[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

First, good post, kn--and a fun debate. Here are my responses.

Originally Posted by kn

At its worse, it’s good retail politics. At its best, it’s a recognition that the money doesn’t belong to government, a concept difficult for statist elites to comprehend.

It's hard for me to understand how you can have the same people who've held the reins of power in Alberta for 30 years, now supposedly marshalled against the "statist elites." Who are these boogeymen? The liberals, who've been in the political wilderness since the 1920s?

If you say the Tories, then sure, I'd agree. But the Wild Rose is the same people, running on the same platform. You can't
a) be in power for 30 years, and then
b) claim that the "statist elite" is somebody else.

Secondly, I think the fact that sometimes funds may be used by the government to greater good than its citizens can use it for is so obvious it's practically trite. The fact that the Rutherford Conservatives in this province refuse to even acknowledge it is just evidence of their hypocrisy, because you have to think that even they realize it's true.

But that's in a way not even the point; what you call "good retail politics" is also sort of insulting to the electorate. I think this is precisely the kind of idea that the "statist elite" loves: you leave us in power for another term, and in exchange we'll toss you a breadcrumb from the top of the pyramid.

If anything, this emphasizes the political asymmetry here: the elite can now re-package populism for its own uses, as a social control mechanism to keep what you call the "great unwashed" pacified, duped into the belief that the elite, now dressed in shirtsleeves instead of pinstripes, will protect the interests of the populace instead of the interests they've always protected--their own.

Yeah, why should we elect the senate when it can be used for patronage appointments? And citizen-initiated referenda? Who would want the great unwashed proposing legislation?

I never said we should have patronage appointments. But I did say that we needed meaningful electoral reform. This ridiculous straw poll that we run for Senate doesn't count, and I think Preston Manning would agree, actually. As long as it's dependent on the discretion of the P.M. it's not really an election, and as long as the senate continues to be a rubber-stamp arm of the government it's not meaningful anyway. Manning wanted a "Triple E" senate. What we have is only ONE "E"and even that is an illusion.

As for citizen-initiated referenda, sure, why not? Let the unwashed have their little speaker's corner, while the meaningful political work is done by the legislative branch, who are elected the same way they've always been elected, in a first-past-the-post system that causes bizarre results sometimes and encourages gerrymandering.

I'm not opposed to electoral reform; we need it. But these ideas are like trying to eat soup with a slotted spoon.

Populism has always existed in Alberta’s political culture. The UFA, Social Credit, and Reform Party all had populist elements. Manning experienced it under his father long before Flanagan was around. I can’t speak for the Wildrose or other parties, but I know when I was a director for the Calgary-West constituency association in the early days of the Reform Party, anyone could have a say in shaping policy.

FL has been very clear that this is not the case now; we should not be listening to just anyone's ideas about the direction of this province, even if they're candidates for office. Rather, she insists, policy comes down from the top, and if the top doesn't say it, it's not part of the Wild Rose agenda.

There were good things--and some bad--about the old Reform Party. Preston Manning was, as much as I disagreed with him about almost everything, a true visionary. But that old party has been overtaken by the cynicism of establishment Canadian politics, as you yourself point out: Harper, who was never the visionary that Manning was, has proven not to be an agent of change after all, which is disappointing but not a surprise if you know him at all.

But the Harper-Manning debate isn't really even relevant to the debate over "who the Wild Rose" is. They're trying to tap into the populism that animated Reform, but really these are just Tories with a different name.

That being said, any populist movement will necessarily need to be articulated and usually that's by an “elite”. The question revolves around the different outlook between a populist elite and statist elite. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on comparative analyses of various schools of economic theory but I’d be really surprised if Love and Flanagan were ideologues who saw no role for government. They simply have more faith in people and the market to make better decisions than the state.

And this is where the shoe drops. A "populist" elite is an oxymoron, but it's the very bill of goods that Rod Love sold us under the banner of the PCs. The idea of populism is to topple the elite, and that must take structural and formal as well as rhetorical form for it to have any meaning.

You are right about one thing: Rod Love isn't an ideologue. He's a cynic, who I'm relatively sure doesn't believe anything in particular. Flanagan is an ideologue, though--to the point where he's inexplicably popular in right-wing circles in Alberta but is a figure of ridicule in intellectual circles in his own field across Canada, and would be more widely ridiculed if anyone outside of Canada had even heard of him.

At the end of the day, it's not about "faith in the state" so much as it's about what you think the state is: a populist believes that the state, in its ideal form, is a vessel for popular action, the collective force of the common will marshalled to the greater good. The "statist elite" is of the view that the reins of power must be carefully guarded in order to protect the interests of those who hold them.

I know which I think the Wild Rose is standing for; they've stood for it since they got into office in the 1990s, and now they've finally managed to purge the last vestiges of Peter Lougheed conservatism from their ranks, which is pretty ungrateful considering he was the one who led them out of the wilderness after their 40 years wandering the desert.

Actually, I think it’ll be more of a change than we’ve seen with the Harper Conservatives since Wildrose will not be as hampered by the need to represent various diverse regions of the country or feel pressured to move to the left.

I guess this is a matter of opinion; Harper, of course, isn't a populist either, but that's because he's basically a blank slate. Harper has of course overseen some change, but it hasn't been the sort of change that Preston Manning circa 1985 would recognize or endorse.