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On March 28, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled the 2023 federal budget, hailing it as a historic opportunity. The budget was widely anticipated to include major green energy incentives in response to President Joe Bidens Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It delivered on this front, providing Can$20.9 billion over six years bundled in a series of tax credits for clean electricity, clean hydrogen, and clean technology manufacturing. However, the overall budget is a mixed bag, with its climate initiatives serving as a proxy for other half measures contained therein. On matters of importance for working people such as housing and public sector wages the budget appears to be a total failure.

Environmentalist organizations, for starters, were ambivalent about the climate plans outlined in the budget. Keith Stewart, energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said the group welcomes the unprecedented federal investments in greening the grid, which will be critical as we phase out fossil fuels by replacing them with electricity from renewable energy sources. However, he cautioned, the budget outlines continued plans to subsidize oil and gas companies, sending mixed messages. No money in the world could convince oil companies to become good actors on climate change, so it would be far more effective to simply regulate their emissions and invest scarce public funds into accelerating investments in efficiency and electrification, Stewart added.

Equiterre, the environmentalist NGO where Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault worked before he entered politics, criticized the budgets dependence on unproven carbon and storage technology, which allows oil and gas companies to continue production unabated. Equiterres director of government relations Marc-Andr Viau said:

This budget is in line with the governments environmental vision, which aims to achieve its environmental objectives through a combination of clean and less clean technologies. Some announced measures such as the decarbonization of electricity networks are promising, but some, such as the significant financing of carbon capture and storage, are causing perplexity.

Furthermore, the budget doesnt contain any investments in public transit. The clean transportation program manager for Environmental Defence Canada, Nate Wallace, warned that a lack of funding in emissions-reducing public transit will lead to a death spiral of service cuts and fare increases that will push people into their cars. Wallace expressed hope that the governments coming update on permanent transit funding, expected later this year, will address funding shortfalls, but noted that these investments are needed immediately. He did, however, applaud the federal governments investment in zero-emission vehicle manufacturing as a measured response to the IRA.

Another major component of the budget is $13 billion for the expansion of a means-tested dental-care program for those who make less than $90,000, which was a key piece of the federal Liberals agreement with the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP). The NDP committed to support the Liberal minority government until 2025 in exchange for certain concessions under the agreement.

In 2022, the federal government created a temporary dental benefit cash payment for children under twelve, in families under the income threshold, which will be replaced next year with a government insurance program. This year, eligibility will expand to people under eighteen, seniors, and people with disabilities who fall below the income threshold and lack private insurance. By 2025, everyone in households earning less than $90,000 will become eligible.

To address rising inflation, the budget includes a onetime grocery rebate on the federal Goods and Services Tax, which will provide families with two children up to $467, seniors $225, and single people $234 to help them pay for groceries. This years average monthly grocery bill, for a family of four, is expected to be $1,357. The NDP has inexplicably touted this meager spending which Freeland described as narrowly focused and fiscally responsible as a win for affordability.

Pharmacare, another important Liberal concession for the NDPs support, remains absent from the budget. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh acknowledges that this wont come to fruition before the expiration of their deal, but continues to prop up the Liberal government nonetheless. Evidently, Singh believes that there is merit in focusing on the affordability, climate, and dental-care half measures, in spite of the fact that the Liberals were likely to implement these items anyways. It is likely that the Liberals will outline a framework for implementing a pharmacare system just in time for the next election. This will maintain the partys perennial promise of pharmacare, a pledge theyve been making for the past quarter century.

The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) lambasted the budget for not including any measures to ease the housing affordability crisis. Its clear that the federal government does not see the scale and urgency of these crises, and have offered no solutions, said CAEH president and CEO Tim Richter. For thousands of Canadians who will not be able to pay their rent this week, they will find no relief or meaningful support in this budget. Too many others will be projected unnecessarily into the life-threatening experience of homelessness.

The only housing commitment in the budget is a $4 billion investment in an Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy. While the measure is very much needed to address the disproportionate number of homeless indigenous people, it is insufficient. Its also being delivered by the Canada Housing and Mortgage Company, rather than National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc. This decision calls to mind antecedent colonial impositions that have always been disguised as charity.

