Category Archives: Liberal

PM Modi has done it again! He manages to do things that leave our liberal elites seething in anger, but unable to directly attack his actions. They vent their frustration in many ways. Often, they take it out on him by choosing an entirely different arena.

The choice of Droupadi Murmu, a tribal leader who has grown from the grassroots, has riled them as well. We will see why and how the ecosystem may plan its revenge.

NDTVs initial coverage of the story is astudy in propaganda. In fact, reading our liberal websites and magazines should be compulsory for anyone interested in researching political propaganda and hatchet jobs disguised as journalism. Not able to attack BJP directly, it refers to President Kovinds choice as Bihar Governor Ram Nath Kovind, who happened to be a Dalit. In other words, it wants to mention Bihar Governor and Dalit in the same breath, and does not want to credit BJP with choosing a Dalit! In fact, the person that wrote it or the editor thinks it is so clever, that it is repeated in the headline to give it more punch!

You see, Kovind was Bihar Governor that happened to be Dalit, not a Dalit that happened to be Bihar Governor a position that Modi gets to fill as well. After all, Bihar Governors have a natural claim to Presidency nominations so his being Dalit was a mere coincidence!

Of course, when you play with words there are many a way to escape. You can talk about context, nuance etc., and take full benefit of plausible deniability. And of course, abuse the person questioning as a Sanghi, troll or whatever words that comes to their mind.

Let us turn to the question of why elite liberals hate Modi for choosing outsiders that dont belong.

Modi himself was attacked relentlessly by the ecosystem of Stalinists, Beijings serfs, Islamists and brown-nosed coolies of corrupt fascist families that control the liberal narratives in India. One elite leftist journalist, Malini Parthasarathy said she would not want someone that cant speak English in that position. Obviously, she must have been impressed with Deve Gowda or Charan Singhs enthralling audience with perfect Queens English and wants the standards not to be lowered. Of course, Manmohan saheb can speak any language because saying nothing is the same in Telugu, Swahili, or French.

We often come across assorted low-life critters crawling out of rocks and blackwater tanks of Janpath to abuse Modi in other ways, including his alleged lack of knowledge on western cutlery. The point is always the same he is not one of ours, he cannot rule. No matter what the majority of Indians that voted to say. Of course, selective, temporary exemptions are granted to rustic leaders from cow belt, who dont care about English or vinglish, provided table scrap of their loot is also shared fairly and doesnt in any way impede the main loot in Delhi.

The answer to the question of WHY they behave this way is quite simple.

Firstly, these abuses and elitist contempt for merit, far from disqualifying them, act like stamps in the Starbucks cards that you can trade for more coffee. In this case, it is a passport to many juicy gigs, chances to write Op-Eds in western liberal rags, global NGO gigs, dollar flow into fundraisers and investments from favoured moneybags in your online rag. Membership has its benefits.

Secondly, many of our so-called journalists are dynasts themselves or have benefited from the corrupt, nepotist, cronyism-ridden, mutual back-scratching network of left-liberal elites. Merits or talent had nothing to do with it. It goes without saying that practically all of them are from upper castes as well. So dont be surprised if they root for an upper-class dynast from a similar background.

Some of them were simply born into the job. Papa and gramps was a journalist, so am I. Many of them are some connected or favoured babus daughter, liberal netas brother or wife or girlfriend etc. Since they control the ecosystem and the awards that go with it, close ties to powers dont make them officially biased at all. They are still fearlessly independent and speak truth to power depending on who is in the power of course. They will get upset if you question their independence. While anyone that was seen at a bus stop standing next to a BJP leader becomes Sanghi for life, these elites are just journalists. They dont have to explain their conflict of interests or even disclose them. You are a troll if you question.

You may have noticed they often must quote their drivers or maids when discussing the problems of the subaltern because they themselves have not experienced even one skipped a meal or one job application that was turned down! They romanticise the dynasty era and its shortages and depravity because they were not the ones that stood in mile-long ration shop queues or suffered day-long power cuts if there was electricity at all. As someone sarcastically put it, you waited five years for the phone and fifteen minutes for a dial tone. You can go to a shop and buy an HMT watch or a Bajaj scooter. You need to wait or have connections. Like their annadatas, they too studied overseas or in good schools and colleges and came back to lecture us on the idea of India.

