Essay: On the Unnamed Conservative Sickness
The inheritance was real. The abandonment was real. The recovery is still possible.
I have been thinking lately about how a political tradition gets sick, which is a different thing entirely from how it gets beaten. Being beaten is clean enough. You lose an election, you lick your wounds, you regroup, and you come back, and everyone can see plainly what happened to you and roughly when. Sickness is quieter, and for that reason more dangerous, because it hollows a thing out from the inside while it is still up and walking around, insisting to anyone who asks that it has never felt better. The patient keeps all the outward signs of health. He has the flag and the lawn signs and the rallies and the followers stacked up by the hundred thousand. What he has mislaid somewhere along the way is the only thing that ever made him worth following to begin with.
That, as best I can tell, is where Canadian conservatism finds itself now. I want to try to account for how it got here honestly, which means resisting the easy comfort of laying the whole business at somebody else’s door. Some of it does belong at other doors. But not the worst of it.
Start with the universities, because the university is where a political tradition is supposed to go to grow its intellectual roots, or where it used to go. This past March a doctoral researcher at Oxford named James Manzi published a study in the journal Theory and Society that had not really been done before at that scale. He ran very nearly six hundred thousand social science abstracts, drawn from more than three hundred journals and published between 1960 and 2024, through a large language model trained to place each one on a fixed political spectrum. The finding was not subtle. Something close to ninety per cent of the politically relevant work leaned left, and the average position of every single social science discipline he examined came out left of centre in every single year of the survey. Not most years. Every year. And the disciplines that leaned furthest left turned out to be the same ones that had grown most uniform, the ones in which a dissenting voice had become hardest to find at all.
Set that beside what we already know about who is doing the teaching. The work of Mitchell Langbert and his colleagues, who went and counted faculty by their own voter registration rather than guessing at their sympathies, found registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans across the professoriate by something on the order of eight to one, and far more lopsidedly than that in precisely the disciplines that matter most to the questions I am circling here. In history the ratio ran past thirty to one. In sociology and anthropology it ran higher still, to the point where in some departments a conservative is less outnumbered than simply absent. I want to be careful, because this counting is largely American, and our own Canadian figures are thinner and less faithfully kept. But nobody who has spent any time near a Canadian humanities faculty believes the direction of the thing is different on our side of the line.
What that means, when you sit with it a while, is that the right-leaning intellectual — the person who in an earlier generation might have spent a working life building a rigorous conservative account of how a country ought to govern itself, or hold its property, or read its own laws — has been quietly shown the door of the very institutions built to house that work. Such people do not vanish into the air. They land, for the most part, in think tanks and policy shops, which sounds a reasonable enough substitute until you stop to consider what a think tank is actually for. A think tank produces papers for the next budget. It does not produce philosophy for the next generation. It will argue the costing of a policy down to the decimal; it will not sit for twenty years with the prior question of what the policy is finally for.
And so the supply chain broke. The people who ought to have been forging the foundational arguments, testing them against the best opposition they could find, and handing them down in better repair than they received them, simply stopped being made in the places built to make them. A tradition cut off in that way is left to feed on itself, chewing over its inherited arguments without the means to develop them — and, in the worst case, handing its whole intellectual identity over to people who were never trained to think the questions through at all.
Which brings me, reluctantly, to the influencers. I use the word without the sneer it usually carries, because the sneer is lazy and it misses the actual problem. The people who built large followings online around one conservative-adjacent grievance or another are not the villains of this story. They are entrepreneurs, and they found a real market and served it ably. The market was real — that is the thing to hold onto. The unease about vaccine mandates was real. The mistrust of far-off institutions was real. The bone-deep sense that ordinary people were being managed by a class of expert strangers who neither knew nor cared what their lives were actually like was real then and is real now, and I will not pretend otherwise in order to make a tidier point.
