[LINK] "Retrospective on the CPC, redux"
jsburbidge writes about what he says as the worrying flashy populism underlying the Conservative Party of Canada under Harper.
My own take is that this reflects three extremely problematic driving forces which have nothing to do with "conservatism" per se but which have been constant underlying strains in the CPC: populism, control, and an approach which is constantly small-scale, tactically, political (in the sense of always campaigning, not Aristotle's sense of the word or anything like it). And it's shaped, within that context, by a base which looks a lot like Rob Ford (minus, admittedly, the substance abuse problems): somewhat bigoted, not very bright, anti-intellectual, angry and sure that someone else is to blame.
In a notional phase space of political attitudes, conservative parties in the West seem to have wandered into a particularly nasty local maximum, where the core is resistant to any attempt to move away but there is a significant gap over to the majority of voters in the middle and left: culturally xenophobic, anti-elitist, attached to an energy-based, carbon-heavy lifestyle which is on its way out. (The old archetypal Tory was a member of the elite, originally a member of the landed classes and latterly a lawyer connected with high finance or the corporate world. Recently Canada and Ontario have seen "pure" career politicians like Harper and Manning, with a golf pro as the only successful provincial Conservative leader since Bill Davis.) This has been made even more marked by the move towards direct election of leaders, which favours populist appeals.
The old split between "social conservatives" and "economic conservatives", although still present, has become overshadowed in North America by a form of fused ideology which combines xenophobia and nostalgia for a "simpler", idealized society (from the social side) with a championing of small government and a small-business rhetoric on the economic side, along with a tendency, in power, to support the 1% while deploying populist propaganda. Although this is more emphatic in the USAn Tea Party, it's a reasonable summation of much of the CPC under Harper, and it certainly looks as though it describes the bulk of its base.
To say nothing of the centralization.