Posted by “If liberals are so f***ing smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?” Is a famous quote from fictional news anchor Will McAvoy in first few minutes of the premier of the short-lived HBO series The Newsroom. Liberals have, for the past two decades, considered themselves pinnacle of social evolution. It is the hubris of what is now being called the “End of History” or what I like to call “Fukuyamaism” named after the author of the 1989 article bearing the same name. “The end of history instead proposes a state in which human life continues indefinitely into the future without any further major changes in society, system of governance, or economics.” In my view, Fukuyamaism refers to a specific prediction which is “with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy – occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) – humanity had reached “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” But then comes this in The New Yorker in 2018: “Francis Fukuyama postpones the end of history“. “Twenty-nine years later, it seems that the realists haven’t gone anywhere, and that history has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It turns out that liberal democracy and free trade may actually be rather fragile achievements. (Consumerism appears safe for now.) There is something out there that doesn’t like liberalism, and is making trouble for the survival of its institutions.”
“Fukuyama thinks he knows what that something is, and his answer is summed up in the title of his new book, “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment”. The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the “master concept” that explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, isis, Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir. Oh, and the whole business begins with Plato’s Republic. Fukuyama covers all of this in less than two hundred pages. How does he do it?”
“Not well. Some of the problem comes from misunderstanding figures like Beauvoir and Freud; some comes from reducing the work of complex writers like Rousseau and Nietzsche to a single philosophical bullet point. A lot comes from the astonishingly blasé assumption—which was also the astonishingly blasé assumption of “The End of History?”—that Western thought is universal thought. But the whole project, trying to fit Vladimir Putin into the same analytic paradigm as Black Lives Matter and tracing them both back to Martin Luther, is far-fetched. It’s a case of Great Booksism: history as a chain of paper dolls cut out of books that only a tiny fraction of human beings have even heard of. Fukuyama is a smart man, but no one could have made this argument work.”
In other words, rather than examine the inherent flaw in the base assumption that liberal democracy and free markets are the pinnacle of human socio-economic development and hence inevitable, Fukuyama has tried to explain away the fact that history didn’t end by slapping a band-aid on his original failed thesis of the universality of human thought and culture by saying it is a “demand for recognition” (whatever that means) that is the true “master concept”. Sadly, this helps us exactly zero because it doesn’t tell us squat about how this is used to predict and solve the current malaise in Western liberal democracies and the model they represent.
However, the view that liberalism is inexorable continues to this day with this article in The Atlantic from 2016 “Why America is moving left“. “Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation’s statehouses—and could well win the presidency—but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning… There is a backlash against the liberalism of the Obama era. But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left… The next Democratic president will be more liberal than Barack Obama. The next Republican president will be more liberal than George W. Bush.”
But then Trump happened and even the most obtuse liberal would be hard pressed to say that Donald Trump is more liberal than George W. Bush. Liberals were left navel gazing wondering how could they lose so badly when all the demographic changes were in their favour. Rather than re-examine their basic thesis that domination by Democrats was an inevitable reality, the liberals chose to make excuses instead like this 2019 article in The American Prospect, “Is the Emerging Democratic Majority Finally Coming to Pass?” which basically states that, “the fundamental trends had not changed, even if they were playing out slowly with temporary political reversals along the way.” In other words, nothing is wrong even though our predictions of Democrat liberal domination in the early 21st century has not come to pass, Trump is just a temporary blip.
The same philosophy, bordering on cult-like denial of any view other than what they think is the truth plays out north of the border in Canada as well. Like this Politico article, “Why Justin Trudeau’s party is sticking with him — for now.” The Liberals, who used to win so frequently they were jokingly referred to as Canada’s natural governing party, had been stripped bare by factors including infighting, a cash shortage, unpopular leaders, a newly united right-wing party, unprecedented support for a rival left-wing party and decades-old regional resentments that built up in western and eastern Canada. Then, a celebrity life-raft floated in to the rescue. Trudeau was a household name from birth, the son of a four-term prime minister who modernized Canada’s Constitution. The attention he commanded put his Liberals back on voters’ radar, catapulting them from third place to power in one single election in 2015. ‘He saved their bacon,’ said Conrad Winn, a pollster and political-science professor at Carleton University.”
Non-Canadians and even most Canadians do not know or don’t remember how close the Liberals came to extinction. In 2011, the Conservatives won 166 seats and a majority on 39.6% of the popular vote. The New Communist Party (NDP) for the first time formed the official opposition with 103 seats and 30.6% of the popular vote. The Liberals were decimated, winning only 34 seats and 18.9% of the popular vote.