Meritocracy is alien to them and must oppose it tooth and nail as it endangers not just them but the entire ecosystem. It is like an alien species of weed or predator imported and starts wreaking havoc as the native ones are not adapted to them. It sends a bad signal to Dalits and tribals that they should demand real powerful jobs not just the posts like floor leader of House etc that the Prince Regent thinks he is too good for.

Let us now turn to HOW after all, some things are not easy to oppose or take on directly. Other ways must be found. Attacking BJP for choosing a Dalit affects their carefully constructed faade of sympathy for the subaltern. As we mentioned, most are upper-caste elites and therefore depend on their political loyalties and obedience to the cause to wipe clean their own privileged lives and fast-track careers and thus attack others for being anti-Dalit.

So, the choice of Kovind for the highest job was dealt with in a variety of ways not talking about it, blacking it out, attributing other reasons, cynicism etc. But such was the anger that unless I am mistaken, Madame never visited him once for courtesy, except to present memos and demands. Her coolies in the media have never said anything good about that man, who too rose to the highest office from a humble background. Contrast that with comparing Kanhaiya to Mahatma Gandhi and Rahul to the Mahatma for his splendid speech! It is not as if these boot lickers were short of words.

The choice of Murmu presents the same problem. And it will be dealt with in the exact same way. Propaganda, snide remarks, tangential attacks, outright lies and half-truths. And of course, selective blackouts.

So dont be surprised if attacks are launched on Modi and BJP from totally unexpected flanks. Some of these tried and tested weapons are still potent. All it takes is to get someone to throw a stone at some place of worship to start a global cycle of outrage that goes all the way to Biden or UNSC. Having tasted victory through street power, burning trains, violence and anarchy, that is yet another open route.

You can even expect tribals to be incited through well trained leftist liberal networks to nullify this choice.

The ecosystem is scared. They will lash out. It is best if both the government and the people are prepared.

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How PM Modi riles liberal elites: The choice of Droupadi Murmu, the frustration of the cabal and the dangerous games they might play - OpIndia

Yesterday, the United Conservative Party failed to get a leadership candidate it really could have used and instead got stuck with a non-candidate it sincerely wants nothing to do with.

Michelle Rempel Garner, touted for weeks by media pontificators as a likely contender to lead the UCP who had been granted special dispensation by the party to run despite not quite meeting its membership requirements, took a clear eyed look at her chances and said nuts to that plan.

Meanwhile, Raj Sherman, a former Alberta Liberal leader and one-man political wrecking crew whom it would be charitable to describe as sometimes erratic, said he was going to stick around and run anyway despite being told to get lost by the UCP.

I didnt think it was possible to feel empathy with the UCP, but after it suffered this double whammy in one day, its hard not to sort of.

Ms. Rempel Garner, the Conservative Party of Canada MP for Calgary Nose Hill, may have been the best chance the party had to field a credible leader for the early 21st Century, an economic conservative who nevertheless favoured reproductive and LBGTQ rights.

She would have been an excellent foil to NDP Leader and former premier Rachel Notley.

Alas for the UCP, Ms. Rempel Garner took a look at the Iron Age social attitudes nurtured by departing Premier Jason Kenney in the partys ranks and the simmering civil war in its caucus and cabinet and decided it couldnt be fixed. Who can blame her?

Details of her remarkably frank Dear John letter to the UCP yesterday are found here.

Dr. Sherman? Since his days as a junior member of Ed Stelmachs Progressive Conservative cabinet, the Edmonton Emergency Room physician has left a trail of political devastation in his wake.

In 2010, he gave premier Stelmach little choice but to fire him after he penned a rambling, sometimes incoherent email attacking his own partys failure to reduce Emergency Room wait times and mailed it to, well, almost everyone.

This wouldnt have been so bad if Dr. Sherman hadnt been the Parliamentary assistant to what was known in those days as the minister of health and wellness.

Given the boot by Mr. Stelmach, Dr. Sherman followed up with a media interview attacking Alberta Health Services Board chair Ken Hughes and then health minister Ron Liepert, now one of Ms. Rempel Garners Conservative Caucus colleagues in Ottawa.

In 2011, Dr. Sherman took a notion to run for the leadership of the Alberta Liberal Party, whose leader David Swann really wanted to retire.

