When and how will the Canadian Liberal party get back into power?

[RickJay]

@BrainGlutton

[shrug] Sometimes it has an answer. The Dems were the natural-governing-party of the U.S. 1932-1980 – that is, they were the party that represented the prevailing consensus- or majority-view as to the social contract in general – and you could make a case they still are, just by dint of superior numbers of registered voters.

And yet the voters didn’t see it that way when electing a President in 1952, 1956, 1968, 1972, or 1980, suggesting they weren’t quite as natural a governing party as you’d make it sound.

There’s a significant difference between “winning the most elections in a carefully selected 48-year period” (why start at 1932 and end in 1980? Why not go from 1948 to 2008? 1900 to 2000? Selecting your start and end points makes no sense except for the specific purpose of bracketing Democratic wins) and “natural governing party.” Winning the most elections from 1932 to 1980 is a mathematical necessity; SOMEONE has to have won the most elections unless, by some miraculously unlikely circumstance, both parties win exactly the same number. “Natural governing party” suggests there is an alignment between a party’s place in the sociopolitical landscape and the manner in which elections are contested that decides those elections.

There’s no such alignment in Canada and never was. The Liberals won most of the elections at the federal level for awhile because they had better leaders and better ideas; they quite simply ran better elections. Once that stopped, they stopped winning. When they got really incompetent then they not only stopped winning but couldn’t even finish second.

The assumption the Liberals wanted people to make, which is why they invented the “natural governing party” term, is that Canadians were inherently Liberal; that the Liberal Party was fundamentally aligned with a monolithic, universal Canadian identity. To vote anything other than Liberal was implied to be an un-Canadian thing to do. Indeed, in 2011 they stopped hinting it and just came right out and said it. It was bullshit, and always was bullshit; there is no monolithic Canadian political identity. The Conservatives demonstrated that there’s just as much conservatism in Canadians as liberalism and thereby squashed the Liberals by providing people with an actual platform and leader to vote for, as opposed to a blowhard in a suit and a platform that amounted to “vote for us because we deserve it.”

But sooner or later the Conservatives will make the same mistake. They’ll assume Canadians are just naturally Conservative. If they win in 2015 it’ll reach fever pitch by about 2016, when they’ll have been in pwoer for ten years and so will start to self-delude themselves into thinking it’s just their natural place in the world to be in power, and they’ll stop listening to what Canadians are saying, and then they’ll be squashed, just as the Liberals and BQwere in 2011, just as the PCs were in 1993, and so on.

Historically, Canadians have not voted for the party that has been more “Canadian,” they’ve voted for the party that actually gave them the clearest (not always best, but clearest) reason to vote for them.

If the Liberals can do that they may save themselves. If they don’t they may be a third party for generations.

[BrainGlutton]

@RickJay

And yet the voters didn’t see it that way when electing a President in 1952, 1956, 1968, 1972, or 1980, suggesting they weren’t quite as natural a governing party as you’d make it sound.

Even when the Pubs were in, it was the Dems who were essentially setting the agenda and defining the boundaries of what would be accepted as non-preposterous debate – that didn’t change until 1980. It’s a “Sun Party/Moon Party” thing. As Sam Tanenhaus told Newsweek in 2009, when being interviewed about his new book:

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn’t quite declare conservatism dead.
Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America’s institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation’s millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by “the trusts”—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The consensus forged by Buckley in the 1960s gained strength through two decisive acts: first, Buckley denounced right-wing extremists, such as the members of the John Birch Society, and made sure when he did it to secure the support of conservative Republicans like Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Sen. John Tower. This pulled the movement toward the center. Second: Buckley saw that the civil disturbances of the late 1960s (in particular urban riots and increasingly militant anti-Vietnam protests) posed a challenge to social harmonies preferred by genuine conservatives and genuine liberals alike. When the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan called on liberals to join with conservatives in upholding “the politics of stability,” Buckley replied that he was ready to help. He placed the values of “civil society” (in Burke’s term) above those of his own movement or the GOP.

Today we see very little evidence of this. In his classic The Future of American Politics (1952), the political journalist Samuel Lubell said that our two-party system in fact consists of periods of alternating one-party rule—there is a majority “sun” party and a minority “moon” party. “It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out,” Lubell wrote. Thus, in the 1980s, Republicans grasped (and Democrats did not) that new entrepreneurial energies had been unleashed, and also that the Cold War could be brought to a conclusion through strong foreign policy. This was the Republicans’ “sun” period. The reverse is happening today. The Democrats now dominate our heliocentric system—first on the economic stimulus, which is already proving to be at least a limited success, and now on the issue of health-care reform. These are both entirely Democratic initiatives. The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don’t have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh’s stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.

Is there an analogous historical moment? Conservatives argue that this is 1965 and that a renaissance is at hand.
I disagree. Today, conservatives seem in a position closer to the one they occupied during the New Deal. The epithets so many on the right now hurl at Obama—“socialist,” “fascist”—precisely echo the accusations Herbert Hoover and “Old Right” made against FDR in 1936. And the spectacle of citizens appearing at town-hall meetings with guns recalls nothing so much as the vigilante Minutemen whom Buckley evicted from the conservative movement in the 1960s. A serious conservative like David Frum knows this, and has spoken up. It is remarkable how few others have. The moon party is being yanked ever farther onto its marginal orbit.

[RickJay]

No, it isn’t a “sun party/moon party thing.” But I’ll spare you a TL;DR excerpt from someone’s new book, My Political Opinions Defended By Post-Hoc Rationalization. In any case we’re talking about Canada; there is no such thing here as a “natural governing party” and there never has been, and to be honest, I don’t even think your lengthy excerpt from whatshisname’s comments even speaks to that issue.