Geoff Russ: The 'nation of values' is a tyranny
When the state defines a nation by ideas instead of a shared heritage, disagreement turns fellow citizens into traitors.
Nations will devise any number of values and ideas, both good and bad. But the nation is always older.
What makes a nation is a people defined by a shared heritage, history, and habits, to name only a few characteristics. That is why Canadians are different from Australians, the Irish and Americans, whatever similarities they share.
Healthy nations are conscious of their kinship with those buried in cathedrals and old graveyards. These are instincts rather than abstract innovations, just as few people intellectualise their emotions when visiting a grandparent’s grave. When nations feel like families, it helps them bear the deepest and most jarring disagreements. This is why civil wars are so traumatic and, at least in the West, so rare.
Canada is more unusual than other countries because it functions politically according to a set of ideas and values crafted, selected and made actionable by the Liberal Party of Canada, whose political dominance has allowed it to pretend that everything else is illegitimate to varying degrees.
This is politically useful to the Liberals because a pure ‘nation of values’ is akin to tyranny. Defining a people and their country purely by modern ideals and principles turns ancestors and fellow citizens into hostile foreigners.
When creed is country, dissent from the creed becomes socially, if not legally, treasonous. This also applies to people who died long ago, whose legacies can be written off as outdated or unsuited to the times.
In his book Common Ground, Justin Trudeau wrote:
‘Our modern Canadian identity is no longer based on ethnic, religious, historical, or geographic grounds. Canadians are of every possible colour, culture, and creed, and continue to celebrate and revel in our diversity. We have created instead a national identity that is based on shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, justice, equality, and opportunity. And while many of the almost one hundred countries I’ve travelled through in my life aspire to those values, Canada is pretty much the only place that defines itself through them. Which is why we’re the only place on earth that is strong not in spite of our differences but because of them.’
Rather than being defined by its people, the country becomes little more than what partisans define, and express by means of, the state apparatus. This creed includes public healthcare, government-run childcare, Charter rights and Diversity Inc.
Do you oppose Canada’s sinking single-payer healthcare system? You are un-Canadian.
Do you think less highly of multiculturalism as doctrine? You do not actually like Canada.
Do you bristle at the curbing of the Canadian tradition of owning rifles? You are a pseudo-American.
Do you not have your ‘Elbows up’? Something is terribly wrong with you.
Do you not believe in the Liberal Party’s version of Canada? You are some sort of traitor.
Ben Woodfinden: Are you angry enough?
Last week, I tweeted out something that had been sitting in my drafts for probably a month. The timing was misjudged on my part, because it ended up being used across media as an example of online conservative infighting.
Between Confederation and the twenty-first century, the Liberal Party ceased to be just one faction competing within the Canadian family. Instead, they attempted with great success to become the family itself. Now this project is being tinkered with for a new era.
Under Mark Carney, the Liberals have begun shedding Trudeau’s economic agenda, but they will not surrender the creedal tests that have enabled the party to promote its personally tailored, nationalised distinction between friend and enemy.
These are the tenets of nothing less than a social and cultural tyranny, in which the party is permitted to define who is Canadian and what is Canadian. To the party, those who reject this framework of Canadianness are the true paper citizens, not truly Canadian at heart and better suited to American citizenship.
Ironically, no other nation on the planet has been a stronger proponent of the ‘nation of ideas’ (which is interchangeable with a ‘nation of values’) than the United States. No other country has more famously built itself on a written, ironclad Constitution of liberal propositions, as opposed to the English tradition of an unwritten constitution based on precedent and tradition.
Contrary to the assertions of many on the right, Canada was not founded as an ideologically liberal country in the same vein. Canada was founded by men of a loyal inclination, who were sceptical of economic or political engagement with anyone but those they recognised as kith and kin. At the time, that meant the British Empire.
