Jason Kenney's entrance in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race highlights the difference between a political faction and a political party. Too often forgotten are the significant differences between factions and parties.
Jason Kenney's entrance in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race highlights the difference between a political faction and a political party.
Too often forgotten are the significant differences between factions and parties.
Factions keep things quiet and rule with plenty of winks and nods. In the essay Federalist No. 10 (1787), James Madison famously described factions as citizens "adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Those interests, he said, could be made explicit by arguments of principle but factions seldom made them.
In contrast to factions and other conspiracies, Edmund Burke argued in 1770 that, in constitutional monarchies, parties had the task of organizing opinions and making them respectable. A party, he said, is a body of persons united "for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some principle on which they are all agreed." Again the operative word is "principle."
Unlike factions, parties act on principle. They act on different principles, to be sure, but members of factions seek only to satisfy their personal ambitions and desires -- usually money and power. Competition, accordingly, is between or among parties. There can be no competition between a faction and a party.
This distinction, which stems from a time when parties first saw the light of day, remains valid. The proof of its validity was evident in the outcome of the 2015 provincial election when a large and principle-free faction, comprised of the PCs and the Wildrose floor-crossers, were crushed by Alberta's New Democrats. That, as Kenney has often said, is what makes the NDP an "accidental government."
Since then, it is fair to say that neither the Wildrose nor the PCs have been successful in articulating a respectable principle upon which non-socialists might agree. This is Kenney's great opportunity.
Because partisan contentions are over principles, they are more than mere preferences. People with different preferences (rare or medium-rare?) are usually indifferent towards others' preferences. Parties, however, want to prevail -- to rule and to ensure that their rules are obeyed, even by their opponents. The NDP is not stupid and understands this very well.
This is why, fearing a successful Kenney leadership bid, the NDP government is trying to make it more difficult. They proposed changes to party finance rules, which they justified as "getting money out of politics." But as Tom Flanagan pointed out in the Globe and Mail, it is really just gaming the system to their advantage.
Kenney's overriding principle is clear: "The Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties must put Alberta first." This means "moving beyond those bruised egos" in the two parties and creating "a broad, tolerant, diverse, free-enterprise coalition."
The interesting question now is whether the bruised egos of the PC remnant will embrace conservative principles. The signs are mixed.
Thomas Lukaszuk sat in the PC cabinets of both Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford. He is the incarnation of just about everything wrong with the old PCs, and he wants Kenney barred from running.
Sandra Jansen, a sitting PC MLA, said that Kenney "is clearly intent on dismantling the party," by which she means the old PC faction. This is clearly true.
For Lukaszuk, Jansen, and a few senior PC party officials who seem to be as afraid of Kenney as is the NDP, what Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord said of the restored Bourbons of the French Revolution clearly applies: they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
In the spring 2015 provincial election, the discredited PCs abandoned any connection to respectable principles and turned themselves into a faction. That in turn gave us the NDP.
The hostility those same PCs now show toward Kenney puts them in the same position.
Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
© 2016 Distributed by Troy Media
