willing partner for …. I’ll end the metaphor there, but you get the drift.
Writing in the Without Diminishment Substack newsletter last week, policy consultant Alex MacDonald argued that, “While the fusionist project in Canada promised to wed the supposed mutual values of economic libertarians and social traditionalists into an intellectually coherent and principled conservative coalition to be electorally viable, we have instead witnessed the social conservatives become the concubine of the economic libertarians.”
Part of the problem, he argues, is that, “The libertarian mindset has gained purchase in far more than just economic questions. That is, conservatives have become skeptical of the state in general, not just as it interfaces with the economy. The state, we are told, ought to be neutral. Any calls for the state to wield its power in defence of traditional values is tantamount to the woke-progressive co-opting of the state, and therefore must be despised.”
It’s a compelling narrative — and one that has been espoused by many other nominally conservative writers in this country — but it does not tell the full story. The “fusionist” alliance between libertarians and social conservatives was forged during the Cold War, when both factions united in their shared opposition to the Soviet Union and the threat of global communism. But it was more than a mere coalition of conservatives opposed to Soviet atheism and libertarians looking to protect free markets.
It was more…but not much more. As I have written before, fusionism was a marriage of convenience and a morganatic one at that, without a legitimate heir. The Cold War is over; arguing about what fusionism should look like today is like arguing about the legitimate King of France. Even at the time, the editors of National Review were far from enthusiastic about the compromise (Russell Kirk famously refused to appear on the masthead with Frank Meyer). Compromise is necessary in politics, but it is a flaccid rallying cry.
In the 20th century, many of the leading thinkers on the American right — such as Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., George Will and Ronald Reagan — firmly believed in individual liberty, free markets and limited government, even though many of them held socially conservative views.
While making a fair point, Kline manages to miss the bigger point. Notably, all four of these men described themselves as libertarians, and though they all would be considered socially conservative by today’s standards (the current iteration of Will, not so much), each was also open to progressive policies and sometimes pushed them.
It is easy to look back and see stodgy men in grey suits and assume they were rocks of reaction, but if you look at the disagreements of the time, you will see that Kline has erased entirely the many conservatives who were arrayed against them, as well as the very different conservative traditions in Canada, Britain, and Europe that are more relevant for us.
Goldwater and Reagan were politicians of their ages (born in 1909 and 1911, respectively), whose governing philosophies were shaped by debates that are of mostly eccentric historical interest today. Their economic liberalism, for example, was forged in opposition to FDR’s New Deal: Is that really where Kline would draw the line? Throwing down the gauntlet for Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics and Lochner v New York? How many votes are there in that today?
Is the 'fusionist' alliance between libertarians and social conservatives outdated in today's political landscape?
How does the article define 'ordered liberty' and its role in conservative politics?
What is the article's stance on the role of the state in shaping culture?
More to the point, why should we care? Of what relevance are the winners and losers in a foreign intellectual controversy from 60 years ago? It’s a distant distraction from the problems facing Canada in 2025. While there have always been people on the right who have embraced big government as a blunt instrument to achieve their political goals — European fascists and former Alberta premier William Aberhart come to mind — history has shown that their experiments often descend into authoritarianism and their economic theories have always been abject failures, ending up in the dustbin of history. Aaaaand stop the clock. Godwin’s Law remains undefeated. Only fascists and kooky social creditors, apparently, would consider committing the unpardonable sin of actually doing things in government. I’d like to credit Kline with a nice piece of irony for using the same “dustbin” metaphor that Trotsky used to accuse his opponents of being behind the times, but given the confusion that precedes it, I suspect the joke is the happy fruit of ignorance. The modern push to divorce the social and economic tenets of conservatism should thus not be seen as an attempt to revive some mythical purebred socially conservative ideology, but a reaction to the excesses of the left from people who fundamentally don’t share the values that have defined the conservative movement for more than a century. We have already seen this play out south of the border. Would that be the “modern” push that looks back to “Rerum Novarum” (1891) as a humane via media between socialism and capitalism? That defends the old (and original) idea of Red Toryism that was mostly forgotten before any of them were born? After trumpeting a Cold War compromise from the 1950s as a model of contemporary conservatism, it’s passing strange