The Liberals had two good candidates for the job, capable MLAs Laurie Blakeman and Hugh Macdonald. However, the party had foolishly decided to allow anybody to vote for their new leader, including non-members.

On Sept. 10, 2011, thanks to that brainstorm, Dr. Sherman won the Liberal leadership on the first ballot.

He thought he had all the answers especially when it came to health care and for a spell he managed to persuade quite a few Albertans that was so. It didnt last.

At one point Dr. Sherman tried to modify the partys name to the Liberalberta party. That didnt work out either.

In the 2012 provincial election, Alison Redfords PCs formed the government with 61 seats. The Liberals once a credible opposition party managed to win only five seats with Dr. Sherman at the helm. That surprise kept the partys heart pumping, though, for another three years.

The Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith, now another candidate to lead the UCP, managed to win 17 seats, enough to become the Official Opposition. The NDP won four.

Dr. Sherman soon earned a reputation as a party leader who made startling revelations and strident claims about the conduct of the government and the health care system, and then couldnt back them up.

He didnt seem that interested in leading the party, either, which was described by a cynical commentator as a group of independents who shared office space.

Dr. Shermans performance in the 2013 preferential health care inquiry was underwhelming. His accusations, which contributed to the inquiry being called, amounted to very little, with retired Judge John Z. Vertes concluding there were only a few minor incidents of patients receiving preferential access to care.

Before the next election in 2015, Ms. Redfords premiership imploded; Jim Prentice was imported from Ottawa to save the four-decade PC dynasty; Ms. Smith and eight of her Wildrose MLAs committed political hara-kiri by crossing the floor of the legislature to the PCs; and the Liberals under Dr. Sherman began to disintegrate with two MLAs quitting to run federally. The NDP surpassed the Liberals both fund-raising and popularity.

On Jan. 26, 2015, Dr. Sherman chose to pull the plug on the Liberals, quitting as leader and promising not to run again as an MLA.

On May 5, 2015, the NDP astonished everyone, including themselves, by winning a majority government in a general election. The Liberals elected only one MLA, an outcome for which Dr. Sherman certainly deserves some of the credit. Dr. Swann, the only Liberal still standing, was pressed back into service as interim leader.

In the 2019 election, the Liberals failed to elect a single MLA.

When Dr. Sherman began talking about running for the leadership of the UCP after Premier Kenneys announcement in April he would be stepping down, the notion was greeted everywhere with incredulity.

Having been sensibly turned down by the UCP, Dr. Sherman insisted hes going to run anyway, sort of.

This will be a challenge since his name wont be on the ballot.

Yesterday, Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid gave Dr. Shermans notion a gently respectful hearing.

Mr. Braid reported that Dr. Sherman who suffered what seemed to be a heart episode last week at 55 planned to leave emergency medicine at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton after 30 years, having always worked some ER shifts through his political career.

This is a pity. By all accounts, Dr. Sherman is a fine emergency doc.

The same cannot be said of his political acumen.

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Told to take a hike by UCP, former Alberta Liberal leader Raj Sherman says he'll run to lead Conservatives anyway - albertapolitics.ca

Ottawa, ON Matt Jeneroux, Conservative Shadow Minister for Housing and Diversity and Inclusion, and Luc Berthold, Deputy Leader of the Official Opposition and Qubec Political Lieutenant, today released the following statement in response to the CMHCs Housing Market Information report:

Todays report released by the CMHC blows a hole through the Liberals housing narrative, exposing that their plan will fail to make housing more affordable for Canadians.

The report identifies a 3.5 million shortfall between the current rates of new constructions and the baseline for housing affordability for Canadians, meaning that over 22 million units are needed by 2030. Simply put, this report is the most recent confirmation of what Conservatives have been warning of all along.

The Liberal government has had six years to fix the issue of housing affordability and has failed to develop a plan that works. Instead, they double-down on a failing system that favours foreign buyers over affordability for Canadians and continues to see supply lag far behind demand.

As families and young people are being priced out of the market and abandoning the dream of home ownership, Canadians cant afford more hollow promises and failed programs from Justin Trudeau. Since the Liberals formed government in 2015, the average price of a home has nearly doubled. In the last year alone, prices have jumped by nearly 20 per cent, making the dream of home ownership unattainable for families and young people across Canada, and driving the sky-high rent costs we are seeing in cities across the country.

