Conservative Party of Canada. - Fight the Right

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2012 Warren Kinsella

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Kinsella, Warren, 1960
Fight the right / Warren Kinsella.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36167-7

1. ConservatismCanada. 2. Right and left (Political science)Canada. 3. Conservative Party of Canada. 4. Politics, PracticalCanada. 5. CanadaPolitics and government2006. I. Title.

JC 573.2. C 3 K 55 2012 320.520971 C2012-902049-4

Cover design by Terri Nimmo

Cover image: David M. Schrader | Dreamstime.com

v3.1

ALSO BY WARREN KINSELLA

The War Room
Furys Hour
Unholy Alliances
Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics
Party Favours
Web of Hate

To Emma, Ben, Sam and Jake

The conservative species is, increasingly, dominating a fragile political environment. Liberal flora and fauna are being harmed.
Herewith, an examination and an assessment of their dastardly manipulations of language and values. Also, a brief discussion of what progressives and liberals must do to ensure the survival of their own species, a subject-matter that will be expanded upon in this slender manual. Finally, a call to action: one to rouse the liberal species from its slumber.

Fight the Right!

Because, whether you like it or notand the polls say quite a few of us dont like itconservatives, large and small c, are winning.

Everywhere you look these days, conservatives are winning elections, winning power, winning control. Nationally, locally, the story is the same: angry white men on the Right are ascendant. The Left, meanwhile, seems to be increasingly divided and dispirited, and rapidly losing ground.

Conservatives are on the march for all sorts of reasons. Theyre well funded, thanks to their well-heeled corporate backers. Theyre better organized than at any time in their history. The corporate, right-wing media adore them. The politics and economics of the era seemingly favour them. Andup here in Canada, at leastconservatives have benefited from schisms and squabbling on the Left. Liberals, lefties and progressives all continue to scrap over shrinking political real estate. The Right, meanwhile, reaps the benefits.

Everywhere you look, these days, conservatives abound, and they are bad news. As will be shown in due course, they ruin economies and social balance. They pit one class against another. They discriminate. They are nasty, brutish and short-sighted.

Theres a rising rightist tide, all right, one that cant be disputed. Just about everywhere in the West, conservatives dominate the discourse. In the U.S., Gallup polls suggest that nearly half of Americans consider themselves conservative or very conservativewhile only a puny 20 percent now self-identify as liberal. In Canada, conservatives and/or the Conservative Party dominate at almost every level of government, from one coast to another. Meanwhile, most of the European Union is governed from the Right, too, with nearly all of the EUs 27 member states embracing the Right or, sometimes, the further right.

From Rome to Riga, from Maine to Miami, from Whitehorse to Witless Bay, conservatives are on the march. Theyre not very good at governing, but theyve gotten particularly good at winning power. What, if anything, can be done?

Well, we can fight the Right, for starters.

Thus, this book.

Fight the Right is a handbook of sorts. Its a handbook on how to understand and ultimately survive the mean and nasty conservative era in which we find ourselves. Its a guide on how to keep sane, when all those around you seemingly are notand when power seems to reside with a few (ostensibly) red-necked, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who want to take us back to the Dark Ages, or worse. Its a manual, quite literally, on how to push back against the rising rightist tide, and win.

Ive been around liberal (small and large l) campaigns for all of my adult life, and a good part of my teenage years, too. Ive been privileged to be an advisor to lots of winning progressives, from Prime Minister Jean Chrtien to Bobby Kennedy Jr. Ive helped out trade unions, NGOs, associations and individuals over the years. And while Ive been fortunate to be part of a few wins, Ive had my share of losses. You learn a lot from losing.

What Ive learned along the way are a few things about how to take on the Right and how to beat them at their own game. Fight the Right is designed to help progressives better comprehend their adversary, and then to go on and defeat conservatives wherever the battle is taking shape. On the campaign trail. In the legislature or the council chamber. In TV and radio newsrooms, where shrill right-wing voices increasingly dominate. In the pages of our newspapers, which overwhelmingly favour the Right. Wherever conservative cabals are targeting average citizens and hard-working families, this book will try to provide a way to give the bullies a taste of their own medicine.

Salvation lies in understanding. The surest way to defeat your adversary, as John Stuart Mill says, is to first understand them: [Cicero] has left it on record that he always studied his adversarys case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. In other words, the best way to stop losing to conservatives is to figure out why they keep winning. This book is all about following Mills sage advice.

Thus, Fight the Right will take a look at why conservatives are winning and how they have radically changed their approach to politics in order to do so. Mainly, Ill argue that conservatives have stolen the two things that liberals used to own: values and language. Without knowing how to appeal to the values of average citizensand lacking the very words to do soprogressives are forever doomed to failure. The only way to seize victory is to appeal to peoples hearts as well as their minds. Conservatives know this, andfor a few years, nowthey have been rigorously applying it in every campaign.

Fight the Right will also map out some of the issues that conservatives have in their crosshairs, as well as what we progressives have done wrongand what the Right has done, well, right. From conservatives perspective, victory hasnt yet been secured; to them, there is still much to be done. There are those things that they like (armies and generals, tax cuts for the rich, guns, big corporations and people who think just like them) and those things they dont (abortion, social justice, gays and lesbians, diversity, the United Nations, culture and people who dont think like them at all). To conservatives, its total victory or nothing. For progressives, whether they like it or not, the war is already underway. For progressives to pretend otherwise only helps the other side to win.