Is Conservatism Impossible?
Philosopher George Grant contemplated “love of one’s own” as a key element of Canadian nationhood. Is this idea reconcilable with modern politics?
Photo: CBC
“The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada” wrote George Grant in Lament for a Nation. “As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on Earth.”
While Grant has largely receded from most political dialogue today, his influence remains. With seven years and three failed elections, no doubt Canadian conservatives are weary of their doctrine’s vitality going forward. Is there something innately wrong with the philosophy itself?
Canada, according to Grant, was a fundamentally conservative political project. Faced with the prospect of absorption into the American Empire, Upper and Lower Canada hesitantly joined forces. For this reason, Confederation does not have the rosy mythos the American revolution does. Rather, the arrangement was an attempt to save the traditions and customs that American liberalism scoffs at. Thus, said Grant, Canada was from day one a reactionary, defensive entity—a “lonely outpost” holding out against the forces of American hegemony. No wonder Northrop Frye lamented Canadian literature’s “garrison mentality.” It’s what we’re good at.
Liberalism asserts the primacy of the individual. This much is self-evident. But what makes liberalism dangerous to a conservative nation, like Canada, is that its insistence on individualism is absolute. Humanity’s essence is our ability to construct the world as we see fit. Nature, for example, is virtually meaningless beyond economic potential and/or postcard vista. “Instrumental reason,” according to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, smothers much of our moral pondering beneath the demands of rational management.
Embedded in Grant’s pessimistic outlook is a quasi-Marxist critique—though he would certainly have retched at the suggestion. He suggested that because liberal capitalism has “proven” its efficacy and legitimacy through material prosperity, it is the fundamental “superstructure” that all politics takes place within. Left, right, it hardly matters if both sides fundamentally agree on the basic shape of society. Liberalism, in Grant’s view, is this essential framework. Because modern conservatism has sold itself to liberalism, and slotted itself within that liberal superstructure, what it tries to “conserve” is just whatever is around now. Appeals to deep time that attempt to hit the brakes of a society are not appealing in an age of acceleration. It does not preserve anything that speaks to any broader social or spiritual Good, or any sort of moral horizon; it preserves what will be minimally necessary to prevent chaos. Conservatives cannot conserve anything if everything is subject to change according to the demands of technological advance.
Grant’s conservatism contemplates “love of one’s own” as a defining value. Is this reconcilable with modern politics? Whilst Grant certainly did not mean it in racial or gendered terms, nationalist mythologies tend to be inherently exclusive. The idea of Canada as a “conservative Anglo-French synthesis” is hardly an alluring mythos for an ethnically diverse Canada—unsurprisingly. The place of “multiculturalism” in our national conversation, regardless of any individual opinion on it, mitigates any attempt to suggest a history of Canada with the preservation of conservative European traditions at their core.
How can a philosophy reliant on “tradition, deference, and public morality” hold sway in an age of liberal domination? Liberalism is the “default setting” at this point in North American history. To speak outside the “cultural frame,” as Grant put it, is to alienate oneself. The allure of material prosperity offered by liberal capitalism makes all else secondary. Alternative values like tradition and public order become window dressing for the greater project of universal homogenization at the core of American liberalism. The current obsession with identity only makes conservatism more difficult.
This is not to suggest that liberalism is despicable, root and branch. Certainly not. The ethos of individualism allows for the fulfillment of greater autonomy and agency, and it prevents the arbitrary and needlessly destructive forces of a socially defined identity. Our existence, say the Existentialists, should precede our essence. Moreover, the free market is certainly a net positive as well. The authoritarian experiments of the twentieth century made vast centrally planned economies bankrupt both in theory and practice. Conservatism will survive if the demands of free enterprise and absolute freedom do not eclipse all other considerations. If all great questions of moral significance can be reduced to efficiency or cost-benefit, then conservatism will never again emerge as a viable political force. In a time of such profound hopelessness and meaninglessness among so many people, especially the young, perhaps offering a political doctrine that asserts the value of community could be conservatism’s pathway back to relevance.
We may share a border with the most dynamic nation on Earth. Yet, this need not predetermine Canada’s fate. Perhaps conservatives just need the courage to question the liberal project. This alone may begin the process of carving a way outside our cultural frame and the liberal superstructure. Asserting national particularity at a time when liberal capitalism has embedded itself so deeply on the continent sounds like, as the late Al Purdy quipped, “a belated yap of a captive dog.”
Perhaps any distinctiveness is inexorably doomed to disappear, yet if it exists enough to be lamented, it still survives.