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Last month, the conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony published an essay in Quillette on The Challenge of Marxism. Hazony is known for his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, which lodged some valid critiques of liberalism, but was ultimately unconvincing in its effort to reframe nationalism as an anti-imperialist endeavor. His chosen exemplars included the United Kingdom, France, and the United States all countries with long histories of colonialism and expansionism.

With his new essay, Hazony has jumped into the culture wars, attempting to explain and criticize the astonishingly successful Marxist takeover of companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches. He concludes with a call for liberals to unite with conservatives to halt this takeover, lest the dastardly Marxists achieve their goal of conquering liberalism itself.

Hazonys essay, though long and detailed, has many flaws. In the end, its less a compelling takedown of contemporary leftists than another illustration of why conservatives should read Marx.

Hazony opens his essay with an odd claim. Contemporary Marxists, he argues, arent willing to wear their colors proudly, instead attempting to disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including the Left, Progressivism, Social Justice, Anti-Racism, Anti-Fascism, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, Identity Politics, Political Correctness, Wokeness, and more. Nonetheless the essence of the political left remains staunchly Marxist, building upon Marxs framework as Hazony understands it.

For him, Marxism has four characteristics. First, it is based on an oppressor/oppressed narrative, viewing people as invariably attached to groups that exploit one another. Second, it posits a theory of false consciousness where the ruling class and their victims may be unaware of the exploitation occurring, since it is obscured by the ruling ideology. Third, Marxists demand the revolutionary reconstitution of society through the destruction of the ruling class and its ideology. And finally, once the revolution is accomplished, a classless society will emerge.

This account ignores a tremendous amount of what makes Marxism theoretically interesting, focusing instead on well-known tropes and clichs. It is startling, but telling, that Hazony never once approaches Marxism as a critique of political economy, even though Marx was kind enough to label two of his books critiques of political economy. By effacing this fundamental characteristic of Marxism, Hazony reduces it to a simplistic doctrine that could be mapped onto more or less anything.

If it is true that Marxism is just an oppressor/oppressed narrative with some stuff about a ruling ideology and revolution tacked on, then mostly every revolutionary movement through history has been Marxist even before Marx lived. The American revolutionaries who criticized the ruling ideology of monarchism and waged a war for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would fit three of Hazonys four characteristics, making them borderline proto-Marxists. About the only thing that remains of what distinguished Marx in Hazonys account is his claim that we are moving toward a classless society, something about which the German critic wrote very little.

Marxism is a very specific modernist doctrine, inspired by the events and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marx drew on three dominant currents in European thought at the time: the German philosophical reaction to Hegel, French radicalism, and English political economy.

From Hegel, Marx took the idea that history is the story of humanity moving toward greater freedom, understood by both Hegel and Marx as the capacity for self-determination. Marx famously attempted to turn Hegel right side up by contending that the renowned philosophers emphasis on ideas was misguided: material relations, Marx argued, largely moved history forward. From French radicalism, Marx took the idea of a class conflict between workers and the bourgeoisie. He was certain that one day we would live in a classless society, where every individual could develop each side of their nature.

And from the English political economists, Marx took much of his understanding about how capitalism worked; in particular, he drew on David Ricardo to argue that the exchange value of commodities lay in the socially necessary labor time invested in them. This last point was important for Marx circa Capital Volume One, since it seemed to explain the mechanism of workers exploitation. As David Harvey has pointed out, in the later posthumous volumes things become more complicated as Marx began to theorize on the nature of fictitious capital in the stock and credit markets. These developments demonstrated how capitalism was able to adapt to its own contradictions, but only through quick fixes that left the fundamental tensions intact and could even sharpen them over time.

This quick summary by no means captures the breadth of Marxs work. But it should at least suggest how much richer Marxism is than the simple antagonisms Hazony puts forward.

