What are We Conserving?

In the consideration of politics a movement’s goals are of crucial importance. What do they hope to achieve? Why are they doing what they are doing? Only by beginning with their ends can a movement undertake a project with absolute certainty and single-minded determination; any other attitude can only lead to inevitable defeat.

The words and actions of the leaders of the Conservative movement display a general pattern with respect to their goals. In their minds everything seems to revolve around fiscal issues like cutting taxes, small government and balancing the budget. Indeed when considering all these things together, it seems that the basis of modern conservative thought is that most sublime principle: the GDP.

In the eyes of the modern conservative establishment, a nation is just a big marketplace, and a man is nothing more than an interchangeable economic unit. They can only see the world through the lens of libertarian free market dogmas. In short, the goal of politics is to serve capital. Amongst the leadership of the modern conservative movement these are merely self-evident truths. On every question from immigration to the environment it comes back to the same: we must maximize the GDP no matter what we have to sacrifice to achieve this.

As a result of this political position, the Conservative establishment has been blinded to the great many problems facing the Canadian people. As a result of this blindness the Conservative establishment has allowed many problems to expand and afflict growing numbers of people.

Canada is awash with drugs that strike communities like a venomous plague. Between 2016 and 2019 more than 13 900 people died from opioid overdoses alone. The Conservatives for years promoted the type of unregulated free market that allowed american drug companies to get Canadians addicted to painkillers for profit. Moreover, by focusing only on issues of fiscal management and ignoring social issues, the conservatives ignore the underlying social conditions that drive people to become addicted. At a time when western societies are experiencing a decline of social bonds between members of communities, it is certain that people will turn to drugs as a means of coping.

For most of Canadian history the family was understood to be the fundamental unit of a society, the irreducible element that produces the character of the whole. A government interested in stability, and hence, prosperity, should seek to strengthen and affirm the family unit. But, instead of promoting family values the state itself now pushes deviant sexual indoctrination on our children. Usually on this issue the Conservatives have failed to defend the family. But even when Conservatives like Doug Ford promise to defend children from radical ideological indoctrination, they end up supporting the far-left policies they promised to defeat. Meanwhile countless communities are hollowed out as people struggle to find work and provide for their families. But instead of helping Canadians here at home, our elites are more concerned with virtue signalling.

Canada now accepts mass immigration to the tune of 300 000 people per year from all over the world. This policy is supported by the elites who control every major Canadian political party including the Conservatives. Now many among the elite and the media are promoting the idea that we should take many more immigrants to get to a population of 100 million by the year 2100. Our country currently has around 37 million people and Canadians already face many issues that the government is incapable of addressing. How will this country cope with 100 million? The environmental impact of more than doubling the population will be severe. We are already told that Canada is not environmentally sustainable enough, yet our elites are planning to more than double our resource consumption? It seems they’re only interested in sustainable development when they can make regular people pay for it. This is all happening at same time our government declares to everyone who will listen that Canada has no national identity. If immigrants coming to the country are being told it has no identity, how can anyone expect them to assimilate? But since Canada’s elites do not value Canada’s identity, they don’t want immigrants to assimilate. But if this country is to be filled with millions of people split up into countless different national identities with nothing to unite them, it seems impossible for Canada to maintain social cohesion.

If the government wishes to increase Canada’s population, why not promote Canadians having more kids? Indeed, the birthrate is a very clear and simple indicator of the health of a society, and for Canada it does not look good. People in this country aren’t having kids. And who can have kids in a country like this? People can’t afford to house their families, and people’s wages have stagnated.

Men and women are already struggling to find work and provide for their families. And yet, with a tenth of Alberta’s young men unable to find work, Canada’s Conservatives see fit to continue with the program of mass immigration, bringing many times that many men into the country each year. The law of supply and demand dictates that more people competing for the same jobs means lower wages. This benefits only the large business owners who happen to still employ Canadian workers at their companies.

For average people the outlook is bleak, in fact, an increasing number of people find themselves so totally isolated and living such hopeless lives that they kill themselves in the thousands. And it is not just adults, but also children who are increasingly committing suicide. Furthermore, this country has seen a huge increase in the rates of depression to the point where 1 in 10 young people in this country suffer from depression.

Surely having a strong economy is of crucial importance. The economy is meant to serve the needs of the people. Yet the modern Conservative movement wants people to serve the needs of the economy. There is no sense in wanting the stock market to always go up if average Canadians can’t maintain a decent standard of living. A growing GDP is only good if everyone gets to enjoy the benefits of economic growth.

