Monday, May 12, 2008 — What Is Progress? What Is Progressive?

In a speech, today, Canada’s Prime Min­is­ter, Stephen Harp­er out­lined his plan to force our coun­try down the same path to bank­rupt­cy and self-destruc­tion that the Unit­ed States has relent­less­ly pur­sued over the last gen­er­a­tion. It’s first pur­pose is to destroy our domes­tic indus­try (espe­cial­ly in Ontario) and reduce us to abject sub­mis­sion to “Big Ener­gy”, the glob­al com­mu­nism of oil sheiks, dic­ta­tors and multi­na­tion­al gang­sters. It’s sec­ondary pur­pose is to esca­late eco­nom­i­cal­ly par­a­lyz­ing mil­i­tary spend­ing, and make us even more avail­able as mer­ce­nary canon fod­der to our glob­al mas­ters. Canada’s indus­tri­al base is rapid­ly dis­in­te­grat­ing. Just today, the clo­sure of anoth­er major indus­tri­al facil­i­ty in Ontario was announced. Canada’s cur­rent­ly “strong” econ­o­my is being propped up by oil and gas pro­duc­tion, and pros­per­i­ty is con­fined to the exportable resource regions. Oil, gas, min­ing. The Con­ser­v­a­tive regime is forc­ing us back into the pathet­ic “hew­ers of wood and draw­ers of water” sta­tus that it took us a cen­tu­ry of strug­gle to free our­selves from. The decade of bal­anced bud­gets and sur­plus­es gen­er­at­ed by Lib­er­al gov­ern­ments has been can­celed out ― pil­laged by the Con­ser­v­a­tive regime ― and we will soon be plung­ing into debt. This is the result of import­ing the obnox­ious, free­dom-hat­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­o­gy that has crip­pled and dis­hon­oured the Unit­ed States ― an ide­ol­o­gy that would far more accu­rate­ly be named “Neo-Com­mu­nism”.

Iron­i­cal­ly, there is plen­ty of evi­dence that Amer­i­cans are sum­mon­ing the courage to rebel against the dis­ease of Con­ser­vatism. It’s not cer­tain whether this rebel­lion will suc­ceed. At present, it seems to con­sist of noth­ing more than an unfo­cused dis­con­tent, a resent­ment of con­stant­ly being lied to, and bore­dom with the rant­i­ng of Con­ser­v­a­tive aparatchiks and True Believ­ers. Amer­i­cans want “change”, but do they have any idea what they want to change, specif­i­cal­ly? It seems cer­tain that Barak Oba­ma will become Pres­i­dent, but in a polit­i­cal sys­tem in which only per­son­al charis­ma and mys­ti­cal sym­bol­ism deter­mine results, there is lit­tle dis­cus­sion of what poli­cies and strate­gies might get Amer­i­cans out of the hole they have dug for them­selves. Opti­mism and hope are nice, but opti­mism doesn’t pay debts, or rebuild a rot­ten econ­o­my, or rekin­dle the flame of free­dom ― rea­son and hard work do. Con­ser­vatism has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly under­mined the abil­i­ty of Amer­i­cans to either rea­son or work. It has poi­soned the moral impulse. Is this cur­rent shift in mood a gen­uine desire to reform the soci­ety, or is it just anoth­er ver­sion of scream­ing to get the ted­dy-bear back, and return to pas­sive depen­dence? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Such things can’t be judged by fol­low­ing the media. I would have to live in the U.S. again to form an opinion.

America’s shift to a vague desire for “some­thing dif­fer­ent” is dri­ven by dis­con­tent and ennui, a psy­cho­log­i­cal state that Cana­di­ans don’t find them­selves in. Our cur­rent Con­ser­v­a­tive regime is a sec­ond-hand cast-off of the Amer­i­can arti­cle, a mechan­i­cal aping by those among us who have the habit of import­ing out-of-date trends. Some of us are always adopt­ing some Amer­i­can or Euro­pean idea after it is old-hat and worn out. But, after many years of eco­nom­ic solid­i­ty and sen­si­ble finances, gen­er­at­ed by Lib­er­al gov­ern­ment, there is lit­tle dis­con­tent in the land. The first cracks in the foun­da­tions are not being noticed, or tak­en seri­ous­ly. So it is still pos­si­ble for Harp­er to ped­dle to Cana­di­ans import­ed ide­o­log­i­cal trash that Amer­i­cans are sick of.

