A Tea Party North? No Thank You

I've been thinking about writing this for a week, but haven't because I've met Andrew Lawton and I like him a lot. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of me when I was his age. The only difference is that the Right ain't what it was then, although that is when it began to become what it is today.

When I was Andrew's age, my hero, George H.W Bush, was running for reelection. The first Bush was traditionally conservative, although he was pushed towards populist nonsense on social issues that he never cared about by the Reagan base, which was predominately Southern, and formerly Democratic ex-segregationists.

That's a controversial thing to say, even today, but the history bears it out. Southern Democrats became Republicans for the first time in a response to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater won six of his seven states in that year's presidential election in the Deep South. Richard Nixon lost almost all of those states in 1968, but only because of the presence on the ballot of George Wallace and his overtly segregationist platform.

However, he swept those states in 1972, and added to his coalition Midwestern union households that were disaffected by Democratic social policies and opposition to the war in Vietnam. Gerald Ford was unable to hold it together because of Watergate; the end of the war; the presence of the "New Southerner", Jimmy Carter, on the ballot; and the economy, which cost Ford Ohio. But Ford lost by an incredibly close margin in the popular vote.

Ronald Reagan, on his third try for the presidency, won those demographics back - nearly winning even Carter's Georgia - and that's the Republican base you know today.

Modern Republicans and Tea Partiers can argue about that all they want, but all you have to do is look at the electoral collage maps between 1960 and 1980 and think about what the issues at the time were.

The first President Bush wasn't a Reagan Republican, at least not in spirit. He was, like me, a pragmatist in the model of Eisenhower, Nixon (his governing style, as opposed to his campaign rhetoric) and Ford. In '92, he was challenged for the Republican nomination by Pat Buchanan, who won the base, if not the primaries. Buchanan forever changed the GOP and is the spiritual father of the Tea Party movement, at least more than any other single person.

It was at that point that the Republican Party began shrinking in noticeable ways. While they still won elections, their lack of moderates - and therefore winning candidates and incumbents - in the Northeast became more and more striking and ideological purity - as determined soley by the base - became a given. If that sounds familiar, it should because that's exactly what's happening today. Buchanan lost the nomination, but he fundamentally reshaped the party. The Tea Party is a much larger and much louder version of his 1992 "Pitchfork brigades", but little more.

Mr. Lawton, who I happen to like personally very much, is apparently deeply involved in bringing Tea Party politics to Canada, which I think is a very, very bad mistake.

Are Canadians getting fed up with government regulations, rules and taxes? The man behind an attempt to start a Tea Party movement in Canada hopes so.

This past weekend hundreds of thousands of Americans flocked to Washington for a rally about taking back their country. They came to hear speakers such as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and although not explicitly a Tea Party event, the crowd drew many from the movement that calls for government to get government off the backs of hard working people.

Andrew Lawton wants to bring that spirit to Canada.

Lawton, a conservative-leaning activist from London, Ont., is one of the organizers behind an online attempt to start a Tea Party movement in Canada.

Starting with a Facebook group, Lawton says there are plans for rallies this fall in Ottawa and Quebec City. Other cities may be added.

There are differences between the two countries Lawton acknowledges but adds the basis of the movement is the same.

“The issues differ but the ideology stays the same. Advocating for smaller government, freedom and letting people live their own lives.”

“One person came up to me recently and said that freedom is an American value,” said Lawton. “That’s not true. It’s an attitude I want to change.”

There are several reasons why bringing Tea Parties here would be a horrible, but before I get into them, I'll give Andrew another opportunity to explain himself. This from his blog, Strictly Right.

People on both sides of the political spectrum have expressed skepticism about the idea of a Tea Party Movement in Canada. Those on the Left think that it’s an avenue for fascist, racist, right-wingers to spout their hatred. Even some on the right are too worried about the “optics” of utilizing an American concept to advocate for Canadian values. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, conservatism and liberty are not American concepts; they are basic, fundamental truths that people in any country should embrace.

A prominent Canadian Conservative Party blogger and I had an exchange this afternoon where he was suggesting it be called something else. Why? People know and understand what the Tea Party movements stands for. As Kathy Shaidle said, “I envision the usual Canadian ‘conserv.’ bores/wonks bickering about terminolgy as excuse to avoid action.”

The "optics" of having a Tea Party would be bad enough. On a week when the Right is incessently bitching about the omnipresent George Soros undermining SunTV News, it hardly helps to have a foreign-inspired political movement countering it.

Firstly, as the Girl on the Right has pointed out, a Tea Party would be interesting optically, since we still have the Queen on our money, and stuff.

One of the reasons that I've found the Tea Partiers so intellectually strange is that they're given to saying things like "The government is forcing you into slavery. Here to explain how is former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, Representative Michele Bachmann, Senator Jim DeMint and Governor Rick Perry!"

Now imagine trying that in a country that's still technically a monarchy. Remember, Canadians had a place in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party. We were the enemy.

Secondly, we already have a Conservative government. Most of you have probably noticed that the U.S government wasn't determined to enslave everyone until January 20, 2009. There's a reason for that. If you split a governing a coalition, the people that you really don't like tend to win elections.

How do I know that? Well, that goes to my third point: It's already happened here before, and not all that long ago. If you read your modern history, you'll know that it didn't end well for any branch of conservatism in this country.

Western Conservatives were so upset with the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, which had just won two of the biggest majority governments in Canadian history and had done more to further conservatism than Stephen Harper ever has, that they broke away and formed the Reform Party, headed by Preston Manning.