This tendency for crude simplification extends to Hazonys treatment of neo-Marxism, which he associates with successor movements led by Michel Foucault, postmodernism, and more including the Progressive or Anti-Racism movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain. But how or why these movements owe much, if anything, to Marxism is left extremely vague. Michel Foucault famously denigrated Marxism as outdated nineteenth-century economics and even flirted with neoliberalism. So much for class conflict as the engine of history. As for the anti-racist movements gathering steam across the world, theyre more likely to look to Martin Luther King and other totems of the black freedom struggle than Marx.

None of this is to say these movements dont or shouldnt draw from Marx (they should!). But reducing them to simply updated Marxism ignores the particularities and histories of progressive figures and movements rather ironic given that Hazony spends a great deal of The Virtue of Nationalism arguing for the benefits of a world of particular nations, each with its own identity, history, and customs that warrant respect.

Later in his essay, Hazony makes the novel decision to criticize liberals who believe Marxism is nothing but a great lie. This isnt because he wishes to praise Marxisms theoretical insights or political ambitions, but because he shares its progenitors critical appraisal of liberal individualism.

Hazony argues Marx was well aware that the liberal conception of the individual self, possessing rights and liberties secured by the state, was an ideological and legal fiction. While liberals felt that the modern state had provided full liberty for all, Hazony takes the Marxist insight to be that there will always be disparities in power between social groups, and the more powerful will always oppress or exploit the weaker. As he puts it:

Marx is right to see that every society consists of cohesive classes or groups, and that political life everywhere is primarily about the power relations among different groups. He is also right that at any given time, one group (or a coalition of groups) dominates the state, and that the laws and policies of the state tend to reflect the interests and ideals of this dominant group. Moreover, Marx is right when he says that the dominant group tends to see its own preferred laws and policies as reflecting reason or nature, and works to disseminate its way of looking at things throughout society, so that various kinds of injustice and oppression tend to be obscured from view.

Hazony goes on to criticize American liberals for pushing secularization and liberalization, particularly by excluding religion from schools and permitting pornography, which amount to quiet persecution of religious families. Liberals tend to be systematically blind to the oppression they wreak against conservatives, merely assuming that their doctrines provide liberty and equality for all. Hazony thinks Marx was far savvier in recognizing that by analyzing society in terms of power relations among classes or groups, we can bring to light important political phenomena to which Enlightenment liberal theories theories that tend to reduce politics to the individual and his or her private liberties are systematically blind.

None of this means Hazony is sympathetic to the idea that workers are the victims of exploitation or anything else that smacks of left-wing critique. Later in the essay, he criticizes Marxism for having three fatal flaws. First, Marxists assume any form of power relation is a relationship of oppressor and oppressed, even though some are mutually beneficial. Second, they believe that social oppression must be so great that any given society will inevitably be fraught with tension, leading to its eventual overthrow. And finally, Marx and Marxists are notoriously vague about the specifics of post-oppression society, and their actual track record is a parade of horrors.

Of the three, only the last strikes me as at all compelling. It is true that Marx never spelled out what a postcapitalist society would look like, and this ambiguity has led to figures like Stalin invoking his theories to justify tyranny. Socialists are better-off confronting this problem than pretending it doesnt exist, which makes us easier prey for critiques like Hazonys.

But whatever Marx intended, we can infer from his Critique of the Gotha Program that he wanted a democratic society free of exploitation, where the means of production were owned in common and distribution was organized according to the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Whatever that might look like, it bears little resemblance to the litany of dictatorships conservatives love to point to when trashing Marxism. (Conservatives critics also skate by the central role that class struggle and Marxist-inspired parties played in building social democracies, even if those societies never transcended capitalism.)

There are big problems with pretty much every other feature of Hazonys analysis of the flaws of Marxism and leftism. Hazony never takes on the specifically Marxist point that the relation between capital and labor is indeed oppressive and exploitative a key point, since Marx never claimed that all types of power relations or hierarchies were illegitimate. His argument was far more specific: capitalist relations were oppressive because they were based on the systematic exploitation of labor.

