The Paranoid Style of Stephen Harper

(With a tip of the hat in gratitude to American historian Richard Hofstadter.)

For the past couple of weeks, the nation's chattering heads have been puzzling over a conundrum: how could a master-strategist as gifted as Stephen Harper blunder as badly as he did with his government's lame-brained Economic Statement?

The answer is not so complicated.  Stephen Harper is not, and never has been, a gifted political strategist.  That cock-eyed idea has been a fabrication of our incestuous media which is dominated by right-wing pundits on the CBC who will cheer him on should he  ever have the chance to privatize the network and private media journalists who fear they will be shown the door if they tell the truth about Harper.

 There is though an oddly unnerving quality about Harper that is even a little spooky.  That oddness, I believe, derives from the fact that Harper exhibits a paranoid political style.

 By paranoid style, I mean, that Harper belongs to the resentful right, whose adherents understand the world in simplistic, binary terms, and depict those who disagree with them as the agents of endless conspiracies against the forces of righteousness.  (A telling example of the paranoid style is the way Conservatives have taken to labeling the Liberal-NDP coalition as “un-Canadian”.  This ludicrous term is lifted from “un-American”, an unsavory epithet that was much employed by McCarthyites during the 1950s who believed they had a corner on what it was to be American.  Until the Harperites appeared, no politicians in Canada were so certain of their monopoly of virtue as to label their foes “un-Canadian.)

Stephen Harper's response to the decision of the three opposition parties to vote down his government and replace has provoked one display after another of Harper's paranoid style. 

Harper's vitriolic assault on the opposition parties has been fueled by two conspiracy theories.  The first is that the determination of the opposition parties to vote non-confidence in his government had nothing to do with his Economic Statement but was evidence of a cabal that had been scheming against him long before the Statement saw the light of day.  The second was that working with the Bloc Quebecois to bring down his government  was no less than a diabolical plot against Canada.

In fact, the economic disagreement between the Harper government and the opposition is fundamental.  The Harperites, true disciples of Milton Friedman and his acolytes in quarters such as the C.D. Howe Institute---the Institute Harper consulted on the eve of the G 20 summit---are wedded to the idea that interest rate cuts by the Bank of Canada should suffice to restore the health of the Canadian economy.  They are determined to keep fiscal stimulus---the spending of large sums of public money on infrastructure or to salvage the auto and forest products sectors---to an absolute minimum.  This goes to the very heart of neo-con ideology.  Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty are determined not to preside over the return of the mixed economy, in which the public sector plays a major role and government steers the economy.  Their strategy is to make Canada a free-rider whose economy will revive thanks to Barack Obama's stimulus program.  That way their Canada will be a lean, mean provider of resources to the U.S., above-all of oil sands synthetic crude, when the Obama recovery generates an increase in petroleum demand and a return to high oil prices.  So what if our cities, infrastructure, auto industry and educational systems are casualties o0f the economic crisis?

These are the real questions that ought to be debated as we face the turmoil of the financial crisis.  Instead, Stephen Harper reduces it all to an opposition conspiracy.

The second conspiracy to which Harper responded in full paranoid fury was the idea of a Liberal-NDP coalition that would depend on the backing of the Bloc to sustain it on confidence votes.  Harper's dismissal of Quebec's MPs as “the other” takes us back to the days when Preston Manning used to maunder darkly about the coming collision with Quebec which he compared to the state of affairs in the United States on the eve of the Civil War.

The paranoid strain in right-wing politics is quintessentially American.  But, in his essence, Harper is an American right-winger, with not a Tory bone in his body.