"Is morality a conservative issue? Not in Canada; How the American and Canadian right wings took diverging ideological paths" by James Farney | Globe Correspondent, January 27, 2013
Last year Stephen Woodworth, a member of Canada’s Parliament, introduced a motion to create an expert panel that would reexamine how Canada’s criminal laws define the beginning of human life. The point was clear: He wanted to open a debate over abortion, currently handled as a purely medical matter in Canada, and consider whether it might be redefined as a crime.
Woodworth is a member of the Conservative Party, and his motion drew a strong response. The four liberal opposition parties, not surprisingly, immediately condemned it. But so did many of his fellow Conservatives. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an evangelical Christian and arguably the most right-wing Canadian leader in history, declared the motion “unfortunate” and made clear he would be voting against it. The Conservative responsible for maintaining government discipline in the House, Gordon O’Connor, went further, declaring, “This should never happen in a civilized society....I cannot understand why those who are adamantly opposed to abortion want to impose their beliefs on others by way of the Criminal Code.”
I must admit I've evolved on the issue; however, where I stand on the issue now may seem contradictory even though I am staying true to my beliefs. Although generally opposed I must accept the will of my fellow citizens, and would expect the same if the reverse held.
I know it sounds barbaric in the realm of the pro-abortion, agenda-pushing paper's range of debate, but I concluded long ago that this is a pro-life, not pro-death, blog. I mean, when you think about it, wars waged in the name of the EUSraeli Empire have aborted millions of lives.
Much as Americans may joke about it as an outpost of Europe to our north, Canada is the nation most similar to the United States in the world—not just culturally, but in its politics. Its Conservative Party, in power since 2006, has been steadfastly pro-Israel, ended diplomatic relations with Iran, rolled back gun control, reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy, minimized environmental regulations to encourage resource development, and offloaded responsibilities for the welfare state to the provinces. A mainstream Republican who ended up north of the border would find Canadian conservatism, in many respects, a perfectly congenial political home.
I'm surprised Canada has fallen so far so fast.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: A Bad Idea For Canada
But not in every respect....
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In the United Statestoday, it seems automatic that one party would be on one side of a whole menu of social issues—abortion, gay rights, sex education in schools, divorce, and the role of women—and that these would sit cheek-by-jowl with the other bedrock conservative issues of military strength and pro-business economic policies. The Republican Party has embraced its social agenda so fervently over the past several decades that it’s easy to forget a point that some of the party’s more libertarian members make: that a political interest in people’s morality doesn’t fit particularly well with a belief in limiting the power and reach of the government.
It's easy to forget a lot of things that wing of the party says (hi).
Canadian conservatives tend to agree with American conservatives when it comes to economic and foreign policy, so why the difference on social issues? While many factors make politics in the two countries different, a crucial one is the historical evolution of conservative ideology—particularly in the late 1960s, when social issues like abortion, homosexuality, the public display of religion, no-fault divorce, and the role of women became contentious in both countries.
Initially, it was policy makers, judges, and political elites who struggled with how to adapt laws and public policy to quickly changing social mores. But, by the early 1970s, these were becoming political issues: Both progressives and conservatives were mobilizing powerful grass-roots organizations that made social issues the centerpieces of their political appeal....
Both Canada and America had to sort out these issues in their politics and, as they did, conservatives in the two nations arrived at markedly different perspectives.
At the start of the 1960s, the Republican Party in America was a coalition between liberals like Nelson Rockefeller—who promoted a growing welfare state, generally supported the UN, and were friendly to the “Northeastern consensus”—and libertarian or free-market conservatives like Barry Goldwater, who opposed the growth of the welfare state, sought a militantly anticommunist foreign policy, and mostly hailed from the West and Midwest.
They chose Goldwater as the rep of.... oooooooh.
Goldwater’s wing of the party grew quickly, and as it did a group of conservative intellectuals was waging a self-conscious campaign to redefine American conservatism, as an ideology and a movement.
The neo-cons of the day?
They saw it as a fusion between libertarians, who emphasized freedom, and traditionalists—often religiously motivated—who emphasized order and public virtue. Chief among these thinkers and writers was the late William F. Buckley, who embraced both small government and a religiously motivated moral traditionalism. He and his cohort were so successful in engineering this fusion that even libertarian conservatives like Goldwater made the restoration of public virtue a part of their political appeals. The success of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” in 1968-72 gave the Republicans an influential new mass of morally conservative voters, and Republican conservatives had all but driven liberals out of the party by the time of Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.
As issues like gay rights, divorce, and abortion emerged, conservatives found, in their concern with public virtue, political reason to oppose change.
It's not that I think such issues are unimportant, but they are also divisive issues when so many of us agree on so many things. Stop the wars, end the bank lootings, and universal health coverage for all -- to list three for starters.
Of course, those gobbling up the goodies control the monied information outlets and they never cease to pit their subjects and serfs at each others throats via race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or whatever else is useful so that we will fight amongst ourselves and ignore the structural and institutional problems that they have devised and which they control.
Then, as the religious right mobilized in the late 1970s, it was able to identify its activism as “conservative” on these grounds, and supported traditional-value Republicans. Once established as a legitimate part of American conservatism, social conservatives benefited from the ability of religious groups like the Moral Majority to mobilize voters and from the openness of American institutions to influence by interest groups. But it was the ideological legitimacy that came first.
Now it is corporate money that controls the domestic economy and the Lobby's money that directs AmeriKan foreign policy.
