Talk:Tom Flanagan

As this page is about Flanagan specifically, I think is is best to keep the material discussing the Calgary School on that page, which his is linked to.--Bob Burton 01:23, 16 Jun 2006 (EDT)

The Calgary School of thought, in which Tom Flanagan is a major figure, comprises professors of political science, economics and history at the University of Calgary. In addition to Flanagan, the neo-conservative group includes Barry Cooper, David Bercuson who is director of the university's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, Ted Morton, Rainer Knopff, Roger Gibbons, and in the Department of Economics, Robert Mansell, under whom Prime Minister Stephen Harper became caught up in the university’s ferment of right-leaning economics and politics when he was a student. [[1]]

The group has also been called the “Calgary Mafia”. [[2]].

I have relocated this here, as it interrupts the flow of the profile and seems more relevant for the Calgary School page than that of Flanagan alone. I also changed the reference to him declining to be interviewed - people are entitled to decline to be interviewed and, without knowing the reasons given, I'm wary of labelling people who exercise that right "shadowy". --Bob Burton 01:38, 16 Jun 2006 (EDT)

In an article in The American Enterprise Online on 1 February 2006, No Left Turns blogger Joseph Knippenberg, a professor of politics and associate provost for student achievement at Ogelthorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia disparages Marci MacDonald’s article and other Canadians who suggest that Flanagan (and Prime Minister Harper) are spreading a US Republican or Straussian ideology in Canada. [[3]]

American Enterprise Online columnist Knippenberg is especially disparaging of Dr. Shadia Drury, Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Regina, who has been one of the more outspoken and articulate critics of Tom Flanagan, his Civitas Society, and the neo-conservative Calgary School of thought. Ibid.

Dr. Shadia Drury [[4]] left the University of Calgary in 2004. She has written numerous books, essays and articles about what she sees as the threat to democracy in the United States and Canada of the Straussian neo-conservatism of people such as Tom Flanagan in Canada that resembles the politicial philosophy of Paul Wolfowitz, espousing the “noble lie” to protect citizens from themselves and deceive the population with populist propaganda. [[5]] Her criticism of the neo-conservative political philosophy of Straussians in Calgary and elsewhere has been, perhaps predictably, described by the American Enterprise Institute as “shrill and implausible” .[[6]]