Harper's CPC: Inventing the Opposition

So, what does underly the moral-conventional distinction?  Is it a sense of fairness?  Even many animals show a sense of fairness, and fairness is obviously relevant to moral concerns.  Maybe the moral-convention distinction works on the 'golden rule' - the child can imagine not wanting others to engage in moral transgressions even if they weren't forbidden whereas their only objection to social conventional transgressions is when someone else gets to do it while they can't.

There's something very fascinating about current federal Conservative behaviour patterns, from a psychological point of view.  Generally, groups have enough of a diversity of internal opinion that cross-organizational patterning doesn't work as well as this.

Evidence:

"I think it's a shame.  I think it would have been good for Canada and certainly good for Ukraine to have a number of parties there.  Show some dignity in it, rather than just always angling for votes which unfortunately I think the Conservatives do too often," he said.

Lots of this in the history of Harper's CPC; from poison pills in the legislature to conveniently timed foreign junkets to reallocation of funding to NGOs - everything the Conservative government does is to their advantage, no punches pulled.  They go for the throat.

And yet:

Pierre Poilievre, the minister for democratic reform, says he was not referring to Election Canada head Marc Mayrand when he said "the referee shouldn't be wearing a team jersey" on the day he introduced the proposed fair election act.

An act that many are saying is anything but fair.  But the Tories feel that the deck is stacked against them.  They've also demonstrated they think the media is against them.  In fact, they're a very defensive bunch in general.  It's like they're on a witch hunt against anyone they think is hunting them, in fact.

So look at the big picture; they feel entitled to brush off others, because they're an empire now.  They have no ethical questions about slamming the opposition parties for behaviour they themselves engage in.  Yet they are paranoid that somehow, the world is being unfair to them and they have to do something about it.

It's great, circular logic, which makes it an internal system.  If there were no opposition - if somehow, the Harper Conservatives were able to quash Parliament, the media and any "special interest" group they felt were somehow out to get them, they would probably find themselves vilifying and abusing someone else, like an addiction to standing against.

There's a diagnosis in this.  

Which is why we promote diversity in the first place.