Hazony might have been on firmer ground with his second criticism if hed leaned into his critique of the teleological vision of history, which led some classical Marxists to claim capitalism was going to inevitably fall and be replaced by communism. But his contention doesnt even rise to this level. Instead, he wants to argue that in a conservative society, it is possible weaker groups [would] benefit from their position, or at least are better-off than in a revolutionarily reconstituted polity.

And this is where things get interesting.

Hazony isnt fond of liberalism. He sees American liberalism in particular as an oppressive force that has bullied religious and conservative families by advancing a pornographic, secular agenda. But Hazony is also deeply anxious that liberals will ally with progressive and Marxist groups the great evil, in his mind to further corrode conservatism.

In the most insightful part of his essay, Hazony describes the dance of liberalism and Marxism. Liberals and Marxists both believe in freedom and equality, and both are hostile to inherited traditions and hierarchies. Marxists and other progressives just take things a step further by arguing that real freedom and equality havent been achieved because of capitalism and other elements of liberal society. Under the right conditions, Hazony argues, liberals might become sympathetic to these arguments, since they often draw on the principles and rhetoric of liberalism. Liberals might even start pushing a Marxist agenda.

Hazony, then, isnt criticizing Marxism in the name of defending liberalism. What he is doing trying to entice centrists to side with the political right rather than the political left. He is willing to tolerate liberals as part of an alliance to prevent the Marxist conquest of society.

To make this attractive to liberals, Hazony raises the stakes by suggesting the political left wants to destroy democracy and eliminate both conservatives and liberals. He argues that both conservatives and liberals are distinct in allowing at minimum a two-party system dominated by themselves. By contrast, Marxists are only willing to confer legitimacy on ... one political party the party of the oppressed, whose aim is the revolutionary reconstitution of society. And this means that the Marxist political framework cannot co-exist with democratic government.

This is patently wrong. One of socialists ambitions since the nineteenth century has been to advance democracy in the political sphere, which is why they were central to the struggle for workers suffrage in Europe and elsewhere. Socialists deplore liberal capitalism for not being democratic enough. Likewise, the other progressive groups denigrated in Hazonys essay are hardly foes of democracy: anti-racist movements have been agitating against voter suppression.

It is also telling that Hazonys essay ignores the antidemocratic efforts of contemporary conservative strongmen, from Viktor Orbns dismantling of democracy in Hungary to Trumps flirtations with canceling the 2020 election. Probably a savvy move given that none of this supports Hazonys contention that liberal democrats have nothing to fear from aligning with the political right.

Interestingly, Hazonys essay skirts near a deep insight, before rushing away, perhaps for tactical reasons. The insight: both liberalism and Marxism properly understood are eminently modernist doctrines. Both emerged within a few centuries of each other and are committed to the principles of respecting moral equality by securing freedom for all.

The march of liberalism and socialism have razed traditionalist orders and hierarchies that insisted on naturalizing inequities of power. These traditionalist orders were neither natural nor particularly beneficent, subordinating women, LGBT individuals, religious and ethnic minorities, and so on for millennia.

Liberalism often failed to live up to its principles, which is partly why the political left emerged and remains so necessary. Liberals often engaged in just the kind of tactical alliances with conservative traditionalists Hazony calls for in order to maintain unjustifiable hierarchies. But this alliance is always fraught, since a liberal who doesnt believe in freedom and equality for all is no liberal.

The same is true of those of us on the political left, except we believe that these ideals cannot be achieved within the bounds of the liberal state and ideology. More radical reforms are needed to complete the historical process of emancipation from necessity and exploitation, though what reforms and how radical are matters of substantial debate. (My own preference is for what the philosopher John Rawls would call liberal socialism.)

All this brings us squarely back to Karl Marx, who was very aware of these dynamics. With Engels, he applauded liberal capitalism for both its productive capacity and, for the first time, enshrining formal equality for all. It had achieved this precisely by upending the old traditionalist order, profaning all that was sacred, and forcing humanity to face up to its real conditions for the first time.

