Many depictions centre on Stephen Harper as the lone wolf, the rogue conservative who marches to his own drummer. This way of looking at him, though, won’t help you to understand the context in which he has operated.
Harper is one side of an ideological coin; missing from the discussion is the other side of the coin — the network of conservative think-tanks such as the Fraser Institute working over many decades to change the climate of ideas that make sense to many of us. By climate of ideas, I mean our commonly accepted notions about how government and the private sector should operate, and our understandings of ourselves as self-centred individualists or as compassionate members of society.
Imagine that Stephen Harper was a candidate for the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party in 1983, when the Fraser Institute was not even 10 years old, in a contest that was won by Brian Mulroney. In all likelihood Harper would have been knocked off after the first ballot because his views were too radical for most delegates. Twenty years after that, espousing the same policies, he was able to win the leadership of the Conservative party handily on the first ballot and was soon prime minister