for Kline to accuse writers who prefer Aristotle, Averroes, and Aquinas to Goldwater of being dangerous innovators. Once again, Kline is much more focused on what happens “south of the border” than anyone on the New Right. Why does Kline think people who admire the nation-building of Sir John A Macdonald and Louis St. Laurent and count George Grant among their patron saints share his obsession with intra-American debates? You are more likely to find them discussing British, French, Danish, and Singaporean politics. Fed up with the illiberal left’s incessant drive to control speech, dictate behaviour and ram its skewed morality down everyone’s throats, Americans not only voted for a madman with a loose grasp of reality in 2016, they did so again in 2024. But although U.S. President Donald Trump carried the Republican mantle, there is little about him that can be described as “conservative.” Ok, the Trump obsession is getting weird. I usually roll my eyes when the Canadian Left questions the National Post’s patriotic credentials, but I’m starting to see their point. Someone needs to remind Kline which “nation” his paper’s title refers to. His flip-flopping on issues like abortion and his “p–sy”-grabbing, porn-star-shagging sexual misadventures don’t make him a natural ally of the religious right, while his protectionist trade policies and attempts to co-opt private businesses into working to achieve the state’s political goals — what we used to call “fascism” — has alienated genuine economic liberals. Trump, America zzzzzzzz … But what he is good at is making a show of aggressively pushing back against the woke left. And his base is more than happy to support his mercurial ideology, if it allows them to “own the libs.” While Canada’s “new right” movement is far more intellectual than its MAGA counterpart, it’s also motivated by a desire to get revenge for the past decade, in which the Liberals systematically stripped this country of some of its most cherished norms and values. zzzzzzz … Wait, after four paragraphs of American hand-wringing, is that a mention of Canada? And a curious one. There is no “revenge” in restoration. If you burn down my house and I rebuild it, I haven’t exacted revenge on you—I’ve done what a responsible citizen must do. “Using state power to help restore Canada is a return to conservative principles, not a betrayal of them,” argued my Post colleague Geoff Russ on Wednesday. “In a democracy, winning power grants a party permission to do more than balance the books. A government has the privilege to shape culture along the lines of its vision of the good.” Russ’s quote would not be out of place in the mouth of Macdonald, Diefenbaker, Mulroney, or Harper (or to use Kline’s preferred American idiom, the Goldwater who committed his campaign to the moral renewal of America or the Reagan who increased taxes to ensure the solvency of social security, ran deficits to defeat international communism, supported prayer in school, and launched a so-called “war on drugs”). To govern is to choose, and to govern well is to choose wisely. Kline thinks that can be done by getting government out of the business of culture (and, presumably, education). That is his vision of the good, and he is welcome to it, but he can’t pretend it would not be an ideological use of government power to dismantle or cut loose so many existing institutions. The libertarian Javier Millei is probably the most active user of government power among Western leaders. Conservative strategist and regular Post contributor Anthony Koch similarly argues that the “state manufactures culture,” and that because the “progressive movement conquered culture by taking the schools, the credentialing process, the language of law, the codes of bureaucracy and the rituals of civic life,” the only way to make Canada great again, to borrow a phrase, is to emulate the left’s heavy-handed tactics. Koch has explained what he means at length, so I won’t speak for him. While there’s some truth in this, the reality is much more messy and complex. Though governments can certainly shape a nation’s culture, it’s always an uphill, and often bloody, battle when the state’s vision doesn’t align with the views of large swaths of civil society, as we saw in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In a democracy, however, culture is largely altered from the bottom up, not the top down. The two most important factors that will determine Canada’s culture in 25 years are the immigration system (who and how many we admit into our country) and the education system (how we educate the next generation of native born and immigrant children). Both of these are “top-down” factors. So too are our corporate and personal tax laws, criminal laws, building codes, employment insurance laws, pensions, and Old Age Security. In each case, how we set the rules will have a dramatic effect on regional and national cultures, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. None of this denies that culture is also generated from the bottom up. I’m just pointing out what is bleedingly obvious to anyone who looks around Canada: Our lives, our cities, our jobs, our families, and our future are shaped by a web of top-down government decisions. Change them all, even a little, and you change our society in profound ways. That is the lesson of the last three generations, and of the two Trudeaus in particular. The Liberals’ “cultural revolution” didn’t happen in a vacuum. It built on the feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist