Real Talk About Canada and America
What Do the Calls for a 51st State Really Mean?
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The election of Donald Trump as 47th US president has been cause for celebration. But Americans (and folk in the radical right) should be cautious about celebrating too much, too early—especially patriotic American nationalists. The foaming-at-the-mouth glee of Ben Shapiro over annexing Canada and Greenland is either performative, or a cope. America is weak, and that is why Trump is in.
America gambled on Ukraine and lost big. The global order of progressive secular humanism thought it could force Russia to knuckle under with the force of economic and informational warfare, only to find that Russia had been fortifying against this for 20 years. When this war failed, it sent the American imperial centre into a tailspin, and the election of Trump has been a consequence of that.
Meanwhile, China has been proceeding apace with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China now has BRI cooperation agreements with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations. Investment in this project has surpassed USD 1 trillion. America has no comparable initiatives to the BRI, and is simply losing ground on infrastructure while its global supply chain weakens. The bottom line is that America is a power on the wane.
To say that America’s fundamentals are weak would be an understatement, but the election of Trump signals that it has finally decided to fix its problems. It needs its native ethnic stock to buy back in to the idea of America, and quickly. So the move has been a) to put the woke away, and b) to ratchet up the jingoism. Both are needed, given the scale of its problems. But whereas the former will entice the heritage Anglosphere to get on board, the latter will drive it away from the imperial centre. America needs to play its cards very carefully here.
In early January, Trump called a press conference where he aired a list of grievances against the international order. As summarized by financial analyst Craig Shapiro:
He is breaking the 75+ year deal from the post-Bretton Woods World which was to provide military assistance to RoW and secure stable and safe trade lanes in exchange for using the USD and re-investing excess reserves in USTs.
America is tired of others around the world not holding up their end of the bargain and it's time to pay the piper back. The US can’t afford to be anywhere and everywhere anymore. Canada, Mexico, Panama Canal, NATO, Middle East, etc.
It is “America First and Only” policy and the rest of the world needs to wake up and notice. The old system is dying and a new one will arise that is more likely to be mercantilist, multilateral, with a re-introduction of gold as neutral reserve settlement asset.1
This idea of America’s client states not “holding up their end of the bargain” is idiotic, and designed solely for domestic consumption. It is not serious policy analysis, and no security or foreign policy elites believe it. America’s client states have been marching in complete lockstep with the imperial centre for 80 years. It’s just that marching orders have now changed. What’s more, and as we will show, America depends on its allies much more than it lets on.
This performative jingoism has fed into the discourse around Canada as the “51st state”. As the mainstream take goes, Canada has not been holding up its end of the security bargain, and its irresponsible post-nationalism is leaving the Arctic essentially undefended in the face of Russia and China. Therefore Canada needs to be annexed for security purposes, and since it is already a vassal of the US, this should simply be formalized by bring it into the American union. But this take fundamentally misunderstands both the American geopolitical position and also the national character of Canada.
Recently there have been some serious attempts to understand the Canadian national character from within the radical right. I would encourage you all to engage with these:
But let us summarize the character of Canada before explaining just how much weaker is the American position vis-à-vis Canada, than people think.
Canada is traditionalist in its marrow; it does not have a revolutionary bone in its body. John Carter’s characterization of Canada as the Prussia of North America is apt. Whereas the famous watchword for America is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Canada’s stated guiding principle is peace, order, and good government.2 Nowhere in the Canadian national character is there a love of liberty. We are not natural libertarians. We are natural authoritarians. This may seem odd given that we are currently secular humanist liberals, but consider Canada’s lockdown policies in 2020–2022, or its crackdown on the trucker protests.
Canada is also a loyalist country. Canadian identity is bound up with the imperial centre. When that centre was Britain, Canada considered itself “more British than the British”.3 Now that the centre is America, Canada is “more American than America”. This is, incidentally, the same reason why Britain is more progressive than America. This is the conservatism of the fringes, and by conservatism we don’t mean traditional religion and hierarchy, we mean “maintaining the status quo”—serving the ideological commitments of the centre, even when the centre itself has abandoned those commitments.
Whatever the imperial centre is doing, Canada is doing that thing but even harder. When the British empire was riding high, Canada was crying Rule, Britannia! and was the empire’s strongest soldier. Canadian soldiers were feared even among the allied forces in WWI. The Canadian government automatically entered WWI in 1914 without hesitation, whereas Britain itself was more divided on intervention.
When Britain was still meaningfully monarchist, Canada was monarchist +1. Canadians are descended from United Empire Loyalists—British colonial settlers in North America who remained loyal to the monarchy and opposed revolutionary changes. We think republicanism sucks and is unstable, and we’re not wrong. Until the latter half of the 20th century, Canada retained strong monarchical traditions in its governance, maintaining titles, royal symbols, and legal frameworks even as Britain was gradually becoming more republican. Canadians established Victoria Day in 1845 as a major national holiday, long before Britain had an equivalent. Even up to the 1980s, Canada kept a Governor General4 and formal royal assent for legislation, when Britain had long since de facto retired many of these functions. For Canada to heal and become a real nation again will require healing Britain first, but that is a whole other discussion.
Since WWII, the imperial centre has been America, and in that time this centre has been doing gay post-national progressivism, so for half a century Canada has been doing that even harder, just as before. The laundry list of Canadian gestures in this direction is long and depressing, and we hardly need enumerate them. But now there has been a sudden change of heart in the imperial centre.