Zigging and Zagging Along the 49th Parallel

Hey,

In 1972, the Canadian Broadcast Company held a radio contest, asking listeners to finish the sentence “As Canadian as…” The goal was to find the Canadian equivalent of “As American as apple pie.” The winning entry: “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”

It’s a well-known story in Canada because Canadians have long wrestled with the question of national identity. Just google “Canada” and “identity crisis” and you’ll see what I mean. Heck, Wikipedia has a lengthy article dedicated to “Canadian identity.” (Search for “American identity” and you get redirected to “American culture.” Search for “German identity” and you’re sent to “German nationalism.” Make of that what you will.)

“Identity crisis” isn’t the right word because a crisis is by definition a deviation from the norm, and Canada has been suffering from acute confusion for like four centuries.

In the last century, a big reason for this is that Canadians are in some respects modern day Laodiceans, who are described in the Book of Revelation as “neither hot, nor cold…[but] lukewarm.” This too is a little unfair, because Jesus said the Laodiceans’ lukewarmness made him want to spit them out, which is kind of harsh.

Canada dealt with its Identity Deficit Disorder (IDD) by embracing anti-Americanism. More than 70 years ago, historian Frank H. Underhill wrote that the Canadian “is the first anti-American, the model anti-American, the archetypal anti-American, the ideal anti-American as he exists in the eyes of God.” You might think he was so peevish because Americans kept charging their meals to his account at the Bushwood Country Club, but this was a widespread point of view. “Without at least a touch of anti-Americanism,” Canadian journalist Blair Fraser wrote in 1967, “Canada would have no reason to exist.”

As you might expect, this anti-Americanism expresses itself most passionately and frequently when Americans say anything critical of our neighbors to the north. There’s a certain Irishness to Canadians, a charge that no doubt would offend many Irish and Canadians alike. One of the stereotypes about the Irish is that they love to give each other grief among themselves, but if an outsider says something a fraction as insulting about one of their own, the outsider will be on the fighting side of all of them. It’s like in Animal House: “They can’t do that to our pledges, only we can do that to our pledges.” So while Canadians have produced countless books, documentaries, and symposia on Canada’s lack of identity, if an American repeats any of that, the Canucks get pissed.

For instance, more than 20 years ago, Steven Pearlstein, then the Washington Post’s man in Canada, wrapped up his time there with an essay on Canada’s IDD. He wrote:

Over the years, Canadians might have coalesced around a shared sense of history but for the fact that they have so little of it they consider worth remembering. The country never fought a revolution or a civil war, pioneered no great social or political movement, produced no great world leader and committed no memorable atrocities–as one writer put it, Canada has no Lincolns, no Gettysburgs and no Gettysburg addresses.

The essay set off a firestorm of controversy—in Canada. Victoria Dickenson, then the director of Montreal’s McCord Museum of Canadian History, offered a typical response: “Gosh, if we could just massacre some people!”

A couple years later, I wrote a cover story for National Review jokingly suggesting we should bomb Canada. I didn’t want us to kill anybody. Who—aside from grizzly bears—wants to kill Canadians? I just thought a symbolic strike would inspire the Canadians to shed some of their Laodicean langueur (as the Quebecois might say). That too set off a firestorm of controversy in Canada, reminiscent of the great Cornell-Harvard rivalry everyone at Cornell knows about but nobody at Harvard is aware of. 

An experiment in liberty.

So why am I bringing this up? Firstly, because I think U.S.-Canada differences are fascinating. No, really. Seymour Martin Lipset, one of my intellectual heroes, thought Canada was fascinating, too. Lipset was one of the foremost scholars on the concept of American exceptionalism, rightly understood. What I mean is that American exceptionalism was never intended to be a “rah-rah, we’re No. 1!” thing, as everyone from Donald Trump to Barack Obama believed. The word “exceptional” didn’t imply superiority, but difference. America was just different from other countries. America was more religious than other economically advanced democracies; it was also more violent. Lacking a feudal past, we were less hospitable to socialism. And since we were founded by a bunch of liberty-obsessed Whigs, anti-monarchists, and bourgeois revolutionaries, we just did things differently. (As I have written countless times, the progressive project was always about erasing American exceptionalism in an effort to make us more like Europe.)

It was Lipset who pointed out that perhaps the greatest natural experiment in the history of political science unfolded in North America. It’s often forgotten that the British had 20 colonies or provinces in North America in 1776, but only 13 of them rebelled against the crown.

Yeah, sure there were differences between the Canadian and American colonies, but were they any more pronounced than the cultural differences between, say, Vermont and South Carolina? What meaningfully separated these two societies wasn’t ethnicity, history, or even language (the Quebecers were probably the most sympathetic to the revolution), but an idea and the institutions created in service to that idea. At least 50,000 loyalists and royalists moved to Canada during the American Revolution. In 1791, the British created a new province called Upper Canada. The project was overseen by future British Prime Minister William W. Grenville. He studied the “constitution of our former Colonies … in order that we may profit by our experience there, & avoid, if possible, in the Government of Canada, those defects which hastened the independence of our ancient possession in America.” The first lieutenant governor of the province explained that “the establishment of the British Constitution in this Province offers the best method gradually to counteract, and ultimately to destroy or to disarm the [American] spirit of democratic subversion.”

