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So Glenn Beck, beloved FOX news pundit guy, gave his big speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this weekend. It was a speech that he himself had previously characterized as being near-divine in motivation; a prophetical call for America to absolve herself of the sins of liberalism and big government, and repent herself into the Christo-republic of Glenn’s dreams.
After months and months of such up-selling, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the actual speech ended up falling a little flat. In response to critics, who objected to the timing and locale of his big event (which matched that of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, 47 years ago), Beck ended up removing most of the political content from his address, and forbid his audience from being overtly partisan signs to the gathering. The speech that eventually was heard was largely about morality and spirituality in the abstract, with a heavy focus on the military, but bereft of any particularly interesting right-wing sound bytes.
In any case, I think the whole show was typical Beck. I don’t regard the man as one with anything of much use to say, or any legitimate movement to lead. I think he has the sort of self-righteous, busy-body energy that accurately reflects what he is: a latecomer to politics with a desperate desire for relevance.
Beck reminds me a lot of the sort of people I would meet in my first-year political science classes. He’s read a few books about ideas that he never previously bothered to think about, and suddenly becomes convinced that he possesses a blazing insight that makes him one of the great intellectuals of our time. I remember, for instance, once watching him march around on his show waving a copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom;” an incredibly well-known book within any sort of self-respecting conservative circle. But Beck was so supremely proud of himself for discovering von Hayek’s work, and could not wait to implore his audience to read this awesome book, too, so they too could be as smart as he.
It’s the patronizing attitude and ignorant pomposity that are Beck’s worst qualities, and ones he doesn’t face nearly enough flack for, from either right or left. He can be as far-right and religious he wants, for all I care, but at least drop the pretense that you’re doing anything new. There have been a lot of much wiser Glenn Becks before him, and I don’t doubt there will be many to follow.
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Americans, to the extent they are ever interested in Canadian politics, are often quite intrigued by the issue of Quebec separatism. This contrasts quite greatly with Canadians, who are, by and large, thoroughly sick of the topic. We’re so sick, in fact, that we’ve pretty much lost our ability to discuss or analyze the phenomenon in any sort of rational or calm way, and instead continually lapse into tired chauvinistic tropes.
Today, most English-Canadians can only muster up the energy to react to French-Canadian separatism in one of two ways:
In late 2009, a guy named Barry Cooper released a cynical little book about modern Canada entitled It’s the Regime, Stupid. Since I’m quite a fan of such books, which Canada does not produce very often, I wrote a review shortly after purchasing it. But then I experienced some computer problems, and the document was lost forever — or so I thought. The other day I discovered a rough draft I had saved elsewhere, which I was then able to re-edit into something passable. Hopefully you’ll still find it interesting, though the book itself is now hardly a “new release.”
It’s the Regime, Stupid by Barry Cooper (2009)
No one can claim false advertising. It’s the Regime, Stupid is exactly as unclear and inaccessible as the title suggests. Regime? Meaning what, exactly? There is actually an asterisk beside the word on the cover, leading to a footnote on the back, helpfully telling the reader that “regime,” in the author’s intended sense, refers to the “settled way of doing things.” It’s a very awkward and contrived title for a book with a rather simple thesis; namely that Canada’s government is a hopelessly corrupt, ineffective, and stagnant mess, with decades of unsupervised bureaucratic growth and cloistered, parochial leftist groupthink to blame.
In the old days, editorial cartoons were controversial because they expressed contentious political opinions. These days, they’re controversial just for existing.
A surprisingly large amount of people possess some deep-seated need to tell the world that they hate editorial cartoons. For some folks, it’s almost as intense as their passion to tell the world they hate Family Circus, or that The Simpsons “isn’t funny anymore.”
Cracked.com published a scathing rant yesterday under the headline “Political Cartoons: The Lowest Form of Communication,” authored by someone named “Christina H.” A number of readers have asked me to respond to her essay, so I’ll do my best. It’s a bit of a challenge, because, in all honesty, there is not a great deal of substance to respond to. Christina’s piece is interesting mostly as an example of the sort of ritualistic hate frequently directed against the totemic demon of “political cartooning,” the Art Form We Can All Agree Sucks. Read the rest of this entry »
The only thing more annoying than a sore winner is an ignorant one. In the last couple of decades, virtually all the leading voices of right-wing opinion in Canada have steadily become more restrained and moderate, which is to say, steadily more libertarian, yet the libertarians themselves remain in hostile denial of this victory.
My pals at the Western Standard, one of Canada’s leading libertarian webzones, have been having a lot of “whither libertarianism?” type discussions lately, hashing back and forth as to whether or not their preferred ideology is compatible with Canada’s conservative movement, and if not, how to ensure libertarian voices do not go unheard in the national discourse.
The whole issue rings fairly hollow, and has the taint of a manufactured crisis. Libertarians in Canada are actually doing much, much better than they themselves are willing to admit, and, as an intellectual movement, have in fact largely eclipsed all other forms of right-wing thought in this country. A particularly revealing moment can be found in a recent CBC interview on the matter; intending to showcase a debate between a traditional conservative and a libertarian, the host is startled to find out that her “conservative” guest is actually just another libertarian. Oops.