Wait a second, the browning of Canada is, if anything, proceeding at a faster pace than it is in the United States as we have more immigration and refugees as a percentage of the total population than our friends to the south. Plus we have a much greater historical propensity to socialism than American ever had where liberal and socialist are still four letter words best not uttered in polite company. But at least our liberals seem to realize that demographics alone are not sufficient to declare conservatism dead and liberalism to be in permanent ascendancy like they do south of the border.
So why do liberals fail to understand why they lose so goddamned always? Well, I pointed out the problem four years ago in this article, “When liberals start to eat their young… even if they have nice hair.” ” The problem with the current liberal coalition is that it is moving ever further left from center and that it’s inherently unstable and unelectable. Other than a sense of being a minority that is being discriminated against; what do feminists, LGBTQ, blacks, hispanics, natives, muslims and jews have in common? The only glue holding this together is a bunch of educated liberal white’s in New York and California (the fair-trade, low-fat, soy-milk, gluten-free, Latte sipping urban elite) saying how much they want to help and advance all these groups. This group has their own agenda though. One focused on showing how enlightened and holier-than-thou they are (hence the smugness); they are Social Justice Warriors (SJW) promoting diversity and equality while at the same time saving the planet (animals, forests, climate, oceans, or all the above) from the evil rapaciousness of mankind (and by mankind they actually mean old angry white males). Without the liberal urban elite goading them on, the minority groups probably have more issues that divide them than bring them together. They certainly have their own agenda’s and self-interests which, for the most part, put them in conflict with the agendas of many of the other groups.”
Yes, liberalism in its modern incarnation of identity politics is rife with inherent conflicts of interests. Like when Black Lives Matter disrupts the Gay Pride parade in Toronto demanding “a commitment to increase representation among Pride Toronto staff, and to prioritize the hiring of black transgender women and indigenous people. Or when feminists go toe-to-toe with LGBTQ as we saw recently with J.K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter) who tweeted: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?” #IStandWithMaya. Or when CNN reports, “In a survey of American Muslims, 0% identified as lesbian or gay.”
So when a politician like Justin Trudeau hangs his hat on identity politics and how woke and inclusive he is, he creates his own minefield for him to walk on because there is absolutely no way for him to reconcile all these disparate interests. Remember when “‘Because it’s 2015’: Trudeau forms Canada’s 1st gender-balanced cabinet“? One of the highlights of this massive political virtue signalling was the appointment of “Jody Wilson-Raybould, a lawyer and former regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, was sworn in as attorney general and justice minister, becoming the first aboriginal person to hold the post”. Trudeau was on a roll — Jody Wilson-Raybould was like two birds with one stone. If she were only a lesbian, it would have been the perfect liberal trifecta.
And then the SNC-Lavalin scandal hit and Trudeau’s identity politics came back to bite him in the ass. As the National Post wrote, “Here’s why Justin Trudeau’s identity-politics troubles were inevitable.” ” As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau squirms before the cameras, mooting unsatisfying explanation after unsatisfying explanation as to just what transpired between his office and Wilson-Raybould in the matter of the SNC Lavalin prosecution, she’s practically soaked to the bone with praise.” Within a few months, not only was she removed as attorney general and justice minister, she was booted from the liberal party.
The problem with setting yourself up as a holier-than-thou saint of inclusiveness and social justice is that nobody, not even the Pope, could consistency hold themselves up to that standard under the spotlight of politics and the media. It makes no sense to demand that half your cabinet be women if it means artificially stuffing it with people who are not qualified or passing over more qualified individuals for the position. In the 2015 elections, only 88 out of 338 Members of Parliament were female for a ratio of 28%. Of these, only 50 were Liberal and Trudeau picked 15 of them for his cabinet. In other words, if you were a woman in the liberal party, you almost had a 1/3 chance of being in the cabinet. Put it another way, a female Liberal was 3x more likely than a male one to be picked as a cabinet minister. As anyone who has ever hired people or run a business can tell you, when you restrict your pool of available candidates that severely for jobs that require specific knowledge and skills (cabinet ministers are supposed to be specialists), you are probably not going to get the best person for the job.