Enough is enough. Conservatives will continue to fight for families and young people across Canada who are struggling to afford rent and are giving up on homeownership. We will continue to advocate for measures that increase supply, combat money laundering, improve mortgage policies, and simplify the tax code. Our plan will provide meaningful solutions that prioritize Canadians and put families first, not speculators.

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Liberal housing plan will not fix affordability crisis: CMHC - Conservative Party of Canada

Former NSW transport minister Andrew Constance does not have a plan B.

For the first time in 20 years, Constance is not a politician after bowing out of his long career in state politics to contest the federal seat of Gilmore. But the long-term state minister did not think it would end like this.

Former NSW transport minister Andrew Constance has not ruled out a future in politics.Credit:Janie Barrett

Counting came down to the wire, but his federal ambitions fell short by just 373 votes, and Constance failed to pick up the South Coast seat the Liberals were pinning their hopes on. His request for a recount was knocked back by the Australian Electoral Commission, but for now, he is happy.

However, the fire in his belly has not gone. The career MP hasnt ruled out another tilt at Canberra, although he says the troubled NSW division of the party he joined as a Young Liberal needs to find its way or face irrelevance.

The party cant exist for itself, its got to exist for the community, Constance said. Its got to reflect community values and community thinking. Politics cant continue as a dog-eat-dog world because it isnt resulting in good outcomes for our community.

While Constance, 48, was a constant and senior figure in the NSW Coalition after it was swept to power in 2011, he rose to prominence after the deadly Black Summer fires. He almost lost his home in Malua Bay on the final day of 2019. That day, New Years Eve, changed me forever, he later said.

Andrew Constance, pictured in January 2020, was personally caught up in the Black Summer bushfires. Credit:Kate Geraghty

He publicly clashed with then prime minister Scott Morrison, who Constance said probably got the welcome he deserved after an ill-fated trip to the fire-ravaged town of Cobargo, where Morrison was heckled by locals.

I know this is tough, and I know Im on his side of politics. But the only two people who are providing leadership at this stage are [NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner] Shane Fitzsimmons and [premier] Gladys Berejiklian, Constance said at the time.

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The Liberal Party cant exist for itself: Constance on life after politics - Sydney Morning Herald

The lesson to be learned from the rise of the teals and other fracturing of the centre-right vote in Australia is that the Liberal party needs to have a clearly defined purpose if it wants to succeed.

This disintegration is not entirely without precedent. By the time the United Australia Party officially dissolved in 1945 the party had long been rudderless, its raison detre of getting the nation through the Depression with thrift and sacrifice having exhausted itself.

It was Robert Menzies who famously resurrected the fortunes of the Australian centre-right, but he did not do it by establishing a broad church. While it was certainly meant to have a broad appeal ranging from salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, Menzies explicitly founded what he called a party with a philosophy.

Recently in the Guardian Van Badham argued that history shows that the Australian centre-right succeeds most when it appeals to the centre. However, the formation of the Liberal party represented no leftward shift from its predecessor, which after all had been formed around an ex-Labor premier of Tasmania.

The Liberal party represented a revival of Australias strongest political tradition, namely liberalism, and with it came a clear sense of direction. Menzies was tapping into something with deep roots in Australian history, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century virtually every Australian politician called themselves liberal.

In the Australian context liberalism has conservative elements, which can often lead to confusion in definitions. By the time of federation liberals had triumphed such that defending that which existed was to conserve a liberal order. Australian liberals have always believed that freedom flourishes under our existing institutions, including parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy.

Australian liberalism thus contains many of the tenets of the philosophy of Edmund Burke, whom Menzies admired. During the 1940s when Menzies was giving his series of radio broadcasts made famous by the forgotten people, he quoted from Burke that a political party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.

The concept of the broad church when it comes to the Liberal party of Australia is a legacy of John Howard, who was trying to put to bed ideological infighting which had dogged the party throughout the 1980s. But the fact that the Liberal party was led out of the wilderness by Howard rather than a Peacock says a lot.

The Australian centre-right has tended to succeed when it has a clearly defined purpose, whether that be upholding patriotism during and after the first world war, maintaining fiscal conservatism in response to our gravest economic crisis, or defending the role of free enterprise threatened by Chifleys bank nationalisation and the rise of international communism.

The Australian centre-right has failed when it becomes purposeless, like the end of the UAP or even during the 1980s, when Labor had taken up the crucial job of Reagan/Thatcher style economic reform.

