Reply #11: From an article a couple of years ago on the men behind Harper [View All]

[Minstrel Boy]

(and overshadowing those men is neo-con Leo Strauss)

That neo-conservative agenda may read as if it has been lifted straight from the dusty desk drawers of Ronald Reagan: lower taxes, less federal government, and free markets unfettered by social programs such as medicare that keep citizens from being forced to pull up their own socks. But their arguments echo the local landscape, where Big Oil sets the tone – usually from a U.S. head office – and Pierre Trudeau's 1980 National Energy Policy left the conviction that Confederation was rigged against the West.

...

Shadia Drury, a member of the U of C department until last year, accuses her former colleagues of harbouring a more sinister mission. An expert on Leo Strauss, the philosophical father of the neo-conservative movement, Drury paints the Calgary School as a homegrown variation on American Straussians like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who share their teacher's deep suspicions of liberal democracy. Strauss argued that a ruling elite often had to resort to deception – a noble lie – to protect citizens from themselves. To that end, he recommended harnessing the simplistic platitudes of populism to galvanize mass support for measures that would in fact restrict rights. Drury warned the Globe's John Ibbitson that the members of the Calgary School "want to replace the rule of law with the populism of the majority," and labelled Stephen Harper "their product."

...

...back in Alberta, Ted Byfield, the unabashed voice of the West since the Calgary School's professors were pups, sees it another way – in terms Leo Strauss might have approved. "All these positions which Harper cherishes are there because of a group of people in Calgary – Flanagan most prominent among them," Byfield says. "I don't think he knows how to compromise. It's not in his genes. The issue now is: how do we fool the world into thinking we're moving to the left when we're not?"

To those who are unnerved by that prospect, Byfield offers no cheer. "Those people who said they're dangerous – they're right!" he says. "People with ideas are dangerous. If Harper gets elected, he'll make a helluva change in this country."

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/09/2119243