Why The Dominion?

Some thoughts on the state of intellectual conservatism, the media environment in Canada, and the purpose of The Dominion

Greetings! It’s hard to know exactly how to introduce something like this, so what I’m going to do is introduce you to The Dominion by explaining the thought process that led to me to decide to have a go at launching it. This inaugural newsletter will be a bit longer than future ones, but please do bear with me. 

A few weeks ago now, lots of right-wingers announced they were deleting their Twitter accounts and switching over to Parler, a newish social media platform that markets itself as protecting free speech, unlike an increasingly censorious Twitter. As far as I can tell, few people have actually made the switch, they’re still tweeting away, but they’ve set up Parler accounts as well.  

Imagine if the great Twitter exodus does happen, and Parler, or something else, becomes the new right-wing online hub, what would that look like? Would it produce a new kind of conservative digital forum where better online discussions and networks are built, or would it become a self-selecting echo chamber and isolated island of conspiratorial fringe voices that cut themselves off from the digital public square, but radicalize themselves and the people who find their way ashore? I think the latter, and it says something about the unique challenges that we face in the digital age when so much of the world is moving online. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this challenge recently because, as I frequently comment on Twitter, I call myself a conservative, even though I’m extremely disillusioned with the state of conservatism in this country. Sure, Conservative parties can sometimes win elections, but to be conservative in Canada in 2020 means almost absolutely nothing substantive, and is largely just defined by what, and who, it opposes. What I have tried to start doing is to help sketch out and help build a new kind of conservatism, one that is not just substantive, but distinctly Canadian (the lack of a truly Canadian conservatism will be a topic of a future newsletter). 

I’m not quite hubristic enough to think that this is something I can accomplish alone, but the one area where I might be able to contribute something significant would be in the intellectual realm, and as part of this I’ve been exploring the idea of launching an ‘ideas journal,’ a serious publication designed to fill a vacuum in the abysmal conservative media landscape in Canada by providing a new forum for serious thinking and ideas, not one built just to generate clicks. 

But an important question from the outset of a project like this was how to avoid becoming the isolated and radicalizing echo chamber so many such attempts end up becoming. Back in 2009, Tucker Carlson gave a speech at CPAC where he offered a sort of call to arms for conservative journalism. The crux of his argument was that conservative media needed to start doing real reporting, not just opinion writing. What he was in essence calling for was a conservative New York Times: “The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it is also…a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.” The crowd boos at the mention of the NYT, which spoke to the challenge that Carlson was up against. A year later, Carlson launched The Daily Caller.

Relatedly, not too long ago Vanity Fair did an interesting profile of The American Conservative, one of the most interesting conservative magazines in America today. The whole piece is worth the read, but the most interesting takeaway is TAC’s ambition to “become The Atlantic of the right.” But as the piece points out, TAC isn’t the first right wing magazine with this ambition, and other attempts have met little success.

My point here is not to praise the NYT or Atlantic, or attack the Caller or TAC (quite the opposite, I am a big fan of TAC especially). I bring this up because in seeking to create conservative versions of the NYT or Atlantic, conservatives are after something else, namely an institutional prestige and legitimacy that means your ideas and propositions are simply treated as more serious, even by opponents, from the get go. It’s a way of legitimizing thinking and ideas. But this is easier said than done, you can’t simply manufacture institutional prestige.

American conservatism, for all its flaws, still has an intellectual and media landscape that puts Canadian conservatism to shame. American conservatives have publications like The American Conservative, Commentary, American Affairs, National Affairs, First Things, City Journal, Modern Age, and many others. What does Canada have? The National Post is arguably the closest thing we have to a serious conservative publication, and it is a newspaper, not an ideas journal. We have newspapers, tabloids, a few websites, and a few interesting columnists and voices, but we lack in an even worse way what it is that American conservative publications often seek; an institutional prestige that makes for serious thinking and ensures people take conservative thought and ideas more seriously. 