Leaders who define themselves by their moderation have failed because they go out of their way to make the party pointless. Look at not just Peacocks failure, but the unexpected near defeats of 1969 and 2016. It must be remembered that Malcolm Fraser, who was electorally successful, only drifted to the left after office.

Australias unusual system of compulsory voting and compulsory preferencing does drag politics towards the centre. Australia has a long tradition of sacred cows that cannot be touched because of this, namely the Australian settlement which endured for decades, and an industrial relations system that cost Stanley Melbourne Bruce and John Howard not just their prime ministerships but their seats. One could argue that border protection has become a new settled issue in this vein.

But just because our voting system nudges politics towards the centre does not mean that centre-right parties are rewarded for leaning into this and losing their sense of direction. People need to be motivated to campaign when they dont have a union cajoling them to do so, and right-leaning preferences are far less reliable at coming back to their respective major party.

The recent wave of teal independents follows the fracturing of the UAP into multiple parties towards the end of its lifespan, but even before this it was the centre-right who introduced preferencing because of a tendency to have a multiplicity of candidates.

People who value individual freedom and personal conscience tend to herd about as well as cats. They need to be inspired and led.

Moderate Liberals are often fond of quoting Menzies as saying that Liberals were determined to be a progressive party, but what is too often forgotten is that as a visionary with a strong will Menzies would define what progress meant. He was not a weathervane pointing the direction of social and political trends beyond his control, and which actively eat away at a liberal ethos.

The centre-right will recover sooner or later, when it again finds its purpose. It is difficult to imagine that this will happen by simply chasing the teal vote.

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The Liberal party cannot rebuild until it rediscovers its reason to exist - The Guardian

None of these stories can be said to reflect or advance the agenda of anything you might call the left. Mainstream American movies have, for decades, been in love with guns, suspicious of democracy, ambivalent about feminism, squeamish about divorce, allergic to abortion, all over the place on matters of sexuality and very nervous about anything to do with race.

I know there are exceptions, and Im not trying to flip the script and reveal the reactionary face of Hollywood, though its true that in the years of the Production Code (from the mid-30s until the late 60s), Hollywood upheld a fairly conservative vision of American life. Nonmarital sex was strictly policed, interracial romance completely forbidden. Crime could not pay, and the dignity of institutions had to be protected. Even in the post-Code years, what mainstream American movies have most often supplied arent critical engagements with reality, but fantasies of the status quo. The dominant narrative forms, tending toward happy or redemptive endings or, more recently, toward a horizon of endless sequels are fundamentally affirmative of the way things are. What they affirm, most of all, is consensus, an ideal of harmony that isnt so much apolitical as anti-political, finding expression not in the voting booth but at the box office.

At least since the end of World War II, the production of consensus has been integral to Hollywoods cultural mission and its business model. During the war, the studios worked closely with the military to deliver morale-boosting, mission-explaining messages to the home-front public, a collaboration that helped raise the industrys prestige and its sense of its own importance. In the postwar era, even as they faced challenges from television, the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the demographic volatility of the audience, the studios conceived their mission in universal terms. Movies were for everybody.

That article of faith has always been a hard sell in a society defined by pluralism and, perhaps more persistently than wed like to admit, by polarization. The notion that movies in the second half of the 20th century reflected a now-vanished consensus is doubly dubious. The consensus was never there, except insofar as Hollywood manufactured it. Perhaps more than any other American institution, Hollywood worked to foster agreement, to imagine a space within the theater walls and on the screen where conflicts could be resolved and contradictions wished away. In the westerns, the cowboys fought the Indians, the ranchers battled the railroads, and the sheriffs shot it out with the outlaws. But the outcome of those struggles was the pacification of the frontier and the advance of a less violent, more benevolent civilization. In the dramas of racial conflict, Sidney Poitier and an avatar of intolerance (Tony Curtis, Spencer Tracy, Rod Steiger) found common ground in the end.

This wasnt propaganda in the usual sense, but rather an elaborate mythos, a reservoir of stories and meanings that didnt need to be believed to be effective. Weve always known that movies arent real we like to insist that watching them is a kind of dreaming and thats partly why we love them so much.