But liberalism remained just one stage in the movement of history, and like all before it would eventually give way to a new form of society. Whether this is inevitable, as Marx sometimes seemed to imply, there are indeed many limitations to liberal democracy as it exists today. Liberals sincerely committed to freedom and equality should recognize that and ask if they are better-off allied to a political right committed to turning back the clock or striding into the future with progressives and socialists who share many of their fundamentally modernist convictions.

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Why Liberals Should Unite With Socialists, Not the Right - Jacobin magazine

In the real world, where successful businesses are operated somewhere in the broad range between break-even and absolute-maximum profitability, there was and is always leeway for being a bit unnecessarily fair and responsible to accept slightly smaller profit margins to fulfill implicit obligations to employees, customers, communities, society at large, decency itself. But while economists still argue over Friedmans theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists the Friedman doctrine turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in Its a Wonderful Life, the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that theyd been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

As for government regulation, Friedmans doctrine included a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose Catch-22. Any virtuous act by businesses beyond what the law requires is simpering folly, he insists, yet according to him too almost any government attempt to regulate business is the beginning of the end of freedom and democracy. Friedmans was a reductio ad absurdum purification of what had become a well-tempered, successful, increasingly fair free-market system. His vision was to revert to a fundamentalist capitalism from which a century of systemic interventions and buffers by democratic government and norms would be removed.

Friedman was horrified by the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to capitalism, profits, the soulless corporation and so on. Indeed, a survey-research firm that had been asking people every year if they thought business tries to strike a fair balance between profits and the interests of the public found the number who agreed had dropped to 33 percent in 1970 from 70 percent in 1968. (By the late 70s it had bottomed out at 15 percent.) The very same month that The New Yorker filled a whole issue with excerpts from a liberal professors hurrah-for-revolution best seller, The Greening of America, Friedman delivered his counterrevolutionary economic manifesto to 1.5 million Times subscribers. Yet its self-righteous, hyperbolic, screw-the-Establishment confrontationalism is also a product of that 1970 moment: While Friedman was reacting against the surging support for social justice, he did so in the spirit of the late 1960s. Two ascendant countercultures, the hippies and the economic libertarians, in 1970 one large and one still tiny, shared a new ultraindividualism as a prime directive: If it feels good, do it; follow your bliss; find your own truth; and do your own thing were just nice utopian flip sides of every man for himself. For businessmen who felt demonized by public opinion and besieged by tougher government regulation for the last few years, the militancy of the Friedman doctrine in The New York freaking Times a year after Woodstock was thrilling. And then, as now, to get what they were mainly after politically superlow taxes, minimized regulation they exploited the voter backlash against street protests by aggrieved, angry younger Americans.

Just as America reached Peak Left, the Friedman doctrine and, a year later, a battle plan commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, drafted by the corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, quoting Friedman, just before he joined the Supreme Court became founding scripture for an economic crusade to discredit the New Deal consensus and rewrite the social contract. Democratic and liberal leaders, alas, didnt put up much of a fight. At the end of the 1970s, for instance, PBS commissioned a 10-episode series, Free to Choose, starring Friedman and funded by General Motors, General Mills and PepsiCo. A spokesperson for the show promised it would explain to viewers like you how weve become puppets of big government. And indeed, in that four-TV-channel era, Friedman used his noncommercial government-subsidized PBS platform to argue that the Food and Drug Administration, public schools, labor unions and federal taxes, among other btes noires, were bad for America. The series premiered in January 1980, just before the first Republican primaries, in which Ronald Reagan was a candidate. Of course, Reagan won the nomination and the presidency, after which Friedman patted himself on the back for his work with Goldwater and the epochal move away from New Deal ideas. As Friedman put it in 1982, you need ideas that are lying around his ideas as ready alternatives to existing policies, and then at a ripe moment the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Throughout big business and finance and much of conventional wisdom, the Friedman doctrine came to mean that the pursuit of absolutely maximum profit for your company and yourself trumped every other value or motive, greed-is-good definitively replacing concern for the common good. A result was an American economy and culture driven by selfishness, callousness and recklessness. Before long, a big Hollywood movies most memorable scene was a kind of dramatization of the Friedman doctrine, Libertarian Economics for Dummies. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, sexy Gordon Gekko told his ecstatic fellow stockholders, that greed for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works. And greed, he promised, would make America great again.

