China Has No Reformer Leadership

"It is long past time to come to the obvious conclusion on the human rights debate. President Xi Jinping may be an exceptional leader, but a liberal reformer he is not. Indeed, more than any Chinese leader since Mao, he is utterly committed to authoritarian governments. The central objective of his tenure to date has been to return China to a system in which one man governs for life."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now. 

Harnesses Capitalism's Productive Capacity and Constrains Its Destabilizing Impulses

"Still, the global financial crisis was a lesson that less intervention is not always the best intervention.
Markets are a powerful tool for allocating scarce resources, linking capital and customers, and producing huge sums of material wealth.
But frameworks matter. It is up to government to establish an institutional framework that harnesses capitalism's productive capacity and constrains its destabilizing impulses.
It is also up to government to ensure the system serves broad public interest and not just those of big Market players. This means developing an agenda focused on getting good outcomes for working and middle-class people, not on fulfilling intellectual abstractions."

-Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now. 

The Opiate Of Intellectuals

"Clinton even used the 1996 State of the Union to proclaim that "the era of big government is over." 

It is worth mentioning that one important element of society never fully embraced the new economic consensus. Much of the western academia remain fixated on communism. Indeed, as the Berlin Wall fell, it became evident that Communists True Believers persisted only on its western side. In the educational establishment, Marxism lingered as the opiate of the intellectuals."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now. 

What is Populism

"But what exactly is populism?....

At least since Trump's damp and dreary Inauguration Day, populism has become a loaded term. It has been made the default explanation for any political view or event that diverges from establishment opinion. Opposition to trade deals? Populism. Protest against immigration? It must be the populist. And unexpected election result? What else did populism? And So It Goes. One academic has the gist of it: most uses of the term populism are motivated by an establishment desire to denigrate any opposition to the "liberal consensus." Put differently: there is a tendency, particularly among contemporary liberals, to call political outcomes that they support "democracy," and ones that do not "populism." In other words, they see to wait equate populism with demagoguery.

That effort is itself demagoguery, for populism can have a positive interpretation. Put simply, it is any political movement that places The wider interests of the common people ahead of the special interest of the privileged few. If you think about it, in most every democracy, every political party tends to frame its core appeal in such terms, at least to some degree.

Is this such a nonsensical concept? In fact, there are times when the consensus of the political establishment diverges from the weight of a public opinion. For instance, the desirability of trade deals and of unskilled immigration are areas where the leadership of both the US Republican and Democratic parties has often parted company with the bulk of their supporters. When such divergence occurs, it is the tendency of the elites to try to take such political debate off the table. Populism is a force that can put these issues back on the agenda.

There have been many instances of elite consensus being challenged by the wider public. Economic orthodoxy in one peroid has become economic heresy in the next. Wars have been undertaken when they should not have, and pacifism has been practice in the face of inevitable conflict. Elites often have interest and perspectives that are distinct from those of the general public. And they are sometimes wrong.

Think of it this way. Populism is a framework for identifying political priorities and making political decisions. But it does not tell us much about the underlying policies per se. So-called populist politicians have stood for ideas that could be classified as left-wing, right-wing, or even Centrist."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now: Politics and Leadership In the Age of Disruption 

Voiceless

"These voters do not tend to have college degrees. They disproportionately work in Industries, such as manufacturing, they are facing ongoing disruption from low-cost competition and new technology. In short, they are in the parts of the Western economy that have fared poorly in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization. 

And they were feeling voiceless. This is a common finding in different studies of both the Trump election and the Brexit referendum. The concerns of these people have been either largely ignored or, if acknowledged at all, vigorously denounced. There can be no doubt about the extent to which these voters believe that the political establishment does not care about them. They have come to mistrust both the traditional liberal/ center-left and conservative/ center-right options."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now: Politics and Leadership In the Age of Disruption.