So the die is cast and there will be 4 years of Conservative rule now that Harper has been “deeply honoured” by a “majority mandate” (his 55% of seats in parliament, thanks to a winner-take-all electoral system, is due to only 39% of the vote). In light of this, it is perhaps worth taking the time to remind ourselves of some features of Mr Harper that are even more dubious than his palling around with Chad Kroeger and his narcissistic desire to plaster the government lobby of the House of Commons with photographs of himself.

The Harper government’s ability to finesse its image is outstanding. This is some grade-A dissembling, folks. Despite the rhetoric of moderation, there can be no doubt that Harper hews to a deeply socially-conservative perspective of the world. Often, in an exemplary adherence to naked-emperor lockstep, a narrative is trotted out that either sees Harper himself as fiscally, not socially, conservative or that maintains that Harper government initiatives that go “too far” will always be hamstrung by some congenital liberalism allegedly innate to Canadians. While the latter is up for debate (I don’t buy it), the former is highly suspicious. While he may not hold forth on such convictions regularly, when happily enveloped in Sanctum Sanctorums of conservative symposia, surrounded by like-minded bedfellows, he sounds off with such nuggets as “Serious conservative parties simply cannot shy away from values questions.” I don’t mean here to overlook his economic conservatism, which also tends to be obscured beneath lip-service paid to “centrism,” especially when framed by the likes of the National Post, but rather to suggest that, where Harper is concerned, the two are intertwined. “Values questions” inform social policy and, of course, have an undeniable economic underpinning. A reconfiguration of what is understood to be a “public good” is bound to happen when policy decisions reorient what constitutes “responsibility” and attempt to shuffle said responsibility from the state to the market and the family unit or “individual” (as if the “individual” exists as a purer iteration of itself under market conditions). Are our responsibilities to our communities and the greater social fabric or are they to ourselves and our atomized familial units, floating in disaggregated so-called neighbourhoods? Public goods become understood to be private goods as collective social solidarity dissolves.

A look at some elements of Harper’s past makes his (sometimes) concealed conservatism as transparent as melting glaciers:

Decades ago, when Harper was decidedly more candid in his views, he is quoted as saying that, as of 1994, “Canada has yet to experience a conservative government.” This means that the halcyon days of Canadian conservatism were, in reality, centrist (sadly, by today’s measure, that may be true, but these comments were made in the early 90s). Speaking directly about the Clark and Mulroney governments, Harper claimed that

To me, the government was in effect suppressing conservatism because it was in power . . . True conservatives were reduced to silence, arguing behind closed doors. The federal Progressive Conservative Party was ideologically centrist and ideologically anti-conservative.

As Scott Ross notes, given that the Mulroney conservatives were responsible for privatizing over a third of Crown Corporations, signing NAFTA, and supporting the first Gulf War, one wonders what a properly “pro-conservative” government might look like. Maybe we’ll finally find out!

We here begin to see the outlies of the splintering of conservatism writ large. But without getting bogged down in what differentiates, say, paleo-conservatism from neoconservatism, we can discuss whether or not the Harper government is “merely” a proponent of neoliberal economics — that is, a doctrinaire form of liberalism that holds that the optimum condition of individual liberty is found in the free market — or whether it harbours the anti-democratic features of neoconservatism and, further, is sympathetic to what has been called “theo-conservatism.”

Neoconservatism, a difficult chimera to wrestle with, is happy to corroborate the myths of neoliberal ideology, but differs from neoliberalism most visibly in its sympathy to the Enlightenment project of remaking society on an ideal model. In this light, it can be seen as a branch of the Utopian Right and actually is diametrically opposed to early European and American conservatism, which saw government as a means of coping with human frailties and imperfections, rather than an instrument for the re-creation of society. Neoconservatism, then, can be read as the ugly marriage of laissez-faire economics with a penchant for social interventionism.

Much has been made of neoconservatism’s ties to Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, its sanction of justifications for the “big lie” (see: WMDs and the Iraq War) and its unapologetically bellicose foreign policy (the exportation of “freedom” around the world). But neoconservatism exists outside its American variant and operates on a domestic, not just external, level as well. It is perhaps easiest to conceive of neoconservatism as a strain of neoliberalism that doesn’t hold its nose at the sobriquet, “social conservatism” (although it is often not opposed to secularism).

Which brings us to The Calgary School, where, in the late 80s, Harper studied and, in concert with neoconservative faculty, formed what would become the Reform Party. Among those at the Calgary School who loomed large in the development of the Reform Party and its eventual usurpation by the Canadian Alliance, is Political Science professor, Tom Flanagan, whose most recent public appearance featured his calling for the death of Julian Assange with remarkably asinine brio, commenting that he was “feeling pretty manly today” (an aging, pasty academic exhorting violence from the comfort of a TV studio gives a pitch-perfect rendering of the term chickenhawk). (Flanagan’s outburst prompted an open letter to be written, requesting his censure, to University of Calgary President, Dr. Elizabeth Cannon, signed by 97 U of C alumni.)

