The US after this election is witnessing the results of an effort which has taken the best part of forty years through which socially conservatism has become mainstream. It has been a comprehensive effort which has worked its way through the media, economics, academia, the churches and government to succesfully make that which was utterly unappealing in the mid-60s pop culture today. The rise of country music, pick-up truck manufacture, shift in church attendence, an attack on prudent taxation and an assertion of moral cause for whatever one does are all aspects of this shift.
What is the centre and left to do? One thing it must do is start. Fortunately in Canada, we know that any rightist thought beyond the centre is marginal, as recent elections show. Where 51% of the US population votes for the God-fearing friend of commerce, Canadians can’t get up enough interest in them to get them into the 30% range – because we know they are nuts or are Albertans. Our centre and left (known in the States as the far-left/liberals/socialists/pinkos) only have a problem merely of fragmentation as opposed to purpose. Yet, it is still at risk…so perhaps setting some general principles of the true moral majority would help as ground work for the 2016 US election when the House, Senate and White House might all reasonably be expected next to fall back into our southern neighbour’s Democratic hands:
- You have to express and assert moral values. The centre and left must recognize that it is the steward of the moral core of liberty and learn to express that convincingly. Currently, the right is asserting a faith-based conception of politics which is set up as opposed to “realty”, whatever that is supposed to mean. One principle that is key in understanding the success of the US right is that the abandonment of thought is not the fulfillment of any relationhip to faith. It is just abandonment to unthought so get into that Bible and point out that Jesus had no time for the bankers and bean-counters in authority, knocked down the temple and wanted the feet of the poor into some reasonable footwear. The centre and left also need to erode what are described as faith-based approaches through asserting that faith and reason are not anti-thetical, that morality and thought is better than morality and not thought. As you Mom said when you couldn’t find your bike – God gave you a brain for something…USE IT!
- Fiscal prudency. Since the earliest days of Margaret Thatcher, the core economic principle of the right has been imprudence. Favouring the few, wasting natural resources for today, cutting taxes mindlessly and racking up public debt are all rightist economic cornerstones. As a result, the centre and left need to embrace prudence…no, not Prudence, just prudence. Being the best money managers, safe-guarding of the public purse, keeping an eye on the long term, are all key. It is a wide-open field and frankly the one you’ve been sitting in the middle of for years, all the while being told by the misfits, the foxes in the chicken coop, that you are incapable. You believed them. Maybe because of the suits, who knows. Calling this new approach something grand and geographically friendly yet obtuse, like, say, the Houston School, will help. It will not cause fear and may be allowed to infiltrate for the required decade or more without anyone noticing, taking time for adherents to become pundits and then policy makers.
- Last, the centre and left in North America have to come to believe in themselves. In Europe this is easy having been ravaged by the extremes of the Nazis and Soviets for decades. It is only in the last three years that North America has taken to consider itself the victim of the world. In asserting itself as having risen from that great wrong it has been uneven, a bit unsteady so that we now see that liberty has been protected by cutting back on it fencing it in. Time for the bloom to force itself again. It is good to be free and the centre and left have to make that meaningful again. Next time someone craps on “liberals” say “did you say Liberace? Why would you say that about Liberace? I suppose you didn’t care for Ed Sullivan either, or apple pie and you believe cheating on your taxes isn’t much like cheating on your wife. Are you still cheating on your taxes? Har-har-har!” You can take it from there. Look around your leftie life, stake out what is good and wholesome and, then, proclaim it as the salvation for the nation. A good lesson to remember from the right on this point is it doesn’t have to be true, you just have to say it a lot. It is, though, likely true.
Some will think this scatter-brained and some just copying. But that is what it is going to take to get that 51% needed to keep out the fringe. See, you don’t have to befriend the Ayn Rand set, with their calls to stop pampering children by keeping the out of the work force. You just just have to convince that nice centre-right family on the next street. There you go. You know them. Invite them over for cups of tea, leave out the Toronto Star and New Yorker, maybe put on play a little reggae quietly and see what develops. Remember, you have a decade or two to pull this off so no rush. Find some friends and start a circle – avoid the word “cell” as you do this, please. Adopt the bollo tie as your secret sign. Next time you see someone wearing one, give them a wink. The revolution has begun.