The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik has an essay in the forthcoming May 15 issue that looks back at the American revolution and wonders if we’ve hopelessly romanticized it. The revolution, he writes, can be understood as the New World edition of a “much larger political quarrel throughout the British Empire” between radical reformers and “intellectuals and aristocrats” committed to a robust, efficient, and profitable empire. The first gave us the USA; the second gave us Canada.
Canada is Canada not simply because of how it came to be, but where it is. Sharing a transcontinental border with us, Canada is self-consciously not the United States. The more egregiously Americans act, the more reasonable Canadians want to be. I missed the McCarthy era because I was living in Canada then; you’d think so-called Soviet double agents would have been just as single-minded about destroying Canadian democracy from within as American democracy, but Canadians just couldn’t get worked up over the possibility. I think they felt the U.S. had that particular hysteria covered.