There are many problems with Canadian conservatism, ones that will be frequent topics of subsequent newsletters, but at the intellectual level this is one of the key challenges. One of the reasons conservatism here is so morribund is that it is unable to generate new thinking and new ideas. And part of the reason for this is that there are so few spaces and voices that can do so.

When we talk about ideas and thinking, we aren’t just talking about public policy prescriptions. Thinking of conservatism as being reducible to little more than ten point policy plans, with policies that haven’t changed since the 1980s, and calling that conservative thought, is a pathology Canadian conservatism suffers from and at least part of the reason for this is because serious conservative thinking is non-existent, so policy papers are the closest you’ll get. There is more, much more to politics, than just public policy.

The lack of institutions to generate this kind of serious thought, and a lack of institutional prestige to help ensure conservatism is treated as intellectually serious means that conservatism is just taken less seriously, and starts from an immediate disadvantage.

We’re obviously a much smaller country, so it would be foolish to expect us to be able to produce a plethora of such journals, but surely we could manage at least one? I think so, which is why I started thinking about trying to launch one. But this is much easier said than done. An ideas journal is something I plan on launching, but the challenges of building something sustainable and serious along these lines that doesn’t end up, out of financial necessity, descending into a clickbait factory are significant. I will say more about this another time. 

But it isn’t just the conservative media landscape in Canada that isn’t particularly vibrant, Canadian media is in general struggling and now increasingly dependent on public money to survive. Part of these challenges are to do with the changing media landscape in the digital age, but there’s also another reason less talked about I think (unsurprisingly) that explains why Canadian media is struggling so much, namely its mediocrity and how repetitive and uninteresting so much writing in this country is. 

There are two aspects to this. The first is that what is considered to be worthy of being written about is increasingly just perspectivist “feelings first” writing. Canada does still have some serious magazines and publications, but increasingly what passes for “good” writing seems to just be people telling you personal stories and experiences, especially ones that fit a certain ideological narrative. There’s no room for disagreement or interesting discussion of this kind of writing, all you’re supposed to do is share and describe it using words like powerful, stunning, moving, and brave. It’s not that there isn’t a role and place for writing like this, it’s just increasingly this is all that there is. The repetitiveness of this, even if every story is supposedly unique, is quite frankly boring, and it automatically precludes discussion and debate because you aren’t challenging an argument, you’re challenging someones experiences. 

The second part of this is the ideological part, which is connected to the first part. It’s not just that writing is now repetitive, feelings first writing, it’s that this approach to “good” writing is itself ideological and has infected virtually all mainstream writing and media institutions in this country. I won’t bore you with yet another take on the war inside the NYT, but Bari Weiss’ resignation letter describes Canadian media as much as it does the NYT I think: 

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.

Elite Canadian journalism increasingly, in the name of the values of the “successor ideology,” is written for a narrow audience by people who think and see the world in the same way, even if they are all ostensibly committed to a very specific ideological account of diversity. Weiss goes on:  

“Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.

This has infected both reporting and opinion writing, even in our newspapers that are ostensibly on the right. I’ve heard stories from journalist friends about the types of people produced by journalism schools today now, people who now fill newsrooms, stories that match anecdotal experiences of my own, and the public subsidization of our media will exacerbate this problem.

Money is power, and the public money that now supports much Canadian media is only going to incentivize media organizations to continue down this path, not simply because it removes market pressures, but because the incentives to publish this kind of orthodox writing and reporting will be the best way to ensure the public money continues to flow. Even if publishing heterodox writing or limiting how much space is dedicated to feelings first writing won’t lose organizations money, the subsidies will still subtly shape content and push it towards the moribund writing that ticks all the right boxes and doesn't upset the small elite audience that want this kind of writing. It’s already bad, and it’s only going to get worse.

But we also shouldn’t pretend that media that doesn’t take public money is superior or produces better reporting and content. Sites not dependent on public money but on private revenue streams often become little more than sensationalist clickbait factories designed to manufacture outrage and controversy to generate the traffic that provides the necessary revenue. This isn’t conducive to serious writing or thinking either.