In 1976, Friedman became the first Chicago school economist to win a Nobel Prize. That same year, two members of the University of Rochester business-school faculty published a 55-page paper conceived as an operational elaboration of the Friedman doctrine. Theory of the Firm made righteous greed seem scientific, with equations and language of the managers indifference curve is tangent to a line with slope equal to u kind. Its big point was that if corporate executives are mere salarymen rather than owners of company stock, theyll overspend on charitable contributions, get lax on employee discipline, concern themselves too much about personal relations (love, respect, etc.) with employees and the attractiveness of the secretarial staff. It is one of the most-cited economics papers ever. The professors also wrote a shorter, more accessible follow-up that ditched the math and the pretense of scholarly neutrality: big business has been cast in the role of villain by consumer advocates, environmentalists and the like, who want to spread the clich that corporations have too much power.

The modern understanding of how corporate managers should run companies, an article in The Harvard Business Review declared in 2012, has been defined to a large extent by that original Friedman-doctrine-inspired paper from 1976. It went beyond doctrinal Friedmania that companies must absolutely maximize profit, now positing as a kind of mathematical fact that stock price, a much less objective measure, was the only meaningful corporate metric. Soon a Reagan-administration S.E.C. rule change effectively gave free rein to public companies, for the first time since the New Deal, to buy up shares of their own stock on the open market in order to jack up the price. U.S. executive pay, meanwhile, shifted from consisting mainly of salary and bonus to mainly stock and stock options. Astonishingly, stock buybacks eventually consumed most of the earnings of S&P 500 companies, as they still do. So here we are with a re-engineered system in which just the richest 10th of us have 84 percent of all stock shares owned by Americans, and a ravaged economy in which the stock market is close to an all-time high.

Read the original here:
How Liberals Opened the Door to Libertarian Economics - The New York Times

The bill designed to keep the financial wheels of the provincial government churning is not yet a done deal, but the Opposition partiesand two Independent MHAshavescored a partial victory in the process, one that seeminglyquietsany chatter about an imminent provincial election.

Debate continues this week in the House of Assemblyon the Liberals'interim supply bill,which allows government money to keep flowing, ahead of a formal budget being passed.

For example, the billwould include funds to ensure workers are paid and the province to meet other financial obligations.

Late Tuesday night, the PCs, NDP andtwo Independent MHAsscored a political victory by passing an amendment making the interim supply bill for two months, instead of the three months the Liberals wanted.

"I think we simply demonstrated to the government that they can't do any old thing they want to do and we kept them to a sense of fiscal discipline," PC Leader Ches Crosbie said Wednesday afternoon.

Finance MinisterSiobhan Coadysaid "she didn't understandthe logic" of endorsing a 60-day bill. She said it took 57 days to pass a budget in 2018.

"I'd rather have more than less [time]," Coady added.

The PCs and NDPhad originally balked at the three-month proposal.

"We've been accommodating within reason but to be asking for threemonths right now is overreaching,"Crosbie said earlier this week. "Three months is a large blank cheque."

That measuredoesn't mean the entire interim supply bill has passed because other parts of the legislation must be voted on individually.

But the Tuesday night voteon the amendment underscores that the Liberal minority government needs votes from across the aislesin order to get bills passed.

Coady has said a budget will be presented on Sept. 30. The interim supply bill must be approved before that.

Budgets are usually announced in the spring, but the pandemic disrupted that financial schedule, and in March the Opposition parties supported a six-month $4.6-billion interim supply bill.