The lack of urgency on the housing file makes sense when you realize that 38 percent of parliamentarians own real estate, meaning that they stand to profit from housing scarcity, according to disclosure records compiled by Davide Mastracci at Passage. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland co-owns two rental properties on Aquinas Street in London, UK, with her husband, New York Times reporter Graham Bowley, from which they draw income. She also owns a residential property in Kyiv and farmland in her hometown of Peace River, Alberta.

Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen owns a rental property in Ottawa, from which he draws income. Its entirely unsurprising that those who benefit from the housing affordability crisis fail to appreciate its urgency.

Echoing Biden, Chapter Three of the Canadian budget states that in order for companies to take full advantage of green energy subsidies, they will have to guarantee that wages paid are at the prevailing level. However, as we saw with the IRA, the devil is in the details. In the first six months since the US legislation passed, most of its $50 billion in investments have gone to companies in states that suppress unionization with right-to-work laws, which allow individual workers to opt out of unionization. The Canadian budget promises that the government will introduce anti-scab legislation by the end of the year, but this leaves a large window for employers to hire scabs.

Buried in Chapter Six of the budget, however, is a 3 percent across-the-board cut to the public sector to be implemented over four years for $7 billion in savings, followed by $2.4 billion in cuts annually. Crown corporations, which are owned by the state, are instructed to make comparable spending reductions beginning next year. Fred ORordian, head of tax policy at Ernst & Young, a firm notoriously amenable to reducing the size of government, described these measures as a pretty blunt instrument, which fails to distinguish between programs that are already running efficiently and effectively and those that arent, and it doesnt identify programs that are no longer necessary.

The government insists that these cuts cannot come at the expense of direct benefits and service delivery to Canadians [emphasis added], meaning theyre going to come at the expense of those who deliver the benefits and services, whether through job cuts or wage freezes. Either way, an increasingly overworked public service will be forced to do the same job with fewer resources. As Chris Aylward, the head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which represents federal public sector workers, puts it, This budget screams austerity.

More than one hundred thousand PSAC members have voted in favor of entering a legal strike position. If they do go on strike, there wont yet be any legislation in place to prevent the government from hiring scabs. One might understand the sweeping public sector cuts outlined in the budget, in this context, as a warning to public sector employees that if they want to retain their jobs, they should limit their demands at the bargaining table.

All in all, the Liberals latest budget is in keeping with the partys time-honored modus operandi: pay lip service to the needs of regular people and then pass legislation that keeps the boss class happy. The Liberals are nothing if not consistent.

See the article here:
Canada's New Budget Is a Typical Liberal Road Map for Failing the Working Class - Jacobin magazine

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The soon-to-be four member majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Jill Karofsky, Rebecca Dallet, newly elected Janet Protasiewicz and Ann Walsh Bradley. Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner.

On the day after Wisconsins nasty and expensive state Supreme Court election, the lead sentence of theWisconsin State Journals front page election storyproclaimed: Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated conservative Dan Kelly for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, giving liberals a court majority for the first time in 15 years, boosting Democrats bid to toss out Wisconsins near-complete abortion ban and promising to dramatically reshape politics in the battleground state.

Wisconsin Public Radio, meanwhile, said this in itselection-nightreport: Democrats have scored a major off-year election victory in Wisconsin, winning the states open supreme court seat and flipping control of the court to liberals for the first time in 15 years.

Both articles contain a contention that is highly questionable if not objectively false.

Protasiewicz did clobber Kelly by an unheard-of-for-Wisconsin 11-point margin. But in asserting that liberals controlled the Wisconsin Supreme Court as recently as 15 years ago, these news outlets were just repeating a shorthand description that became common during the election.

Heres the headline and subhead of an ABC Newsstorypublished on the morning of Feb. 19, the day of the primary election that narrowed the field to Kelly and Protasiewicz:

Democrats see a prime chance to take control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court

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Democrats, who havent had a majority in 15 years, see concerns over abortion access and voting rights as key opportunities to take back control.

