I’m one of those Americans who just love Canada. I don’t have any big desire to go live in Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal, and don’t think our country is inferior, but do like to go up there when I can, and in particular, enjoy political discourse with Canadians, who, until recently at least, seemed to combine the best traditions of Europe and America, along with their legendary civility and openness to debate. Two Northern Exposures especially impressed me. One was a Q&A session with Deputy Cabinet Ministers (the people who actually run Canada’s national government) in 2000, when I had to explain and defend Al Gore’s policy agenda and how it would affect my country and theirs, in incredible detail. And the second, a year or two earlier, was a Future of the Left conference at Carlton University where an initially hostile audience constructively engaged, and partially accepted, my arguments for the progressive credentials of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.During all my visits to Canada in the late 1990s, I was told that Finance Minister Paul Martin was the real brains of the governing Liberal Party, and would prove that as Prime Minister when Jean Chretien decided to retire. And that is why the current agony of Martin and the Liberals is so sadly ironic.Chretien finally stepped down in 2003, and bequeathed to Martin not only leadership of the Liberals, but an endlessly unfolding series of ethics scandals, the most recent being AdScam, a sleazy tale of insider government contracts to provide illusory p.r. services in connection with efforts to tamp down Quebec separatism.Nobody has implicated Martin in this mess, but he’s the Prime Minister and Liberal leader, and like Gerald Ford after Watergate, he’s fighting an uphill battle to free his party and his leadership from a huge wave of public revulsion. Like Ford, he’s currently being mocked in the media as being a bit of a deer in the headlights. Martin is currently trying to forestall an immediate election. Despite general media assumptions that Liberals are doomed to disaster, maybe he, again like Gerald Ford, will be able to raise serious doubts about the opposition, which is in this case a Conservative Party that has moved well to the right in order to absorb the western-based Reform Party that kicked up a lot of ideological dust in the 90s. If Martin can’t pull a revival off, then Canada, like the United States, may experience the governing philosophy of a true, latter-day conservative movement, and ultimately decide that punishing themselves for Jean Chretien’s failings is an act of national masochism that should not stand,
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 22: “Red Dog” Democrats Shouldn’t Expect Big Policy Concessions
While mulling some recent material from The Bulwark, I thought I’d explain something to the converted “Never Trumpers” the outlet represents, and did so at New York:
For a while now I’ve had a guilty-pleasure reading habit: The Bulwark, that semi-official outlet of Never Trumpers who view themselves as having definitively broken with the GOP thanks to their former party’s thralldom to Donald J. Trump. I share its contributors’ belief that they (the tribe usefully described by Miller as Red Dog Democrats) represent not just a self-promoting claque of elite scribblers but a real if marginal faction of the Democratic Party, having burned a lot of bridges on their way out of the GOP. Their views appear to parallel those of a significant number of suburban Republicans and independents who voted Democratic in 2018 and 2020. And given the very close balance between voters of the two parties, as reflected most recently in 2020, Democrats really can’t afford to contemptuously reject any potential adherents, however alien or even repugnant they might find their backgrounds.
So it’s understandable when Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes expresses frustration that Democrats refuse to consider their pleas for policy concessions on grounds of holding old grudges:
“The spending. The wokeness. The repeal of the Hyde Amendment. I could go on …
“These are difficult times for folks on the center-right, who’ve tried to join Democrats in a loose alliance to protect the Republic from Trumpism …
“Litmus tests are applied: it’s not enough to be pro-democracy, NTers are also expected to embrace the elements of the progressive agenda — from free community college, to abortion, rent moratoriums, police funding, transgenderism, CRT, social spending, and the candidacy of Greta Thunberg for sainthood.”
Sykes fears it’s all very personal, and warns, “If you cancel moderates/conservatives for their past sins, you don’t have a coalition.”
Here’s the thing, though: It’s not really about the Red Dogs. Yes, I’m sure it’s been tough for them to watch Democrats largely come together around a legislative program that’s significantly more progressive than the one advanced by the Obama administration. But Democrats have been coalescing around the basics of the Build Back Better agenda for some time now. That the famously moderate Joe Biden now embraces it is a sign of how the party has slowly evolved, not some sort of betrayal or surrender to the left. And anyone who paid close attention to the 2020 presidential primaries should have understood that there is less distance between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders than between Joe Biden and the Joe Biden of the 1990s.
Part of what has happened is simply a resolution of internal conflicts among Democrats that left them defensive and at times incoherent. A classic example is one that Sykes mentioned: abortion policy. For years, Democrats claimed to value reproductive rights even as they accepted significant limitations on them: e.g., the Hyde Amendment, which made abortion services, unlike any other medical services, ineligible for any sort of federal support. That amendment, along with acceptance of some largely symbolic restrictions on rare late-term abortions, and the whole “safe, legal, and rare” messaging introduced by Bill Clinton, represented concessions to a significant bloc of Democratic voters and Democratic pols who did not recognize reproductive rights at all.
That has changed over time. Anti-abortion Democratic politicians are a rare and shrinking breed, and there are now significantly fewer anti-abortion Democratic voters than there are pro-choice Republicans. Most Democrats, including Joe Biden, have made the leap into a more coherent and unified position. They aren’t going to turn back the clock to satisfy ex-Republicans, but they aren’t insisting on a “litmus test” just to annoy or exclude them, either. The same could be said for other policy tenets once beloved by a significant number of Democrats — from fiscal hawkishness to armed interventionism to an openness to “entitlement reform” — that remain attractive to the newest proto-Democrats. As for the idea that Democrats are some sort of rigid ideological cult: Come on, seriously? Look at what’s going on with the attempted enactment of the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. If this is an intolerant and exclusive political party, I’d hate to see a loosey-goosey one try to function. It may just be that the issues Red Dogs fret about may lie outside the still relatively loose bounds of party unity.
This doesn’t mean Red Dogs should despair, but it may mean another painful reevaluation of priorities, recognizing that most have already had to sacrifice a lot of old allegiances and even the habitual language used to make sense of the political world. In many respects, the Never Trumpers resemble their spiritual (and in some cases biological) predecessors, the neo-conservatives. These were people who broke with the Democratic Party out of a conviction that Democratic views on national security made continued party loyalty impossible. But most of them retained many views that horrified their new Republican allies until they accepted the inevitable role of a factional minority and grew to accommodate or even share the policy positions and ideological language of the GOP, which was increasingly dominated by conservatives with their own ideological-consistency demands.
Most Red Dogs have no illusions about the party they’ve left and understand their constituencies are too small to form a third force or demand concessions from a position of strength. Most, I suppose, will get used to the strange and sometimes lurid landscape of the Donkey Party. Others will embrace the posture of the gadfly, the people of no party or coalition. But it’s really not personal. It’s just politics.