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Earlier this week, I linked to a post at JSTOR Daily, where Hope Reese interviewed historian Jill Lepore about the crisis facing American institutions in the 21st century. Lepore argued that the sheer degree of polarization
Just this weekend, I came across an essay by Canadian writer Stephen Marche essay in The Walrus, "America's Next Civil War". This article's title perhaps somewhat misrepresents Marche's aticle, in that he imagines not so much outright civil war as a breakdown of civil society, as bipartisanship and polarization makes normal political life impossible. This will have, among other things, significant effects on Canada.
To sum up: the US Congress is too paralyzed by anger to carry out even the most basic tasks of government. America’s legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government is in free fall. The president discredits the fbi, the Department of Justice, and the judicial system on a regular basis. Border guards place children in detention centres at the border. Antigovernment groups, some of which are armed militias, stand ready and prepared for a government collapse. All of this has already happened.
Breakdown of the American order has defined Canada at every stage of its history, contributing far more to the formation of Canada’s national identity than any internal logic or sense of shared purpose. In his book The Civil War Years, the historian Robin Winks describes a series of Canadian reactions to the early stages of the first American Civil War. In 1861, when the Union formed what was then one of the world’s largest standing armies, William Henry Seward, the secretary of state, presented Lincoln with a memorandum suggesting that the Union “send agents into Canada…to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence.” Canadian support for the North withered, and panicked fantasies of imminent conquest flourished. After the First Battle of Bull Run, a humiliating defeat for the Union, two of John A. Macdonald’s followers toasted the victory in the Canadian Legislative Assembly. The possibility of an American invasion spooked the French Canadian press, with one journal declaring there was nothing “so much in horror as the thought of being conquered by the Yankees.”
The first American Civil War led directly to Canadian Confederation. Whatever our differences, we’re quite sure we don’t want to be them.
How much longer before we realize that we need to disentangle Canadian life as much as possible from that of the United States? How much longer before our foreign policy, our economic policy, and our cultural policy accept that any reliance on American institutions is foolish? Insofar as such a separation is even possible, it will be painful. Already, certain national points of definition are emerging in the wake of Trump. We are, despite all our evident hypocrisies, generally in favour of multiculturalism, a rules-based international order, and freedom of trade. They are not just values; the collapsing of the United States reveals them to be integral to our survival as a country.
Northrop Frye once wrote that Canadians are Americans who reject the revolution. When the next revolution comes, we will need to be ready to reject it with everything we have and everything we are.</ Michael Enright at CBC Sunday Edition <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-october-28-2018-1.4877630/what-should-canada-do-if-there-s-a-civil-war-in-the-u-s-1.4877641">interviewed Marche for almost twenty minutes.
This scenario reminds me of nothing so much as the decline of Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, political incapacities leading to economic failure leading to mass violence leading to the terrible junta.
What do you think? What is the United States heading towards? What should Canada do amidst all of this chaos to our south, this incipient breakdown? For that matter, what should the rest of the world do?
There are a lot of specific institutions that I have a lot of faith in. That doesn’t necessarily leave me with a lot of optimism about the moment, partly because of what I said about the automation, the polarization––that’s very difficult to escape. I think we live in an age of tremendous political intolerance. I think we live in an age where people don’t understand the nature of our political institutions.
I don’t think it’s great that we have made Supreme Court Justices all but elected to the office. That’s actually quite terrible for the pursuit of justice. But, you don’t even hear people talk about that. It’s just, “who’s gonna win the battle?”
That really, really concerns me. Because it’s a symptom of the way people want to win by any means necessary. Because we’ve been given this kind of rhetoric of life or death, we’re on the edge of a cliff. It’s very hard for people to operate as a civic community interested in the public good in that kind of a climate.
Just this weekend, I came across an essay by Canadian writer Stephen Marche essay in The Walrus, "America's Next Civil War". This article's title perhaps somewhat misrepresents Marche's aticle, in that he imagines not so much outright civil war as a breakdown of civil society, as bipartisanship and polarization makes normal political life impossible. This will have, among other things, significant effects on Canada.
Breakdown of the American order has defined Canada at every stage of its history, contributing far more to the formation of Canada’s national identity than any internal logic or sense of shared purpose. In his book The Civil War Years, the historian Robin Winks describes a series of Canadian reactions to the early stages of the first American Civil War. In 1861, when the Union formed what was then one of the world’s largest standing armies, William Henry Seward, the secretary of state, presented Lincoln with a memorandum suggesting that the Union “send agents into Canada…to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence.” Canadian support for the North withered, and panicked fantasies of imminent conquest flourished. After the First Battle of Bull Run, a humiliating defeat for the Union, two of John A. Macdonald’s followers toasted the victory in the Canadian Legislative Assembly. The possibility of an American invasion spooked the French Canadian press, with one journal declaring there was nothing “so much in horror as the thought of being conquered by the Yankees.”
The first American Civil War led directly to Canadian Confederation. Whatever our differences, we’re quite sure we don’t want to be them.
How much longer before we realize that we need to disentangle Canadian life as much as possible from that of the United States? How much longer before our foreign policy, our economic policy, and our cultural policy accept that any reliance on American institutions is foolish? Insofar as such a separation is even possible, it will be painful. Already, certain national points of definition are emerging in the wake of Trump. We are, despite all our evident hypocrisies, generally in favour of multiculturalism, a rules-based international order, and freedom of trade. They are not just values; the collapsing of the United States reveals them to be integral to our survival as a country.
Northrop Frye once wrote that Canadians are Americans who reject the revolution. When the next revolution comes, we will need to be ready to reject it with everything we have and everything we are.</ Michael Enright at CBC Sunday Edition <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-october-28-2018-1.4877630/what-should-canada-do-if-there-s-a-civil-war-in-the-u-s-1.4877641">interviewed Marche for almost twenty minutes.
This scenario reminds me of nothing so much as the decline of Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, political incapacities leading to economic failure leading to mass violence leading to the terrible junta.
What do you think? What is the United States heading towards? What should Canada do amidst all of this chaos to our south, this incipient breakdown? For that matter, what should the rest of the world do?
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