In 1995, the great American conservative thinker Thomas Sowell authored a seminal book on the mindset of liberal elites — The Vision of the Anointed — Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. While obviously not based on the bizarre journeys of the Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney governments on the issue of climate change, it describes with remarkable foresight what happened in Canada starting two decades later.
Sowell's Framework for the Liberal Elite
Sowell argued that the liberal elite — the “anointed” as he describes them — repeatedly approach issues with the same flawed strategy that inevitably ends in dysfunction and disaster. According to columnist Lorrie Goldstein, this framework perfectly captures the Liberal record on climate change under Trudeau and Carney.
Failed Climate Change Strategy
Consider the Liberal record of Trudeau’s failed and abandoned $200-billion-plus climate change strategy, paid for by Canadian taxpayers, in the context of how Sowell says the anointed approach issues. It begins, he writes, like this:
- Assertions of a great danger to the whole of society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
- An urgent need for action to avert the impending catastrophe.
- A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behaviour of the many in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
- A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible or motivated by unworthy purposes.
Sowell’s explanation in 1995 of how the liberal anointed think is, of course, the perfect description of how the Trudeau Liberals, the Liberal chattering classes and the liberal media approached climate change starting in 2015.
Climate Crisis Rhetoric and Its Consequences
In describing the “climate crisis” in apocalyptic terms as a crisis above all others, the Liberal anointed ignored that their irrational solutions — the premature abandonment of fossil fuels in a big, cold, northern, sparsely populated, resource-rich country like Canada — would lead to a new set of energy and economic crises. Self-inflicted ones in a world where fossil fuels provide 86.2% of global energy needs.
True to Sowell’s vision of the anointed, those who pointed out this obvious issue — that no credible body from the environmental commissioner to the parliamentary budget officer believed the Liberals would achieve their emission reduction targets — were attacked as “climate deniers.” The Liberal anointed declared, absurdly, that unless one supported their ruinously expensive and doomed-to-fail strategies, they were in favour of hurricanes flattening Canadian cities.
Pivot from Trudeau to Carney Liberals
That is, until the Trudeau Liberals pivoted to the Carney Liberals and started making the same arguments they had previously attacked as climate denialism. Carney, who prior to entering politics was the leading global corporate spokesman for higher carbon taxes, scrapped the consumer carbon tax — Trudeau’s signature climate policy. He acknowledged “Canada is not going to reach our 2030 and 2035 climate targets” — sacrilege in the Trudeau era — because Trudeau’s plan had “too much regulation, not enough action” with a lot of talk “and then nothing happens.”
In theory the Liberals still support Trudeau’s goal of achieving “net zero” emissions by 2050 — an absurd promise to do something 24 years from now when, according to their own previous apocalyptic rhetoric, it will be too late. Finally, Carney said what the Trudeau Liberals had described as climate denialism when Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre first said it — that for as long as the global economy was dependent on oil and natural gas, “as much of that energy as possible should come from Canada, produced responsibly.”
No Apology, No Admission
True to Sowell’s depiction of the anointed, the Liberals have never admitted their $200-billion climate strategy failed, nor apologized to Canadian taxpayers. Why? Because as Sowell wrote three decades ago: “To those with the vision of the anointed, the public serves not only as a general object of disdain, but as a baseline from which to measure their own lofty heights … What the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept the vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin … Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.”
Sound like any political party we know?