And why stop with women? Shouldn’t we be inclusive for all the downtrodden including LGBTQ and visible minorities? I mean 22% of Canadians are visible minorities and yet you only have 5 out of 31 cabinet ministers who are visible minorities. Or as the Globe and Mail points out, “Trudeau’s diverse cabinet not a true Canadian portrait”. “‘A cabinet that looks like Canada!’ Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exclaimed as he introduced his ministers. But this was false on several counts. A cabinet that includes no one of Italian or Chinese origin, a cabinet without Arabs, a cabinet without a single black person – while Sikhs (who comprise about 1.4 per cent of the Canadian population) hold four cabinet posts – is not a true portrait of Canada. Not that I mind. The last thing a modern government needs is a cabinet that would reflect the exact ethnic makeup of the population. That’s because it’s impossible to achieve: Ministers are chosen from a caucus that results from the vagaries of politics and doesn’t correspond to demographic reality. For example, the Liberals have only a handful of black MPs, two MPs of Chinese descent – and 16 Sikhs, reflecting the active interest of Sikhs in politics and of a pattern of block voting in ridings with a significant Sikh minority.” Because when it comes to empty virtue signalling, you can just lump all those Arabs, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Indian, Philippinos and Blacks, into one category called visible minority and call it a day. Unfortunately, #VisibleMinorityLivesMatter just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Despite this, Trudeau and his Liberals managed to squeak back in to power albeit with a minority government and having lost in the popular vote to the Conservatives with only 33.1% versus 34.4% (such is the downside of a first past the post system). On a related tangent, a former classmate who de-friended me on Facebook seemed to have a huge issue with the Conservatives winning a majority with only 40% of the vote in 2011 but doesn’t seem to have an issue when the Liberals win more seats with a lower percentage of the popular vote than the Conservatives in 2019. My former “friend” also falsely stated while pretending to be knowledgeable in both American and Canadian politics during the Trump/Hillary election that Canada hasn’t had a female Prime Minister either. It is incorrect because Kim Campbell, a Conservative, held the position in 1993 (a fact that she disregarded as “oh she doesn’t count” when I called her out on it). Come to think of it Margaret Thatcher, who was the first female British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was also Conservative. As was the second female British Prime Minister Theresa May. What is it with these misogynist conservatives putting women into power? Don’t they know that is the job of the inclusive liberals who, despite it being 2020, have not put a woman in power in the United States, Canada or Britain.
Trudeau’s liberal SJW credentials took another big blow when photos were released of him in blackface not once, not twice, but three times in the past.
But his affection for identity politics will continue to haunt him and his minority government for however long it lasts.
Unfortunately, Trudeau has painted himself into a corner now with the native blockades of railways and other public places around the country. Our Canadian Brainwashing Corporation reports, “Crippling rail blockades spark debate over policing and politics“. While the economy takes a self-made body blow, our august leader remains overseas trying to muster up support for a seat on the UN security council that 99% of Canadians could care less about. To make matters worse, in his sad attempt to raise support for this worthless UN seat (the real power, limited as it is, is held by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with a veto); Trudeau then goes on a photo op smiling, bowing and shaking hands with the Iranian Foreign Minister only a month after they shot down a Ukrainian airliner with 57 Canadians aboard. One would think that this disgusting display of friendship to a country that just murdered our citizens and hasn’t really apologized or offered compensation to the victims would be the lead story of the day. Sadly, our media’s myopic focus on identity politics is unabated. CTV News decided that between crippling illegal blockades by protesters and natives in Canada and sucking up to the theocracy in Iran, the most important news was “PM defends not publicly supporting LGBTQ rights in Senegal“.
So while Canada is in the middle of a major domestic political and economic crisis, all Trudeau has to say while jaunting abroad on a pointless trip that nobody cares about is that, “We are not a kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do in operational matters.”
Unfortunately, as the CBC reports: “Rick Parent is a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University who spent nearly 30 years as a municipal police officer. He said there’s a difference between interfering in a criminal investigation and responding to a politically-motivated demonstration. Governments represent the public but sometimes try to “pass the buck” to police in controversial situations like this, he said. ‘I think it’s an easy way out to say that the police are independent. I think those are like weasel words in the sense that we’re trying to pass the buck on to the police and hold them accountable for this, when in fact … it is a political thing,’ Parent said.”
“Christian Leuprecht, a Royal Military College professor who has written about the RCMP’s structure, said that while police must be independent when it comes to criminal investigations, government intervention in this case would not amount to political interference in an investigation. ‘The federal government does have options, contrary to what it is claiming,’ he said. ‘But it has chosen not to exercise those, likely for political reasons. Because this is, of course, the government that has staked much of its political fate on reconciliation… I think the uniforms, whether it’s federal or provincial, feel it shouldn’t be their responsibility to resolve what is ultimately a political issue.'”
On Friday, Scheer (conservative leader of the opposition) held a news conference in Ottawa and called on Trudeau to direct the national police force to “enforce the law” and end the “illegal” tactics. “Democracy and the rule of law are fundamental pillars of our country, and it’s time they are enforced,” he said. “If they are not, the Trudeau Liberal government will set a dangerous precedent that a small few can have a devastating impact on countless Canadians.”
It is a shame that Scheer lost the election despite winning the popular vote. I can only hope that Trudeau’s minority government loses a vote of non confidence soon and we can go back to the polls to get rid of this idiot and his garbage SJW agenda once and for all.