Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

Arguing for purges and inspired by Orban and Trump. Countering one set of excesses by a reverse set of excesses not helpful:

…It can be overcome, but that starts close to home, with provincial governments actively taking back what is rightfully theirs and installing onside allies — not thoughtless centrist donors who fear alienation from their Liberal-voting friends more than they want to win. It takes a careful and concerted effort to take back professional schools, not by defunding them, but by funding academic chairs to break the monoculture, provide role models to onside students, and provide alternative experts to lean on during contentious policy debates. The federal party can’t do much of this, but it can certainly build relationships with onside provinces to make it happen — or hammer them for failing to live up to their responsibility.

It means firing every activist and replacing every Liberal appointee at the top of any public department, every member of a public board, and abolishing those that exist only to prop up Liberal ideology. That means abandoning gender and anti-racism initiatives, something that even Alberta and Ontario struggle to do.

At this point, defund-everything libertarianism is a gambling strategy: it puts all the movement’s eggs into the basket that is the party’s election platform, and takes a crisis in the Liberal party to have any viability at all. In the off-chance it does result in victory, it is incapable of perpetuating itself.

Aimless tax and budget cuts don’t build movements or develop the careers of up-and-comers; they actually impede your future performance by depriving you of the necessary pipeline of manpower required to run complex institutions for years to come. “Just go to the private sector” doesn’t work, by the way, when the major corporations and companies have some kind of Liberal dependency, which is true for all the major consulting firms, law firms, pipeline companies and banks.

The wisdom that institutional control is the easy path to victory was internalized by the Liberals long ago. It’s time Conservatives started thinking the same way. It won’t deliver overnight, but that’s what it’s going to take to build a machine that can win in the absence of a catastrophic Liberal mistake. Anything less is just rolling the dice.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

The right should not shy away from doing this when they regain power, which is hopefully a matter of when, not if. A government that refuses to stack the deck with its own people is effectively subsidizing a sort of Viet Cong within the state it supposedly heads. As the Americans learned painfully in the Vietnam War, merely shrinking the size of the Viet Cong with napalm did not eliminate the threat. Familiar or friendly and trusted people can be empowered a great deal within the bounds of the law.

Allies should be rewarded, and parallel institutions should supplant or compete with those that already exist. For example, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper made the mistake of not doing more to support the Sun News Network, which might have blossomed into a true conservative institution in the private sector.

§source: Geoff Russ: Orbán gave Conservatives a blueprint for capturing institutions