The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part Two

Re-Examining Canadian Conservatism in Practice

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(If you haven’t read the first part of this essay series, here you go: The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part One . Also, listen to Scott Miller discuss conservatism on the View Points podcast).

By Scott Miller (Historian)

Section 2: What is a socially conservative Canadian in theory and why should a Canadian conservative be socially conservative? Whether they choose to uphold this duty or not, and many Canadian conservatives do not, it has been incumbent upon the conservatives of the anglosphere to oppose and repel the influence of anti-liberal idea systems, foremost among them being the socialist system. The ideology of socialism is grounded in the thinking of that brilliant buffoon who took it upon himself to be the antithesis of John Locke, namely, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); accordingly, in setting himself to the task of solving the problem of inequality, he theorized that man in his ideal primal state (before civilization) lived happily and free as a solitary animal with no language and no family. Naturally, thought Rousseau, children left the mother as soon as they could walk. The evil roots of inequality set in when man started living in families, speaking to each other, working together and thus acquiring material surpluses — ergo, material wealth and families are the evil precursor to inequality itself (which, obviously, is the ultimate consideration in everything!). This bit of amateur anthropology, supremely stupid on the face of it and also at every level as you go down, is what started the ball rolling to the massive left-of-liberal political force that permeates much of Western politics today and is determinedly re-working the fabric of free-world institutions in order to oppose (perceived) evils of material wealth and the family. Yes, feminism takes its cues from this idea system as well (women’s movements could base themselves solely on unobjectionable liberal rights arguments but generally do not). 

The terminology of modern politics is a major stumbling block to the correct understanding of the ideas at play: for example, in Canada, the fact that one party is called the “Liberal” party may imply that it is this party which is particularly involved with liberal values, and the opposing party not — the preceding paragraphs have tried to explicate the reason why that is a serious conceptual error. Even more concerning, somewhere along the line in the struggle between competing idea systems, the word “liberal” itself has become confused and obfuscated in the usage of many Westerners; as Scruton observes, the word liberal “is now used in two conflicting ways, on the one hand to denote the politics and philosophy of individual liberty, as advocated by Locke and his followers, on the other hand to denote the ‘progressive’ ideas and policies that have emerged in the wake of modern socialism. In effect, the two ideas belong to two contrasting narratives of emancipation. Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power” (Scruton 2018, 17). 

There is an additional understanding that is of high importance in conceptualizing the social conservative today: that understanding is that it is not just the word “liberal” that has become distorted, but the very politics of the Liberal party have developed into something other than liberal which, of course, necessitated the creation of the term “classical liberal” in order to denote what the value system of modern left parties once were (but are no longer). So, what are they now? According to Scruton, it was originally the left confrontation with, or exposure to, the socialist alternative position that precipitated this change. He states, “in the course of the confrontation with socialism and its egalitarian supporters in America, the word “liberal” changed meaning... in American popular usage today, “liberalism” means left-liberalism... in this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the under-privileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the nineteenth century socialists... in the battle with socialism, the classical liberal and the conservative now stand side by side” (Scruton 2018, 72; cf. Farney 2012, 13). The term “left-liberalism,” then, refers to a transformed liberalism that is no longer concerned with liberal individualism and has come to frame society in the socialist mode according to group interests — left-liberalism is really left of liberalism (cf. Kaufmann: https://thehub.ca/2024/05/22/eric-kaufmann-left-liberal-extremism-has-turned-canada-into-an-anomaly/).

Now that we have established that a Canadian conservative is someone who should be ideologically liberal, while a Canadian liberal, unless avowedly a classical liberal, is probably someone who wittingly or unwittingly subscribes to various positions underpinned by socialism, the social conservative emerges as that person who takes it upon themselves to oppose the emerging leftward tilt of social policy making. In turn, the social conservative may recognize that this utopian whimsy, this affront to the family and to human nature, is part of that illiberal idea system which took shape in the writings of Rousseau, Fourier, Comte, Marx, Engles, and many others, which simultaneously urges the replacement of liberty as the ultimate aim of society with equality (with equity, when the term emerges). The axioms of the far left have been described as constituting an “unconstrained vision” of social order, one that, along with radical Rousseauean thinker William Godwin, argues against the interests of the individual, asserting instead that the paramount consideration in everything is not the rights of the individual but rather the interests of the collective — only in the future state ordered in this way (they suppose and argue) will the utopian aims of human perfectibility be achievable (Sowell 1987, 19).

In a sense, one might say that the term “social conservative” wouldn’t exist without socialism, although the former came to exist in order to oppose the latter. How does one substantiate the claim that social conservativism came to exist specifically in order to form an opposition to socialism? As Farney’s study makes clear, social conservatism emerged “as a distinctive part of conservatism in the 1960s, when feminists and the gay liberation movement made the personal political.” It came in the context of the sexual revolution of the 60s, when some conservatives (in contradistinction to positions of the Progressive Conservative party generally, see below) determined that the state should respond to, and be involved with, their concerns vis-à-vis abortion, homosexuality, pornography, euthanasia, and so forth (Farney 2012, 22). 