The NDPhad expressed concerns thata three-month supply bill would give the Liberals an opportunity to call a general election this fall.

On Wednesday, Crosbiepointedly said his party is not looking to potentially help bring down the government on a confidence vote related to the budget.

"They have plenty of time, the budget will pass[Coady]tells us in the House that there's going to be nothing in it that we canobject to, I'll take her on face value on that." he said.

"There won't be an issue passing the budget. There will not be an election, they will have plenty of money to pay the bills."

On Tuesday, before the vote on the bill's amendment, bothCoady and PC MHAand finance critic Tony Wakehamsaid neither party wants an election right now.

The supply bill was debated for a few hours on Wednesday morning and will continue this week.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

Originally posted here:
Opposition parties, Independents shave month off Liberals' spending bill - CBC.ca

Paul Wells: Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didn't cancel gravity, and that 'building back better' will, in fact, be hard work

Im grateful to the excellent Toronto Star columnist Heather Scoffield for noticing some fascinating comments Gerald Butts made on Monday.

Butts, of course, resigned in 2019 as Justin Trudeaus principal secretary and has been working since then as a consultant, climate-policy opinion leader and Twitter scold. He was a member of the Task Force for a Resilient Recovery, which spent the summer pushing hard on the build back better rhetoric that imagined the coronavirus pandemic as the dawn of a bold new green-energy future.

To say the least, excitement about a pandemic is counterintuitive. I started writing about the contradictions in June, when nameless Liberals were telling reporters, Itll be a good time to be a progressive government There are a lot of us who are dreaming big. I came back to the theme in August, when the PMO was setting Bill Morneau up as some kind of obstacle to their plans to build back better. And I wrote last week about the unsettling spectacle of Trudeau greeting Morneaus departure as, essentially, the end of history: We can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking. As much as this pandemic is an unexpected challenge, it is also an unprecedented opportunity.

It was already clear last week that some of these considerations were starting to weigh, perhaps belatedly, on the Prime Minister and his advisors. Theres a sensitivity to being perceived to hijack the moment for a green recovery, a senior Liberal source told the CBCs David Cochrane. Boy, I sure hope there is.

Along comes Butts, who on Monday was addressing something called the Recovery Summit, an ambitious online virtual conference organized by some of the usual suspects, including the (Trudeauist) Canada2020 think tank in Ottawa and the (Clintonist) Center for American Progress in Washington.

Butts kicked off the proceedings by pouring industrial quantities of cold water on everyone.

Its important tounderstand and appreciate the level of anxiety that people are going through right now, he said. Conferences like this one were made by and for members of the progressive movement, he said. But in a clear warning to people who consider themselves members of that movement, he added, We depend on the support of the broad middle class and regular people. When we keep that support we form governments. And when we dont, we lose governments.

In an even clearer warning against the weird self-celebratory tone of some of the rhetoric from the government over the summer, he added:Its really important to emphasize what were doing and whom were doing it forrather than celebrate the fact that we are doing it.

I havent spoken to Butts since a few months before the SNC-Lavalin controversy wrecked his career in government, and I doubt he minds at all. So it was odd to hear him sounding warnings that resembled things Ive been writing for months. Its pure coincidence. It simply reflects the fact that to anyone with any distance from the government echo chamber, the Trudeau circles weirdly giddy triumphalism of recent months has got to sound jarring.

To put it diplomatically, I think that in any crisis situation, people will repurpose their pet projects as urgent and necessary responses to the crisis at hand, Butts said. And its vitally important that, when people are feeling as anxious as theyre feeling right now, we start the solutions from where they are and build up from there. And not arrive in the middle of their anxiety with a pre-existing solution that was developed and determined before the crisis thats arisen.

