Storming Babylon: Preston Manning and the Rise of the Reform Party

D.M.L. Farr is a professor emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa.

This book places Manning and his views firmly in a continuum, beginning
with “Bible Bill” Aberhart and his Social Credit government of 1935,
and extending through Aberhart’s successor, Ernest Manning, premier of
Alberta from 1943 to 1968. Preston Manning and his father updated Social
Credit views in a work entitled Political Realignment (1967), which, in
turn, anticipated most of the platform contained in the Reform Party’s
Blue Book (1991).

The pedigree of the Reform Party explains its outlook and its manner,
its stance as the voice of Western Canadian discontent; its criticism of
the federal system; its unhappiness with policies that placate Quebec;
its suspicion of the present forms of bilingualism and multiculturalism;
its scorn for traditional political parties; its authoritarianism; and
its inclination to anti-Semitism. These aspects of the Reform movement
are carefully described in Storming Babylon, as are Manning’s current
efforts to turn his regional party into a broadly based national one.
There is much on Manning’s fundamentalist Protestantism, a creed that
makes him, in the author’s words, “a kind of Christian guerrilla
working in a corrupt secular world.”

The authors, newspaper columnists in Alberta, are well qualified,
through their 1990 book on Western political alienation, Breakup, to
deal with Manning and his party. They are detached but respectful
observers. The book contains a thorough bibliography of archival and
secondary material, along with an index, but no illustrations. For the
general reader, it is the best introduction to Preston Manning and the
phenomenon of the Reform Party now available.