It’s a pleasure to give this year’s Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies. And for this honour I am most appreciative to the University of Ottawa. I said it’s a pleasure to give the lecture because it gives me the opportunity to say something about current Canadian politics — by which I don’t mean the daily fluff of Question Period, but rather the broader, more alarming trend of contemporary thought and practice.
It’s become a truism to say that we are living through the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s. Clearly we could have used the past two years to rethink current assumptions about politics and economics and go in a new direction, as did happen in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Have we done this? On the contrary, the evidence is that Canada plans to stay put. Once the current stimulus package is completed next spring, the 2008 pre-crisis status quo will be re-established. How did we get there?
Writing in The New Yorker magazine two years ago, David Frum, the Canadian born speech-writer for George Bush, asserted that the conservative revolution launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s had as its specific purpose the rolling back of “social democracy” in the Anglo-American world. That’s probably not how the Thatcher-Reagan project would have been described by an American, for whom, as we saw in the debate last year on health-care reform, social democracy is largely an alien concept. But it’s not surprising that Frum would think in these terms. He was, after all, born and raised here in Canada, in a political culture where the broad social and economic values established after the Second World War have commonly been described as social democratic; and I think his formulation does capture what that conservative revolution of the 1980s and ’90s meant, in its attack on all the great advances of the postwar era. The idea, as Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman, has pointed out, was to get government down to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub. (Krugman was quoting another conservative.)
So what was the situation here in Canada, in the U.S. and the U.K. that so disturbed these new conservatives? I will try to put it in context. Virginia Woolf once said that following WWI, there was a widespread yearning for the pre-war years. That was certainly not the case following World War II and the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was no such atavistic desire for a rerun of the past. On the contrary, throughout the advanced democratic capitalist economies there were virtually unanimous calls for “social reconstruction.” A young English soldier writing home from Italy just before the war’s end, had this to say:
“We have almost won the war, at the highest price ever paid for victory. If you could see the shattered misery that once was Italy, the bleeding countryside and the wrecked villages, if you could see Cassino, with a bomb-created river washing green slime through a shapeless rubble that a year ago was homes, you would realize more than ever that the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is not enough, by itself, to justify the destruction, not just of 20 years of fascism, but too often of 20 centuries of Europe.
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/876138--equality-or-barbarism