Over at Literary Review of Canada, Pulitzer prize-winning writer and McGill University professor David Marks Shribman reviews Rob Goodman’s Not Here: Why American Democracy is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself.
Here is a taste:
It once was sufficient to say, as the Canada West Reform leader George Brown did when the American Civil War began in 1861, “We are glad we are not them.” Indeed, Canada is not the United States, and Goodman — who now teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University — wants to keep it that way, much the way people feel when they move from the crowded city to the green spaces beyond the urban belts: I fled all of that, and let’s make sure it doesn’t follow me here. He has a prescription, too, and it comes, in a way, from the language of the country he left behind. “Our future depends on our mental independence from America,” he writes. “The best tool we have for resisting democratic erosion is Canadian localism, especially as it applies to our eroding neighbour: in other words, steadily increasing Canadian separateness and distinctiveness from the United States.”
This talk of independence — separateness — is not unique to Goodman, of course, as talk of American independence was not unique to Thomas Jefferson in the late eighteenth century; some twenty-seven days before the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution in the Second Continental Congress declaring “that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” As far back as the mid‑’60s, Lester B. Pearson knew that “if Canada were to be taken seriously as a nation, it needed to develop a stronger sense of self,” as John Ibbitson points out in his new book, The Duel. Last year a task force organized by the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa produced a paper called A National Security Strategy for the 2020s, which warned that Canada needed to come to terms with the notion that it “can no longer count on some of the traditional pillars that have guaranteed our security and prosperity for decades.” No one had to wonder which pillars the authors were talking about. Shortly thereafter, Ira Wells, who teaches literature and cultural criticism at the University of Toronto, published an article in The Walrus, arguing that “for all of its continued economic dominance, the US often appears on the brink of anarchy.” He speculated darkly that political violence south of the border might “involve complicated and unpredictable spillover events in Canada.”
But as Goodman warns that the American contagion could be expressed “in the storied language of liberty, tyranny, and constitutional order” and as he reminds readers that “political violence has held a privileged place in the American imagination,” he puts the modern Canadian challenge perhaps more simply than other voices: “We can’t aspire to anything meaningfully better until we are secure in our difference, until we stop seeing ourselves through American eyes.”
One of the intriguing subthemes of Goodman’s argument is one of those differences — one that already exists and one that will be startling to Canadians: the danger, deeply seated across the border, of the worship of national founders. In his estimable Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, from 2006, the Brown University historian Gordon S. Wood argued that the Founding Fathers “have a special significance for Americans” and that these revolutionaries-cum-constitutionalists have become “central to our sense of who we are.” There are no Canadian analogues (as the current drive to topple John A. Macdonald from his pedestals shows). “Few things are more foreign to Canada than the intensity of feeling with which Americans regard their founders,” Goodman observes.Â
He goes on to argue against what he calls “fetishizing democracy”:
“Our challenge is protecting democracy without smothering it in reverence: without treating it like a sacred object, a kind of holy relic that goes on procession every two or four years, whose bearing on our lives is not entirely clear and is never explained in much detail, which cannot be examined too closely, but which must be defended at all costs.“
Goodman is asking that Canada do more than just bray about its gift for friendship, nation building, and cheerful offerings of refuge and winter coats to immigrants. Why? Because “determined and self-confident creativity” will be required “to live next to an eroding democracy, without eroding ourselves.”
That’s the heart of his argument, buttressed by the notion that anti-Americanism, always a recessive gene in the Canadian body politic, can be a creative force. It has happened before, in moments that he calls “refusals”: the times when Canada profited from rejecting ideas and initiatives from the United States. “In fact, some of Canada’s most creative periods were periods of refusal,” Goodman writes. “One of the most dynamic forces in our political history has been anti-Americanism. I mean anti-Americanism not as a knee-jerk prejudice or unearned superiority, but as a cold assessment of how American power has often been incompatible with Canadian goals.” Some examples: national unification in the mid-nineteenth century and our “development as a multinational, multicultural democracy in the twentieth.”
Read the entire review here. It is actually a joint review. The other book is Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart.