Almost precisely one year later, on June 25, 1968, Pierre Trudeau was appointed Prime Minister of Canada. In the Canadian mythopoetic imagination, the two events—Trudeaumania and the 1960s counterculture—are generally linked, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Trudeau was an improbable and unappealing 1960s avatarTrudeau was no hippy. He, like his near contemporary, John F. Kennedy (who, if he had lived, would have despised hippies), was a well-preserved remnant of the world that the young baby boomers intended to wash away in a hallucinogenic cloud of peace, love, and sandalwood. He was a balding lawyer, older than the majority of their parents, and he wore his flowers in his fitted lapel rather than his thinning hair. Far from being a new-age spiritualist or a cosmic thinker, he was a Catholic who believed in reason and its potential for scientific and social advancement. The only thing he had in common with the hippies was his girlfriends' ages.The uncertainty, which existed from the outset, is natural. Because Trudeau's liberalism shared many of the younger generation's emancipatory goals, most notably the overthrow of sexual mores (hippies in the name of free love against repression; liberals in the name of reason against irrational tradition), it was easy to see them as part of the same project. In fact, they were two branches of the Enlightenment that were diverging so quickly that the newer one was turning back on the older, devouring it rather than reinforcing it.The hippies turned the light of Enlightenment skepticism back on its own premises, discovering a hole at the center of liberalism. Whether Trudeau realized it or not, by 1968 the Age of Reason had met its match in the Age of Aquarius and was on its way out.
The conflict between his belief in
La raison avant la passion" and the tuned-in and turned-on generation, which believed in magic and good vibrations, could be overlooked as long as they both swept tradition and convention aside. But the philosophical divide was substantial. It was most vividly demonstrated during the FLQ crisis, when Trudeau made it obvious that he had no time for bleeding hearts when they got in the way of his tanks.Trudeau's political goal, which he had been crafting in the pages of Cité Libre since the 1950s, was diametrically opposed to the consciousness-raising movement of 1960s dropouts. Trudeau, unlike the hippies, believed in objective reality that could be known by reason. So much so that he collaborated with law professor Barry Strayer for more than a decade to create a new constitutionalism for Canada based on the premise that politics might be rationally controlled and directed by neutral, unbiased judges.It's hardly revealing the ending to reveal that this isn't what happened. With final responsibility transferred a few hundred yards down Wellington Street from Parliament to the Supreme Court, the Canadian Constitution began to evolve independently, with only indirect impact from the political labor required to hold together an irrational society.After 40 years of such hothouse growth, Canada's legal Constitution today resembles a rare cultivar cultivated by an eccentric recluse. The "living" Constitution, like Des Esseintes' flowers in A Rebours, frequently appears more artificial than alive, as befits a form of government driven by a liberal rationalism that is not naturally and organically linked in theory or practice to the social reality of custom, morality, and public expectation
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