Your Sunday Morning Read....The Last Straussian Standing.

AllTheOpEdsThatAren't
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Last Sunday we had a look at a slightly stale-dated piece by Doug Saunders wherein the good Mr. Saunders came to the thoroughly researched, fact-based conclusion that it is progressive, not conservative, governments that consistently do the right thing when it comes to fiscal management of all the people's money and, by extension, their futures as well.

This week I'd like to revisit a much older piece, from 2010, by Rick Salutin in the Globe that makes the case for why Mr. Stephen Harper governs the way he does:

...Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish thinker who escaped Hitler for the U.S. but despaired over the depravity that liberalism might lead to there as it had in Germany, after the liberal 1920s. He felt almost any means were valid to save Western civilization but, due to liberalism's strength, the strategy had to be cautious, secretive, even duplicitous, with the truth confined to an elite. This rarefied vision became highly influential when it was spread by his students (and theirs) in government, think tanks and media during the Reagan and Bush years. It's a prominent force at Mr. Harper's intellectual home, the University of Calgary...


Mr. Salutin then goes into the details of the five main pillars of Mr. Harper's governing style that he believes are guided by Straussian voices in the dark. These are populism, religion, nationalism, secretiveness and contempt.

Here's what Mr. Salutin had to say at the time (i.e. pre-majority), about that last one:

...There seem high levels of this (contempt), even for politics, among the Harperites (John Baird, Jason Kenney etc.). But Straussianism requires a strong sense of Us v. Them, to overcome the lassitude created through what it views as liberal notions such as tolerance and cultural relativism...


And here you may have thought that Mr. Harper is actually scared poopless about belly dancers wearing veils who are poised to overrun every polling station from Etobicoke to Esquimalt with or without the proper Pierre Pollivere-approved ID.

Then again, if you're reading this you probably didn't think that.

And (to swipe a line from that now long gone Pall Mall smoker) so it goes...

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There is something else to consider here, which I believe is very important. It is also the reason that I truly fear a continuation of Mr. Harper's government for another four years.

And that is the fact that Straussianism has such a hold on the conservative political/corporate establishment in the United States that they really and truly believe (and have shown using the Rovian rules) that that the politics of division can be used to get to 50% + 1 at every level of the republic (eg. house, senate and executive branches). As a result, they are never working for the good of all of the people. And, in fact, as many have pointed out, including Thomas Frank, they are often doing their darndest to make sure the people vote against their own collective good.

Now.

Transport that thinking to Canada and the case can be made that this approach, which is clearly the one being taken by Mr. Harper et al., is even more divorced from any need to govern in the best interest of the majority of the people who live here.

Why?

Because in Canada Mr. Harper knows that he only has to get to 33% + 1 (give or take) and he has a darned good shot at another round of noble lies designed to transform Canada into something the other 67% has no interest in becoming.

Which, of course, brings me back to why I think strategic voting really and truly does matter this time around.

OK?


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How did Straussianism get to the Calgary School and come to so heavily influence the thinking of Mr. Harper and his political friends and influential uncles?...Donald Gutstein laid out that story earlier this year in the Tyee...It provides insight into Mr. Harper's contempt for the Charter as well.


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