At OpinionJournal.com, Mark Steyn offers his opinion on the Conservative victory in Canada. Although Steyn isn’t explicit in his opening, I think he is referring to the prevailing view in the press immediately after the defeat of the Spanish government in March 2004.
QUEBEC–Remember the conventional wisdom of 2004? Back then, you’ll recall, it was the many members of George Bush’s “unilateral” coalition who were supposed to be in trouble, not least the three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere–the president, Tony Blair and John Howard–who would all be paying a terrible electoral price for lying their way into war in Iraq. The Democrats’ position was that Mr. Bush’s rinky-dink nickel-and-dime allies didn’t count: The president has “alienated almost everyone,” said Jimmy Carter, “and now we have just a handful of little tiny countries supposedly helping us in Iraq.” (That would be Britain, Australia, Poland, Japan . . .) Instead of those nobodies, John Kerry pledged that, under his leadership, “America will rejoin the community of nations”–by which he meant Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, the Belgian guy . . .
Two years on, Messrs. Bush, Blair, Howard and Koizumi are all re-elected, while Mr. Chirac is the lamest of lame ducks, and his ingrate citizenry has tossed out his big legacy, the European Constitution; Mr. Schroeder’s government was defeated and he’s now shilling for Russia’s state-owned Gazprom (“It’s all about Gaz!”); and the latest member of the coalition of the unwilling to hit the skids is Canada’s Liberal Party, which fell from office on Monday. . . .
It would be a stretch to argue that Mr. Chirac, Mr. Schroeder and now Paul Martin in Ottawa ran into trouble because of their anti-Americanism. Au contraire, cheap demonization of the Great Satan is almost as popular in the streets of Toronto as in the streets of Islamabad. But these days anti-Americanism is the first refuge of the scoundrel, and it’s usually a reliable indicator that you’re not up to the challenges of the modern world or of your own country. In the final two weeks of the Canadian election, Mr. Martin’s Liberals unleashed a barrage of anti-Conservative attack ads whose ferocity was matched only by their stupidity: They warned that Stephen Harper, the Conservatives’ leader, would be “George Bush’s new best friend”! They dug up damaging quotes from a shocking 1997 speech in which he’d praised America as “a light and inspiration”! Another week and they’d have had pictures from that summer in the late ’80s he spent as Dick Cheney’s pool boy.
Mr. Harper, the incoming prime minister, will not be “George Bush’s new best friend”–that’s a more competitive field than John Kerry and Jimmy Carter think. But at the very least a Harper government won’t rely on reflexive anti-Americanism as the defining element of Canadian identity. No cheery right-wingers south of the border should exaggerate what happened on Monday. It was an act of political hygiene: The Liberal Party was mired in a swamp of scandals, the most surreal of which was a racket to shore up the antiseparatist cause in Quebec by handing out millions of free Canadian flags, a project which so overburdened the domestic flag industry the project had to be outsourced to overseas companies, who at a cost of $45 each sent back a gazillion flags that can’t fly. That’s to say, they had no eyelets, no sleeve, no halyard line for your rope and toggle and whatnot. You have to lean a ladder up against the pole and nail it into position, which on a January morning at Lac St-Jean hardly seems likely to endear nationalist Quebecers to the virtues of the Canadian state. Millions of dollars were transferred to “advertising agencies” and “consultancies” run by the party’s pals and in return they came up with a quintessentially Liberal wheeze: Even if you wanted to salute it, you can’t run it up the flagpole. As a forlorn emblem of Trudeaupian nationalism, that’s hard to beat.
And yet and yet . . . in throwing the bums out, Canadian voters declined to subject them to full-scale humiliation. Even with viable alternatives for all tastes–conservative, socialist and Quebec separatist–it seems one can never underestimate the appeal of a party of floundering discredited kleptocrat incompetents led by a vindictive empty suit who fought one of the most inept campaigns in modern political history. They clung on to over 100 seats and the votes of Canada’s three biggest cities. Truly, the Liberals are one of the most amazingly resilient parties this side of Kim Jong-Il’s. . . .
[E]ven if [Stephen Harper] does nothing else, he’ll bring to an end a decade of self-defeating sneering. The ayatollahs at least flatter America as a seducer–the Great Satan–which is a more accurate and sophisticated construct than deriding her as the Great Moron.
Comments are closed.