Disloyal R's are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win - I will teach them!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 11, 2016
Steve Sailer is right: Trump likes crises. Immigration patriots and Alt Righters are restless now, but that’s happened before and he’s always come back. Still, he’d better come back.
Remember that by October 11, 2016, the Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign was similarly in crisis. Four days earlier, the “grab ’em by the p_____” conversation had been leaked, and Establishment Republicans launched what amounted to a coup against him. The pollsters and the Main Stream Media predicted a worse-than-Goldwater loss to Hillary Clinton. It seemed the Never Trumpers had been vindicated.
But Trump never lost faith. He said of the GOP, “They don’t know how to win” and declared, “But I will teach them!” Four weeks later, Trump’s victory panicked the political Establishment worldwide.
Trump knew what the experts did not. He knew that the American people hungered for an alternative that only he—not the Democrats, not Movement Conservatism—could provide: America First.
In other words:
Of course, Trump’s election has precipitated a rolling Soros-style “Color Revolution” attempt against him, directed by the Deep State and abetted by the MSM. And right now, at the risk of being accused of having taken the “black pill,” one might think that his Presidency has stalled.
Trump’s visa restrictions on terrorist-producing countries have twice been blocked by unelected Leftist judges. His lobbying for Paul Ryan’s revision of Obamacare failed. He has bombed Iraq (the fifth American President to do so), attacked Yemen and now—after an obvious false-flag chemical attack by “moderate” rebels—has intervened in Syria, despite the risk of war with Russia and despite the fact he assailed Hillary Clinton for her desire to jeopardize American lives in this very manner. He even seems about to plunge into costly tax policy wonkery that obsesses the Beltway Right.
Perhaps Trump is lured by the siren song of respectability. If so, I have a message for him from the great White [as in snow!] North: consider the fate of another populist and outsider who was lured to his destruction thereby, one who vanished without trace after nine years in power—Canadian Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Harper’s election in 2006 was just as much a shock to a complacent Center-Left consensus as Trump’s, or for that matter Reagan’s in 1980. Harper’s position could be summed up as An End To (Liberal) Business As Usual. In other words
But Harper betrayed all those who voted for him based on those hopes. His volte-face on Quebec was inexplicable given that his election win in 2011 broke a supposed “iron law” of Canadian politics: Harper took only five of 75 seats in Quebec—but 48% of the popular vote outside it—proving that it was indeed possible to win a majority in Canada without significant Québécois support. (This was exactly what VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow had argued in The Patriot Game, his 1986 book on Canadian politics).
Further evidence of the nature of Harper’s winning coalition came from exit polling. He took an astonishing 55% of the Protestant vote [in a five-way race], 50% of “those who frequently attend a church or temple” but only 31% of visible minorities.
So Harper was perfectly placed to end the blackmail-bribery-rent seeking scam Quebec has been running on Canada since the 1960s. He could have told them that henceforth they were another province like any other. That if they didn’t like this new deal, they could leave. Or he could have moved to expel Quebec, just as the Czechs expelled the Slovaks in 1993, and Malaysia expelled Singapore in 1965.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Quebec’s separatists haven’t disappeared. A Parti Québécois government was elected as recently as 2012. And as our history proves, time and again, the more Quebec gets, the more it demands. Harper gave Quebec more. Specifically—
Quebec is most assuredly that, but pointing out its flaws comes at a heavy price. Andrew Potter, Director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University in Montreal was forced to resign in March after arguing that Quebec was a “pathologically alienated and low-trust society.” [Author of Maclean’s Quebec malaise piece steps down from post at McGill, By Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press , March 23, 2017]
Those who know Harper and his long-time guru, Professor Tom Flanagan, say that it was always his intent that the Conservatives (the party he rescued from the scrapheap when he merged it with the Canadian Alliance in 2003) supplant the Liberals as Canada’s “Natural Governing Party.” And to supplant the Liberals, in this view, the Conservatives would have to become the Liberals. Which is pretty much what happened.
Canada continues as a welfare state in the worst sense, with employment-insurance regulations that grossly favor Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces and a “transfer payments” scheme that allows the “have-not” provinces (Quebec being the worst offender) to beggar productive Western Canada in perpetuity.