Moreover, having a decent standard of living means more than seeing an increase in the national GDP. What kind of life is it when the nation loses its social cohesion and communities all around the country become hollowed out? This is not just an economic question. People need clean air and water that is free from pollution, people need strong social bonds with their neighbours, people need a healthy and safe country to raise their children.

All these are central questions that any serious political movement must address. The modern Canadian Conservative movement is entirely grounded in small government and low taxes. Consequently, it can never address any of these questions. A strong, truly national movement must ground itself in principles and ideals that go far beyond balancing the budget.

When we are led by men who lack any deep convictions then the only possible result will be a political movement which is barren both intellectually and spiritually. But of course talk of intellectual foundations and spiritual principles is unfashionable. The Conservatives need to win elections after all. The Conservatives need to convince people they’re a cool modern party, they’re fiscally conservative and socially liberal, they’re the real liberals, the modern left is so authoritarian. By repeating this message the Conservatives want to promote themselves as the party who does not care where you stand on social issues as long as you support the free market. The question remains: what is it that the Conservatives are actually conserving?

Indeed at this point one would be forgiven for not seeing a difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals they wish to displace. But of course there is a difference, the liberals have power. Their beliefs are supported by every powerful institution: academia, the media, corporations, the state, etc. Conservatives are stuck representing the constituency liberals don’t want: middle class voters, blue collar workers, rural voters and Christians. And so conservatives, the eternal losers of our system are left with the task of rallying their “backwards” voters behind a strong and powerful message: the liberalism of ten years ago. Meanwhile the liberals get to carry home the spoils as they continually lead the charge towards progress.

This is a country where people are losing the sense of meaning and community in their lives, and increasingly they are losing their future. We are unable to defend our faith, our traditions, institutions, our families, even ourselves. Our country is currently undergoing the most radical process of transformation known to human history as our country falls deeper into globalization and progressivism. Yet those who claim to be defenders of our society have let it happen without raising more than a pathetic whimper in protest.

The central conflict of modern politics is over the identity and values of the country. Whether they are aware of it or not the modern conservative movement is ignoring this question which will decide the future of Canada. The modern Conservative movement has no answer to the question of values and identity, or a coherent vision for the future. It has taken peripheral issues and made them central to its ideology. Consequently, Conservatism in this country has entirely abandoned the cultural battleground to the left. Instead, they’ve retreated to the safety of their cubicles, from which they can watch the left win.

While certainly the conservative establishment deserves all this criticism, it is of crucial importance to grasp that the failures of our elites are part of a broader decline of our society. In a normal, healthy country, the elites would be concerned with the good of the people. In such a society, it would not be possible for the current conservative establishment to have any power. People would have rejected such weak and myopic leadership long ago. To better understand the social decline that has led our country to its current battered state, we can turn to the work of German philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche.

Writing in the latter half of the 19th century, Nietzsche noted a lot of the same problems in his own country that Canada faces today. The countries of western Europe in Nietzsche’s day were societies in transition just like our own. The political conflicts between the European left and right were happening against this backdrop of Europe’s move away from its Christian roots and towards an atheistic modern age. Nietzsche argued that this would lead to a great cataclysm because Europe was leaving behind the values that had been the beating heart of its society without having anything to replace them with. And just like in our own time the conservatives proved unable to stop the gathering storm. In The Gay Science he proclaimed:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

The reason for bringing religion into the discussion is that a nation’s politics stem from its values. Canada, for most of its history, has been a Christian nation. As such, Canadian society for most of its history was centered on Christian values. And as Nietzsche notes, it is impossible to ignore the question of values. Every society is grounded in shared values. Therefore to maintain the cohesion of the society it must maintain a strong commitment to its values.

In recent times Canada has abandoned its Christian values in favour of progressive values, but anyone who is right-wing in this age has implicitly recognized that those values have failed to make our society better and have actually made it worse. Indeed progressive values have no answer for any of the issues discussed above. As an alternative to this country’s failed progressive values, Canada needs values that work. And it is the task of the right to fight for the Christian values which once made Canadian society healthy and strong, and can do so again.

God is not dead, but it is obvious to anyone paying attention that Christendom is. Moreover, Nietzsche is right that all of us, especially our leaders, are unworthy of the deed. Nietzsche himself was an atheist who hated Christianity because he saw it as spiritually dead and incapable of elevating the human spirit. Already in his own nominally Christian society he saw a total spiritual emptiness and when he looked to the future he predicted we would come to be what he called last men. The type of men concerned only with their own comfort, happy in their mediocrity these men could only respond to the most profound questions by blinking. As he put it, the world of the future would be a small one indeed, and into it would come the last men, who would make it smaller.

