New Parties, The PCs, And Elite Comfort

Why A New Party Is A Waste Of Space

One of the things that’s been a recurring feature of my writing in the last year and change has been the impact of money and how people vote – and how the people who are swinging left, in Canada and the US and Australia and the UK, are disproportionately well-off white socially liberal voters, in places like Forsyth and Southlake and Milton. It’s just a fact that a lot of the people who have departed right wing parties in recent years have been the kinds of people who spend a lot of their time at dinner parties and charity events, and they’re the kind of people who are sick of being asked why they’re still Republicans or Conservatives. It’s a lot of people who are fiscally conversative and in many ways modest – they’re old money, in a lot of ways, and they’re the kinds of people who care about decorum and honour and decency. And, for some of them, they’re of the belief that there’s no good option for them.

The notion of the “politically homeless” in the context of a new centrist party is always designed around this kind of centrist voter, right – fiscally conservative and socially liberal, pro-tax cuts, pro-small business, pro-choice, and perfectly comfortable with gay people. It’s a group of people that exists, and it’s a world I’ve explored a lot, both in writing for this site and in Salvation In The Storm, but it’s a group that’s wildly overrepresented in the conversation these days, and the reason why is simple – it’s a fantasy of the Laurentian Elite that’s being passed off as a groundswell of popular support. The average member of the politically homeless bought their Rosedale house 30 years ago and is sitting on a literal million dollars in unrealized equity, or they’re 25, work on Bay Street, and have a condo on the waterfront. They’re the kinds of people who would never have a problem with me giving a soft kiss to my partner if I walked in late to a dinner we were both attending, they genuinely believe that the populist, far right are a threat, and they want a new kind of Toryism, because they’re sick of having to call themselves conservatives when modern conservatism is this, in their view, disgraceful perversion of the ideology they believe in.

The problem with the notion of some new party is the purpose isn’t to win power, it’s to make these dinner parties easier for these people again. In 2012, these people could easily politics at the water’s edge – they could talk about their kids and their golf games and their dumb colleagues, and everyone would know they disagree about politics and they’d ignore it, because the stakes weren’t that high and the disagreements really weren’t that sizable. Now, these kinds of interactions – whether at a physical dinner table, or over Zoom or text, these conversations and social gatherings are harder, and people don’t like it. The ”politically homeless” just want to be able to tell their socially liberal friends that they have nothing to do with these dangerous crazies, be it the Jan 6 cosplayers currently occupying my hometown or the socially conservative nutters who voted to uphold the legality of conversion therapy in 2021’s recorded vote. They want to be clear that they’re still good, they just want a tax cut, because, well, they’d benefit from it more than most. It’s not about patriotism, it’s about personal comfort, and pretending otherwise is a farce.

One of the things about writing a book is the ability to dictate every choice, and there are plenty of opportunities to do things just for me, and when I set a book in Texas, the ability to have my characters play a round of golf at Colonial – the posh Fort Worth golf course they play every year on the PGA Tour – was one of the choices that I made for myself, and myself alone. That said, setting a book at least in part in Fort Worth made me think about the people of that place – a place that has swung left hugely in recent years. Thinking about the residents of that place makes me even more certain I’m right about this, because it’s not a Canadian failure that sparks these kinds of conversations, because the wealthy residents of Fort Worth and Southlake who have swung left would leap at a Mitt Romney-Joe Manchin ticket in a heartbeat, even if that ticket would only get 7% at most nationally.

What’s the policy crisis this party – whether a reborn Progressive Conservative Party or some new centrist Australian Democrats ripoff – is supposed to be solving? Where’s the policy manifesto for this supposedly needed party? Oh wait, there’s none, it’s just about, like, centrist vibes? Wow, whoever could have seen this genuine shocker coming? Wait, that’s my job, because what this actually is about is about the Laurentian Elite wanting to be able to get back to their roots – their free dinners and socializing roots. It's all about making the charity dinners and the hospital fundraisers and the dinners at the same restaurant when everyone goes to see the same play. Live in a big city long enough, and prove yourself a reliable person, and you’ll find yourself running with a crowd of Liberals, NDPers, and Tories, and everyone just leaves politics at the door. At least, they did, and the new PC Party is just a bunch of centrist Tories wanting to return to that time.

Properly understood as the self-indulgent whinge that it is, this call for a new party is risible nonsense, and it should be read as such. It would be a failure on any reasonable metric – it could never command 30% in the polls unless it just became a redux of the 2007 Conservative Party Of Canada, which would defeat the entire purpose of it, and it wouldn’t even work as a pressure group because there’s no actual, real manifesto it’s purporting to implement. The reason the PPC has worked as a Conservative pressure group is the CPC is scared shitless of Bernier et al, and this new party wouldn’t change that. All it would do is split the right and keep the right out of office for another 15 years until they could merge again.

So, given that, it’s a dead end, right? Probably – but those who want it won’t shut up about it, because it was never about people in the first place. This idea is a way to make the Laurentian Elite have an easier time at dinner parties, and pretending it’s anything more is malpractice.