When Stephen Harper first became involved in politics 30 years ago as a chief aide to Calgary MP Jim Hawkes, he was filled with hard-line conservative ideas about how to make Canada a better place.

But Harper was a political idealist, not a strategist. Back then, he believed voters would simply come to embrace his ideas if he was just given a decent chance to explain them, logically and passionately.

Today, Harper is a totally different politician. Now, instead of championing ideas, he promotes the politics of fear, hate and polarization as the way to achieve his goals. It’s a strategy he clearly intends to use right through this October’s federal election.

In recent weeks and months, Harper has showcased just how extreme this political makeover has been.

He’s suggested anyone critical of his anti-terrorism legislation is soft on terrorists, who he hints may be lurking anywhere in Canada; he’s fuelled fears and hatred of Muslims by declaring that some of them practice ways that are “contrary to our own values”; he’s sparked fears, even though unfounded, about murderers roaming free on our streets with his new “life-means-life” prison sentence proposal; and he’s played to the rural pro-gun crowd by telling them that guns on farms are OK because they provide “a certain level of security when you’re a ways from immediate police assistance.”

So how did Harper change from being an idealist into a cold, calculating strategist who ruthlessly exploits fear and polarization for political gain?

The answer lies with Tom Flanagan, the former University of Calgary political scientist and one-time national campaign manager who masterminded Harper’s rise to power in the 1990s and advised him through the 2006 election that saw the Conservatives finally win power.

It was Flanagan, who is now out of favour with Harper, who taught the young politician to embrace the politics of fear.

And Harper listened to everything that Flanagan had to say about politics. In those days, Flanagan was seen as “the master strategist, the godfather — even of Harper,” as right-wing commentator Ezra Levant explained to writer Marci McDonald in an in-depth profile of Flanagan for the Walrus magazine.

Flanagan and Harper fell out when Flanagan, who has described his former protégé as “a predator,” wrote an insider book on the 2006 Conservative campaign.

But in his books, opinion article and rare interviews over the subsequent years, Flanagan has laid out his views on politics, fear and modern campaigns that he shared with Harper.

For Flanagan, the politics of hope and optimism simply doesn’t work.

In his 2014 book, Winning Power: Canadian Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century, Flanagan explains how fear is now the most “powerful political emotion” in election campaigns. “Canada really hasn’t had a federal election inspired by hope since Pierre Trudeau campaigned on the theme of the Just Society in 1968, and that mood lasted precisely for one campaign,” he says.

Canadian campaigns are now all about choosing leaders, not about fabulous ideas, he says, adding that, like it or not, elections are horse races and personalities count.

In his 2009 book, Harper’s Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power, Flanagan provides a revealing look at how Harper learned that exploiting citizens’ fears works on everything from winning votes to raising money. One lesson? Follow “the time-honoured advice for raising money by direct mail — make people angry and afraid, and set an opponent for them to give against.”

In his latest book, Persona Non Grata, Flanagan writes that Harper “has enormous gifts of intelligence, willpower, and work ethic; but there is also a dark, almost Nixonian side to the man,” adding Harper “believes in playing politics right up to the edge of the rules.”

It’s damning praise — maybe even admiration — for Harper, a prime minister who doesn’t build bridges between communities, but destroys them; who prefers division and polarization to consensus; who thrives on scaring voters with fearful visions of terrorists, murderers and “people not like us.”

On the strategy of fuelling the polarization of voters to stay in power, Flanagan wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2010, that the tactic allows the Harper Conservatives “to divide and conquer.”

The Harperites “seize issues on which the opposing parties are all on the left of the debate, so they can have the right to themselves. For example, the long-gun registry, whose dismantling the other parties oppose; (or) global warming, where only the Conservatives espouse the economically grounded approach of tracking American policy.

“Such polarized positioning is perfect for the next election,” Flanagan wrote.

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Fear and polarization were “perfect” for Harper in the 2011 election.

Judging by his recent actions, Harper is counting on them being just as “perfect” in 2015.