But a market is not a philosophy, and a heap of separate anxieties, however genuine each one of them is, does not add up to a political tradition. What became of Canadian conservatism across the social media years is that it slowly turned into a federation of grievances in the place where a coherent idea of how to govern ought to have been. Vaccine resistance, suspicion of Indigenous rights, dread of shadowy institutions abroad, a whole imported wardrobe of American culture-war positions with no natural root in Canadian soil — all of it gathered in under the one conservative banner, not because any of it followed from a shared first principle, but because all of it shared a common enemy in the progressive establishment. The enemy of my enemy became, by slow degrees, the entire definition of the movement. And a movement defined only by what it stands against is not a tradition at all. It is a mood. Moods are real enough while they last, and then they pass, and when they have passed you look around and find they have built nothing a person could actually live in.
The borrowing from America deserves its own hard look, because it is where the sickness shows itself most plainly. American conservatism grew in particular soil, and it is worth naming what was in that soil. A revolutionary founding that bred a deep and permanent suspicion of central government. A large and confident religious population that lent the movement both a moral vocabulary and a ready-built organizational spine. A corporate and financial establishment wealthy enough to fund a rival intellectual world of its own. A frontier myth that happens to fit libertarian economics so snugly that the fit feels native rather than argued for.
We have none of those things, or none of them in the same form. We had no revolution. We have a churchgoing population in long decline that has never had the slightest appetite for the public religiosity that powers so much of American conservative life. We do not have the same corporate base. And our own frontier myth, such as it is, is not a story about the self-made man conquering the wilderness alone; it is a story about survival and mutual dependence, about people getting one another through a hard country and a harder winter, which sits a good deal closer to an older Tory communitarianism than to anything libertarian. So when Canadian conservatives import the American positions whole, they are not adapting a living tradition to local weather. They are pulling on a borrowed suit and standing there genuinely puzzled that it hangs so badly off the shoulders.
And nowhere does that borrowed suit fit worse than on the question of Indigenous rights, which is also, as it happens, the very place where our inheritance and the American one part company most sharply and most meaningfully.
The constitutional architecture this country built in relation to Indigenous peoples is genuinely distinct, and the distinction is not a small one. The treaty process, for all the ways it was botched and dishonoured in the carrying out, began from a premise that Indigenous nations were political bodies with whom the Crown was obliged to make agreements and then to keep them. That premise runs straight through the Royal Proclamation of 1763, through the numbered treaties, and into Section 35 of the Constitution. It is a real legal inheritance, and it acknowledged the political standing of Indigenous nations in a way the American framework never pursued with the same consistency or the same force of law.
The intent built into that architecture was real, even where the execution failed — and it did fail, gravely, in ways whose shadow lies across this country still. But intent bears directly on the question of what the inheritance actually holds, and therefore on what a genuine conservatism in this country is bound to defend. At its better moments the Canadian state understood a treaty to be a solemn institutional commitment, carrying the full weight of the inherited legal order behind it. There is nothing progressive in that understanding. It is the oldest conservative instinct there is, applied to the particular conditions of this place. A promise was made. It binds those who came after. We keep it because we are the kind of people who keep what was solemnly promised — or so we have always told ourselves we are.
What grew up afterward — the reconciliation industry, the ministries and the consultation frameworks, the academic careers built atop Indigenous suffering while the communities themselves slid backward by every measure you could put a number to — betrayed that intent in the very act of claiming to fulfil it. And Canadian conservatism, having let its intellectual foundations rot through, had nothing principled left to stand on from which to name the betrayal for what it was. So it drifted instead, lazily, into treating Indigenous rights as some progressive imposition to be resisted, rather than the conservative inheritance they plainly are. It walked off the very ground that most distinguished it from its American cousin and most firmly tied it to its own first principles. Of all the things this sickness has cost us, I am not certain any is more foolish than that one.
The wider confusion shows itself nowhere more clearly than here in British Columbia, where what went by the name of conservatism for most of living memory was in fact the BC Liberal Party — and that deserves to be said plainly and without flinching. The BC Liberals were not conservatives. They were a coalition of people who did not want the NDP in power, gathered under the banner of free enterprise. And that phrase, free enterprise, did all the work that a political philosophy is supposed to do. Asked what we stand for, it answered with a two-word position on the economy, and said precisely nothing about institutions, nothing about community, nothing about the relation of a person to the order he is born into, nothing about what we owe to the land, or to one another, or to the nations who were here long before any of us arrived.
