Totally agree. I won't even call them Tories, because they're nowhere close.

Oh I think we're all aware of what real conservatives are like.

This bunch however are neo-cons….a mixture of tent-revivalism, amateur hour, libertarianism, teabags and assorted nuts.

Just because you define "conservatives" as "Red Tories" in the mold of George Grant doesn't mean it's the only way the term 'conservatism' is used [in] modern parlance.

Indisputably true. But just because "conservative" is used preposterously in modern parlance does not mean that we must flatter that absurdity by treating its semantic confusion as denotatively valid.

A word can either be semantically stable and mean one thing, independently of the agendas of contesting social forces, or it can be semantically plastic and mean anything we want it to mean, subject to whatever norms our society's agenda-setting leadership considers "healthy", "useful", "relevant" and otherwise enlightened. It used to be a mark of the conservative to prefer the former view of language and reject the latter as a classic symptom of liberal relativism. The fact that so many "conservatives" feel the need to admit that the word "conservative" has now been so effectively evacuated of semantic content that it now refers to nothing more than a visceral dislike of the state apparatus and a vague ennui with the very notion of Canadian statehood (a disposition it shares with the Hell's Angels among other criminal organisations, I might add) suggests that the movement may be nearing, or have arrived at, terminal intellectual bankruptcy—yet another item we can add to the list of things it has in common with Canadian liberalism.

I'm not sure why you and Emily get a self-appointed monopoly on defining political nomenclature.

Yeah. We should really leave that monopoly where it belongs, in the hands of Sun-chain editorial boards. Hell—were they to declare tomorrow that an urge to dine on stir-fried macaque testicles were the defining test of a man's conservative bona fides, we would all be duty bound to bow our heads in mute acquiescence before their authoritative verdict.

I wouldn't really fall under anything that you would consider to be "conservative", and quite the opposite to a significant extent…

I believe that's what is called a "breakthrough"… ;)

…but it gets tedious to explain it all the time…

Have you been counting how many times I've been called a "Liberal" and how often I've had to explain (without benefit of coloured chalk or hand puppets, sadly) that, yes, a Tory critique of the CPC is possible, even necessary? It's not too late to start! But, yeah…having one's philosophical affiliations wilfully, maliciously, and consistently distorted is bloody dreary: welcome to my world.

Anyway, I have indeed noted your admirable refusal to conform to any facile or monolithic conceptions of "conservatism", either as conceived by its adherents or by its ideological foes—a refusal that appears to me to have become somewhat more assertive since you began to mingle (and perhaps even breed) with us Eastern bastards. Perhaps you've contracted "Central Canadianitis"—a horrible, ideologically disfiguring disease that presents itself chiefly in the patient's inability to remain on one side of a self-serving either/or fallacy. If so, that's all to the good.

I suppose we shall need to agree to disagree about the inherent nature of conservatism, insofar as I believe it has an inherent nature while you believe it is constructed provisionally. I think your point is only trans-culturally valid: Japanese conservatism is obviously going to be different from Canadian conservatism. When speaking inter-culturally, though, it seems to me that premising conservatism upon a purely relational mode of being-in-the-world concedes to liberalism a virtual explanatory lock upon the process of ideological formation: if the nature of conservatism depends on who you are, where you are, and when you are, then we're all liberals, differing only in our location on the liberal continuum. By that standard, the Albertan who wishes to conserve massive government intervention in the oil industry and re-establish the NEP could call himself a kind of conservative. He might be a minority conservative, of course, but a doctrinaire relational conservative could meet this self-identification with nothing more authoritative than, "Well, you have your conservatism; I have mine," which differs from the liberal/anarchist "You have your truth; I have mine" in ways that completely escape me.

I think your understanding of 'conservatism', be it philosophic or linguistic, however, is an understanding that is either too sophisticated or formalist for me. I still think, admittedly perhaps with at least some degree of ignorance, that the term is relational, and not something that takes its meaning from 'conservatives' in any single moment in time. And I would, if forced, consider many NDP individuals to be far more conservative than myself, on any number of issues (health care, labour relations, etc.). However, I think this results from a semantic and ideological disconnect that you cannot feasibly resolve, in that I don't know what the term means, other than referring to someone who viscerally believes the established order has meaning and value beyond that immediately established by reason.

I wonder, though—if we concede the basic liberal argument that man must orient his beliefs relationally and that one need not hold as true tomorrow what one holds true today, would it not be more efficient for a conservative to adopt liberal beliefs today in anticipation of their becoming conservative a generation hence? Why go through all the pain of conversion and why submit one's society to a storm of ostensibly futile ideological turbulence when social stability (a time-honoured conservative value) would be better served if today's conservatives merely adopted those outrageously anti-Western, civilisation-destroying facets of liberalism that the next generation's conservatives will passionately hold as self-evident articles of faith?

Thus, with same-sex marriage a done deal, Olaf, I really think you should start doing some pioneer advocacy on behalf of legal polygamy if you've any chance of being cited as a conservative authority by the precocious pubescents of the 2060 Executive of the University of Waterloo's Objectivist Club. Sample arguments: "The family unit is the guarantor of social stability, right? Well, just think of how stable society will be when little Johnny has four mommies instead of just one!"; "The Mormons are conservative; the Mormons are polygamous; therefore, polygamy is conservative". Heh. Move over, Edmund.

You, for example, seem quite committed to a Court interpreted Charter document as entirely beyond reproach…

Quite au contraire. If you re-read our exchange on this topic, you shall notice that I never endorsed a Court-interpreted Charter. I merely posited, contrary to your assertion, that judicial activism has been a fact of juridical life in Canada since Confederation and that the imaginative vigour recently expended upon Charter interpretation had been anciently expended upon more broadly constitutional matters, specifically by the JCPC.

Now, we agreed to disagree on that point (as we always manage to do!), but you never caught me saying, "And moreover, judicial activism is really cool", though you may have accurately caught implications such as "Judicial activism is and always has been an inevitable and time-honoured way for judges to f—k up the BNA and/or Canada Act".

Not only do I not endorse a court-fashioned Charter, but I don't even endorse the Charter, something I consider an Americanised excrescence upon what had been a faithfully followed English constitutional tradition. The common law was a more than adequate guarantor of personal liberty, a position I've reiterated ad nauseam everywhere I've left virtual footsteps.

Since we now have the wretched thing, though, and since it's not going anywhere, we'll all just have to collectively grow a pair and realise that it's going to be interpreted with exactly the kind of judicial insolence practiced by the JCPC in the late 1800's, when they decided that they—a bunch of irresponsible British law lords who could not have found Canada on a map—and not the duly elected Fathers of Confederation, had the right to define what "peace, order, and good government" meant.

I've always thought that monogamy betrays a total lack of commitment.