A new line coming out of the embarrassed Canadian right: Rob Ford isnt a conservative, hes a populist. Actually, Rob Ford is about as close to a pure distillation of modern conservatism as you can get: Hes the scion of privilege and wealth who masquerades as an everyman; a brazen and destructive force in public affairs hostile to both reason and empirical reality because they obstruct his parochial view of society; an anti tax and spend crusader who resists and demonizes public efforts to cure social ills as signs of Stalinism but has no problem taxing and spending in the pursuit of his own reactionary schemes; a social conservative who champions traditional values as the basis for both politics and private life but feels free to violate them at his own leisure, defending each transgression as a private matter (though not a private matter when done by others); an anti-society troglodyte who believes there should be no difference between profit-driven enterprises controlled by shareholders and the institutions of democratic governance, no citizens who have an intrinsic solidarity as neighbours, nationals, or people engaged in a common project aimed at general prosperity, only taxpayers who think about their wallets and express themselves more at the shopping mall than they do at the ballot box or community meeting; a conservative who conserves by ripping up bike lanes and cancelling carefully-planned schemes aimed at the public good at great expense; a self-proclaimed democrat who believes his constituents are his bosses, yet refuses to listen to the vast majority of said bosses when they demand his resignation, and who hides behind the artificially democratic formats of radio and TV to spout his demagogic bile. Rob Ford is a populist - a populist conservative in the tradition of new right conservatives like our prime minister and Ontarios leader of the opposition, both of whom were until recently major public supporters of the mayor and students of his political style. The conservative establishment, now embarrassed, would like to disown Rob Ford and continue to pursue the above in its own slicker, subtler, way. Dont let them get away with it.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 18:07:36 +0000
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