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Notes -
Self-Immolation as Civic Nation-Building
To demonize another person, we first have to self-canonize.
Envy and hatred try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body.
In recent news of culture-war-as-trade-war, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney inflicted retaliatory 50% tariffs on many goods traversing the Canada-US border. This will obviously have the effect of scalding his own nation, but both Carney and his countrymen appear to gleefully accept this masochistic act in the hope that the US might also get singed a little bit (75% of Canadians supported a withdrawal from negotiations - negotiations which solely existed in the first place to try and lessen the cost on Canada’s economy). Indeed, the issue appears to be so universally mandated up north that Carney’s nemesis, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, has primarily attacked Carney for… not being antagonistic enough towards the US, particularly in regard to said tariffs. Obviously Poilievre is falling into a classic bear trap tendency of conservatives: fearing the social isolation of a strongly differentiated viewpoint and therefore gradually moulding himself into “Liberals but sensible”. We saw how this played out for the Republican Party from 2008-2016; I wonder if Canada is capable of producing a brash enough figure to fill the crucial life ring role played by Trump, which we now recognize as having been the only solution for the prolonged political life of conservatives in the US.
There is another angle here which is even more fascinating. It is often observed that citizens who despise their own country while at home will become surprisingly patriotic and defensive of their nation when traveling abroad and facing criticisms from foreigners. But there is a stronger, deeper version of this phenomenon: that of a nation which either failed to establish territory in the modern world or which ceased to exist as wars were lost and maps were redrawn. The zealous identity of these “invisible nations” can be seen everywhere from Eastern Europe to Kurdistan to American Indian reservations to the Pacific islands. No flag is raised with more patriotism than those flags which have been erased from the map.
With Canada facing a crisis of existence in its ethnic makeup and self-belief, with its only guiding light being burning resentment toward its big brother, what can save the nation? What can transform a postmodern, puritanical nowhere place into a beloved homeland to be fought for, to be boasted about, to be made great again?
In their recent actions and polling numbers, it appears Canadians already know the answer to these questions. So, in their own mind, they might as well go down swinging.
Canada is, in the nicest sense, not a real country. It is literally an economic union of varied colonies and provinces to resist conquest by or incorporation into the United States. Canada has attempted many times to forge an identity greater than the sum of its parts -- Westward Expansion, colonialism, railroads and national corporations, media, allegiance to Britain and the Crown, the flag... But Canada remains officially multicultural, which is to say Canada has no locus. Canada is not a real country.
At best Canada has achieved a kind of balance. Canada is a large compromise between Ontario and Quebec, which have mostly made peace with each other. But that compromise alienates the East from the West, which has its own issues completely unrelated to the French laws and Ottawa. And the West itself is split by the mountains between the Prairies and the Coast, which also hate each other at least a little. Somehow when you put it all together it vaguely hangs together.
So what Canada has succeeded at, in a sense, is that it's better than the alternatives. It's totally dependent on America and can't exist on its own at all. (A very simple military operation north of Minnesota would divide Canada into at least two pieces, since even Canada's energy networks already pass into America to connect East and West.) However... -- it's more expensive to destroy Canada than America is willing to pay. It's generally been much cheaper to let a few ten millions put up some trade barriers and regulations than it would be worth figuring out the headache. Besides, nobody in America wants to think very long about what to do with Quebec.
That's all changing now that America is realigning everything everything about China and its security posture for the 21st Century. Charitably, it looks like America wants Canada to lock down its ability to serve as a dumping ground for foreign goods that can use Canada to sell more cheaply in America. And Canada would prefer to maintain its strategic ambiguity.
And, well, it seems like Carney and the liberals (remember Trudeau before Carney) want to use Canadian opposition to America and Trump to boost their political position. Realistically that's all this is, Canada is so dependent on the United States they can't really, genuinely, actually make a break. The people don't really understand what they're asking for, it's a little delusional, so probably it can be assuaged in an irrational manner too.
The likeliest outcome after everything is that, eventually, maybe this year, maybe in five years, maybe in 15 years across many agreements over may governments -- Canada and America continue along more-or-less as they have before, America gets Canada to get with the program, Canada gets America to wear a condom and take it out to dinner first. America will continue to subsidize Canada's existence, possibly even at greater cost than before, but Canada will, essentially, continue to exist as a basket-case to manage several problems that the Americans will never want to have to deal with.
Realistically, nothing.
Canada last had a meaningfully independent foreign policy and manufacturing base in the 60s under Diefenbaker. For a lot of reasons Diefenbaker lost and the liberals came in and integrated Canada deeply with the United States. The term "Branch plant economy" was coined to describe what happened. Canada became an appendage of the United States. It no longer had a foreign power like the United Kingdom to serve as patron and buffer. The Canadians wanted this. And at this point there is no other foreign power that can step in: The United States will not allow Canada to become a client state of China. A fantasy about a great Canadian-EU alliance is even more impotent. (Actually, something like this could be kept as a face-saving fiction for everyone to come away feeling like a winner, given that Europe and Canada will both remain firmly within the American orbit.)
What would it take for Canada to achieve meaningful independence? They can't appeal to a foreign power. It would require Canada achieving meaningful industrial sovereignty by building an independent economic and commercial base. What would that look like? It would require a massive push of deregulation and new economic policy that would, frankly, destroy the consensus around which Canada is built. The Quebecois won't go for it, the West and East would have to meet and agree to put aside their differences, and at every step it would simply be easier for any one party to simply integrate with America and be done with it.
Otherwise, without that, Canada is simply a media fiction. And those can always be changed. After all, Canada's government has consistently found it much easier to negotiate sovereignty to the Indian Tribes to give judges and the federal government ultimate supervisory power over the actual democratic will of the people.
The Liberal Party is probably the natural governing party of Canada for the foreseeable future. People will say that it could have gone another way if Trump hadn't had been Trump, and that Trump should have been more sensible and Canada could have been run by the conservatives and everything would be better. But, realistically, the Liberals always had the power to engineer an escalation with America, even if Trump had never said "51st State" at all. In fact, Mark Carney engineering today's episode for political purposes is probably the most likely explanation.
Perhaps Trump should not engage in tariff brinkmanship with countries that aren't real if it ends up costing real dollars and real congress seats in midterm elections.
I’m just not interested in hearing dispassionate electoral analysis from someone who is not dispassionate at all
Oh fine, how about this:
Between Canadian tariffs, conflicts with NATO members, and the expense of the Iranian conflict, Trump is accelerating the fall of the white race and Christian leadership of the world to the ultimate benefit of China, India, and majority nonwhite and/or nonchristian states in general.
He did not start these trends or start these conflicts, but I personally believe there was an implicit understanding that Trump would reverse these trends or at least stem the tide. What I see is greater intra-white conflict and increased deficits, to the detriment of Christian moral legitimacy and US-style conservatism by close association
What was promised
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