Free enterprise, taken as a governing philosophy, is not conservatism. It is a preference for one economic arrangement got up in the costume of a first principle. Edmund Burke had nothing to say about free enterprise, and not because he had simply not yet gotten round to it, but because the question he was actually asking sat underneath economics altogether. He wanted to know what holds a society together in the first place, and what makes it worth the holding, and what exactly we are gambling when we set about pulling it apart in the name of some abstract improvement. You cannot answer a question of that order with an opinion about markets. And nobody, across all the long years the free-enterprise coalition held this province, ever truly stopped to ask the question that sits beneath the slogan — what a conservatism rooted in this particular place would actually be for.
A coalition with nothing beneath it but a common enemy cannot, in the end, hold together, and we have lately watched it fail to. The party rebranded itself BC United, as though the trouble had ever been the name, and then in the late summer of 2024, weeks out from an election, its leader stood up and folded the whole century-old enterprise in the middle of the campaign, urging his own voters to go and back the rival he had personally thrown out of his caucus two years before. A party that could claim eight former premiers simply dissolved. When the single thing binding you together is your opposition to the other side, then the moment someone else can carry that opposition more loudly than you, there is no longer any reason for you to exist.
What rushed into the vacuum was the BC Conservative Party, and I want to be fair about what that was and what it was not. It was not the arrival of a serious conservatism resting on solid ground. It was a surge, and surges run on feeling. The party had been a fringe concern with barely a seat to its name until a man expelled from the establishment party’s own caucus wandered across, took up its leadership almost by accident, and found himself lifted upward on a rising tide of grievance against the New Democrats that he had done next to nothing to build. I do not say that to be unkind to the man. I say it because it matters. A movement that arrives in the world that way owes everything to the mood that carried it and nothing to any idea, and a movement in that position will reach, every single time, for more of the mood. More grievance. Tougher talk. Another red line drawn brighter than the last. It mistakes the volume of its anger for the depth of its foundations.
It is worth pausing here over Michael Oakeshott, who understood the conservative temperament better than almost anyone writing in the last century, and who would have recognized that reflex on sight. Conservatism, Oakeshott argued in the nineteen-fifties, is not really an ideology at all. It is a disposition — a settled preference for the familiar over the unknown, the tried over the untried, the actual over the merely possible, present laughter over utopian bliss. To be conservative, on his account, is simply to prefer to keep and to enjoy what one already has rather than to stake it all on a promise. And he was right, in his own time and on his own terms. But the disposition carries a quiet assumption folded up inside it, one he was honest enough to name out loud: it suits, he said, a man who is aware of having something to lose that he has learned to care for. The whole posture rests on the present being worth conserving in the first place.
That is precisely the assumption that has come apart in our own time. While the institutions still served the people, to conserve them was simple wisdom — but the institutions did not hold still. The radical project Oakeshott’s disposition was built to resist did not wait politely outside the walls to be let in; it moved in, took up residence, and shifted the whole society’s sense of what is normal beneath everyone’s feet. And in a world arranged like that, the bare disposition to conserve no longer conserves anything worth the keeping. It stands guard over the very capture it was built to prevent.
Oakeshott, to his lasting credit, left the door open to exactly this. Even the workman most attached to his familiar tools, he allowed, will now and again find that one has failed past mending — and then there is a time and a place to be radical about replacing it. We are living in such a time. And it means the genuinely conservative answer to this moment is not the one the grievance machine keeps reaching for. It is not more mood, not louder rhetoric, not another red line scored into the sand. All of that is only the old disposition thrashing at a present that has already slipped its grasp. The genuinely conservative answer is to go down beneath the captured surface of things, all the way to the bedrock — the Burkean rock, the oldest principles we possess, the ones concerning inheritance and obligation and the partnership of the generations — and from there to build patiently back upward, out of the real conditions of this land and the people who actually live on it. I have tried to begin sketching what a conservatism native to this coast might look like elsewhere, and I will not lay the whole of it out again here. But that, in the end, is the work in front of us. Not reaction. Reconstruction.
