Since their election defeat two weeks ago, the Ontario Conservatives have not been short of helpful advice on what they should do next.
Liberals advised them to be more like, well, the Liberals, who won, it was said, by positioning themselves in the “activist centre,” which is apparently how we are now to describe a party that ran to the left of the NDP. Moderate conservatives advised them to be more like moderate conservatives. “The moderate conservatism of the Canadian experience,” arch-moderate Tory Hugh Segal sermonized, is about “balance and humility,” not “anger” or “narrow ideology.” He counselled a return to the centrist tradition of Mike Harris, who promised no more, he noted, than to return spending “to the levels of the Bill Davis Progressive Conservatives.” Actually he only returned it to the levels of the David Peterson Liberals, but you get the point.
If you are wondering how the centre could be simultaneously occupied by Kathleen Wynne and Mike Harris, it is perhaps suggestive of some of the problems with this kind of advice. On the one hand, it is a fine example of what has been called the “pundit’s fallacy,” which holds that the winning policy for a political party is whatever the writer happens to think is the right policy. Yet it is even more an example of what I might call the “politico’s fallacy,” which holds that the right policy for a party is whatever the winning policy is. So: if the Conservatives cannot win with the policies they have, they should simply adopt another set of policies — the ones I believe in. After all, as everyone knows, the way you win elections is by moving to the centre. And the centre, as it happens, is just where I’m standing.
Of course, at any given moment the centre is where a great number of people are standing. That is to say it is the status quo: the set of policies with support among enough voters to put the party that proposed them in power. The centre in politics tends to be defined as whatever happens to be the case, based on who won the last election. It is not some fixed meridian, independent of the push and pull of politics. It is defined by the winners. To say you win elections by moving to the centre is to get things precisely backwards. You win elections by moving the centre to you. Wynne defines where the political centre is today, just as Harris did in his day — not by watering down their policies, but by winning elections.
By contrast, the loser is instantly defined as being to the right or left of centre, no matter where the centre might have been before. Tim Hudak is now castigated as a “hard-right” ideologue — there were repeated comparisons, postelection, to the Tea Party — for having promised to spend $4 billion less than the Liberals would. After inflation and population growth, this would take spending all the way back to the levels of 2006, a dusty epoch before electricity and sidewalks when the province was governed by … the Dalton McGuinty Liberals. Even the much savaged reductions in the civil service amounted to 2.5 per cent per annum, or about one-third the normal rate of attrition.
If that is now defined as Ultima Thule, the place beyond the edge of the maps, from which the Conservatives must now hasten back to civilization, then it implies the expansion of the state is a one-way ratchet: no matter how large it grows or how fast, it can never be cut. For that would involve some departure, however slight, from the status quo. And thus, as we now see, the Tea Party.
There is a basic confusion at work here: not just between means and ends — you win power to put policy into effect, not the other way around — but between radicalism (even supposing Hudak were offering any) and extremism. No one wants to see Tea Party politics here, but what defines the Tea Party, at least in its excesses, is not its radicalism, but its extremism.
The distinction is critical. Radicalism, after all, a determination to break with the status quo, offering sweeping change in its place, is sometimes called vision: Vision is radicalism that sells. Certainly radical policy can be ill advised. But it is not ill advised simply for being radical. What matters is whether the policy is suited to the task, whether the change proposed is the change required. Provided it can be persuaded of its necessity, the public is quite open to radical change, whether of the right or left, as the examples of Wynne and Harris suggest.
What the public wants to know is not whether you are radical, but whether you are extreme. The first is a matter of ideology; the second of temperament. Whatever your views, the public is more interested in how you arrived at them, and how you would apply them. Have you been persuaded by the facts, that is, or just a priori dogma? Could you be persuaded otherwise by a different set of facts? Is it important to you to persuade other people, or just to shock them? Are you prepared to make reasonable compromises, or is it all or nothing?
No doubt there are limits to public tolerance, even so, if not in the direction of change, then at least in the pace. The prudent politician must find the overlap between what he believes and what he can realistically persuade the public to accept. But to suggest that an opposition party, particularly of the limited-government variety, can aspire to no more than to ratify the policies of its predecessors — that it must accept the state’s latest high-water mark as its irreducible minimum — is not to counsel moderation but complacency.
Perhaps that is how you win elections. The point is not that there are more important things than winning. It’s that it matters, surely, what you win for.
Twitter: acoyne
