Fragmenting the conservative movement and pitting our political parties against one another to see which one is the better authoritarian will not end well

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Anyone who lived through the 1990s and early 2000s knows that when the Canadian right is divided, electoral success is next to impossible to achieve. Yet a new movement — largely driven by younger people and adopting some of the views espoused by big-government loving, free-market skeptical MAGA Republicans — is threatening to do just that.

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As then-Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper noted back in 2003, the conservative movement in Canada has long rested on an alliance between “the economic and social conservative sides.” But if you listen to people on the so-called new right — also known as “national conservatism” or “postliberalism” — it was always a marriage of convenience rather than shared ideology.

Writing in the Without Diminishment Substack newsletter last week, policy consultant Alex MacDonald argued that, “While the fusionist project in Canada promised to wed the supposed mutual values of economic libertarians and social traditionalists into an intellectually coherent and principled conservative coalition to be electorally viable, we have instead witnessed the social conservatives become the concubine of the economic libertarians.”

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Part of the problem, he argues, is that, “The libertarian mindset has gained purchase in far more than just economic questions. That is, conservatives have become skeptical of the state in general, not just as it interfaces with the economy. The state, we are told, ought to be neutral. Any calls for the state to wield its power in........

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