And Harper continued the Liberals’ ruinous Third-World immigration policy. Indeed, he said in 2015 that the decision he was “most proud of” was that his was “the first government in Canadian history that, faced with a recession, did not cut our immigration” (officially running at 250,000 to 300,000 annually):
Why not?
Because we understand, given the demographic and economic pressures in front of us, that a long-term, large scale immigration program is in this country’s interest. That’s why we’re looking at the long term, and I’m very pleased we’ve done that and moved forward on that. Tale of the tape: Transcript of the Globe debate on the economy, Maclean’s, September 18, 2015
There is no evidence to support this claim, and the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute think-tank has demonstrated that immigration is a huge net drain on the Canadian economy. [Immigration And The Welfare State Revisited, by Patrick Grady and Herbert Grubel, November 2015] Immigration also works to make all of Canada a “pathologically alienated and low-trust society.” But Harper, who like many Canadian conservatives appears to believe what he reads on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, reveled in this. His immigration minister Jason Kenney became a virtual vassal of the Third World, lauded for his efforts with the sobriquets “Smiling Buddha”(by Chinese-Canadians) and “Curry in a hurry” (by Indo-Canadians), both nicknames indicating a cheerful willingness to engage in the displacement of non-Asian Canadians. [Even critics agree Jason Kenney is a strong performer in immigration portfolio, by Peter O’Neil, National Post, December 16, 2011]
Harper took no steps to restore free speech to Canada (moribund since the Supreme Court’s 1990 Taylor ruling), although he did deign to allow the House of Commons to eliminate the penalties formerly meted out by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
On global warming, Harper allowed the clownish environment minister John Baird to declare in a 2007 speech that Canadian “Winter is disappearing as we know it.” Baird banned incandescent light bulbs and further committed Canada to war against carbon, mankind’s eternal enemy.
For all Harper’s unscrupulous pragmatism, he did have principles—neocon-neoliberal principles. What Canada got from him was
Like Trump, Harper was lucky in his opponents. Trump had the good fortune to run against the representatives of an exhausted Conservatism Inc. and then corpulent and corrupt Hillary Clinton. Harper’s opponents, Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, were so weak they almost succeeded in euthanizing the Liberal Party.
But Harper’s luck ran out in 2015. The new Liberal leader was Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre, founder of the New Canada. A callow youth of little intelligence and no accomplishment, he inherited from his father 100% name recognition, nostalgia for the Swinging Sixties and the tribal loyalty of our immigrants. From his mother, he inherited the sexually ambiguous good looks of a boy-band singer. Justin was the something-for-everyone candidate who offered Hope and Change, as opposed to Harper, who offered Invade-The-World, Invite-The-World and a generic Hockey Night in Canada, Tim Hortons double-double patriotism. (Which Paul Wells, in his study of Harper attributes to me, embarrassingly enough.)
The Conservative Party chooses a new leader On May 27. None of the 14 candidates claims to perpetuate the Harper legacy. Despite having been one of Canada’s foremost populists, the endless MSM discussions of the Tory succession never include him. So rarely is he mentioned that he has become The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Harper, like Trump, triumphed as a tribune of the New Politics. Having succeeded, each had to take the decisive strategic steps necessary to reshape his country in his image—in Harper’s case, solving the Quebec problem by evicting it from Confederation, ending Third World Immigration, and decentralization; in Trump’s case, ending the Left’s drive to Elect A New People through immigration.
Harper failed to take these steps. Instead, he became “New boss, same as the old boss” with a vengeance. He didn’t teach the Conservatives how to win; he taught them nothing.
As November 8 proved, the U.S. doesn’t want the same old boss. But unless Trump governs based on the hunger of the people that brought him to power—hunger for government of the people by the people for the people, immigration reform, no more neocon wars—America First—and above all ends America’s nation-breaking immigration disaster—he will become, like Harper, a mere footnote to history.
Kevin Michael Grace (email him) lives in Victoria, BC. He blogs at The Ambler and is the co-host of 2Kevins With Grace & Steel, a weekly podcast.
