The War Room

DOSSIER # 8: PRESIDENT BUSH’S SUPREME COURT AND CANADIAN CULTURE

Since the beginning of this blog we have had as one of our core thesis that more so than any other Western Country, Canadian politics and popular culture is affected by the liberal popular culture of America that rose during the cultural and sexual revolution of the sixties. That the Canadian New Left is both intellectually and morally adrift and having had a monopoly on our cultural institutions for the past three decades with nobody to challenge them has led our nation into a lapse both domestically and internationally.

With the advent of the forced ‘passage’ of Bill-C 38 last week, many of the New Left praised Canada for being a bastion of ‘tolerance’ and openly reveled in how they were able to silence dissent and free speech in the name of establishing their new ‘equality’. The NDP-Liberal coalition basks in the lack of challenge to its authority. That using the systems of government it has put in place systemically over 3 decades, it can thwart Conservatives and have no rival.

Could it be however that its true challenge will come from the source of its power that it sees as its most banal foe? Truisms in life never seem to fail. The two in play here would be: ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely’ and ‘never underestimate your opponent’.

With the announced retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor from the American Supreme Court last week Americans are preparing for what will be perhaps the biggest domestic battle of President Bush’s career. This will be President Bush’s first chance to leave his ideological stamp on the Supreme Court and his judicial nominee will define his presidency as easily as the war in Iraq, 9/11 and The Patriot Act.

In short, a conservative nominee who is principled on issues such as abortion, SSM and euthanasia will help tip the American Supreme Court into the conservative ideological camp and away from the liberal tilt that has defined it and hence America for the past three decades since Roe v. Wade. As expected, left-wing pundits and Democrats have already begun their crusade to attack any nominee who to them does not reflect the values of the New Left. Ralph G. Neas, president of far left People for the American Way has already threatened a fight if President Bush picks a candidate with conservative or Catholic views like Justices Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia. To these people, any nominee who is not a vociferous defendant of abortion or same sex marriage will not make the cut.

President Bush will most certainly pick a conservative nominee, as he should. This battle in the ongoing culture war will help define America’s legal decisions for the next generation. Democrats and liberals in America still believe that they are the mainstream and are concerned, but this could not be further from the truth.

How does this affect Canada?

As we have mentioned, Canadians, contrary to what the CBC and The Toronto Star would have you believe, do not spend too much time watching Don Mackellar films or listening to the inane political ramblings of Sarah Polley. The vast majority do not even watch the CBC. Most views of the Canadian left are formed through the hegemony represented in the American cultural industry. Explicitly, I am referring to the liberal values found in American television, movies, music, magazines, media etc. The impact of our own culture industries on our populace is nil to negligible.

Politically, America has already begun on its journey out of the left-ward socialist tilt that it had been mired in for more than a generation. It’s cultural industries however still retain much of the influence of the communist movement that caused so much controversy during the fifties. Luminaries like Robert Redford have even produced films deifying communist butchers like Che Guevara. Indeed Redford himself has helped finance a film school used for communist propaganda in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Nevertheless, his tenure as an American cultural icon is in its last throes. His world view is no longer that of a young feisty rebel but that of a tired old man.

Again, assuming Bush’s nominee takes hold and he/she is a conservative, not prone to waffling on such New Left dogma as abortion and same-sex marriage, eventually, the American legal and academic culture will shift. Similarly, once the generation of children raised during the Reagan eighties comes to power in the next ten-fifteen years, that generation whose frame of reference is America as a force for good against communism and not America as a force of evil through Vietnam, American popular culture will then also begin to shift right. More films, television programs and media will then be exported reflecting this world-view.

When this comes, it will be hard for Canada to avoid its influence. Canadians will feel more comfortable sharing conservative views when they are being portrayed positively in the popular media whether the CBC and the CRTC approves of it or not. It will be more and more difficult for the NDP-Liberal coalition to demonize conservatism when Canadians will see more positive portrayals of conservatism in popular media. Some might argue this has already begun with not only The Passion of the Christ but with a sympathetic sub-textual portrayal of 9/11 in War of the Worlds and Batman Begins and the fact that alledgedly Ron Howard is retooling The DaVinci Code so as to not offend Catholic or Evangelical sensibilities (although how this is possible I do not know).

This is when Canada will slowly begin to wake out of its slumber and accept how far it has slid to the left. It will be, if you will, a domino cultural shift that will occur over the course of the next generation.

The only question is whether or not in Canada’s case, it will come too late.

posted by Nicol DuMoulin @ 2:04 PM