That trend was clear even before the census debacle. But this latest outbreak of Tory truculence has accelerated the decline. Others have tried, without success, to puzzle out what on Earth the Conservatives could have been thinking. Playing to the base? But what evidence is there that anyone, outside of a small hard core of libertarians, holds any hostility to the census? A plot to starve lefty activist groups of factual ammunition? But census data is presumably of equal use to all causes, left or right.
I think my colleague John Geddes came closest in his piece last week. It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war.
You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites†and “intellectuals.†In the partial dismantling of the census, we reach the final stage: not just hostile to experts, but to knowledge.
It’s an old game, in some respects. There are echoes of the Republican “NASCAR dad†strategy, mixed with the High Tories’ instinctive distrust of new ideas and technocratic monkeying about. Not for nothing did the British Conservatives once glory in the title of the Stupid Party, and the Harper Conservatives seem content to wear the label as well.
But there’s something different going on here. The intellectuals that conservatives generally rail against are those they disagree with. But the Harper Conservatives are just as hostile to the interventions of experts on what one might suppose to be their own side. The decision to cut the GST, rather than income taxes, was made in defiance not of radical economists, but of the orthodox free-market variety. Having jettisoned principle for expediency, the Tories came to regard the “purist†in their own ranks with every bit as much disdain as any lefty egghead—more, actually.
The result is a uniquely nasty, know-nothing strain of conservatism. The Thatcher Tories, unlike their forebears, weren’t anti-intellectual: her cabinet contained some of Britain’s most fertile social and political minds. Ronald Reagan, though hardly an intellectual, did not demonize expert opinion, or pit the educated classes against the rest. Even today’s Republican party, as know-nothing as it sometimes appears, relies heavily on a network of think tanks to provide it with intellectual heft. Only in Canada have expertise and ideas been so brutally cast aside. On the level of principle, this is appalling. A society that holds education and expertise in contempt, no less than one that disdains commerce or entrepreneurship, is dying. To whip up popular hostility to intellectuals is to invite the public to jump on its own funeral pyre.