and environmental movements, many of which have been working to reshape cultural norms throughout the western hemisphere since at least the 1980s. The most extreme variants of these ideological crusades have been propagating through our universities for decades, and it had little to do with which party was in power at the time. Is Kline implying that these changes were not encouraged and, dare I say, manufactured by the state? Canadian universities are state actors, and the work of these “ideological crusades” was carried out with government dollars—in most cases deliberately directed to these causes and away from traditional scholarship. Our revolution did not come down from the Chingkang mountains to sweep all before it; it was incubated in our education faculties and in state institutions like OISE. The shock troops were trained with our money under our noses. The idea that a government should make different and better decisions to uphold academic standards, defend the Western canon, and teach a curriculum to graduate well-formed citizens rather than activist cells of social wreckers is the least we can expect of a conservative government. In the 2000s, the media was filled with zany stories about what was taking place at our institutes of higher learning, but they were generally dismissed as having little bearing on the rest of society, with many assuming that students would eventually be forced to grow up and moderate their views when they entered the real world. But that didn’t happen. Employers didn’t tell new hires to shape up or ship out, they started altering corporate policy to conform to the new standards that were being pushed upon them. Politicians also saw a base of new voters they could harness for electoral gain and moved to the left to better reflect the changing demographics. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau skilfully positioned himself as the fresh young face of this cultural shift. This is a partial account at best. Putting aside that these views were enculturated in state institutions (see above), corporate compliance was not exactly voluntary: it was coerced by “human rights” legislation and tribunals and by federal and provincial affirmative action and, later, DEI mandates. The rise of the HR department was driven by the threat of litigation; it was anything but organic. The fact that he got drunk on power and used the strong arm of government to reshape institutions, handicap the energy industry, denigrate historical figures and bury our cultural heritage should not come as a surprise. He did it because he could. And he was able to because government has grown so large, it now exerts tremendous control over virtually every aspect of our lives, and because there was a critical mass of Canadians who sympathized with the progressive worldview, at least enough not to argue with its adherents and elect the Liberals four times. Engaging in a tug-of-war over culture, in which each party attempts to impose its will on everyone whenever it gains power, is a losing battle for Conservatives, as Canadians predominantly fall on the left of the political spectrum. Likewise, throwing out all the judges and bureaucrats and replacing them with faithful right-wing ideologues may sound like a good idea, but will not be so easy in a country like Canada. This isn’t an argument; it’s a counsel of surrender. But dressing cowardice in the language of prudence cannot make a virtue of a vice. Conservatives of all people are not afraid of a hopeless cause—indeed, they rightly reject the very idea. In T.S. Eliot’s words: “[T]here is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” This view of a cause is bigger than partisan politics, and much of the work that conservatives must do is non-partisan and pre-political. No one on the New Right would deny that. The most important work being done today to preserve a humane and just Canada is not at party conventions but in charter schools and homeschooling networks, in religious congregations, and in local groups organised to oppose the degradation of their neighbourhoods. But even if most of our efforts should be directed at local problems, politics at the provincial and national level still matter because the choices governments make empower and constrain non-political activity for good and ill. Just ask anyone living in a neighbourhood where a drug injection site has opened. A government that is (rightly) concerned about the pollution of our air and water should also worry about the pollution of our minds, especially young minds, by what is permitted in their schools and on their streets and screens. Kline’s pooh-poohing of appointments is especially odd. Every government exercises an endynamistic power, and in doing so, it should appoint officials who align with its vision of the good society. Perhaps Kline would be more receptive to the idea if I cited the Reagan White House’s belief that “personnel is policy.” Out of curiosity, what does he think the alternative is? That conservatives should shrug and appoint progressives to administer our institutions, tribunals, and courts? Be serious. According to new right adherents like Howard Anglin, a columnist at the Hub, Conservatives should emulate the left’s tactics, using the “smack of firm government” to redirect social supports toward “children and stronger families,” and reshape institutions — like the National Film Board, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum — to align with a more conservative worldview. Here I can