By we I mean the movie audience, a collective that for a long time implied a parallel form of citizenship, a civic identity with its own ideology. The best cultural history of American movies, by the critic and scholar Robert Sklar, is called Movie-Made America. The corollary to that title, and one of Sklars arguments, is that moviegoing made Americans.

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Are the Movies Liberal? - The New York Times

The actor Johnny Depp has won his defamation case against former wife Amber Heard. The suit was provoked by an article in the Washington Post, penned by Heard in 2018, that cast her as the face of domestic violence. The jury awarded Depp $15 million in damages after finding that Heard's statements about their marriage were false and that she acted with "actual malice."

It was a stunning verdict, and one that seems to spell the end of the #MeToo movement's edict that we #BelieveAllWomen. But it should come as no surprise that these once ubiquitous and socially enforced liberal feminist edicts are now beginning to succumb to the scrutiny and skepticism that they have so far managed to avoid. The Depp v. Heard case breathed new life into once dismissed criticisms about the limits of #MeToo and the disregard the movement has shown for the importance of due process.

One of the most shocking revelations of the trial was the fact that the American Civil Liberties Union played a major role in getting the defamatory OpEd published, even writing the first draft. An organization supposedly devoted to due process and civil liberties had taken an egregious role in depriving those same rights to Depp.

Needless to say, #MeToo, like any other political or social movement, proved not immune to cynical weaponization. Though the sentiments and aspirations of the movement are in fact noble, the incentive structure surrounding victimhood, grievance and even feminism writ large in the realm of media and political organizations is rife with avenues for opportunism, careerist maneuvering and attention seeking.

Indeed, the liberal feminist mode has come to rely heavily on media spectacle, celebrity and a careerist incentive structure in which success is built on scalps taken without due process. After all, the #MeToo movement has been liberal feminism's greatest hit of late; what does it say of feminism more broadly that its most high-profile success devolved into celebrity smut and the cynical weaponization of grievance?

Of course, liberal feminism's influence in the media is not the only culprit in this pernicious trend. Race-related activism and the climate that grew out of Black Lives Matter has also been rife with similar incidents of cynicism and media scandal. The infamous Jussie Smollett case was yet another example of a celebrity making dubious claims about identity-based violence that ended up being proven false by a court of law. When the Smollett hate crime accusation initially emerged, there was an outpouring of sympathy and support from major celebrities and activists, while those who expressed skepticism were viewed as insensitive or hateful by comparison. Even after Smollett's narrative was proven false, BLM's co-founder Patrice Cullors asked followers to rally and "call the jails" to demand Smollett's release.

Cullors continued to beseech the public for sympathy and accused critics of spreading "disinformation" about the case, despite the clear evidence that Smollett fabricated the attack. "We need folks to challenge the misinformation and disinformation around this case," Cullors said. "That's so critical. What happened to Jesse can happen to any of us, and it's completely unacceptable."

The response of the liberal media in the aftermath of the Heard/Depp Case has included similar levels of cynicism; desperate attempts have been mounting to deflect and deny the consequences of a mode of operation that has gone unchecked in the name of protecting higher cultural causes and aspirations.

Just yesterday, The Root columnist Candice McDuffie wrote an absurd OpEd titled "Amber Heard Verdict Sends A Message to Black Women Everywhere." The piece attempted to argue that the skepticism and mockery that Heard's claims have been met with are not motivated by evidence but instead an undercurrent of seething misogyny.

These desperate efforts to conceal the chinks in the moral armor of liberal feminism continue to slip to new lows. The zealous and emotionally driven liberal media class are now being forced to confront the contradictions that emerge when grievance is portrayed as beyond reproach and scrutiny is equated with hostility.

We must continue to resist the incentive to adjudicate justice based on social edicts and influences instead of due process and evidence.

Angie Speaks is the cohost of the Low Society Podcast.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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Johnny Depp's Victory Is a Crack in the Moral Armor of Liberal Feminism | Opinion - Newsweek

Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 mile) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.

The problem isnt government. Its our government. Nor is the problem unions another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?

One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, the director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper titled State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back. His definition is admirably terse. State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively, he told me. When a government cant collect the taxes its owed or build the sign-up portal for its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail its already spent billions of dollars on, thats a failure of state capacity.

But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindseys argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isnt intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right:

What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades; embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state; and recognizing the vital role played by the nations public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s; reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts; and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.