And two days before the election, NPRreported, An election on Tuesday could change the political trajectory of Wisconsin, a perennial swing state, by flipping the ideological balance of the state Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years.

Since the election, the idea that Wisconsin liberals have just gained a court majority for the first time in 15 years has continued to percolate.

HeresThe Capital Timesin the lead sentence of apiecepublished April 6: As Wisconsins state Supreme Court shifts toward its first liberal majority in 15 years, a liberal law firm plans to challenge the states voting maps based on the assertion that partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution.

And on April 13, theState Journalrepublishedan editorial in theKenosha Newsthat said thismarks the first time the court will have a liberal bent in 15 years.

In fact, Wisconsin did not have what could be safely described as a liberal majority 15 years ago and quite possibly ever if you count the many years in which liberal and conservative were not terms commonly applied to Supreme Court justices and contenders.

From 2004 to 2008, the court had three liberal justices, three conservatives, and one justice, Patrick Crooks, who was a swing vote. Yet while Crooks wasappointedto a circuit court judgeship in Brown County by Wisconsin Gov. MartinSchreiber, a Democrat, he ran for election to the Supreme Court in 1995 as a conservative, losing in the general election to Ann Walsh Bradley. His campaign was run by Scott Jensen, a former Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly who would later end up being convicted of ethics violations.

Crooks was elected to the court the following year, beating Ralph Adam Fine, and was seen as a reliable conservative for much of his tenure, which ended when he died while still in office in 2015, after announcing that he would not seek reelection the following year. He was replaced by conservative Rebecca Bradley,appointedby Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and then elected to a full ten-year term in 2016.

In 2004, Crooks joined court liberals in a series of decisions seen as affecting businesses, drawing ahysterical reactionfrom the states big business lobby, which claimed thatAmericas personal injury lawyers are racing to Wisconsin to take advantage of these rulings, which the group said in an ad send a clear signal to every CEO and top executive in the U.S. that Wisconsin will be a risky state in which to operate. The ad showed a billboard that proclaimed, Hello, Trial Lawyers! Good-bye Jobs!

Yet despite this heated reaction, Crooks was still considered enough of a conservative thatWMCsat back and let him get reelected without challenge in 2006.

Its true that some people called him a liberal but that is far from firmly or clearly established. From hisWikipedia entry: Crooks generally joined the conservative majoritys opinions, especially in criminal matters, but joined the liberal minoritys dissents on certain constitutional issues and matters of court administration. In a 2011Milwaukee Magazinearticleentitled Crooks Is Not a Liberal, journalist Bruce Murphy wrote:

Yes, he isconsidereda liberal and is typically described that way in the media, but in fact, hes a centrist who tends to lean right. Murphy called the identification of Crooks as a liberal the medias error.

Wisconsin Supreme Court watcher Alan Ball, a history professor at Marquette, has backed this up with numbers. Inananalysispublished a day after the election, he calculated that between 2004 and 2008, when Crooks was a critical swing vote, he sided with the three liberals in 44% of non-unanimous decisions (Table 1)considerably more often than the next closest fourth man, Justice David Prosser, who joined the three liberals in only 11% of non-unanimous decisions during this period.

But still, Ball found, Crooks voted with the conservatives slightly moreoften than with the liberals. Therefore, he wrote, it seems a stretch to describe the supreme court as liberal during [this] period.

So how long has it been that liberals comprised a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court?

Thecourt has never had a clear liberal majority in the decades that Ive covered it, Ball told me in an email last fall. In the 21stcentury there have been years when it has leaned conservative when there have been three liberals (Abrahamson, AW Bradley, and Butler, for example, or, currently, AW Bradley, Dallet, and Karofsky) and periods when it has been heavily conservative most recently, the Gableman and Kelly years.

Thus, if a liberal prevails in next springs election, the court will be clearly liberal for the first time in living memory, Ball wrote. Given these stakes, I imagine that the upcoming race will completely shatter all spending records for judicial elections in Wisconsin.