speak with some authority, as the views are mine. But first, Kline’s mischaracterisation: But further subsidizing families will only serve to redirect money we don’t have from people who don’t work to people who don’t use birth control. Likewise, putting political pressure on the government’s cultural institutions will not make them unbiased, just biased in another direction. What conservatives should really be asking is: why do we need the government subsidizing films and museums in the first place? What a drab and squalid worldview this nasty little paragraph invokes. From the sneering eugenicism of smearing families as “people who don’t use birth control” to his bloodless indifference to national cultural institutions, Kline’s vision of society appeals to the basest instincts of envy and ignorance. Wilde’s appraisal of those withered souls who know the price of everything and the value of nothing would be too kind a comparison. On the first point, my actual suggestion was to transfer some tax relief from wealthy retirees to young families—that is, the people supporting those non-workers’ lives of leisure. It may be an oversimplification to say we socialise the costs of ageing, and privatise the costs of children, but it’s not inaccurate, and a society that cares about its future should rebalance that equation. For the rest, I sincerely hope that private benefactors will support orchestras, art galleries, museums, and local historical societies (and I would use the tax code to incentivise it), but where they fall short, the government should step in, as it always has throughout history. As for museums, there are some stories that should not be left to private actors to tell, including the history on display at the Canadian War Museum. What is the alternative? I agree with the French academic and critic Lola Salem, who wrote recently “The right must build a culture that does not live and die by political skirmishes. That means places where the brightest young minds can escape the noise of ideology and encounter something higher. Places guarded against the mediocrities who would cheapen them. It also means discipline: choosing a handful of works to rally around, a canon to be revived and handed on.” Quite right. The goal of conservatives should not be something identifiable as conservative art and culture, but art and culture that is humane and celebrates rare craft; not political art, but an art where politics feels out of place. My point about museums, galleries, and academic granting bodies is that they cannot be unbiased, so we must bias them towards the good, the true, and the beautiful. As a counterfactual, I invited suggestions as to what it would mean for them to be “neutral.” I’m still waiting for an answer. Canadians shouldn’t want their political parties to engage in a cultural arms race, as that road will only lead to serfdom and authoritarianism. Even Anglin conceded that his vision would entail imposing “limits on human autonomy” and accepting that liberty has to be “ordered” — which doesn’t sound like liberty at all. Concede? I’ll shout it from the rooftops with all the gusto of an over-caffeinated muezzin! What is liberty without order but “the state of grace hungered after by stray dogs”? Every state orders our freedom by placing limits on human autonomy. What does Kline think laws forbidding fraud, punishing pollution, restricting the sale and display of pornography, limiting and conditioning immigration and citizenship, setting basic humane working conditions, or plying children with chemical cocktails of puberty blockers are if not limits on autonomy? On this point I stand squarely with Edmund Burke (and, latterly, with Sean Speer and Ken Boessenkool) and dare anyone to call our position unconservative. The best way for Conservatives to avoid a race to the bottom and fix the myriad problems this country faces is to embrace the libertarian faction of the fusionist alliance, which advocates for a state that is too small to subjugate its citizens based on the latest ideological fads, and allows for maximum freedom in how people want to live their lives. “Subjugate”? Really? Coming after a paragraph sounding the alarm of “serfdom” and “authoritarianism,” I’m picturing Kline writing this in a Guy Fawkes mask after one too many viewings of The Fountainhead. (Spoiler, in just a few paragraphs Kline will advocate a partnership between libertarians and conservatives, but here sets the terms: conservatives are to be the meek and subservient trad wives in this marriage of convenience.) National conservative thinkers like MacDonald, Russ, Anglin and Koch complain about the prevalence of abortion and euthanasia, left-wing ideology permeating our universities and public schools, a lack of housing, a crumbling health-care system and the high cost of living. The one thing these issues all have in common is that they’re either monopolized by government, as in the case of health care and education, or they’re made worse by state planning and socialist economic polices. [sic] Like Kline’s original screed, my response is already running far too long, so I’ll pick up the pace. There’s not much point replying to this paragraph anyway, as I don’t think the named authors would recognise Kline’s characterisation of their concerns or object to removing the government monopoly on health care, schools, and housing (which isn’t a government monopoly, unless he means having any planning and development laws at all, rather than the bad and currently overly-restrictive laws). If