Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins |
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Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins
The party has mastered the art of capturing institutions — something the Conservatives would do well to learn
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As Conservatives wonder if they’ll ever win again, Liberals capture institutions. And that’s how they have a second majority government today, intact even after a change in leadership and a decade in power.
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Provincial or federal, private or public, it doesn’t matter. The Liberal Party of Canada probably has at least one tendril in it, because that’s what it’s evolved to do. This has proven to be the most effective strategy around: when the whole landscape is friendly to you and hostile to your biggest opponent, you don’t actually have to do much at all. You can coast on vibes and mediocre performance, and you can even poach some of the other side’s policies and foot soldiers.
Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins Back to video
Take the universities: the people pipelines that spit out new fledgling citizens and fresh professionals each year. No amount of “boots not suits” sloganeering will kill the fact that higher education is the easiest gateway to an elite life for most people. Not only that, universities are sense-making institutions, stables for full-time thinkers and analysts whose work ends up forming the basis for policy down the line.
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Their views form the bulk of the expert consensus, which, in recent years, includes ideas like free drugs for street people, diversity quotas at the expense of quality, and a concept of Aboriginal rights so powerful that it undermines private property. Most rules and norms for any profession or trade come down to the views of the practitioners, and if most practitioners adopt a bad idea, you’re going to look like an uneducated rube for resisting it.
Cynics will shrug this off as the natural state of academia, but the polarization in the academy today is an anomaly brought about........