Coalition conservatism requires comfort with contradiction and debate

Bill’s book mystified me at first, reading it through libertarian eyes at the time. Conservatism seemed confusing at best, reminiscent of Lionel Trilling’s quip about conservatives as having “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Gairdner’s grasp of the “great divide” convinced him that the Right must maintain debate if it hopes to survive as a coalition. Real debate about meaningful issues, shared over good food and drink, offered the only way to win in a nominal two-party electoral system. Civitas Canada will host its 30th conference in Edmonton this upcoming spring. Absent debate, the non-Left devolves into sectarian triumphalism. Whoever controls communications for the Conservative Party gets to pick the faction that defines the right. Sectarianism may hold for a moment; it may even appear the Right speaks with one voice. But it never lasts. As the famous Yeats poem puts it, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; The centre cannot hold; things fall apart.” Here’s the crux. The “centre” in this case is not a uniform creed. The centre is commitment to understanding conservatism as a coalition. Conservatism has no holy book. It has no agreed-upon sage or prophet that we all support without nuance or debate. Liberalism comes close to having holy books with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Hobbes’ Leviathan, or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and several others. Even so, the varieties of liberal experience defy capture into a one creed. Now imagine mixing right-wing liberalism with all the varieties of conservative experience. It highlights the genius and statesmanship of those who were able to create a unified CPC in the first place. It also speaks to the genius of David Frum and Ezra Levant. We cannot dismiss their original plan, in 1996, as idealistic dreaming by younger men. Forget what you know of them today. They were also strong and opinionated in 1996. Even so, they worked together. George Nash, historian and author, chronicled conservatism in his book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, from 1945. He described the rise and fall of right-wing factions over time. In a podcast, Professor Nash said conservatives must avoid “the sectarian temptation.” It drives “deviationism,” the quest to root out those who deviate from the true faith, a feature of the Stalinist Left. Tom Flanagan, founding member of the Calgary School of political science, said something similar in warning against “purity tests.” The open debate we see today is a direct response to an unconscious sectarianism over the last decade or more. Harper’s electoral wins refocused attention on retaining office and away from debate. Unity had brought victory. But as with many parties that form government, unity can become uniformity. Holding onto government becomes the primary goal; debate becomes too risky. Conservatives start to downplay anything liberal media can use to distract voters. It devolves into a mass politics by default, a uni-party that has forgotten its roots. If we want to win, we need principled debate, not unity. We need to see the non-Left as a coalition between fundamentally different factions, who have agreed to work together. Debate is not the same as political division. No question, debate can lead parties to divide. But parties that avoid debate and work to quash what George Nash calls deviationism will end up weak and irrelevant. The coalition’s strength rests in a profound grasp of the breadth and depth of thinking on the non-Left, not in pursuit of a lowest-common-denominator “conservatism.” Canada is not doing well, and the near future threatens worse. The “New Right” doubts whether any currently existing conservatism can save us. Jonah Goldberg, American political commentator, once said, “At the very core of conservatism lies comfort with contradiction.” Conservatives and right-wing liberals will never, ever agree, but we can agree to work together. Will we accept the challenge?