Originally published in the UFV Cascade -- by Christopher DeMarcus (The Cascade)
Ron Dart is a prolific writer and thinker, publishing over 20 books and countless articles. He has been part of UFV since 1990, teaching political science and religious studies.
Dart’s book Keepers of the Flame: Canadian Red Toryism was published on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, a moment in time that also marked a distinct change in Canadian and American relations: the 1962 election in Canada was highly influenced by the Kennedy administration, and the end result was further assimilation of Canada into the American empire.
Q: Why have you done a book about the red tory tradition?
RD: In one sense there is a counter to cultural amnesia in my work. I’m putting the historical pieces of the drama back together again, replaying the play. I was contacted by a press in Quebec and asked to cobble together a variety of essays that tell the red tory tale.
Q: In the manifesto section of the book you lay out an ideal political ideology for the problems we face in modernity. Why don’t more people embrace red toryism as a political view?
RD: I tried to condense the ideas in the manifesto because I’m often asked, “can you compress what this tradition is all about?” In doing a manifesto I’m thinning out a very complex tradition by giving people a teaser, an entranceway in.
The dominance of the blue tories and the cultural amnesia of the past has resulted in the red tory tradition being scattered like a broken Ming vase. Parties pick up elements of it; the Greens have the ecological and environmental elements.
If you read high English romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Southey, they were at the forefront of ecology and they were all high tories. As poet laureates of England, they had a great impact on Canadian thought. But when people study those poets they often only study their literary side, not the political.
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