What Burke, Aquinas and Gramsi can teach the Canadian conservatives to teach

As Canada approaches other federal elections, we find ourselves not simply at a political crossroads, but in a civilized account. Mark Carney Justin Trudeau succeeded as a liberal leader and prime minister. Although the mask has changed, the system remains the same.

This system is rooted in administrative Orthodox – a technocratic class committed to global abstraction and separates from the moral and cultural roots that are based on Canada one day. Discussions of the recent party leaders were sterile exercises – an empty theater that obscures the deepest crisis we face.

For Canadian conservatives, the question is now not only how to win the elections, but how to understand the nature of the battle in which we are. This requires us to stop thinking like activists and start thinking like cultural strategies.

We need to restore visions of three thinkers that I rarely talked about at the same time: Edmund Burke, Thomas Akwinas and Antonio Gramshe.

Let’s start with Burke. The father of the modern province was holding something deep: this political system depended on the foundations before the political. Society cannot survive in rights and rules alone. It needs morals, customs and customs – the habits of the heart have passed like inheritance.

Berke described this as the “second nature of the people”. They are not consciously chosen in the ideas market, but they are absorbed through family, rituals and common memory. A child who stands quietly for the national anthem, who learns to reverence sacrifice and cruelty cruelty, does not participate in abstract thinking. It is formed, given the spirit suitable for freedom.

This is what modern liberalism fails, with all its administrative coldness, in understanding – and what often forgets the Canadian province. We are talking about tax rates and gross domestic product as if economic standards can replace moral cohesion. We campaign on “the ability to bear costs” while the foundations of our culture – family, faith, and even the idea of ​​Canada as a coherent country – dealt with embarrassing effects.

But these foundations are not just preferences. This is the place that matters to Akoyen. His theory of natural law reminds us that there is a telos for human life – a purpose engraved in our nature. Justice is not all that the state announces, and it is not the freedom of an unlimited field of expressive individualism.

Aquinas is aware that real freedom is the freedom to follow good, and the law exists to help in this chase. Humans are social and rational creatures. Natural law flows from that nature: to honor our parents, actually raise our children, live in stable societies, tell the truth, and worship God. These are not the right -wing conversation points. They are the basis of any sane and permanent matter.

What is surprising is that the Canadian state is now dealing with activity against these basic commodities. Family breaking the family, which undermines parental authority in schools, which redefine the human person in law and medicine – and is called “progress”. Here is the harsh paradox: progressive forces do not need to win the elections to win the war.

This leads us to Gramsy, the Italian Marxist tactics of culture. He understood that power is rarely seized through direct confrontation. Instead, it is planted through a long campaign of “cultural domination” – capturing institutions that constitute how people look at the world. He said that the revolution in “sound instinct” had to precede any revolution in politics. This means the patient’s work in the trenches of culture: schools, churches, media, and professional unions. The influence on these, and in the end the masses will come to see your view of the world is not ideological but as a natural nature.

This is exactly what the progressive did in Canada. They have turned their vision of the world into a healthy sense surrounding the bureaucratic state. You see this when public employees publish a journalist in the language of active NGOs, when journalists make fun of “traditional values” as if they were some imported myths, and when they speak clear facts, it becomes a work of professional suicide.

What was the conservative response? At best, shy objection; In the worst case, collusion. We have acted as if the elections are sufficient – as if winning a parliamentary majority could retract contracts from cultural engineering. Not possible. The maneuvering war or the front assault of the political authority will always fail if you already lose the war of position or the slow battle of the cultural land.

Recent discussions confirmed this only. Carney, cold and measuring, did not make any vision that exceeded the technocrat drifting. Jagmeet Singh renewed its usual role as a progressive deputy office. Yves Francois Blanchett indulged his project in Quebec Virrest. Conservative Party leader Pierre Beyviri has spoken fluently about inflation and housing, but he said that a few Canada as a nation, tradition or moral project. On the national defense, there was nothing outside the surface gesture.

No one spoke to the deeper question: What is Canada? Without the response, everything else is noise.

So where does the conservative Canadians go from here?

First, we must start the long, incisive work of cultural renewal. This means building institutions that can form minds and form a personality. We need to take care of the writers, clerics, professors, directors and politicians who understand the nature of the struggle.

Second, we must speak a language rooted in moral clarity. No more bureaucratic expressions. There is no more apology for the belief that children need mothers and fathers, that states have borders, that life is sacred and that the truth is not a social structure.

Third, we must stop fear of the past. The second nature of Burke, the natural law of Aquinas, the cultural logic of Gramsci – reminds us all that our mission is not innovation but restoration. We do not need new values. We need courage to reaffirm those old that still speak to permanent things.

Finally, we must embrace the realism of grams without materialism. The position of the situation is slow and calm and often does not change. But this is how we win. And if we are really serious about saving this country from the orbit decline, we must launch this war with everything we have.

Because if we do not form a proper sense of tomorrow, another person will do so. In fact, they are already.

Andrew to sten He is a professor of international relations at the McCalester College at Saint -Paul, Minnesota, and is an older colleague at the Peace and Diplomacy Institute, and an uninterrupted colleague in the defense priorities in Washington, DC.