He got that right. Theestimated$50 million that was sunk into the states Supreme Court race on behalf of the two candidates, in nearly equal measure, is five times theprevious recordfor a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and more than three times therecordfor a judicial race anywhere in the United States.

WhenProtasiewicz is sworn in this August, liberals will comprise a Wisconsin Supreme Court majority for the first time in at least four decades.

Just ask liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, the courts longest-tenured member.

Ive been on the court for twenty-eight years, and Ive never served with what is labeled a liberal majority, one that sees the role of government and democracy the way that I do, Bradley told journalist Dan Kaufman in anarticlepublished April 12 inThe New Yorker.

In other words, despite all the advertising and national media attention, the issue of control of the court by liberals is an even bigger deal than what youve often been told.

Bill Lueders former editor of The Progressive magazine and current editor-at-large, is a Wisconsin writer who lives in Madison.He also serves as the elected president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a statewide group that works to protect public access to government meetings and records.

Originally posted here:
Op Ed: This Is First Liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court In Living Memory - Urban Milwaukee

A house divided against itself cannot stand is a banality were all familiar with, but what too many Canadians cant seem to get their heads around is that a national broadcaster supported overwhelmingly by the governing Liberals but bitterly opposed by Conservatives cannot stand, either, and probably shouldnt. You can blame Pierre Poilievre for this state of affairs if you like. But Justin Trudeaus Liberals are every bit as guilty.

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For the Liberals, its become a matter of scripture that they saved the CBC from its penury during the Harper years, and theres a grain of truth to that. But the facts show that the CBC occupies a kind of sacred space in the political imagination thats unique to the Trudeau Liberals. Its a bit weird, and its bad news for the CBC.

While Justin Trudeaus government replenished what the Harper Conservatives had drawn down, every government since the Mulroney era of the 1980s had chipped away at the CBCs budget. The grand slasher of them all was Liberal prime minister Jean Chrtien, who left the CBC with 25 per cent fewer dollars in 2003 than the broadcaster was being allocated when Chrtien was elected in 1993, and Chrtiens Liberal successor, Paul Martin, trimmed another seven per cent over the following three years. Harper merely bit off another 14 per cent: $173 million.

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In the run-up to the carefully choreographed outrage over Twitters accurate designation of the CBC as government-funded, Musk had been having quite the lark with news organizations. He tagged the BBC government-funded media, then switched the BBC to publicly-funded after the Beeb kicked up a fuss. He did worse to NPR, tagging the venerable public network as state-affiliated as though it were a dictators mouthpiece, then switched NPRs label to government-funded, which was still wrong.

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Thisbrings us towhat I mean by over the top.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez: Whats new is that Pierre Poilievre (is) running to U.S. billionaires to help weaken the public broadcaster We know all too well what happens when politicians twist the facts and treat the media as the enemy. We cant let that happen in Canada.

That was a bit rich, given that the Liberals own battalions of Twitter fuseliers have expended so much manic energy these past few weeks bombarding and ambuscading pretty well every Canadian newsroom that doesnt have the CBC logo on it: Dens of racists and liars and sinister right-wing plotters, the lot of them, being mean to Justin just because of all the Beijing-affiliated billionaires and influence pedlars who have made themselves so comfortably at home in Trudeaus company over the years.

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Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault: Poilievre is a threat to Canadian democracy, plain and simple. Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne: Pierre Poilievre is undermining himself, our institutions and our democracy. Prime Minister Trudeau himself, speaking about Poilievres Conservatives: When theyre trying to attack a foundational Canadian institution, the fact that he has to run to American billionaires for support to attack Canadians, it says a lot about Mr. Poilievre and his values.

This strikes me as nuts, and not just because Musk is a Canadian citizen. You could say that Poilievre was a bit nuts, too, writing Musk directly to ask him to list the CBC as government-funded media and then celebrating it when he did, this way: CBC officially exposed as government-funded media. Now people know that it is Trudeau propaganda, not news.