The Canadian situation was different. In 1960s Canada, conservative ideology was not a movement in search of a party but the property of a single party, the Progressive Conservatives. At its core were libertarian pro-business conservatives. But to a much more significant degree than in the United States, this core was modified by the influence of another ideological tendency—Toryism. Tories saw themselves as heirs of the Loyalists who had fled the American Revolution two centuries earlier. They were fueled by an almost aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige, a sense that community came first and that a strong, interventionist state was necessary to preserve it. They also believed firmly that public virtue was not a matter for politics, or legislation: That was the responsibility of churches (Canada was still a markedly religious society in the 1960s) and society’s elites. They drew on statements by British Conservatives that it was important to differentiate between sins and crimes....
Yeah, that has sure faded into the dustbin of history. Now they are all greedy money addicts.
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Using Toryism as a prism to understand the difference between Canada and the United States goes a long way in explaining what differentiates the political pasts of the two countries.
My Zionist-controlled agent of war propaganda is a prison, 'er, prism of another kind.
Canadian elites and a substantial part of the population long sought to maintain an ordered and hierarchical society on the British model. Canada’s 19th-century frontier was a highly regulated one compared to America’s; its manufacturing sector protected by heavy government involvement; its society (until after the Second World War) significantly more socially stratified. Canada has always been more open to state intervention in the market, something at least partly attributable to Tory influence, and citizens are significantly more deferential to authority. Though Tory power was already fading by the 1960s, the way in which Canadian conservatism approached social issues means the Tories’ fingerprints still show on Canadian politics.
In understanding the future of the Republican Party, it is important to remember that the libertarian-religious right alliance that now defines the Republican party and American conservatism is not automatic: It was largely determined by conservatives sorting out how to respond to a new set of issues in the 1960s. Under a different set of pressures and influences—such as Canadian conservatives experienced—the interaction between ideology and party politics can fracture in different directions, creating a future that neither party has yet imagined.
Where is this alliance they are talking about, because unless the vote was rigged(!), the current banner carrier (Ron Paul) did poorly in the Republican primaries (or so we are told)?
Today, on issues such as gun control, immigration, trade policy, and fiscal policy, Republicans seem to be approaching a necessary reexamination of parts of their platform. The Canadian comparison suggests that conservatism has the intellectual resources to take Republicans in unanticipated directions, and yet also that the party’s history may make it surprisingly difficult to break with the past.
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What you notice in reading the whole piece is outside abortion the health care system in Canada is ignored. If conservatives in Canada tried to roll back the universal coverage of the single-payer Canadian system in favor of the private U.S. system (or even Obamacare, for that matter), they would have a revolt in the streets and be out of power in about five seconds. It's alluded to in the article, but never acknowledged outright as a difference between conservatives (whatever that label means) in both countries.
And while on the topic of abortion on a Sunday (isn't that just a bit sacrilegious?):
‘‘This is not a black-and-white issue’’
Actually, it is, but that's not the narrative of history, so....
"After 40 years, deep divide is legacy of abortion ruling; Few see chance to find common ground on issue" by David Crary | Associated Press, January 20, 2013
NEW YORK — By today’s politically polarized standards, the Supreme Court’s momentous Roe v. Wade ruling was a landslide. By a 7-to-2 vote on Jan. 22, 1973, the justices established a nationwide right to abortion.
Forty years and about 55 million abortions later, however, the ruling’s legacy is the opposite of consensus. Abortion ranks as one of the most divisive issues in the country, and is likely to remain so as rival camps see little space for common ground.
Unfolding events in two states illustrate the divide.
In New York, a bastion of liberal abortion laws, Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged in his Jan. 9 State of the State speech to entrench those rights even more firmly. In Mississippi, where many antiabortion laws have been enacted in recent years, the lone remaining abortion clinic is on the verge of closure because nearby hospitals won’t grant obligatory admitting privileges to its doctors.
‘‘Unlike a lot of other issues in the culture wars, this is the one in which both sides really regard themselves as civil rights activists, trying to expand the frontiers of human freedom,’’ said Jon Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.
On another hot-button social issue — same-sex marriage — there’s been a strong trend of increasing support in recent years, encompassing nearly all major demographic categories.
I'm thinking of aborting my attention to these matters because they are so prominent in my agenda-pusher.
There’s been no such shift, in either direction, on abortion.
For example, a new Pew Research Center poll finds many conflicted respondents tell pollsters they support the right to legal abortion while considering it morally wrong.
Backers of legal access to abortion were relieved that President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in November.
The Supreme Court justices are believed to divide 5 to 4 in favor of a broad right to abortion. Romney, if elected, might have been able to appoint conservative justices who could help overturn Roe v. Wade, but Obama’s victory makes that unlikely at least for the next four years.
Abortion-rights groups also were heartened by a backlash to certain antiabortion initiatives and rhetoric.
In Missouri and Illinois, Republican candidates for the US Senate lost races that their party initially expected to win after making widely criticized comments regarding abortion rights for rape victims who become pregnant. In Virginia, protests prompted GOP politicians to scale back a bill that would have required women seeking abortions to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.
‘‘All these things got Americans angry and got them to realize just how extreme the other side is,’’ said Jennifer Dalven, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
However, antiabortion leaders see cause for optimism.
In the past two years, after Republican election gains in 2010, GOP-dominated state legislatures have passed more than 130 bills intended to reduce access to abortion. The measures include mandatory counseling, ultrasound for women seeking abortions, bans on abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and curbs on how insurers cover the procedure.
The ACLU and other abortion-rights groups are challenging several of the laws in court, notably the 20-week ban.
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