I know theres a widespread assumption that Butts never really left the Trudeau circle, that he remains the PMs puppeteer. I think thats farcical. Butts probably has an easier time getting Ben Chin to return a call than some of my colleagues do, but for the most part hes basically a sympathetic outsider whos watching the work of friends from a distance. His remarks amplify and consolidate things Dave Cochrane was already hearing from senior Liberals last week. Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didnt cancel gravity or smite the foes of progress, as they define progress, from the earth. When Parliament returns next week, it will still be a venue of measurable personal risk for its occupants, like any large room for the foreseeable future. It will still contain more MPs who arent Liberals than MPs who are. It will be watched by a population that is worried, defensive, and incapable of ignoring risk for the sake of a resounding slogan. It speaks well of the Liberals that they have spent the summer working some goofy rhetoric out of their systems before returning to the real world.

This doesnt mean the government shouldnt pursue reductions in carbon emissions. They ran on promises to do so. They set ambitious targets, having spectacularly missed easier targets in the past. They faced concerted opposition and won. Working to reduce carbon emissions is necessary work with broad public support.

But it will be work. The clear implication of the dreaming big and unprecedented opportunity talk was that Liberals, including the Prime Minister, were talking themselves into believing school was out. That a global calamity would somehow transform hard work into a party, disarm the political opposition and, once againthis is a particularly sturdy fantasy of life in Trudeau-land, as Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau could tell youdelegitimize internal dissent.

It isnt so. Meeting the Liberals own climate goals will be hard work that will feel like hard work, if they care to take it up. The necessary changes will impose costs that will feel like costs before they provide benefits that feel like benefits. The very nature of this crisis will make building back better anything but a cakewalk.

First, because 2020 hasnt wiped out the former world. Building back better became a slogan a decade ago after earthquakes in New Zealand erased a lot of existing infrastructure. COVID-19 has been more like a neutron bomb, interrupting livelihoods but leaving neighbourhoods intact. If I had to build a new rail link from scratch between Toronto and Montreal, I might build something fancy. But the old one is still there. That makes a difference.

Second, because theres little likelihood of a sustained, long-term recovery like the one that characterized Canadas economy for 30 years after World War II, a comparison that was briefly fashionablea few months ago with the build-back-better set. The recoverys likely to be pretty quick, to pick up steam only after a vaccine or effective treatment becomes widespread, and to last only about as long as it takes to return to the status quo ante. Its fantasy to imagine miracle growth lasting the rest of everyones lifetime will take away costs and tradeoffs.

So the Trudeau governments duty to meet its climate targets remains, and so does just about all the difficulty of meeting them. Which means a central question about this Prime Ministerdoes he rise to challenges, ever? also remains.

Link:
Farewell to the Liberals easy green revolution - Maclean's

Among decided voters, 40% say they would back the Trudeau Liberals compared to 30% who would vote for Erin OTooles Conservatives. The NDP under Jagmeet Singh has the support of 15% of decided voters while the Greens have 7% and the Bloc Quebecois 6%.

Trudeaus support is strongest in Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and Ontario. The Liberals also have a strong lead among women of all age groups and men aged 18-34. The Conservatives only hold a slight lead among men 35 and up.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

The numbers, if they translated into votes, would likely deliver Trudeau a stronger majority than he received in 2015.

Nick Kouvalis, Principal at Campaign Research, said the numbers show that Trudeaus gamble in shutting down Parliament has worked.

I think that for a month now they havent been getting the scrutiny on the WE scandal and now the Trudeau Liberals are talking about national pharmacare, daycare money and building a green economy and now they are up in the polls, Kouvalis said.

Based on his polling, Kouvalis said there are enough Canadians interested in the massive spending and social programs he is offering that if Trudeau were to trigger an election, he could find strong support with voters. He added, though, that if the throne speech and budget receive significant scrutiny, that support could fade away again.

Anything can happen in election campaign, Kouvalis said.

Those words are true and should be heeded by all parties.

The Liberals, and Trudeau, had been riding high in the polls for months amid the pandemic bump that most sitting political leaders were seeing. That lead evaporated amid daily headlines of scandal.

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LILLEY: Closing Parliament and WE scandal boosts Liberal poll numbers - Toronto Sun