Reform swept the Western provinces, but they never won more than two seats east of Manitoba and none in Quebec. The Liberals swept vote-rich Ontario, Atlantic Canada, and never won fewer than a third of Quebec's 75 seats. This allowed them to win three back-to-back majorities, even though a combined "small c-conservative" vote would have beaten the Grits in two of those elections.

Just for the record, I was part of the problem. I voted for the Reform Party under Manning twice. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Reform's successor movement, the Canadian Alliance, because it's leader, Stockwell Day, was a mutant and knew virtually nothing about politics. So I voted for the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark, instead. I've voted for independents ever since.

Mr. Lawton, Ms. Shaidle, or anyone else involved in the budding "Tea Party North" has never explained to me why that wouldn't happen again in exactly the same way. Optics aside, at some point practical politics have to be considered.

Fourth, the Tea Party is effective only because of the American primary system, without which the establishment of the Republican Party would be able to completely ignore them. Canada doesn't have primaries, it has nomination meetings. Primaries and caucuses are based on the laws of the states where they are held, whereas nomination meetings are based only on the charters of the individual parties.

Memberships in political parties are also very different in Canada than in the United States. American Republicans and Democrats are "members" of their parties for the purpose of primaries because the registered that way when they last voted. Canadian party memberships are bought and have to be maintained, which at least implies that Tea Parties here would have to be a good deal more motivated than their American cousins. Furthermore, most of our parties require that their candidate's nomination papers be signed by the party leader, who should be logically be counted on to crush insurgencies because it threatens his or her power.

Fifth, let's assume that Tea Party Conservatives (and just as the American Tea Partiers are universally Republicans, Canadian Tea Partiers would be Conservatives) get nominated and elected. Now they get to learn how a parliamentary system actually works.

In a parliamentary democracy - and especially in Canada, where power has been centralized in the Prime Minister's Office for over forty years - you don't cross the leadership without losing your party membership, and therefore your office and research budgets, your staff, and almost any hope of getting reelected. I don't know if anyone else has gotten the memo, but Stephen Harper isn't especially good at brooking dissent.

Sixth, the Tea Parties are not conservative. Like the Canadian Reform Party was, they're populist. If you read Preston Manning's second book,Think Big: My Life in Politics, you'll see that he freely admits that the Reform Party was essentially populist, which was at the core of Manning's clashes with Stephen Harper. Like the Reform Party, the NDP began as a Western populist movement, and they've never formed a federal government, either. Their ideas were co-opted by the Liberals, yes, but that's very different than being elected in your own right.

If the Tea Parties can't exactly be described as populist, the next nearest description for them is "Revolutionary conservatives." Since that's an oxymoron, I'll stick with populist.

The fatal flaw of the American Tea Party is that populism has never been successful nationally in the United States, and even less so in Canada. You might elect a Hiram Johnson in California, or an Ernest Manning in Alberta, but electing a populist president or prime minister has never been done in North America, - with the possible exception of Andrew Jackson, who I don't think that most Tea Partiers are looking to as a model - which is as good an indication as any that it probably won't be. Ontario is and probably always will be a firewall against populism, and Quebec's history of populism - as exemplified by Maurice Duplessis - has always been specific to Quebec itself.

The closest thing that Canada has ever had to a populist government was the John Diefenbaker years, which didn't last for very long and imploded soon after the death of Duplessis. Diefenbaker's populism wasn't sustainable in Quebec absent the Duplessis political machine, and once Quebec was gone, Diefenbaker's popularity in Ontario and the major cities disappeared. Without Quebec, Ontario, and the big cities behind it, so was Diefenbaker mandate. That should prove that prairie populism can't survive far beyond the prairies for very long. In a representative democracy, you can only get elected in the places where people actually live.

The Tea Party movement might very well carry the day for the GOP in Congress this November, although I still have doubts about that. What I have no doubt about is that they'll move their 2012 presidential nominee so far to the populist right - which will be an interesting experience for a Mormon who was governor of Massachusetts - that it will be almost impossible for Barack Obama to lose.

I want conservatism to succeed, but that has to be a practical, pragmatic conservatism that endures beyond the mandate of one man for it to be sustainable. Beating weak candidates like Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry doesn't mean that conservative ideas won, it just means that they got lucky in a bunch of elections. On the other hand, when conservatives have been faced with politically astute liberals; like John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton, they've had their asses kicked.

People like Andrew and Kathy - and the Tea Partiers as a whole - tend to think that battle of ideas has already been won, and it hasn't. Barack Obama won and he'll probably win again. Stephen Harper, by almost any reasonable measure, is governing to the left of Jean Chretien, yet can't win a majority and likely won't. But they want to drag him into becoming Preston Manning or Stockwell Day, who lost to Chretien three times in a row, between them.

If you want to "take action," in Kathy Shaidle's words, you first have to win a goddamned election. You have to do it clearly, decisively, and you have to do it in clearly enunciated ideas. The Tea Party isn't doing that. They might very well win this year, if only as a default option to the highly unpopular Obama; based on semi-retarded rhetoric about "keeping government out of Medicare" and constant, lunatic, Glenn Beck-inspired tirades about slavery that are even more stupid than they are offensive.

That might win once. But it will lose almost immediately afterward, because it isn't a philosophy, it's a reaction to immediate circumstances.

And if that didn't work for Preston Manning, who I actually personally like and respect, it won't work for a Tea Party that hasn't spent half the time thinking through his positions and governing philosophies that he did.