IT'S LIBERALISM THAT'S FLATLINING
by George Jonas
National Post
October 2, 2005

For the past week several of my
colleagues have addressed
themselves to an intriguing
question. Is conservatism dead in
this country? Whatever the answer, there's another question that intrigues
me
even more: Is liberalism dead in Canada?

Considering that for 44 of the last 60 years the Liberal party has been in
power,
the question seems nonsensical. But that's only if one accepts labels at
face value.
No doubt, conservatism could be seen as ailing and liberalism as being in a
state
of vigorous health if the Conservative Party of Canada were reliably
conservative
and the Liberal party even remotely liberal. I suggest they're not.

From my perspective -- the perspective of a classical (or "19th century")
liberal,
often and erroneously described as a conservative -- the Liberal and
Conservative
parties in this country have one thing in common. They've both stopped
offering
the basic fare of liberalism or conservatism.

Instead, they bring to the nation's table half-baked dishes of corporate
statism,
regulatory collectivism, economic interventionism, environmental despotism,
cultural egalitarianism and selective sexual libertinism, often served up
in some
60s-style quasi-Marxist sauce.

The Conservatives do it slowly, apologetically, sometimes holding their
noses, now
and then with bad grace. The Liberals do it with their tails wagging. The
Tories see
they're betraying many of their ideals. The Grits seem oblivious to it.

It's ironic, because to arrive at their present position, Liberals had to
depart much
further from the fundamental tenets of liberalism than Conservatives had to
depart from the tenets of conservatism. "Red Tory" has always been less of
a
contradiction in terms than "Red Grit" would have been. Liberalism, as its
name
implies, considers liberty the core ideal of its creed, while the core unit
of its
concern is the individual. Simply put, Liberals are -- used to be -- the
party of
individual liberty.

Conservatives didn't oppose individuality or liberty as such, but they were
far
more concerned with community interests and values. When individual and
"public" interests were seen to conflict, the Tory trenches would have been
on the
public side. The regulatory, interventionist state wouldn't have been
anathema to
old-style Conservatives, the way it was to old-style Liberals.

How did it all turn around? Here are a few reasons as they pop into my
head.

First, liberals fell into the trap of believing that the enemies of
liberalism were all
on the right side of the political spectrum. They thought that -- as the
French
saying has it -- "there's no enemy on the left." This error made liberals
vulnerable
to the baneful influence of socialist statism. In Canada it led a Liberal
prime
minister to say that the CCF (predecessor of the NDP) "were merely Liberals
in a
hurry." Louis St. Laurent not only said this, but turned it into a
self-fulfilling
prophecy. By the time the Trudeau years rolled around with their wage and
price
controls, the Liberals all but caught up with Canada's socialists.

Eventually, liberals bent so far backwards looking for social and economic
justice
that they just toppled over. They tried to be better than fair, which is
like trying
to be straighter than vertical. They didn't see that super-liberal policies
often have
sub-liberal consequences. They didn't see that -- for instance -- if you
start out by
making your borders porous for humanitarian reasons, you may end up having
to
deny legal safeguards to immigrants suspected of subversion.

In short, liberals didn't see that being too liberal may morph into
becoming
illiberal and bring about the end of liberalism. They pressed ahead,
turning into
their own parody at times as they tried to remedy all the ills of
existence,
forgetting that many aren't open to social remedies.

They tried to balance one injustice with another, as in affirmative action.
They
abandoned the individual as the focal point of humanity's quest for liberty
and
justice, and focused instead on the group. Rather than equal opportunity
for each
person, they sought parity of result for every racial, sexual or ethnic
aggregate.
Liberals lost sight of the fact that, while equality is a liberal idea,
capable of
fulfillment in a free society, parity is an illiberal notion that requires
coercion to
achieve.

One could describe, at the risk of some oversimplification, the history of
New
World liberalism as the story of two main branches. One branch gave in to
some
form of statism, the other branch didn't. What the two branches had in
common
was that they both stopped being liberal, each in its own way.

The first branch ceased to be liberal by succumbing to statism, including
such
overt forms as Stalinism in the 1930s or Maoism in the 1960s, not
necessarily as
supporters or fellow travellers, but as the famous anti-anti-communists of
the
Western left. The second branch refused to give in to statism in any
incarnation,
but eventually abandoned liberalism as a lost cause in America or Canada
and
turned to neo-conservatism.

Traditional conservatism was also afflicted, but not as badly. That's why
conservatism is far from being dead in Canada, even though the Conservative
party isn't in good shape. With the Grits it's the other way around. The
Liberal
party is thriving. It's liberalism that is on its last legs.

© National Post 2005

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