The Biden administration cant do much about the rights hostility to government. But it can confront the mistakes and divisions on the left.

A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In The Procedure Fetish he argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that thats because American politics in general and the Democratic Party, in particular, are dominated by lawyers. Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States, Bagley writes. And if all youve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.

This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this adversarial legalism and shown that its a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state, he writes. The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions the list goes on and on.

The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagleys ultimate and, in my view, wisest point. Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow, he says. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair. That is what weve lost in fact, not just in perception.

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Opinion | What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds - The New York Times

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Premier Doug Ford had an impressive election victory on Thursday, but its not the start of a Progressive Conservative dynasty in Ontario and the Liberal Party isnt going to disappear.

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People who think in such politically apocalyptic terms dont know the history of Ontario politics.

Its going to be very difficult for the PCs to win a third majority government in 2026, whether Ford is still premier or has retired and been replaced by a successor.

The last time any party in Ontario achieved three majority governments in a row was when John Robarts and the PCs won the 1963 and 1967 elections, followed by Bill Davis winning a third majority in 1971 51 years ago.

Davis Ontarios longest serving premier in the modern era (1971 to 1985) never won back-to-back majorities, let alone three in a row.

Following his 1971 majority government, Davis won minority governments in 1975 and 1997, followed by a second majority in 1981.

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The last political dynasty in Ontario 42 years lasted from 1943 when George Drew was elected premier to 1985, when Davis retired from politics, 37 years ago.

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Since then, Ontario voters have elected and defeated Liberal, PC and NDP governments without any enduring loyalty to any one party.

The Liberals David Peterson won fewer seats in the 1985 election than PC premier Frank Miller who succeeded Davis (48 for the Liberals, 52 for the PCs).

But Peterson forged an alliance with then NDP leader Bob Rae (whose party won 25 seats in the 1985 election) to become premier.

Petersons Liberal government lasted five years a minority government from 1985 to 1987 followed by a majority from 1987 to 1990 before being defeated by Rae and the NDP, who won a majority government that lasted from 1990 to 1995.

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Rae and the NDP were defeated in 1995 by the PCs Mike Harris, who won two majority governments (1995 and 1999) before resigning in 2002, with the party choosing Ernie Eves as his successor.

Eves lost the 2003 election to the Liberals Dalton McGuinty, who won two majority governments (2003 and 2007) followed by a minority government in 2011.

McGuinty announced his retirement a year later and was replaced by Kathleen Wynne, who won a majority government, from 2014 to 2018.

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Wynne was defeated by Ford and the PCs in 2018, who won a majority government and have now been re-elected with a second majority, which will run until 2026.

The Liberal party isnt going to disappear, even though it was reduced to seven seats in the 2018 election and added only one more on Thursday, insufficient to achieve official party status which today requires 12 seats.

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The NDP lost official party status in the 1999 and 2003 elections and survived to become the official opposition party in the last two elections.

Since the end of the PC dynasty in Ontario in 1985, the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP have all been in government, all been the official opposition party and all been the third party in the Legislature.

The reason is that Ontario has a mature three-party system (the Greens having won only one seat in the last two elections).

A more enduring theme in Ontario politics is that voters prefer their provincial government to be of a different political stripe than the federal government which repeated itself Thursday, with Fords victory while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are in power in Ottawa.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com

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GOLDSTEIN: There's no Tory dynasty in Ontario and the Liberals aren't dead - Toronto Sun

A Liberal-led parliamentary inquiry into the complaints handling processes of the ABC and SBS will not go ahead.

The environment and communications Senate committee officially dropped its inquiry on Thursday after the completion of an independent review of the procedures.

The inquiry into the public broadcasters was suspended in November last year after the independent review was announced.

Ita Buttrose, chair of the ABC, had previously described the Senate inquiry as an act of political interference designed to intimidate.

The Greens also condemned it as a partisan attempt to undermine the ABCs independence.

The committees chairman, Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, wrote in a brief report tabled in parliament on Thursday that the ABC board had released details of its independent review on 17 May, which included the creation of a new position of ABC ombudsman.

As a result of the ABC board adopting all of the review recommendations, and in particular the board agreeing to the establishment of an ABC ombudsman appointed by, and reporting to, the board, the committee has decided not to proceed with its inquiry, he wrote.

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Liberal-led Senate inquiry into ABC and SBS abandoned - The Guardian