Neither of these models, either publicly subsidized media or traffic driven sites, are viable models for the kind of serious ideas journal I think conservatives so desperately need here. But one of the positives that is emerging as writing increasingly becomes digital, is that options for small and independent writing and writers are also growing. This is why I’ve decided to have a go at starting The Dominion. 

A newsletter allows me to reach a smaller, but more dedicated audience directly. It doesn’t require me to go through editors, and it doesn’t require me to filter or write about certain things to make sure I can get writing published in mainstream media publications. I’m not going to stop writing for publications, but this newsletter will give you more honest perspective from me, because I can write about things that I don’t normally bother about because I know there’s nowhere to publish them. 

I want The Dominion to be the start of something useful and worthwhile. What I think newsletters have the potential to do is recreate some of the best aspects of the old blogosphere, allow interesting voices to emerge and valuable and cordial networks and communities to form around the newsletters. If this has any success I plan on expanding it, having more frequent newsletters (for now it will be weekly), perhaps a podcast at some point, and more. While The Dominion is not the journal of ideas I want to build, I’m hopeful it might become a good springboard for one, and perhaps The Dominion can emerge as a network and community that could support a publication like this in the future. 

I hope this is the start of something valuable, and I’m humbled you’ve already decided it is worth your time. I hope what I can offer you each week is a serious and interesting perspective, one worth reading that offers an alternative to the largely moribund writing you get elsewhere. I’m excited to get started. 

About the Name 

A few people privately, and online, have questioned my name choice for this newsletter, suggesting it’s sending the wrong message and will be misinterpreted as an “alt-right” or “colonial” name. I chose the name deliberately, knowing there would be people who didn’t like the name, and here’s why.

Dominion is an old word, and Canada was once a Dominion. Some people still like to use it as an ode to Canadian history. But increasingly, radicals in the throes of ideological derangement see these kinds of references as “dog whistles.” It’s part of the same conspiratorial pattern that sees the “OK” sign everywhere as a secret white supremacist hand gesture because a few 4chan trolls suggested it, or more closer to home, the suggestion that the Red Ensign flag is a white supremacist symbol because a few nasty white nationalist groups have adopted it as one of their symbols. It’s vital that we don’t give into this, and don’t cede our historic and traditional symbols to the nasty voices that want to claim them for their own ends on both the left and the right.

Dominion is not a dog whistle, and the Red Ensign is not a symbol of white supremacy. The best way to fight back against this is simply to refuse to surrender these symbols and words and to continue to use them unapologetically. Calling this The Dominion is a tiny part of this fight, to not cede these words and symbols, to make reference to our history and traditions in a positive light, and not abandon them to the radicals who want to use them for their own nefarious ends. 

A few Notes

• For now the newsletter will be weekly, and be sent out on Tuesday.

• As I said at the start, I will mostly keep the newsletters shorter than this one, though I’ll leave myself some wiggle room and welcome feedback from you all about this. 

• I noted in the introductory post that I was going to divide the newsletter up into four different segments, with the two main substantive sections being split up between Canadian questions and broader questions of political theory. I’m rethinking this, because it’s a bit too structured and when I’ve been thinking about the sorts of things I’ll end up writing about the lines between them may often be blurred. So instead I am going to keep the format more open ended to keep the writing more interesting, while also keeping the separate sections for interesting links and answering a weekly question. 

• Please do email me questions or topics you’d like me to address. 

• I welcome comments and contributions, in fact I would love to see the comments sections filled with interesting contributions and engagements. I also welcome private thoughts or suggestions from you, about the content or about the newsletter or other ideas as well. The best way to reach out to me privately will be to reply to the newsletters in your inbox.

• Lastly, if you want to help grow The Dominion, I’d ask that you share or recommend it to friends and family you think would also enjoy. To start I’ll also make sure non-subscribers can read the postings on the Substack page, so sharing the link over you social media accounts would also be a great way to help it grow.