Fast forward a couple centuries later and you have two very different countries. Lipset loved to point out that in the 1970s both the Canadian and American governments told their citizens to switch to the metric system. The Canadians dutifully went the whole 8.226 meters for the idea, while Americans barely budged 2.54 centimeters. We’re ornery like that, God bless us.

The giant blue state to the north.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m bringing this up. I definitely could be wrong, but it feels like the Canadians have kind of figured out who they are in recent years. They’ve cultivated the kind of country a lot of American progressives want. One of the remarkable things about the trucker protest is how expressly patriotic and even nationalistic it is, which is one reason Trudeau is so horrified by it. Historically, most Canadians, like a lot of American progressives, are embarrassed by excessive displays of national pride. That’s how those boorish Americans do things.

But Canadian anti-Americanism—while at times strident among some radicals and intellectuals—was never profoundly ideological. It was cultural and oppositional. (If the Americans zig, we should zag.) But to the Canadians’ credit, their zagging, like our zigging, was constrained within the cultural confines of Anglosphere liberalism. It’s sort of like the rivalry between New Hampshire and Vermont. They do things differently, and I’m definitely on team New Hampshire, but it’s not like South Korea versus North Korea.

What I mean is, among certain ideological radicals, the opposite of America isn’t Canada—it’s Castro’s Cuba or Stalin’s Russia or some fantastical abstract notion of “real socialism.” But for Canadians it’s polite nanny-statism, which can involve everything from government funded health insurance to arresting people who refuse to hold the handrail while using an escalator. 

What’s interesting to me is that it’s not just left-wing radicals who think the choice is between America and Stalinism or some other totalitarianism—lots of right-wingers think this too. Biden’s Build Back Better plan isn’t even “socialism,” Marco Rubio oddly insists, it’s “Marxism.” The Green New Dealers’ plan to take away our hamburgers, Seb Gorka declared, is the kind of totalitarianism Stalin only dreamed of.

Before I continue, I should be very clear about something. I don’t like the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, or Canadian nanny-statism. Heck, I don’t even like American nanny-statism. But unless you’re a Canadian trucker this week, you can spend months or years living and working in Canada without feeling like you live in Stalin’s Russia because, even at Canada’s worst, it’s nothing like Stalin’s Russia (except maybe for the weather.). And even what Canada is doing to the truckers—as excessive as it seems—doesn’t make Justin Trudeau Stalin any more than Calvin Coolidge’s breaking of the Boston police strike or Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers made them into Hitler or Pinochet.

This is not a defense of petty bureaucratic nannyism. The hallmark of serious thinking is taking meaningful distinctions seriously. It’s like when left-wingers get mad at me for saying Trump isn’t Hitler and scream, “Why are you defending him?!” I’m not. Last I checked, someone can be really bad and still come far short of invading Poland or committing genocide.

Still, I’m much more open to “authoritarian” or illiberal statism on a big scale during an obvious emergency than I am to the nickel-and-dime statism of the modern welfare or regulatory state. If we were invaded by aliens, I’d be okay with the government giving little consideration to eminent domain rules. Suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War was bad but defensible, given the existential struggle to save the union. But even minor tweaks to the Constitution are less defensible when there is no civil war. I defended a lot of stuff during the pandemic because pandemics are classical exceptions to classical liberalism. But because I think the danger has largely passed, the state should be forced to relinquish its emergency powers.  

“It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life,” Alexis De Tocqueville observed. “For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.”

Also, I should say that there is a danger that a steady erosion in small liberties will create an appetite or at least tolerance for the erosion of core liberties. De Tocqueville again: “Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men.”

So with that out of the way, it’s worth thinking about what some of our rhetoric today would sound like if you replaced every use of “Stalinist Russia” and “Maoist China” with “Canada.”  “Biden wants us to be Canadian!” sounds silly, but it’s a hell of a lot closer to reality than “Biden wants us to be like Castro’s Cuba!” And I hear stuff like that all the time. In fairness, Tucker and I are on the same page for a change—sorta.

The American people are too good, too decent, too in love with their freedoms, and too exceptional to become willing accomplices to totalitarianism. And even if you disagree with that, give the American people enough credit that merely spending—yes, foolishly and irresponsibly—$3.5 trillion on Build Back Better isn’t enough to complete the transformation to totalitarianism. Similarly, left-wingers who insist that tightening voting rules, or simply restoring them to where they were pre-pandemic, should also give Americans credit. Barack Obama wasn’t elected by a Jim Crow country.

Given how much I love America, using Canada as a cautionary tale works for me. Heck, I love the U.K., and wouldn’t mind living there for a while. But I don’t want America to be like the U.K. either. I get that things change, but I want to hold onto American exceptionalism, or at least the best parts of it. In other words, I’d like America to stay as American as possible under the circumstances.