“The character of the process by which the views of the intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow is therefore of much more than academic interest. Whether we merely wish to foresee or attempt to influence the course of events, it is a factor of much greater importance than is generally understood. What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles. Paradoxically enough, however, in general only the parties of the Left have done most to spread the belief that it was the numerical strength of the opposing material interests which decided political issues, whereas in practice these same parties have regularly and successfully acted as if they understood the key position of the intellectuals. Whether by design or driven by the force of circumstances, they have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this ‘elite,’ while the more conservative groups have acted, as regularly but unsuccessfully, on a more naive view of mass democracy and have usually vainly tried directly to reach and to persuade the individual voter.”

Friedrich Hayek “The Intellectuals and Socialism”

In the Epoch Times this week I praised Tom Holland’s Dominion for arguing compellingly that values we consider universal, such as “human rights”, are actually specifically Judeo-Christian in origin and I warned that they are unlikely to survive the ongoing loss of faith.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.

“To say [Garry] Geisel is appealing, of course, is to mean it only in the strictly legal sense.”

Linda Williamson in Ottawa Sun Oct. 4, 1999

“To speak of Dickens is to think of Bumble the beadle, and that carries our mind at once to a whole crowd of thick-headed magistrates, interfering philanthropists, tyrannical administrators of the Poor Law, and the like. Have you ever noticed the fact that in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in the whole range of English literature, a person in petty authority, a minor official hardly ever appears, except to be made ridiculous? There seems to be a deep conviction in our minds that the man who carries some wand of office is more likely than other men to be half knave and wholly fool.”

Transcript from the improbably surviving one of two records used to transport C.S. Lewis’s May 1941 talk to Icelanders, which we don’t even know if it was ever broadcast, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that our politicians are dangerously helpless in the face of explicit support for antisemitic terrorism not from active malevolence but because it’s a form of evil their woke “paradigm” or worldview can’t process… yet.

“It is impossible for someone like me who is not totally immersed in these questions to judge to what extent Aboriginal people sincerely wish to perpetuate in large measure, though with modern benefits, the lives of their ancestors. I doubt if the alternatives were clearly laid out, a majority of Indigenous people would choose to live nomadic lives tribally and eating fish and game. But whether it is a tactical masquerade to maximize compensation and reparations or a sincere commitment, native Canadians at the very least have a right not to be treated as if they were immigrants from a foreign and much different country. It hardly needs emphasis that they and their ancestral civilization antedated the arrival of the now overwhelming majority of Canadians of overseas ancestry, and as a now well recognized natural right, they’re entitled to preserve as much as they wish of their traditional civilization, as long as it does not violate fundamental principles of Canadian life.”

Conrad Black in National Post April 6, 2024