Review of The North American High Tory Tradition

With what has been transpiring on the US side of the border, it might be tempting to wag our Canadian fingers. Ron Dart, prodigious writer, mountaineer, poet, political science prof, and one of Canada’s leading intellectuals of the Red Tory tradition, admonishes otherwise. In his recent book, The North American High Tory Tradition, he demonstrates that the two apparently differing ideological camps have a single root. And we in Canada, wish as we might, are not as free of the offending subsequent effects as we may think.  

In this text, Ron Dart has managed to accomplish quite an astounding thing: not merely reflect cogently – and with pique – on wide-ranging topics such as (but not limited to), Noam Chomsky, Platonic versus Aristotelian philosophy, contemplative mysticism, Allen Ginsburg, C.S. Lewis, the Beats, Anglicanism, Erasmus, Puritan theology, Charles Taylor, colonialization, and T.S Eliot, but even more impressively, has masterfully strung through all these topics and personalities a thread which, by the conclusion, brings home to the reader an undeniable fact: liberalism is a weed which must be dealt with if we as people – not just Canadians, or Americans or Westerners – are to flourish.

Sound like a rather large undertaking which Dart has attempted? It is; and, he has done it beautifully. Each of the above topics, along with still others, are handily dealt with in a way that aids to a great enlargement on a topic that isn’t much explored these days: the importance of what true conservatism looks like.