My old friend George Gibault, the director of Social Credit Caucus Research from the 1970s until the party’s ultimate collapse in 1994 was exceptional. He played a significant role in an internal coup against Premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1988, working with Finance Minister Mel Couvelier and Attorney-General Bud Smith to radically circumscribe the powers of the premier and place much de facto authority in the hands of Couvelier and Smith.
George’s involvement in that high-level decision was exceptional because he was a career courtier who had risen through the ranks of the party’s unelected activists and through the party bureaucracy in the Victoria legislature while it sat in government.
While courtiers have always been an important part of politics in any system of government, different social orders strongly condition who becomes a powerful courtier and how. When George was coming up politically, during the last decades of the Cold War, the most senior courtiers, especially in conservative parties, were not people who had risen through the ranks of junior courtiers. Premiers and Prime Ministers hired men—and it was overwhelmingly men—out of other careers, “successful” businessmen, academics, prominent lawyers, who would typically place their assets in some kind of trust to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest and self-dealing. They would also take a significant pay cut. The discourse was that they were “giving something back,” engaging in “public service.”
We all know that the trusts were not very blind and that the friends and relatives of the courtiers would soon find the government making decisions that improved their bottom line. Nevertheless, the public performance of virtue did condition our horizon of expectations. When these men were revealed to be self-dealers, hypocrites, we would be outraged, genuinely, because their authority supposedly came from their altruistic virtue. Men like Jimmy Pattison, the future billionaire, were given prominent jobs for a nominal or token salary; such jobs were an effective tactic for self-fashioning and virtue signaling for those wishing to graduate from a mere rich and successful businessman and enter the financial elite.
Conservative parties also had a healthy verging on unhealthy suspicion of civil servants. Indeed, provincial civil servants did not gain the right to vote in BC elections until 1972. The sense was that the civil service was a separate and hostile locus of power in a legislature. Both of BC’s major parties continued conducting gratuitous reorganizations and civil service purges until the end of the twentieth century. Political power, understood as a zero sum game, meant that every bit of power an unelected government employee gained came either at the expense of the liberty of the citizens or at the expense of the power of elected representatives.
Perhaps because of the outsized influence of Warsaw Pact refugees within Social Credit, the party, George especially, feared the political world in which we now live, in which the managerial class has become fully self-conscious and self-interested and has, as a cartel, seized state power from elected officials primarily through the courtier subset of the managerial class or, as they used to say out East, the commissars.
As the twenty-first century has worn on, our baseline has shifted and we have normalized the way that the courtier class has usurped the power of elected officials and how it has come to control its own promotion structures, making career courtiers the norm, for the first time, on the political right.
Ironically, this has also led to a decline in our expectations that our politicians, elected and unelected, will or should not engage in brazen self-dealing and looting of the public purse. If being a courtier is just a profession, like any other, expected to act in its own interests and make no pretense of a special virtue, altruism or sacrifice, how are we to object to them pursuing “their own interests.” And this has bled to our expectations of elected officials, especially as their wealth has increased so rapidly relative to the rest of the population.
But, especially since the advent of Trumpism and the other Bannonite movements around the world, parties of the right have developed a class politics utterly inimical to the courtier class. At a moment when their parties and governments, like all others, are in the vise grip of the commissars, conservative parties find themselves crucibles of class conflict. Courtiers inside conservative parties might strike the odd anti-Woke pose and try to sound like Andrew Tate but they are fundamentally motivated by the same class interests that motivate progressive courtiers and the permanent civil service.
In other words, to be a decent conservative courtier, one must be a supremely self-conscious, self-examining class traitor. At my job, I try to follow George’s example and be exactly that. But that’s the problem with neoliberalism: you cannot solve systemic problems solely through personal virtue. And so, the only other option is that conservatives must break the power of the labour system, smash its promotion structures, purge the ranks, slash the pay and install good old fashioned senior courtiers.
And this is why the managerial class hates Elon Musk more even than Donald Trump. Because the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk’s control of is something out of the Cold War, before the managerial class became self-conscious and seized huge chunks of state, social and institutional power. Not only does it place a wealthy, eccentric businessman with no government experience at its head; its primary purpose is to conduct a massive civil service purge and concurrent reorganization, seeking to break the hold of the commissars on the state.
And Musk is not the only “inexperienced” and “unqualified” Trump appointee. Nearly every cabinet nominee was assailed during confirmation for the fact that they had not come up through the supposedly meritocratic civil service. Again and again, Democratic senators implied or directly stated that a person who was not already a member of the courtier class, who had done work like this before inside the state, was simply incapable of being a cabinet minister.
Instead of concealing their belief that the state should be a meritocratic technocracy and not a popularly elected democracy, they bared their fangs, with Chuck Schumer suggesting that if the Trump Administration were not careful, they might be personally destroyed or even killed by an intelligence agency. Indeed, throughout mainstream media, we see that the term “democracy” has become its own opposite, now meaning Mandarinate. Those, like Rob Reiner, wishing to “save democracy” mainly mean by this that they wish to preserve the governing power of the commissars and protect the commissars’ authority from the democratic rabble full of unqualified people exercising common sense.
The problem for these putative saviours of democracy is that if Elon Musk or Robert F Kennedy or some other prominent wealthy outsider is actually competent to do their job and carrying it out competently, it is a standing refutation of the commissars’ claims of running an expertise-based, meritocratic outfit that produces uniquely and solely qualified experts for leadership positions.
And this is why we see such an odd political configuration: industrial workers, youth and the old school bourgeoisie in an alliance to restore some modicum of twentieth century representative democracy as the commissar class rushes to finish dismantling it. But this coalition has been able to get further in the United States precisely because, while the culture of political parties and of the judiciary has been captured, to a large extent, by the commissars, America’s robust and democratic political institutions have proven harder to tame.
A country like Canada has made substantial and devastating changes to its democratic institutions to ensure that its parties, across the spectrum, are controlled by the courtier class. As I have stated in previous essays, Jean Chrétien’s 2003 Election Act gave the office of the leader of every party direct appointment powers over candidates. And between 2004 and 2010, not only has an increasing proportion of candidates been directly appointed; all parties have established “candidate vetting” committees composed entirely of courtiers, with secret memberships that meet in secret and produce no minutes. These committees can veto any candidacy at will and without cause.
In a country like Canada, legislators do literally serve at the pleasure of the courtiers who can, with no institutional primary system, veto a legislator’s re-election bid with the stroke of a pen. And without a primary system, I do not know how Canada’s political system will confront the contradiction of interests between the interests of the conservative courtier class and the class alignment of the parties they serve. But that confrontation is coming, nevertheless. It is inevitable. I wish George were here to puzzle it through with me.
