November 2003
by Barry Stagg
We are in a democracy where low prices and leisure are plentiful and we think, incorrectly, that low prices and leisure are freedom. That is the basis for what can be called retail democracy. Retail efficiency: high quality and low prices buy a lot of loyalty . Where there is a huge mass market and that mass market is the world's largest market-our neighbourhood- the mirage of freedom through retailing or consumption is powerful and durable. Look at how it cultures the rise of anti-Semitic and anti-American forces as the threat of Islamist destabilization of our great markets - post September 11, 2001- are seen by amoral consumers as functions of the American support for that persistent plague to Islamists: Israel. Outstanding columns by George Jonas and Victor Hanson this past week pointed out the scourge of casual anti-Semitism and how it is moving back into fashion. Jonas points out the 'Pragmatic Anti-Semites' while Hanson writes about the fashionable liberal bigotry expressed against ' Those Jews'. Using the profane logic of consumerism, shoppers wish to solve the problem by removing the source of the Islamist's complaint. This is not unlike ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler, but these are shoppers hurrying home for Christmas after all.
News is subordinated to fashion guidance in these times so the failure of government, pejoratively identified as 'Bush', to restore consumer tranquility and carefree shopping is broadcast as if it were an independent issue clear of the foul mass murders that precipitated the war the Americans have launched in defence of their country. Shoppers include the lifestyle fetishists who tout the hothouse ethics of environmentalism. These utopians sell a bill of goods to the pampered and protected.
Critics of these trends are gaining ground. Fashionable liberalism as practiced by a tenured and comfortable academia is properly deplored by Victor Hanson. Activist judges are singed by Robert Bork in his latest book, 'Coercing Virtue'. These American writers have their counterparts in Canada.
Martin Loney in his book 'The Pursuit of Division' illuminates the Canadian form of the ossification that Hanson marks: careerism and security of employment in the industry of academia trump the traditional search for wisdom. Similarly, Donald Savoie's academic text, 'Governing From The Centre' analyzes Bork's subject matter from a different vantage point. Professor Savoie shows how, in Canada, executive governance dominates our nominally parliamentary democracy. In the same way, Professor Bork shows that the judiciary, given the tools to rule by judicial fiat, proceed to do so.
Activism by the executive arms of government, bureaucrats or the judiciary, is a basic product of the parliamentary vacuum created when we choose by indifference to let our democratic machinery go unused. In short, we do not work up any sort of parliamentary sweat, in contrast to the robust legislative debating of the classic parliamentarians of the 19th century: Disraeli, Gladstone, Lincoln and Burr, Laurier and John A. Macdonald. Now bureaucrats and the judiciary fill the void left when legislators sink into careerism.
I am with the late, great Malcolm Muggeridge in declining to attribute any form of conspiratorial purpose to these present circumstances. In his profound essay "The Great Liberal Death Wish" Mr. Muggeridge holds to the belief that the abdications from responsibility and common sense of our elites are non-conspiratorial and all the more malignant because of that. "Ah, if only it were a conspiracy. How easy then to apprehend the principals and subdue their dupes" This quote pinpoints the folly of assuming a plan in the feckless liberal process of denying the basic tenets of Western civilization.
We are in a cyclical state with our casual collective revolving around again to the self-destructive inversion of reason that brought us the liberal embrace of the twin monsters, Hitler and Stalin and the ruinous catharsis of World War Two. Now, we get the liberal idiocy of Western empathy both with reptilian tyrants like Saddam Hussein and with fanatical Islamist ignoramuses who would incinerate us all in an instant.
In swift summary then, try this for a deliberately understated conclusion: It seems that we suffer from a collective lack of effort. This intellectual and spiritual malaise may be nothing more profound than the torpor of the comfortable and secure. We let others do the heavy lifting and we let them do it their way, with their own tools and at their own self-appointed rates of pay. In what is no small irony, we get much more than we pay for.
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