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Well, no, thats not quite what people know, and its an insult to the many hardworking CBC news reporters who have been doing their best to maintain neutrality, knowing full well that if Poilievres Conservatives ever take office the chances are fairly good that theyll be unemployed. Its also an insult to everyones intelligence to suggest that the CBC is still that beloved and vital corner of the airwaves where Canadians could talk to another from the cities of the south to the towns and villages of the far north, and from coast to coast to coast a place where Canadians can have their own conversations away from the deafening commotion of the vast American news and entertainment complex.

That CBC is as dead and finished as The Beachcombers.

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Lately, the CBC has become a primary entry point for the diffusion of the American culture wars into Canada, and like Trudeau, CBC President Catherine Tait has happily enlisted as a partisan in those same faddish preoccupations and obsessions.

There are those of us who still cling to the proposition that a well-funded national broadcaster could uphold an idea of Canada that leaves everyone with some dignity and serves as a rampart against the rising bedlam of ever-multiplying grievance constituencies and identity groupuscules. But were losing the argument.

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In any case, this weeks histrionics from all quarters amply demonstrate that a state-funded broadcaster cant and probably shouldnt survive if its wildly loved by the governing party and loathed by Her Majestys Loyal Opposition.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.

Read more:
Glavin: The Liberals' weird fixation with the CBC is the real problem - Ottawa Citizen

This essay is based on the invited comments delivered on March 10, 2023, celebrating the Lee Kong Chian Chair Professorship of Chandran Kukathas at Singapore Management University.

I congratulate Singapore and the faculty and students of Singapore Management University for luring the pre-eminent liberal theorist of our age, Chandran Kukathas, to the republic of Singapore. If liberalism has any future it will be decided on the shores of the South China Sea. So, this occasion marks symbolically not just a shift toward the region in economic but also in intellectual or, if you wish, ideological terms.

Here, in what follows I take up Kukathas question near the end of his prepared remarks on the relationship between liberalism and capitalism in three ways. First, I distinguish between two origin stories of liberalism that liberals tell to themselves and that, perhaps even more than any definition, thereby also frame our self-understanding about our program. The first story is centered on mutual toleration. The second story is centered on taming, even domesticating state power. This second story will shape the distinction I offer between two ideal types of capitalism: one in its mercantile guise and one in a more liberal guise in order, third, to articulate two important challenges to liberalism which I claim necessitate a liberal theory of politics and political change.

The first version of the origin story of liberalism presents its origin as a reaction to the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. This account generally foregrounds Lockes advocacy of mutual toleration and sometimes includes Spinozas defense of free thinking as originating moments. In America (I learned this from Teresa Bejan) the narrative includes the early colonist Roger Williams. Many of liberalisms characteristic institutional formsthe division of powers, the separation between Church and State, and freedom of speech and press freedomsare interpreted as resulting from the need to accommodate mutual disagreement over religious truth and the highest good. Kukathas offers a version of this story in hisThe Liberal Archipelago. We also find a version of it throughout John Rawls writings.

I have never been satisfied with this origin story because, first, such toleration is highly attenuated in Locke and the others. Second, mutual religious toleration is not unique to liberalism; as David Hume implies inThe Natural History of Religionthere was impressive religious toleration within the Roman empire. Facilitating mutual religious toleration is, in fact, characteristic ofgovernancein many empires.

In an influential 2014 essay,What Is Liberalism?,Duncan Bell persuasively argued that the narrative centered on mutual toleration is a twentieth-century, especially American, construction. I would argue that the story resonated in societies where Protestants had to consider the significance of Catholic electoral gains.

Bells own tendency is toward nominalism and historical contingency, and intends to unmask any self-presentation by liberals as a mythical backward projection of the needs of a given present. Part of Bells argument turns on the idea that the very label liberal only originates with the Spanish liberales of the 1812 Constitution and is subsequently borrowed as a form of disapprobation in the English context.

