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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 10, 2011
Against public policy
Let me begin this column with a mea culpa. Last fall, I devoted a series of Sunday columns to discussing some standard questions of public policy. I had no right to bore my reader to such a degree. I was anyway too old, and had been too long in journalism, to make the mistake I was making: to flirt so gratuitously with brain death. As a Catholic Christian, I should have recognized this as a sin.This public confession is unfortunately necessary, before I proceed with this week's topic. After years of nothing, Canada is suddenly spoiled for choice in the area of conservative journalism. Since the year began, we have acquired the Sun News Network on television. We have The Dorchester Review. Now we have the Canadian Observer. Suddenly "conservatives" are coming out of all the closets, and stirring from beneath every bed. To be fair, we had things like the Fraser Institute, a smattering of talk radio, the National Post, an errant tendency in Maclean's, and a strange contributor to the Ottawa Citizen. But nothing like the States, where you could drown in conservative "think tanks," Fox dominates the idiot box for "breaking news," the Tea Partiers aren't exactly shrinking violets, and "alternative media" stalk the corridors of power. The very fact we have a "Conservative" government in Canada, when we have had such a shortage of conservative apparatchiks, and a conservative intelligentsia so thin on the ground, is a miracle my reader may like or dislike. In the absence of loud public prompting, Canadians have had to swing to the right largely on their own initiative. Now, "full disclosure" is traditionally offered at this point. Not only was I not consulted in the launch of any of these new "media outlets"; not one of them offered me a gig. I still get more calls from TVO, and the frigging CBC, than from any of the "conservative" standardbearers. (But does this distress me? Noooooo.) The two new magazines I mentioned are "highbrow." Sun News TV is of course in a much different category. In order to appeal to a large rightwing market, it is universally believed by media executives that one must have babes of low cleavage, rednecks ranting into the camera, and human-interest stories in rather questionable taste. As someone capable of enjoying all these things, I can hardly gainsay the formula. But the viewer imagined by such executives must be very easy to please. As a (genuinely conservative) friend has observed: "I for one could not sleep at night if I didn't know that Mike the Bald and Ezra the Perpetually Incensed are appearing in rec rooms and parlours where the fat folks are asleep, and the cat or dog is eating the leftover pizza from the open box on the floor." "Populist" would be a more accurate term than "conservative" to describe such media. And again, I am not against it, for I am sometimes on the side of the people, and do not practise guilt by association, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Besides, I find Coren and Levant entertaining. But for the full slog, through the ideological morass, we now have these two magazines. The Dorchester Review represents something of the older Canadian outlook, founded in the British Protestant intellectual tradition. It reads history, strikes dry poses, and eschews any kind of categorical conclusion. The Canadian Observer is more the "policy wonk" magazine, in the modern Yankee manner. It reads statistics, eschews charm, and strikes directly for "results." Yet all three, in their respective ways, come out of the Whig, or "classical liberal" tradition. They all put politics, instinctively, at the centre of public life, and view private life through a political telescope. Whereas, a genuinely Tory, or "classical conservative" view of the world is essentially religious, and views private life sub specie aeternitatis. It strikes me that the very idea of "public policy" is something conservatives should be against. Secular government exists for straightforward purposes, such as enforcing laws, and defending the realm against the possibility of invasion. It has no business favouring one social group over another, or encouraging or discouraging anything. When it tries to do so, it crosses the boundary of "Church and State," into the realm of faith, hope, and charity. To what I consider a genuinely conservative mind, public policy goes beyond boredom, into positive irritation. And to discuss "the culture" in the abstract is to raise politics to "cultural policy," going beyond irritation. A genuinely conservative journalism would attack the political questions in an entirely different way. It would be far more descriptive than prescriptive. Indeed, the great Tory journals of the past (I am thinking of periodical essays of the 18th century, of Blackwood's Magazine in its 19th-century heyday, of weeklies like the Tablet and the Spectator in the 20th) did not try to tell us how to think. They investigated the world as they found it, thereby giving their readers something to think about. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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