In fact, Canada’s nineteenth-century liberals found the Canadian Conservatives of Confederation so repugnant that they even founded the Liberal Party to oppose them. Even so, those same Liberals, such as George Brown, practised their beliefs within an imperial framework and were fiercely loyal to the Crown.
Again, political disagreement is far more peaceful within the bounds of a family, made up of those who were born into it or who married into it.
Imagine an English Tory of the most aristocratic lineage in the City of London today. By some miracle, he is sitting in a room alone with a former coal miner from Northumberland. They hate each other’s politics and always will. The Tory prizes good manners and drinks at the East India Club, while the ex-pitman votes for Labour and once found a social life in a union hall.
However, neither the Tory nor the Northerner would, presumably, strip the other of his Englishness, for their quarrel is one within a family that shares a language and the long story of the foggy island on which they stand.
The Tory or the Northerner may be descended from Huguenot refugees or Irish labourers, but he exists within an inherited English prescription. Were England the land of purely creedal inhabitants, they could tear up one another’s membership in that family on the basis of ideology.
Canada is not England, which still retains a nationalism that bristles against attempts to subsume it into a spiritually borderless global village.
A national culture can grow like a beautiful wild garden, with only minimal intervention from a state that accepts what it is and seeks only to nurture it. But when ideologically motivated, that same state can rip it up and replace it with the most rigid, artificial turf.
That is precisely what happened in Canada’s cultural revolution after the Second World War. The Liberals, aided by the acquiescence of their weaker Conservative rivals, used the state to try to remake Canada into a propositional nation. This is not a conspiracy theory, nor is it a little-known fact; it is part of the country’s historical record.
For all their attempts to adapt to and fit into Liberal Canada, the Conservatives are on track to continue as the de facto night managers of our politics, governing one year for every two of Liberal rule.
In a perverse way, many Canadian conservatives who fancy themselves as dissidents find so much heartfelt meaning in the thinking of the American right that they side with the United States over their own people in cross-border disputes.
That said, they are a minority, even among Canadian conservatives. The stubborn anti-annexationist tendency in Canada, in the shadow of the most powerful entity in the history of mankind, is a sign of something sterner.
Despite the decline of nation-states, the older bonds that bind a people together still prove their worth.
What are some things that can still unite Canadians from the Atlantic to the Pacific? One is ice hockey, as clichéd as that sounds. Surely, it is no coincidence that something so intimately connected to history, landscape, weather, and people can draw out such a distinctly Canadian unity.
Other occasions, customs, and institutions with a similar effect, to varying degrees, are Remembrance Day, Christmas and bilingual institutions, all of which have their roots in older Canada.
There are still millions of Canadians with a similarly rooted bond to this country that was passed down to them by their families and friends, not by theory. That is worth championing.
Unless the Canadian right can magically transform itself into a faction equal in strength to the Liberals overnight, it must keep revising its promises, appeals and strategies to overcome its disadvantage. A worthy affirmation that might aid it would be that Canada is made first and foremost by its people, by their long history upon this beautiful land and by the connections they have formed with it.
People have asked, ‘What is Canada’s ultimate purpose?’ Perhaps that purpose should be to strengthen and secure the good life for Canadians, not to conscript them into a march towards becoming nobodies, furnished with official beliefs but empty of all else.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Australian Financial Review.
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Great essay, Geoff.
There is much here to consider, and to ponder.
When I was in university, the political science folks used to talk about “political culture”.
Political culture was, of course, a shared set of ideals, values and beliefs about how society was to be operated.
Heritage was the historical collection of stories, interactions,
events, and traditions that could shape that political culture.
So, heritage is more-or-less fixed (but growing), while political culture can change, based on changing interpretations of shared circumstances.
The Left in Canada has fought hard and long to destroy heritage, in order to affect the political culture.
They have, few would dispute, largely succeeded. I think this was the basic point of “Lament for a Nation”, and why it remains such a seminal piece of work.
Well done, excellent work, and please keep writing and sharing these imperative ideas.
My very best to you.