George Grant saw the larger drift coming a long way off. His Lament for a Nation, published in 1965, mourned the surrender of English Canada’s Tory strain to a continentalism that served neither tradition nor community but only capital and convenience. Grant was not writing about branding, and he was certainly not writing about anything so small as social media. He was writing about something far deeper and far slower: the quiet giving-up of a political inheritance that had once understood a society to be more than an economic arrangement, that had taken community to be something prior to the market and more important than it, and that had held the state to owe its people obligations which could not be discharged by the simple expedient of getting out of the way of commerce.
That inheritance had always kept room in it for the dignity of ordinary labour, because it understood, correctly, that a society indifferent to the condition of its working people was not in fact conserving anything worth the name. Disraeli built his One Nation conservatism on exactly that recognition in the nineteenth century. His point was never that the welfare of working people was a progressive concern to be handed across the aisle to the left. His point was that a conservatism careless of the lives of ordinary people was morally hollow at the centre and, in the longer run, quietly suicidal. A nation is not its gross domestic product. A nation is its people, living particular lives in particular communities, shaped by inheritances that belong to all of them in common. To conserve a nation in any sense worth the breath it takes to say the word, you have to conserve the conditions under which those lives can be lived with some measure of dignity.
And here is the part I am most sure of: that tradition is still here. It did not die. It was crowded out, elbowed into the corners, shouted down by imported grievances and online entrepreneurs and think-tank papers that mistake a clever tactical position for a deep idea. But it can be recovered, precisely because it is rooted in something true about this country and this coast and the actual conditions of living here.
What would recovering it look like, in plain practice? It would look like taking the legislature seriously again as the place where the real political questions of this province are meant to be settled, instead of farming them out to the courts and to ministerial discretion and to an endless apparatus of consultation. It would look like bringing Indigenous nations into that legislature directly — not as a concession handed across to progressivism, but as the long-overdue fulfilment of a conservative inheritance that always understood treaty relationships to be binding political obligations. It would look like a politics rooted in the particular facts of this coast: the land and the fisheries, the resource towns, the cities grown crowded and dear, and the ordinary people in all of them who simply want the province to work and have been waiting a very long time for someone to try in earnest. And it would look like taking the word conservative back from the people who hollowed it out, and insisting, without apology, that the thing it once pointed to is worth the recovering.
The diagnosis has to come first. Every honest treatment begins with an honest account of what went wrong and why, and that account is uncomfortable here precisely because it asks the patient to look hard at himself rather than at his enemies. Canadian conservatism has enemies, and some of them are worth naming, and they will be named in their turn. But the deepest wound was self-inflicted. The inheritance was real. It was given up. And whether it can be recovered is, to my mind, very nearly the most important political question this province and this country have in front of them, even if hardly anyone has yet thought to put it in those terms.
And if the universities have been hollowed out — that is a real loss, but it is not the end of the matter, because a serious mind was never the private property of a faculty lounge. Good minds and cooler heads turn up everywhere, in workshops and wheelhouses and ordinary working lives, anywhere people have had to think hard about real things and live with the consequences of getting them wrong. The rebuilding does not get to wait on the institutions coming back to their senses. It falls to us to begin it ourselves, where we stand and with what we have in hand — and to seek out the people already doing the serious thinking, the ones bringing a real foundation to what they believe rather than borrowing a mood, and to make common cause with them. The supply chain that broke can be built again, and there is no law anywhere that says it has to be rebuilt in the same places it was torn down.
That is the question this project means to take up. Not with a mood, and not with a grievance, and not with a template borrowed wholesale from someone else’s country, but with a genuine reckoning with what was lost, and a serious proposal for what getting it back would actually require.
That conversation continues here.