Kline keeps reading the New Right, he will find this is something of an obsession of theirs. The solution is to re-embrace markets and economic freedom, not denigrate them. Don’t want your tax dollars used to fund abortions and assisted suicide, and don’t want hospitals and doctors forced to perform procedures they deem unconscionable? That wouldn’t happen under a private system. Want your kids to learn the “three Rs” in class instead of being force-fed ideological drivel? That would be an option if we had genuine school choice. Take a deep breath. Ready? Now repeat after me: No one here is opposed to markets and economic freedom. Markets are tools; a means to an end, namely the efficient allocation of finite goods. Under the right conditions, they may encourage moral behaviour (Adam Smith was a moral philosopher first, and an economist second). What concerns me, and I suspect some of the other writers Kline name-checks, are the conditions under which markets operate, which must not contravene the basic goods of society. Markets in bananas or pork bellies are one thing; markets in people, passports, marriage, or sex are quite another. I can’t speak for the other writers Kline impugns, but I support limited government in the banal and tautological sense that government should be no larger than is necessary to carry out its goals. But the conversation must start with the proper goals of government. It is in this sense that I oppose limits as a principle of government. The limits come after the more fundamental questions are answered, and indeed are established by those answers. As for health care and education, there aren’t many people in Canada who have written more in favour of both permitting private health care (without abandoning a commitment to universal care, like every one of our peer countries from the U.K. to Denmark and Switzerland to New Zealand) and education reform, including school choice, so I don’t know who Kline thinks he is arguing against here. There will always be friction between the libertarian and social conservative factions of the movement, especially on social issues like nationalism, policing, abortion and medical assistance in dying. But there is plenty of room for common ground. Oh, now you say so! Then why did I just waste my coffee break reading 1800 words complaining about your putative allies? I suppose I should be grateful that the would-be master thinks there may be common ground with his would-be servant, but for some reason I can’t quite manage it. While there are dangers to extreme nationalism, for example, there is also plenty of evidence that Trudeau’s post-national state has failed Canadians. Libertarians and social conservatives should thus be able to agree that we should be promoting the values that made this country prosperous — like the rule of law, private property, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and democracy — so Canadians can rally around them. The first sentence is obvious; the second, strangely for an anti-statist, is boilerplate Government of Canada speak. Swap out “private property” for “inclusion” and he could have cut and pasted it from a Justin Trudeau press release (I’m ignoring the Nietzschean language of “promoting values,” which Trudeau also wielded as a rhetorical sledgehammer). And even the NDP now pays lip service to private property rights. Anyone may agree with these ideas so long as they float free of a flesh and blood community, commensurate duties, and practical limitations because they are slogans. They elide the difficult questions of government: Which laws should rule and who decides? And how do we accommodate property, speech, religion, and democracy when they require trade-offs? Invoking “values” is easy; translating them into reality is the hard job of governing. We should also be able to agree that one of the fundamental duties of the state is to keep people safe, which means ridding our streets of crime and building an army that’s strong enough to defend our borders. Again, I am left wondering whom Kline thinks he is criticising. The New Right contains some of the loudest voices encouraging conservative governments to appeal to what Robert Peel called “that great and intelligent class of society … which is far less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government.” Welcome to the “smack of firm government” club, Jesse! Your ticket to the induction ceremony in Singapore is in the post. Ultimately, the best way to fix what ails this country is to embrace free minds, free markets and personal liberty. Fragmenting the conservative movement and pitting our political parties against one another to see which one is the better authoritarian will not end well. Again, I’m not sure whom Kline is opposing here, and by now I’m convinced he is even less certain, so I’ll end with a reassurance: No one on the New Right is asking for anything more radical than that conservative governments approach national and local culture more or less as we did for most of our history. If Kline thinks that is a slippery slope to authoritarianism, I can’t help him. Good government requires both the exercise of power as well as prudent limits on its exercise, and the proper balance between is the ordered liberty that is our patrimony as Canadians. Good faith debate over how that balance should be struck at any given time and place is the stuff of conservative politics and always will be.
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.
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