Somewhat oddly, Bell didnt pursue the question why these Spanish liberales called themselves liberals. They were, in fact, explicitly invoking Adam Smith, whose ideas were debated in the Cortes of Cdiz throughout the arguments that produced the ill-fated 1812 Constitution. In fact, the Spanish liberales didnt just argue for the characteristically Smithian free trade position, and for liberalization of the Spanish economy. They also criticized the imperial project of the Spanish crown. By echoing the closing pages of Smiths (1776)Wealth of Nationsand its political-constitutional project of a sovereign Atlantic parliament that could represent the American colonies and the British Isles, they also advocated for a states-general that would do something similar for global Spanish possessions.[1] In Smith this federal parliamentary project is also intended to remove political grievances in Ireland and Scotland.

Now, inWealth of Nations, Smith appropriated the older use of the term liberal, which evokes an aristocratic, even Aristotelian generosity, and applied it to his own system as a political project and, crucially for my present purposes, opposed it to the illiberal project of mercantilism. I return to that move shortly.

Thus, the second, more Smithian version of the origin of liberalism understands itself as an ameliorative project in opposition to the aggressive state-sponsored mercantilism of the Westphalian state. Here mercantilism is understood as a socio-economic system, in Kukathas sense, of state capture by an interested class which uses the state to promote its own economic interests either through so-called rents, conquest (imperialism), slavery, monopolistic trade, debt financing of war, and so on. Smith invents or constructs the very idea of mercantilism in order to engage in what one would call ideology critique today.

In this version of its origin story, liberalism takes the modern state for granted and understands itself from the start as a reformist project of it. The key conceptual move is to turn any zero-sum logic into a win-win agenda that promotes, as a political program, a moral vision (the good or open society) that is all about the expansion of individual freedoms (note the plural) and peace. While Kukathas doesnt articulate this story, its rather close in spirit to the project in his recentImmigration and Freedom. So, I hope he accepts this story as a friendly suggestion.

The Smithian version of liberalisms origins relies on a conceptual distinction between two ideal types of capitalism: a hierarchy-facilitating mercantile one in which capital and the war-prone state mutually reinforce each other to the benefit of well-connected elites, and a more humane and pacific liberal variant in which the fruits of liberty and commerce are widely dispersed under the rule of law. In reality, there are many kinds in between.

From a liberal point of view, when socialists, post-colonialists, and conservatives criticize capitalism, they are describing what Smith calls mercantilism. So, while, for example, Marxists will see rent-seeking and class domination as characteristic of capitalism, liberals will see it as its corruption. And when Karl Polanyi sees capitalism as leading to fascism, the German Ordoliberals diagnose, as Foucault discerned, the rise of Nazism as an effect of the growth of monopoly and social planning.

The main problem for liberals, regarding the distinction between two kinds of capitalism I have offered here, is not that they are tempted to say that real liberalism has never been tried when faced with criticism about ugly political history and reality. Rather the problem is that the distinction masks from liberals two important intellectual challenges. First, the political success of liberalism can always give rise to forces that make possible a renewed or worse form of mercantilism or as Kukathas put it, the spirit of monopoly. Hobsons 1902 bookImperialismoffers a sober diagnosis of this process. The liberal world orders implosion in World War I is a rather dramatic example. In Europe and the U.S. such a process was also very visible during the last decade in the aftermath of the financial crisis and recession. But, where liberalism retains its pull, this dynamic of liberal praxis generating mercantile effects also induces important intellectual and institutional liberal innovations, including anti-trust (to prevent concentrated market power), the progressive tax rate and inheritance tax (to prevent concentrated economic power), the promotion of meritocracy in government hiring (to undercut a spoils system), the expansion of the franchise (as a counterweight to narrow elites), the development of international law and the rise of functional and regional international cooperation (as means to resolve disputes without war), the redefinition of marriage (to allow for diversity of human coupling), and so on in an open-ended fashion.

