GOLDSTEIN: In Trudeau’s vision of himself, he was always the chosen one
The Prime Minister clearly sees himself as the guardian of the vision of the anointed in Canada
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With the Trudeau government soon to become history, whatever happens in the next federal election, the most accurate portrayal of what it became comes from a 30-year-old book on the prevailing liberal political vision of our time – the vision of the anointed.
Written by the great American conservative thinker Thomas Sowell in 1995, The Vision of the Anointed, Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, obviously isn’t about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his decade of Liberal government in Canada, but it describes it to a tee.
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As Sowell writes, “the vision of the anointed is not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in a causal sense, but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in the world. It is a vision of differential rectitude” or righteousness.
“What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special status of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane.
“Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin … the benighted are to be made ‘aware,’ to have their ‘consciousness raised,’ and the wistful hope is held out that they will ‘grow.’ Should the benighted prove recalcitrant, however, then their ‘mean-spiritedness’ must be fought and the ‘real reasons’ behind their arguments and actions exposed.”
This is how Trudeau, who clearly sees himself as the chosen one and the guardian of the vision of the anointed in Canada, has operated on every major issue his government has dealt with from climate change, to the pandemic, to the trucker convoy, to gun control, to using the power of government to redistribute income, to Canada’s response to U.S President-elect Donald Trump’s looming tariff threat.
In Trudeau’s vision on each of these issues there is a morally correct position – his – and those who do not share it are not merely wrong but motivated by ill intentions.
Over and over again Trudeau, as Canada’s divider-in-chief, has addressed such complex issues by creating a villain – the latest in a long line of them being Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, for defending the economy of her province, which is her job – and then attacking that villain, in Smith’s case by questioning her loyalty to Canada.
The danger with this approach, as Sowell observes, is that “in the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly ‘thinking people’ who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression.
“In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes, but in lost jobs, social disintegration and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many.”
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In Trudeau’s case, consider the issue of climate change alone.
Anyone examining Trudeau’s climate change plan with access to the government’s publicly available data on Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions and a calculator can easily figure out that Trudeau’s carbon tax is not doing what he claimed it would do, in terms of lowering emissions, and that Canada will miss the imaginary reduction targets his government has set for itself.
And yet, year after year as Trudeau and Co. poured hundreds of billions of dollars into “fighting” climate change, the Liberals insisted the policy was succeeding in doing what they said it would do, until the whole house of cards collapsed under its own weight to the point where even the leading contenders to replace Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister – Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland – hint vaguely at new approaches to the issue.
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As Sowell warned three decades ago, “the prevailing vision of our era is long overdue for a critical examination – or, for many, a first examination.
“This vision so permeates the media and academia … that many grow to adulthood unaware that there is any other way to look at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions of so-called ‘thinking people’…
“Many of these ‘thinking people’ could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.”
The problem, of course, is that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
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