A proposal for a different kind of Canadian coalition
The time has come for some creative ungoverning
Neil Reynolds
Exactly 50 years ago, in his review of Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, neoconservative writer Irving Kristol recalled that Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were both Whigs. For the modern mind, this makes no sense. Burke was famously a conservative and Smith famously a liberal.
“In modern textbooks of political theory,” Mr. Kristol said, Burke and Smith “are segregated from one another: the romantic exponent of tradition and authority as against the individualist liberal who believed in laissez-faire.” But this separation, he said, was anachronistic. Burke never called himself a conservative. Smith never mentioned laissez-faire. In their own time, the two philosophers were united in the unique synthesis of conservative and radical principles that made the Whigs a dominant political force in Britain for 200 years.
The first of the Whig principles, Kristol noted, was the affirmation that liberty was the most precious of political goods, a belief that separated Whigs from reactionary conservatives (who championed the Crown) as effectively as it separated them from socialists (who championed equality). The second was the conviction that civilization was the result “of human action but not of human design,” a profound conservative and revolutionary insight that effectively limits government intrusion into people’s lives.
Mr. Kristol’s observations were highly relevant to Dr. Hayek, who described himself in his manifesto as an “unrepentant Old Whig.” For his part, Mr. Kristol called Dr. Hayek “the last of the Whigs.” But this was decidedly premature. When Margaret Thatcher assumed the leadership of the British Conservative Party in 1975, a year after Dr. Hayek won his Nobel Prize, she took a copy of his book to a policy meeting of MPs, slammed it down on a table and declared: “This is what we believe.” Whigs, indeed, still abound. But they are now separated from other Whigs by allegiance – based upon a 20th century separation of the principles that once united them – to political parties with more malleable beliefs.
From this perspective, it’s interesting that “Whiggism” has been defined as “liberal-conservatism” – for the self-evident reason that Whiggism disappeared when it split into liberal parties and conservative parties. (Like “Tory,” meaning outlaw in Irish-Gaelic, “Whig,” meaning cattle thief in Scots-Gaelic, is an explicitly pejorative term.)
But the question now arises: With Britain’s Conservative-Liberal coalition, have Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg restored Whiggism to high office? It’s too early to tell – though it is significant that the leaders signed off on a commitment to reduce the size of Britain’s government in the next five years.
But the restoration of the Whigs in Britain, if such it be, suggests that the proponents of a Canadian coalition are getting it all wrong. You do not get a restoration of the Whig coalition by uniting liberals and socialists. You get an enhanced socialist party. The correct strategic Canadian coalition would copy the British coalition: a union of Conservatives and Liberals. The result would give Whigs a commanding position in the country – with every prospect of forming a majority government with the support of 60 per cent or more of Canadian voters.
An alliance of Whigs would exploit the electoral dynamic espoused by Mr. Clegg: It’s better to join the No. 1 party with the No. 2 party (“the winners”) than to join the No. 2 party with the No. 3 or No. 4 party (“the losers.”) Such a Conservative-Liberal coalition would serve Canada well, for a number of years at least. The trick would be (as in Britain) to devise a pact that sets aside all the minor issues that divide the two parties.
Opposition parties, in conventional practice, are obliged to oppose everything. The trick would be to specify a few major issues on which they would work together. These issues, under the circumstances, would be economic: the balancing of the budget, the paying down of debt, the strategic withering of the state.
Could Canada’s Liberals and Conservatives, on due reflection, restore the ancient Whig alliance? Perhaps not. But the moment is right for government with a certain sense of humility. In the name of doing good, governments have accomplished much wrong; The time has come for some creative ungoverning.
Dr. Hayek never promised utopian results from Whiggery. He conceded that, in fact, no political party ever knows the consequences of the programs and policies that it enthusiastically champions. No one knows, he said, what will be – or what might otherwise have been. “The main merit [in Whig principles]” he said, “is that you don’t have to depend on finding good men.” As Lord Acton said, it isn’t that any particular party is unfit to govern – “rather it’s that every party is unfit to govern.” Whigs disperse power among more people. And that’s democracy at its best.
Canada never completely lost its historic connection to Whig principles – honourably preserved to this day in the historic Kingston newspaper called the Whig-Standard.