To say that the sexual revolution had a socialist force behind it, as did much which provoked social conservatism, is no idle speculation: the sexual revolution wasn’t just some value-neutral organic phenomenon that spontaneously happened, it was spurred on (at least in part) by socialist and Marxist theorists who helped to inspire and energize it. One particularly insidious and influential body of work was in vogue on campuses at the time, that of Frankfurt school Marxist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1971), who theorized that the state of abundance in capitalist societies meant that the time for sexual liberation and the supremacy of the “pleasure principle” was at hand, and this was to be the basis of a “comprehensive emancipation” (Bottomore 2002, 41; Kolakowski 1978 v. 3, 397; Holmes 2017, 253). What Marcuse had to say was, in a sense, nothing new: the theme of free love was an operationalization of Rousseau’s claim that the family is the ultimate source of social inequality and, consequently, free love had been explored in the cult compounds of the socialists of the early 1800s (Manuel and Manuel 1979, 793). In these cult compounds, which operated according to socialist founding father Charles Fourier’s social vision and were called “phalansteries,” adults exchanged sexual partners at random, and the pool of resulting children chose their parents according to whim — thus, the hated nuclear family was abolished in practice not just in theory. At least, on a small scale and for a short time. A good social conservative may support the women’s movement insofar as that movement has based itself on the liberal ideology of rights for all (as it sometimes has). On the other hand, a social conservative should firmly oppose the feminist movement, which took its name and its ideology from Charles Fourier (the same father of socialism who brought the world phalansteries — Goldstein 1982, 98). Once one has established this much, it will hardly come as a surprise that divorce and abortion were first legalized in a nation with a social policy shaped by Marxist ideation, namely, the Soviet Union (McDuffie 2011, 29). My argument is that none of these things should come to pass should they proceed from the laughable Rousseauean principle that the family is the source of inequality and the ideal state of life is man living mute and in solitude.

The purpose of this section has been to bring the clash of social visions into perspective, and to emphasize that the contest between liberalism and socialism, the two major ideologies that epitomize modern politics, is more than incidental here — it is not incidental that social conservativism based itself on the defense of religion and the family upon emerging in the 1960s, it is because socialism is antagonistic to religion and the family and has helped to degrade those things by promoting the utopian vision in popular culture and in policy making. In Canada, this is made possible not only through the influence of the NDP party, but also through the onset of left-liberalism (defined above as the shift of a liberal party to a policy platform falling somewhere between liberalism and socialism). I would argue that, although social conservatives have typically leaned on the defense of religion as a basis for their position, when the problem is framed in the manner just discussed, there are many intellectually and morally compelling positions that could be called upon to protect liberty from social revolutions that propagate themselves on the basis of patently false and even ludicrous claims about human nature. It is doubtful that arguments based on the defense of religion will shift any of the prevailing political winds of the current day.  

 As will be made clear below, although there seems to be every reason for the federal and provincial conservative parties of Canada to have incorporated social conservativism into their party platforms as a defense of liberty and a countering of left-liberalism, overwhelmingly, they have not.

End of Part 2. Please return next week for Part 3: Why conservative politicians in Canada -e.g. Patrick Brown and Doug Ford- are weak and fail as social conservatives.

Bibliography:

Bottomore, Tom. 2002. The Frankfurt School and its Critics. Routledge, London.

Brown, Patrick. 2018. Take Down: The Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown. Optimum Publishing International: Montreal and Toronto.

Farney, James. 2009. “The Personal Is Not Political: The Progressive Conservative Response to Social Issues.” American Review of Canadian Studies 39:3: 242-252.

Farney, James. 2012. Social Conservatives and Party Politics in Canada and the United States. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, Buffalo, London.

Graham, Peter. 2019. Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Goldstein, Leslie. 1982. Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The St.-Simonians and Fourier. Journal of the History of Ideas 43/1: 91-108.

Holmes, Kim. 2017. The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. New York, London: Encounter Books.

Kolakowski, Leszek. 1978. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (Vol. 3). Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

Manuel, Frank and Frietzie Manuel. 1979. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press.

McDuffie, Eric. 2011. Sojourning for freedom Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Duke University Press: Durham and London.

Preece, Rod. 1977. “The Myth of the Red Tory.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1/2: 1–28.

Scruton, Roger. 2018. Conservativism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. All Print Books: New York.

Sowell, Thomas. 1987. A Conflict of Visions. Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Basic Books.

Woodfinden, Ben. 2022. “A Tory Impulse and Anti-Laurentian Ideas Drive Canadian Conservatism”, thehub.ca, accessed June 28, 2002: https://thehub.ca/2022/08/17/ben-woodfinden-a-tory-impulse-and-anti-laurentian-ideas-drive-canadian-conservatism/

Woodfinden, Ben and Sean Speer. 2013. “Canadian Conservativism and National Developmentalism: Sir John A. MacDonald’s Hamiltonian Persuasion.” In Canadian Conservative Political Thought, edited by Lee Trepanier and Richard Avramenko, 85–100. Routledge, New York and London.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

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