The question National Post recently posed, “Is conservatism dead?”, provoked predictably a large number of responses from across the country. The thought that conservatism is dead might only be entertained in Canada is an indication how far removed the country is in somewhat solitary orbit from the contemporary political reality found in leading G7 countries of the world. Conservatism, far from being dead, remains on the contrary politically robust and on the offense against liberal-left ideology bereft of ideas or vision in the relentlessly fast-pace world of global economy and terrorism.
Within the confines of Canada the question has some legitimacy given the inability of conservatives to form a national government, and shift the political axis of the country from the centre-left to centre-right. The failure of conservatives to persuade Canadians to vote them into power through the past four elections also suggests another more intriguing question, “who is responsible for conservatism’s death?”
The answer to the second question, I believe, is conservatives themselves. Conservatism cannot be revived in Canada unless conservatives acknowledge their responsibility as a precondition to recognizing what is sorely needed to produce a majority conservative coalition deserving once again to shape the country’s destiny.
The major difficulty besetting the political fortune of conservatives is not with their internal bickering, factionalism, leadership quarrels, and never-ending jousting within a membership divided over fiscal and social matters. It is in their inability to provide a compelling vision of a Canada they want the people to imagine as desirable and worth building through a common national effort. Conservatism without vision is politics without poetry, and politics devoid of poetry is body without soul.
Canadian conservatives are obsessed with policies. They believe that if only they could put together a convincing set of policies consistent with their agenda of a smaller government, lower taxes, fiscal prudence, balanced federal-provincial relations, greater market incentives for higher economic productivity and job creation, and provide for accountable government through democratic reforms of federal institutions, Canadians would respond more favourably in future elections than they have over the past decade.
But people do not elect accountants or lawyers to be prime ministers. A political leader who wants a majority electoral support in a democracy must connect with the heart of the nation, speak to its soul, arouse its imagination and win its trust. Such a leader must have something of a poet in him to make such a connection. This task is made more difficult for a leader of the opposition party than for the leader of the ruling party. An opposition leader must convince people that not only the ruling party has failed the nation, but that they can trust him sufficiently to place their future in his hands.
This is when poetry in politics becomes essential. Poetry, as Northrop Frye reminded Canadians, “is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words… So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is.” What Frye meant, as he explained elsewhere, if words are to move people into imaginative action as in politics, if the best within people is to be cultivated and realized, then words need to be delivered as poetry to be effective.
Policies are the prose of politics, necessary as is the foundation supporting the poetry of steel and cement of a building rising skyward. It is obvious that what distinguishes one building from another is the imagination of architect’s design resting on the foundation, or of words that become poetry and take flight illuminating a vision without which policies would remain a mere barren plinth.
The most successful conservative leaders from Winston Churchill to Ronald Reagan had a flair with words. They were poets who could capture the nation’s imagination, pull together “conservatives of the heart” into a winning coalition, and move people in realizing a shared vision. Without such an instinct for poetry in politics Sir John A. Macdonald could not have made his vision of a Canada be imagined by his contemporaries, inspiring them into labour that became our inheritance. From Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Disraeli to John Diefenbaker and Charles De Gaulle conservative leaders were gifted with speech to render the history of their nations resonate in the hearts of the living generation as a call to even greater deeds.
Contemporary conservatives seem to be tone-deaf to poetry and, as a result, their vision for the country whatever it be has failed to kindle the imagination of Canadians. They keep reinforcing the foundation with new twist of policies rising higher as if the foundation might become the substitute for the building of steel and cement that needs to be imagined. Lacking poetry their prose remains unimaginative without wings to make people soar from protecting the mundane to investing in future of greater prosperity.
Liberals in Canada have the wind of government behind them, the levers of power with which to move money and seduce voters even if they fail to win their loyalty. They may lack imagination, as do the present generation of Liberals, and their words may be deadening prose, but the alchemy of power is an effective substitute for both. Unless conservatives learn to give wings to words, their prose will remain that of a party of grievances and a reservoir of resentments nursing wounds of recurring defeats.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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