The rise of a homogeneous Canadian media and political class, who, by background and education, are fundamentally disinterested in social/cultural issues but obsessed with financial and legal ones, has in large part displaced any truly “conservative” voices from the contemporary partisan debate in this country. Marci MacDonald’s wild conspiracies notwithstanding, there is no organized “religious right” in Canada, nor is there any identifiable network of John Birch/Pat Buchanan-style traditionalists. Though Canada did, at one time, have vibrant paleoconservative organizations and Anglo-rights groups, notably the grassroots Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform and the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada, they have long since withered on the vine; shunned and denounced, if acknowledged at all. Even identifiably “Tory” outfits promoting a robustly class-conscious, hierarchical vision of Canada are now few and far between.
Libertarians have almost single-handily filled this ideological vacuum. Indeed, if we define “libertarian” as one who favors personal liberty, free-markets, and individual choice at the expense of government coercion, state planning, and arbitrary moral codes, then practically every single institution and personality forming Canada’s mainstream “right wing” establishment is libertarian in some form. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a while since I’ve made something new for the Filibuster charts section, so here goes:
I made a chart chronicling the presidents of the United States who came before George Washington. If the entire premise sounds like a goofy bit of half-baked, deceptive trivia of dubious veracity… well, it sort of is. Read on with The Presidents of the United States before George Washington.
Bryan Lee O'Malley
If there is to be a comic book tasked with the awesome responsibility of summarizing life as a directionless 20-something in 21st century North America, we could probably do worse than Scott Pilgrim. But we could probably do better, too.
The six-volume graphic novel series, authored by Ontario-born Bryan Lee O’Malley, released its final chapter this week, concluding its half-decade storyline just in time for the release of the movie adaptation next month. Ever since volume one debuted way back in 2004, the Pilgrim books have held a certain treasured spot in the heart of the collective video game/comics/anime/Internet subculture, and made O’Malley a darling of the professional geek circuit. Indeed, if the presently-ongoing San Diego Comic-Con is any indication, he seems to have now officially entered pop culture sheik status, as fans parade before him dressed as his iconic, manga-inspired characters.
Yet beyond the praise of his art or writing comes more substantial acclaim; O’Malley is frequently described as having written the definitive narrative of echo-boomer existence, successfully capturing the “energy of a generation” in a heroic “chronicle of our time,” to cite but two of his series’ breathless back cover blurbs. Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever I write an article criticizing the parliamentary style of government, I’m surprised at how many American readers rush in to defend the system. I think it really highlights the under-acknowledged American propensity to glamorize the politics of other countries as somehow more calm or rational than their own. Despite their commonly caricatured portrayal as swaggering US supremacists, I find many Americans actually possess a very naive affinity for foreign institutions simply on the basis that they’re not American. It’s a bias that plagues conservatives as well as liberals.
Dick Morris, the former Clinton adviser-cum-conservative talking-head, offers a good example of this kind of thing in a recent article lamenting the decline of the British parliamentary system under Prime Minister Cameron’s coalition government. “The changes that the parties have agreed to will transform the British government from a decisive decision-making machine into a morass of compromise, half-measures, and deadlock,” he writes. “Gridlock will be exported across the ocean to the UK.” Read the rest of this entry »
The great dilemma of modern Canadian conservatism has been its struggle to successfully establish some patriotic narrative of national pride and purpose. Since at least the 1960s, the dominant strain of Canadian nationalism has been identifiably leftist in some form or another
, whereby patriotism is generally defined as support for the Liberal Party and its various agendas of socialized medicine, multiculturalism, and cultural subsidies. Conservatives, who tend to be critical of such things, are now saddled with the uphill battle of trying to culturally reorient a country that has been dominated by the ideology of the other side for so very long.
The Canadian Century is an interesting cultural artifact in this regard, as it represents an attempt to link the rising popularity of conservative fiscal principles with a classically Canadian appeal to anti-American chauvinism. In doing so, it presents a new, fairly modest conservative thesis of Canadian nationalism in which the country’s national purpose is defined as simply being more fiscally conservative than the United States — a goal we are said to be currently achieving. It’s a bold and challenging argument, and will likely be very attractive to many Canadian fiscal conservatives who desire a sense of patriotic identity, yet remain profoundly disillusioned with the government-directed nationalism of the Liberal Party, and find themselves increasingly nonplussed by the agenda of Obama’s America.
Though the idea that Canada’s national identity can be simplified into such a narrow economic goal is somewhat naive and unsophisticated, The Canadian Century is nevertheless an unusually sobering look at the political realities of North America from a perspective we rarely hear. As a book on the fiscal state of the continent, and the challenges that await in the new decade, it may prove enormously prescient. Read the rest of this entry »
Fun fact: My cartoons are now being run on MSNBC’s very excellent political cartoon archive, run by the great American cartoonist Daryl Cagle. If you have any interest in political cartoons whatsoever, I’m sure you’ve already visited the site many times before, but if not, check it out! It’s kind of subdivided into several different sections, so here are the key links:
- “Best cartoons of the day,” a couple-times-a-week updating roster of the work of America’s best editorial cartoonists,
- the cartoon index, where you can check out cartoons organized by theme,
- Cagle’s blog, which is where he introduces new cartoonists (like me!) posts interviews, and other cool stuff,
