Opinion - What Burke, Aquinas and Gramsci can teach Canadian conservatives

Yahoo

24-04-2025

As Canada approaches another federal election, we find ourselves not simply at a political crossroads, but at a civilizational reckoning. Mark Carney has succeeded Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister. And although the mask has changed, the regime remains the same.
This regime is rooted in managerial orthodoxy — a technocratic class committed to global abstractions and detached from the moral and cultural roots that once anchored Canada. The recent party leaders' debates were sterile exercises — empty theater that obscured the deeper crisis we face.
For Canadian conservatives, the question now is not just how to win an election, but how to understand the nature of the battle we are in. This requires us to stop thinking like campaigners and start thinking like cultural strategists.
We need to recover insights from three thinkers rarely spoken of in the same breath: Edmund Burke, Thomas Aquinas and Antonio Gramsci.
Let's start with Burke. The father of modern conservatism grasped something profound: that political order rests on pre-political foundations. Society cannot survive on rights and rules alone. It needs manners, customs and mores — habits of the heart passed down like heirlooms.
Burke described these as becoming a people's 'second nature.' They are not consciously chosen in the marketplace of ideas but are absorbed through family, ritual and shared memory. The child who stands quietly for the national anthem, who learns to revere sacrifice and abhor cruelty, is not engaged in abstract reasoning. He is being formed, given a soul fit for freedom.
This is what modern liberalism, in all its managerial coldness, fails to understand — and what Canadian conservatism too often forgets. We speak of tax rates and GDP as though economic metrics can substitute for moral cohesion. We campaign on 'affordability' while the very foundations of our culture — the family, faith, even the idea of Canada as a coherent nation — are treated as embarrassing relics.
But these foundations are not mere preferences. This is where Aquinas matters. His theory of natural law reminds us that there is a telos to human life — a purpose inscribed in our nature. Justice is not whatever the state declares it to be, nor is liberty an unlimited field for expressive individualism.
Aquinas taught that true freedom is the freedom to pursue the good, and the law exists to aid in that pursuit. Human beings are social, rational creatures. The natural law flows from that nature: to honor our parents, to raise our children in truth, to live in stable communities, to tell the truth, to worship God. These are not right-wing talking points. They are the basis of any sane and enduring order.
What's astonishing is that the Canadian state now actively militates against these basic goods. It funds programs that fracture the family, that undermine parental authority in schools, that redefine the human person in law and medicine — and calls all of it 'progress.' And here's the cruel irony: progressive forces don't need to win elections to win the war.
That brings us to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist tactician of culture. He understood that power is rarely seized through direct confrontation. Rather, it is cultivated through a long campaign of 'cultural hegemony' — the capturing of institutions that shape how people view the world. He argued that a revolution in 'common sense' had to precede any revolution in politics. That meant patient work in the trenches of culture: schools, churches, the media, professional guilds. Influence those, and eventually the masses will come to see your worldview not as ideology but as normality.
This is exactly what progressives have done in Canada. They have turned their vision of the world into the ambient common sense of the bureaucratic state. You see it when public servants issue press releases in the language of activist NGOs, when journalists scoff at 'traditional values' as though they were some imported superstition and when speaking obvious truths becomes an act of professional suicide.
And what has the conservative response been? At best, timid objection; at worst, complicity. We have acted as though elections are enough — as though winning a parliamentary majority can somehow roll back decades of cultural engineering. It can't. The war of maneuver or the frontal assault for political power will always fail if the war of position or the slow battle for cultural ground has already been lost.
The recent debates only confirmed this. Carney, cool and measured, offered no vision beyond technocratic drift. Jagmeet Singh reprised his usual role as progressive placeholder. Yves-François Blanchet indulged his Quebec-first vanity project. Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre spoke fluently about inflation and housing, but said little of Canada as a nation, tradition or moral project. On national defense, there was nothing beyond surface gestures.
No one spoke to the deeper question: What is Canada for? And without answering that, everything else is noise.
So where do conservative Canadians go from here?
First, we must begin the long, unglamorous work of cultural renewal. That means building institutions that can shape minds and form character. We need to nurture writers, clergy, professors, filmmakers and policy thinkers who understand the nature of the struggle.
Second, we must speak a language rooted in moral clarity. No more bureaucratic euphemisms. No more apologies for believing that children need mothers and fathers, that nations have borders, that life is sacred and that truth is not a social construct.
Third, we must stop being afraid of the past. Burke's second nature, Aquinas's natural law, Gramsci's cultural common sense — all remind us that our task is not innovation but restoration. We don't need new values. We need the courage to reassert old ones that still speak to the permanent things.
Finally, we must embrace Gramsci's realism without his materialism. The war of position is slow, quiet and often thankless. But it is how we win. And if we are truly serious about saving this country from managed decline, then we must wage that war with everything we have.
Because if we do not shape the common sense of tomorrow, someone else will. In fact, they already are.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.