"Long live the revolution!"
Don’t you believe it. Eventually the revolution must be tamed. It must be repudiated, institutionalized or in some other way transcended. After Robespierre—Napoleon; after Madero, Huerta, Villa, Zapata, Obregon—Cárdenas and the Institutional Revolutionary Party; after Mao—Deng. After William Aberhart—Ernest C. Manning, under whose anesthetizing leadership Social Credit changed from being a radical populist insurgency to an ultraconservative administration. When zealots make way for men in rumpled suits wearing toe rubbers, the revolution has been domesticated.
Following William Aberhart’s charismatic mobilization of the Social Credit movement but erratic and inevitable betrayal of its promise, Ernest C. Manning sustained the illusion of continuity with the revolution at least rhetorically with his prophetic radio mission, the venerable Back to the Bible Hour. Meanwhile, he gave the movement a new enemy to be frightened...
H.V. Nelles, the L.R. Wilson Professor of Canadian History at McMaster University, recently published with his co-author, Christopher Armstrong, The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta’s Bow River, 1845–2000 (University of Calgary Press, 2007).
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