Flanagan acted as the Reform Party’s Director of Policy, Strategy and Research, served as Harper’s Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager for the Alliance years, and organized and managed the Conservative campaign for the 2004 election. He and Harper have considerable history. And yet, ever since Harper attained an ascendant stronghold on the national political stage, Flanagan’s presence has been scarce.

This is likely due, to a certain extent, to the fact that Flanagan’s unapologetic U of C rhetoric doesn’t play well on the national stage. As Marci McDonald writes in her fantastic Walrus piece on the Calgary School and Flanagan:

[Flanagan] has never blanched at owning up to his most contentious beliefs: scrapping medicare in favour of personal medical savings accounts — a policy adopted by some U.S. corporations — and whittling aboriginal claims on land and self-determination down to individual property rights and municipal self-government.

In any case, it is likely that the two men would draw lines in the sand on certain issues. Where Flanagan appears to be staunchly secular, snippets of speeches given by Harper to select audiences suggest that he could be pushed out of the neocon fold and into the theo-con coven. Donald Gutstein, in an article which examines the Harper government’s similarities to Bush the II’s neocon administration, writes of a speech given by Harper to Civitas, a group of Canadian neoconservatives and libertarians, which keeps a low public profile (they have no website):

The state should take a more activist role in policing social norms and values, Harper told the assembled conservatives. To achieve this goal, social and economic conservatives must reunite as they have in the U.S., where evangelical Christians and business rule in an unholy alliance. Red Tories must be jettisoned from the party, he said, and alliances forged with ethnic and immigrant communities who currently vote Liberal but espouse traditional family values. This was the successful strategy counselled by the neocons under Ronald Reagan to pull conservative Democrats into the Republican tent.

Given the “majority mandate” apparently given to the Conservatives yesterday by an increase, from last election, of 2% of the vote (which works out to 24 more seats), it is worth scrutinizing Harper’s public statements from before 2004 and at clandestine meetings to see if his scrubbed, “centre-right” agenda squares with the seeming candour of his previous, or secret, selves. He is recorded as saying, at the 1997 meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank, that “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.” This has since been shrugged off as a joke. Harper likes to present himself as level-headed, reasonable, even keeled. Surely this man can be reasoned with!, says his demeanour. But perhaps this “joke,” as with statements made decades ago and the political commitments of his academic cohort at the U of C, attest to a much more strident conservatism than is often portrayed. And, if it were more transparent, perhaps those “Blue” Liberals in Toronto wouldn’t have jumped ship last night. Neoliberalism, concealed beneath “sensible” invocations of fiscal responsibility, is damaging enough. Twinned with a desire to remake social conditions under a supercilious morality, it becomes far more sinister. In the following excerpt, from an article written five years ago — “The Harper Government: Towards A New Social Order?” — Professor Ann Porter succinctly sums up the dangers posed by Harper’s conservative agenda. It’s galling that this agenda is now in the hands of a majority government. All the more so if this majority is largely, or even partially, the result of Harper’s managed persona. <Canadians to the world: “fool me once, shame on — [pause] — shame on you. Fool me — [pause] — You can’t get fooled again.”>

. . . The Conservative agenda involves proposals for a new type of social and economic order, one that involves not only the continuation — and probably a more aggressive continuation — of a neo-liberal agenda of privatization and market-based solutions, but also the promotion of certain ways of forming the social fabric. This variant of neo-liberalism isn’t just about increasing reliance on the market; it is also about intrusion into private areas of family and household life, foreclosing possibilities and (at least for a sizeable number in the Conservative bloc) imposing a narrow, religious-based morality. The consequences of this range of possible changes for the provision of social services, the downloading onto unpaid labour in the home, for notions of community and solidarity, for the deepening of inequalities and increased vulnerability of individuals and communities, for the ability for people to lead independent and engaged lives, and to make their own choices in critical areas of their lives, are profound.
The Conservatives have advanced a discourse of “choice”, most prominently in the area of childcare. Yet many of their policies act in precisely the opposite way- to limit choice and foreclose possibilities. Looking at economic, labour market and social security provisions taken as a whole, it is difficult to see how anything other than more of the low wage, precarious type of work will flourish under a Harper government and that this will be accompanied by the continued erosion of the public and broader public sector (hospitals, schools etc) that both provided more stable jobs and the type of services needed for families, households and individuals to continue to function. The result is likely to be an acceleration of the trend to a social and economic framework defined by a combination of more precarious work, and a reduction in state provided income security, and where the choices and survival strategies available to people will be very narrow indeed.