The Christianity of Nietzsche was the Christianity he had learned as a young man studying theology at the University of Bonn in the hopes of becoming a Lutheran minister. It was the liberal Christianity of thinkers like Friedrich Schleiermacher and David Strauss. It was in studying liberal theology and higher criticism that Nietzsche became an atheist. By combining Christianity with the enlightenment liberalism that was so fashionable at that time the liberal-Christians had hoped to bring Christianity out of the dark ages and make it acceptable to a modern bourgeois society.

That they believed this reveals the true nature of their religion. They believed in liberalism more than they did in Christianity and so liberalism became their true religion. Yet instead of dealing honestly with their conversion to a new worldview they desired to convert all of Christendom along with them. The Bible itself describes such men: “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man.” Indeed, “no one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.” And so by attempting to reform the faith they introduced into Christendom a fatal poison. It was in this new faith and the society it produced that Nietzsche saw only hypocrisy and vice.

Every major Christian denomination has seen a brutal attack against the foundations of their creed, and more than one has gladly accepted the revisions with open arms. Many faithful now attend churches where they are taught that Christ would be proud to see his church celebrating the homosexual movement. Several churches now teach that the murder of our own children through abortion is of no consequence.

Of course, if the leaders of our churches do not take Christianity seriously then we should not be surprised that more and more the Canadian people are abandoning the faith. Then there are those who call themselves conservative, who claim to be taking up the mantle of this tradition. And yet where are they when the thundering footsteps of the march of progress trample those common people they claim to lead? Sitting on the sidelines, and breathing a sigh of relief that they were not the ones who were targeted. Is it respectable leadership to chase popularity by adopting the latest fads? Will this ever bring the right power? What image of the right wing does this behaviour give average people?

For all their faults, Nietzsche and fervent atheists like him show a greater desire for Christ than lukewarm Christians and so-called conservatives. Nietzsche understood that Christianity is a fundamentally transformative religion. God claims for himself every sphere of creation totally and completely. It is a doctrine that seeks to shake men to their very cores and convert their hearts. God does not beg for scraps at the table of liberalism.

Nietzsche hated Christianity with the passion of someone who understood the primacy of God in the affairs of men. His intent was that his philosophical project would culminate in the discovery of some doctrine that could replace God as the source of all meaning and vitality. Nietzsche's zealous and intransigent attacks on faith reveal a man who was truly aware of, and disturbed by the void left in the centre of Man’s soul if God is absent.

Liberal Christians and Conservatives, who see and understand nothing, seek only to please those who hate them. They want nothing more than to compromise the doctrines of the church in order to be in line with the times. In their minds it is Christ who must be transformed by the saving grace of liberal modernity. Any teachings that are problematic must be deconstructed and all the unfashionable and retrograde elements of the faith must be purged. In modernity everything must submit to the whims of the latest ideological trend. Christ himself as well as St. Paul warns in the Bible against those wolves in sheep’s clothing who wish to draw members of the Lord’s flock away from the church. Yet modern so-called Christians and conservatives are so faint of heart that they scarcely deserve the title of wolves. They are mere sheep's clothing to be tossed around whichever way the wind is blowing.

“Liberal Christians and Conservatives, who see and understand nothing, seek only to please those who hate them”

There is no clearer sign of our times than the burning of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and the reaction to it. For indeed great was the outpouring of sorrow at the burning of one of our greatest temples. And yet one must wonder, whence do all these tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth emerge from when they are so conspicuously absent in the face of the innumerable tribulations and humiliations which our people suffer everyday.

Doubtless, the Notre-Dame fire was a tragedy, and yet is the suffering of our fellow men, women and children not much more so. Are the souls of our fellow Man not priceless, and if so, why do we not treat them as such? We cry at the sight of the destruction of the monuments of our church when these are but the products of a healthy and virtuous society. These monuments are beautiful because they were built by men with a transcendent purpose, they dedicated themselves to glorifying God and providing for their society, and their monuments are a mere byproduct of this. We are hypocrites to claim we care about the fruit, when at the same time we allow the tree that produced it to be destroyed. If the right is to have a future in this country, it has to be a voice for the forgotten people of this nation. Because doing nothing means our country will persist in its folly all the way into the abyss, guided only by the chattering of the hour.