So the ques­tion before us, in both coun­tries, is: What Is Progress? What Is Pro­gres­sive? The vague jum­ble of inco­her­ent ideas and trends that are labeled “lib­er­al” in the Unit­ed States ― and suc­cess­ful­ly demo­nized by the high­ly orga­nized pro­pa­gan­da machine of the Con­ser­v­a­tive aris­toc­ra­cy ― doesn’t offer any kind of alter­na­tive. It is mere­ly a reac­tive impulse. The peo­ple labeled “lib­er­al” in North Amer­i­ca are the per­fect suck­ers, the per­fect chumps. They sel­dom see through lies, and can be manip­u­lat­ed with ease. They nev­er seem to catch on to the fact that Con­ser­v­a­tives always do the exact oppo­site of what they say. Con­ser­v­a­tives yap about free­dom, and build con­cen­tra­tion camps. They yap about patri­o­tism and hand over the coun­try to for­eign tyrants. They yap about “moral­i­ty” and wal­low in filth and cor­rup­tion. They yap about “free mar­kets” and run the biggest state-man­aged and state-inter­ven­tion­ist, col­lec­tivist regime in human his­to­ry. They yap about oppos­ing “big gov­ern­ment” and relent­less­ly pur­sue the infla­tion of gov­ern­ment pow­er and an omnipo­tent Impe­r­i­al pres­i­den­cy. They yap about the evils of “tax-and-spend Lib­er­als” and indulge in an insane spend­ing fren­zy that has bank­rupt­ed the world’s most pow­er­ful economy.

The pathet­ic crea­tures called “lib­er­als” in the U.S. invari­ably react, not to what Con­ser­v­a­tives do, but only to what they say. So, if Amer­i­cans, caught in a sad dual­is­tic “left-right” men­tal­i­ty, try to change things, they invari­ably embrace pre­cise­ly the val­ues that Con­ser­v­a­tives real­ly want. Big­ger gov­ern­ment with big­ger pow­ers, bureau­crat­ic mega-projects, more alpha­bet agen­cies with dra­con­ian author­i­ty and no account­abil­i­ty, more “big­ness”, more mega­lo­ma­nia, more raz­zle-daz­zle and pomp, more social engi­neer­ing, more direc­tion from the top down. These are Con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, not “lib­er­al” ones. And the real Con­ser­v­a­tives will always come back into pow­er, because they are the gen­uine arti­cle. In the next round, they will glee­ful­ly inher­it the greater state pow­ers, hand­ed to them on plat­ter by the pre­dictable reac­tions of “lib­er­als”.

Take, for exam­ple, one of the few areas of pol­i­cy for which Democ­rats in the U.S. have spe­cif­ic plans. They are propos­ing a nation­al health-care insur­ance sys­tem. Pre­dictably, the sys­tem they pro­pose is actu­al­ly one that was devised by Con­ser­v­a­tive “think-tanks” — one that is inef­fi­cient and unwork­able on pur­pose. Good luck with that. Because of the two-dimen­sion­al “left-right” non­sense, Amer­i­cans are led to believe that this is a form of “social­ized med­i­cine”, that it exists on a con­tin­u­um with their exist­ing set­up at one end, and state-man­aged, col­lec­tivised med­i­cine at the oth­er. This is non­sense. but it is believed equal­ly by sup­port­ers and oppo­nents of health care reform. Because of this non­sen­si­cal sys­tem of clas­si­fi­ca­tion, attempts to pro­vide uni­ver­sal health care are bound to end up with a big mess, instead of improved health care.

I’ve exam­ined the data as care­ful­ly as I could, and there is absolute­ly no ques­tion that Cana­di­ans get a much bet­ter health care deal than Amer­i­cans do. A vis­it to an Amer­i­can hos­pi­tal con­vinced me of that with­in fif­teen min­utes. But I have relied on inter­na­tion­al­ly and objec­tive­ly gen­er­at­ed data to form my con­clu­sions. The Cana­di­an sys­tem, which is not “social­ized med­i­cine” at all, does two things: 1) it pro­vides bet­ter qual­i­ty health care at half the price that Amer­i­cans pay, and 2) it pro­motes greater indi­vid­u­al­ism and per­son­al inde­pen­dence. Those are the pur­pos­es of any prac­ti­cal risk-reduc­tion scheme, and the essence of a demo­c­ra­t­ic response to any large-scale social prob­lem. But, because of absurd ide­o­log­i­cal gib­ber­ish, most Amer­i­cans, and even many Cana­di­ans, pro­found­ly mis­un­der­stand this system.

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