Notice that this version of the origin narrative, with a distinction between mercantile and liberal capitalism, implies that liberals counsel sometimes strengthening state institutions and their functioningattacking (inSam Baggs felicitous phrase) concentrated powers(or, as the radical philosophers would say, sinister interests) in the private sphereand sometimes strengthening the forces of civil society, including of businesses, foundations, and religions. (Jacob Levy has nicely articulated a sophisticated version of this tactical vacillation in his bookRationalism, Pluralism & Freedom.) At a given time, the ameliorative, mitigating spirit of the different strands of liberalism demands from us imperfect judgments about what the most urgent dangers are and what the right way to respond to them might be. The necessity of such judgments accounts for our many disagreements.

But despite this dynamic of liberal development in response to the reality that liberal reforms of capitalism can strengthen the mercantile spirit over time, there is no guarantee that liberal ideas are self-actualizing. Let me explain, in closing, briefly what I have in mind.

To speak bluntly: many recently influential liberal thinkers have a distaste for politics. Among many so-called classical liberals, politics is nearly synonymous with rent-seeking. (Ironically, this accepts the Marxist interpretation of capitalism.) The problem is that if you turn your back on politics you end up being tempted to put your faith in transitional enlightened dictators or a technocracy that disguises the sectorial interests they promote behind jargon and the authority of science as a means to silence others. One reason I admire Kukathas is that he has never been tempted by any of this.

Now, inThe Liberal Archipelago, Kukathas does have a theory of politics. Its a theory in which competing elites use the state to shape society while battling over rents. The problem is that it is difficult to see how and why by Kukathass own lights elites would pursue the ideals he promotes. So, this is an unpromising approach to politics for a liberal.

Sometimes the different strands of liberalism are tempted by three other theories of politics. The first theory assumes that good normative ideas are automatically implemented by benevolent and truth-seeking legislators and then executed by a rule-following bureaucracy in virtue of being good normative ideas. As George Stigler notes in a 1971 article on rent-seeking that got him the Nobel prize, nobody would assent to holding such a theory explicitly, although deliberative democrats, public reason liberals, and a lot of policy advice assumes it in practice. I view this as magical thinking.

Second, some Hayekians (echoing Plato) suggest that in politics unreason rules. On this view, politics is simply unpredictable or corrosive to any rational ideals (or both). Politics is just as irrational as the anarchic elements of society it is meant to represent. This is regrettable because it reduces liberal theorizing to a sterile moralizing.

The third attitude toward the political presupposes knowledge of (and now I quote Stigler)the political forces which confine and direct policy.As Kukathas has emphasized in a number of works, social theory and social science supply feasibility constraints on normative projects. So, from this perspective, any program of reform must include a constituency or coalition that can promote the policy effectively. Obviously, the promise here is that this may increase the chances of uptake; it also often makes all liberal proposals much more status-quo friendly. Sometimes the concession to feasibility makes the liberal program appear as a handmaiden to conservatism or common sense morality.

This more promising approach to politics is, in fact, immanent in Kukathass more recentImmigration and Freedom. For by making visible the wide variety of political, cultural, and economic self-harms that follow from an illiberal policy on immigration, Kukathas appeals to the enlightened self-interest of elites and potentially large social coalitions in the service of moral and non-zero sum ends. It is not difficult to see how political agency and successful coalition-building can be guided by it and thereby check the dangers of sliding into or remaining stuck in a closed, surveillance society.

In that spirit I wish Kukathas and SMU a long and fruitful collaboration, because the world needs your insights.

[1] For background to this claim, see Jess Astigarraga and Juan Zabalza, eds., Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations in Spain: A History of Reception, Dissemination, Adaptation and Application, 17771840 (Routledge, 2021). See especially the chapter by Javier Usoz, Adam Smith and the Cortes of Cdiz (18101813): More than Enlightened Liberalism, pp. 186204. Pitts, Jennifer. Legislator of the world? A rereading of Bentham on colonies. Political Theory 31.2 (2003): 200-234.

Featured Image is Palau archipelago, by LuxTonnerre

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The Two Origin Stories of Liberalism Liberal Currents - Liberal Currents

After almost a year in the post, Dutton comes off as a seasoned, instantly familiar character actor trying to fill a leading man role a one-speed player who struggles to find a new way to ply his trade. His main goal is to avoid arguments and say what the partys diminished base wants to hear. That can keep the show steady for a while, but it wont revive its fortunes.

