This article will focus on Liberalism in Canada due to the fact that Liberalism – and the Liberal Party – have come to define Canada. There can be no discussion of Canada in the modern age if it does not chart the rise of the Liber Party and the lionization of Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, whom I was instructed in school as the grandfather of Canada. This will be an article about Nationalism in Canada, and its ultimate impossibility. Let’s begin.
George Grant, in his overview of Canada back in the 1940s in his book Lament for a Nation, stated Canada is continually defined as a “state-in-progress,” always becoming but having no true identity. You will recognize this statement echoed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who claimed Canada was the first “post-nation-state.” The trick of this sort of thinking is that the longer people genuinely believe this, the further away history gets, and people actually believe that Canada was always full of Somalis and the British were only here to shoot Aboriginals in cabins while teaching them English.
“We must change now because all we have ever been is change.”
We cannot maintain Canadian identity as we cannot maintain Conservatism or Traditionalism: what once existed is being erased, and its future is constructed in opposition to it. It exists “to keep the conversation going.”
Ricardo Duchesne has a similar point where in his book, Canada in Decay, he fronts an attack on Straussian portrayal of the West just being about ideas and values with no ties to a population while also agreeing other ethnicities must retain theirs. If you live in Canada, this is a common occurrence. This is not based in history, and in his book, he goes as far as to explore the census history of Canada and shows it as a European majority for the vast span of its existence. This underlines the modern hypocrisy of claiming the nation being at once historically multicultural, but always racist due to its restrictive immigration policies.
Duchesne also outlines the processes through which this change s emotionally anchored in the populace. This is crucial because it prohibits curiosity and installs a low humming in a person’s psyche that even investigating this brand new foundation is tantamount to treason.
Step 1: Anti-Democracy. Racism is the worst evil and contrary to democracy, so even if it is true it is harmful. Step 2: Anti-Science. We see the repudiation of “scientific racism”, and explaining that anyone holding these views is driven by irrational fear or ignorance. Step 3: Anti-Peace. Here is the condemning of Western colonialism and the revival of the eighteenth-century notion of the “noble savage,” which has its roots in Materialism (to be discussed later) and the belief that the less cultured a society is, the more purely human they are. Lastly is step 4: Anti-Humanity. We end the universalization of human rights, which you can see not only in Canada but also the United Nations. <- [YOU ARE HERE.]
The Liberal mind is in a constant state of flux, where one must be loyal to their heritage and protect their ethnic identity but having an in-group preference makes you insane.
“The enormity of the break from the past will arouse in the dispossessed youth intense forms of beatness. But, after all, the United States supports a large Beat fringe. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger titillate the status quo rather than threaten it. Dissent is built into the fabric of the modern system. We bureaucratize it as much as anything else. Is there any reason to believe French Canada will be any different? A majority of the young is patterned for its place in the bureaucracies. Those who resist such shaping will retreat into a fringe world of pseudo-revolt”
– George Scott
In a theme that will become all too common in discussions of some more mustardy modern political ideologies, Liberals are by their nature universalizing. This started many decades ago (n Canada, it originally began centuries ago in Britain) as a play for a North American continentalism, and as the vanguards of the age of progress the believe that all movement they are in charge of is upward. And in even truer Liberal mentality, even when confronted with difficulties, “it’s the thought that counts.” This is because their worldview begins with thought rather than observation and study.
In that sense, Liberals don’t necessarily see nationalism as evil, but rather as a misguided relic or, at best, quaint. It’s obvious that any universalizing ideology will align itself with either continental or global corporations at some point since they both desire the same borderless connectedness, however for different reasons. The politicians and civil servants, very simply, want to abolish war.
Much of this thinking as we know it sprang up in the shadow of World War 2, and for many they will openly state that this is all in the interest of stopping global conflict and the erase the specter of colossal war. And here we see the fuel to this engine, one which nationalists still have not matched with the same emotional impact: “we do this to save lives. You obviously don’t want to save lives.”
In fact, all you need to do is look to who many see as the Godfather of Modern Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. In a famous essay titled “The New Treason of the Intellectuals,” he writes “the very idea of the nation state is absurd,” pessimistically stating that to have a nation state one must have an ethnic majority while minorities constantly carve out their own ethnic enclaves in a state of constant tension and conflict. The answer to this, repeated by his son years later, was to abolish the nation state and all traces of even a historic ethnic or national identity.
In Canada in Decay, Ricardo Duchesne points to Plato who believed that the human soul consisted of three parts: a part that desires the physical, a part that reasons, and a part that causes humans to desire honor and renown amongst their peoples. Liberal theory, he claims, came about in reaction to this “spiritedness,” in the wake of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War. Much as modern Liberals claim to be against war and all the forces which they claim causes it, so have they done throughout history. It is not against war in itself, but the forces of identity, competitiveness, and as Hobbes described, a thirst for power and riches.
In this regard, many Nationalists see both Marxist and Capitalist empires as threats to sovereignty, and it’s only in the fevered Rube-Goldberg machines of Neocons where they believe that the only way to defeat the influence of Communism is to side completely with multinational corporations. We’ve witnessed what Disney can do, and a glitterbomb in a raped rectum is poor recompense.
In these cases, the destructive is always highlighted, and why not? The Liberals propose something new and as yet unseen, everything that can be studied can be cast in a negative light but hope for a promised land if proposed abstractly can only be countered abstractly. In their Proto-Human, the only thing the entire population of Earth desires is money, freedom from the fear of death, and total peace between every individual. Be careful to note: not groups, but individuals.
“My view is quite different: if we are interested in preserving and advancing the interests of European Canadians, it is better to work within the existing framework of multiculturalism than to promote assimilation. Current Conservatives are hyper-Liberals in believing that all forms of group identity can be discarded, and that Liberalism is all about “freeing” the individual from any historical or biological antecedents, and making identities purely a matter of personal choice – except when they criticize Leftists for ignoring biological differences between men and women.”
– Ricardo Duchesne
George Grant tracks the rise of the Liberal party with their alignment with the urban areas, which was aligned with the large corporations which were continental in scope, which while bringing ties closer to America also allows another vector of pressure in the pursuit of control or political influence. As George Grant later says, “their aspirations of progress have made Canada redundant.”
Similarly, socialism, if accomplishing everything it endeavors to correct, will inevitably see its success as shame if it is not spread to all those who deserve it, which according to them is every single person on the planet. You can detect this shame whenever you hear them speak on the topic. Unless you try to convince them of some culturally-and-historically sensitive form of National Socialism, but then you’re a Nazi which is worse to them than the thought of a lesbian having a miscarriage.
Conservatism was always framed in the classical British sense where the community took precedent over the individual to bring order and identity. Only liberalism brought the experiment of the individual in America and Canada fought it. The loss to Liberalism is the loss of Canada.
Nationalism fails, even in the case of Bernier, due to not appealing uniquely to Quebec, the intelligentsia, and the business class. This can be done without appealing to the neoliberal corporate class, but it literally cannot be done without the former. Nationalists routinely fail by ignoring this. And if you get too acclimated to failure, you just become a Conservative.
Be careful of those who are on the side of the fluidity of reality. When people tell you to imagine a utopian future, they necessarily do this while re-imagining the past to justify the change. This is evident in how they rework Canadian history to be, at once, isolationist and xenophobic while also being 100% multicultural and made by open-minded immigration.
Go down fighting, don’t go down smirking.