Why Harper hates experts
Andrew Coyne demonstrates afresh why he is my favorite conservative columnist with this attempt to fathom Harper's inexplicable vandalizing of the census. Money quote: It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war. You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites” and “intellectuals.”...
17 August, 2010