Peter Dutton is digging deeper in his efforts to appease the Coalitions conservative base. Dionne Gain

The Liberals awful condition is not all down to Dutton. This is a shared failure. Most of its parliamentary representatives and frontbenchers, and the leadership group are in lockstep with him. But Dutton is the most obvious problem because its in his gift to begin to turn things around. When a party is in trouble, the leader is obliged to acknowledge whats wrong and encourage others to help him fashion a remedy, not to continue flawed behaviours.

The Liberals chief weakness before last years election was that it overdosed on unity under Scott Morrison. No one was willing to sound the alarm, even though it was clear by the second half of 2021 that he was leading them over a cliff. The same thing is happening under Dutton.

What courage or genuine leadership is involved in pandering to the partys narrow and ageing membership and its avatars in the party room by denouncing every idea the government comes up with as the end of the world? After all, this is the least ambitious new Labor government in living memory. Most voters know that. Thats why they voted for it.

Liberals failed to speak up as the party lost its way under Scott Morrison. The same is happening under Peter Dutton. Bloomberg

Old political polarities have been reversed. It used to be that Labors leaders were naturally hemmed in by the ALPs Byzantine organisation of activist local branches, the caucus, the policy platform argued out publicly and put in place by the national conference, the national executive, the unions, the factions. Conversely, Liberal leaders had an almost unfettered right to dictate the direction of the partys positions and agenda.

That has now flipped. The Albanese governments agenda was shaped almost exclusively by the leader, his office, and a small group of senior ministers. Over at the Liberal Party these days, it works the other way, with the tail wagging the dog. Despite all the shop-worn bromides about the party being a broad church, its tiny sprinkling of moderates today chiefly fulfil a decorative function at the federal level, while the leadership reflects the angry reactionary positions of the local branches and their parliamentary representatives. Hence, for example, climate change is still not regarded as a serious thing and the very idea of to cherished democratic ideals where, supposedly, every Australian is equal.

Both the Coalition and opposition leader Peter Dutton have seen their approval ratings slip in a new poll.

Whats startling is that although things are going so badly, theres so little appetite to do anything about it. Only months after the partys poorest general election result in almost 80 years, the Liberals this month registered the worst byelection result for an opposition in 100 years, in which Labor campaigned hard on Duttons lack of popularity.

The Liberal Party had won Aston successively under Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, John Howard (five times), Tony Abbott (twice), Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison (twice) but lost it at Peter Duttons first crack.

At last years election, the Coalitions national primary vote was 35.7 per cent, down from 41.4 in 2019.

And yet, its not just steady as she goes; Dutton has doubled down, coming clean at last on his commitment to the No case on the Voice. He did this with the imprimatur of the vast bulk of his fellow Liberal MPs and their most vigorous supporters in the community and the media.

Bringing into the shadow cabinet and giving her carriage of the No case in the Voice referendum will send the rusted-on supporters into raptures and make her one of the countrys best-known politicians by years end.

Whats startling is that although things are going so badly, theres so little appetite to do anything about it.

Maybe it will mean a win for the No case the requirement to get a majority vote in four states in a referendum is a big hurdle. But it wont bring the Liberals any closer to an electoral revival, further deepening the alienation between them and voters under 40.

Probably the best thing that could happen to the Liberals would be for the No case to lose. That could pierce the bubble, causing them to face up to the rolling catastrophe they are creating for themselves.

Frontbencher Dan Tehan last weekend called on Dutton to conduct an urgent policy review. That a senior member of the Liberal team had to go public to nudge his leader towards taking such an obvious step in the wake of a series of shattering defeats offers an eloquent commentary on the partys mindset.

If Dutton complies with Tehans request, it would be the first time the party has produced a comprehensive set of new policy ideas in a long time, possibly since the days of Howard and Peter Costello in the 1990s.

But has he got the inclination to do it? Based on his performance so far, its hard to believe he does.

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The Liberals condition is a shared failure. But Dutton is the obvious problem - Sydney Morning Herald