The Canadian Right’s Cultural Cringe
We tend to think of nationalism as a phenomenon of the political right. In recent years the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the UK have generally been supported by the right in those countries and opposed by the left. Some have wondered why Canada has been spared these trends, and why our political right seems less nationalistic than it’s counterparts in the US and UK.
In fact, in recent decades, it has been the case that nationalism in Canada has been more generally associated with the political left (I speak in generalities of course). The debate over the 1988 Canada US free trade agreement pitted the pro free trade Progressive Conservatives against the anti free trade Liberals and NDP. Left wingers here tend to be more sceptical of American influence, more willing to use the state to stand up for what they perceive to be ‘Canadian interests’. Conservatives by contrast tend to have a more positive attitude towards the United States, and are generally more hostile to efforts of the state to preserve Canada’s sovereignty. Commentary on this topic has tended to focus on why the left here has tended to be more nationalistic. But I would like to instead to talk about the opposite side of this: why isn’t the Canadian right more nationalistic?
Quick aside: What I will be arguing applies only to English Canada. Not that Quebec’s various interactions with Canadian nationalism are not worthy of examination, just that this is a separate topic and should be addressed separately.
The theory I would like to advance is this: the Canadian right suffers from something known as the ‘cultural cringe’. The term ‘cultural cringe’ was originally coined in Australia and was used to refer to the inferiority complex many Australians felt regarding their own culture when compared to the culture of other countries, particularly Great Britain.
I don’t think I have ever heard this term applied to Canada, but I believe it applies here as much as it does in Australia. I get the sense among many conservative intellectuals here that they believe there is something just inherently ridiculous about Canada, it’s culture, and it’s institutions. Now I don’t think this cultural cringe is unique to conservatives, not at all, but I do think they are the political force in Canada that tends to draw on it the most.
I think the cultural cringe here can trace its origins to Canada’s colonial past. Conservatives in Canada in the 19th Century envisioned this country as a junior partner in a broader British Empire. The good things about this country were the things about it that were recognisably ‘British’ and the most we could ever aspire to was to be a sort of New World imitation UK. This attitude led to, among other things, the belief that anything distinctly Canadian had to be in some way inferior. It was thus the job of Canadian institutions to be a local Canadian imitation of some superior foreign model.
Now this original version of the cultural cringe was very anti-American. Because it thought that what was good about Canada was it’s British character, American influence needed to be resisted. But this attitude also led to a great deal of bigotry against Francophones, Catholics, and Indigenous peoples and sought to erase the contributions these groups had made to Canada and its historical development. It also led them to resist various efforts at nation building in Canada, leaving it to the Liberals to establish themselves as the Party of Canadian nationhood and it’s attendant symbols and institutions.
The decline of the British Empire in the middle years of the 20th Century spelled the end of this particular ideology’s grip on the Canadian right. But as America began to replace the UK as Canada’s primary economic, cultural, and political partner, I would argue that the cultural cringe found a new home. Our national inferiority complex was transferred from feeling inferior to the UK to feeling inferior to the United States. In the 70’s and 80’s, Canadian right wingers began looking for inspiration not domestically, but in the new ‘movement conservative’ ideology gaining traction in the United States. They began speaking in a new political language of ‘free markets’, ‘limited government’ and ‘personal responsibility’ that has been up until that time fairly alien concepts to the Canadian right.
But a byproduct of importing this new ideology was inevitably that, by declaring the superiority of American ideas and institutions, they came to believe in the inferiority of Canadian ideas and institutions. To see Canada as a sort of absurd statist vanity project of our ‘Laurentian elites’ who for narrow nationalistic and self serving reasons were preventing Canada from following it’s inevitable destiny of ever closer integration wit the United States. Not all of these new conservatives said this quite so explicitly, in fact most did not, but these ideas were always floating around.
Now, as it happens, I do not believe that in the year 2020 the Conservative Party necessarily actively *believes* in the tenets of the cultural cringe. But I do think the presence and lingering influence of the cultural cringe has prevented conservatives from truly embracing Canadian patriotism in a convincing way. To love and protect our national institutions rather than merely tolerating them for electoral reasons because the public won’t support their destruction. If the Canadian right wishes to truly stand for this country it must stop going abroad in search of models to import to Canada, but look inward and base it’s core tenets on preserving what is good about the country they call home.
I could not think of a better time to do this than now. With a belligerent and borderline hostile ‘conservative’ President in office in the United States, with the American conservative movement in shambles and prostrate before Trump, why look south of the border for inspiration? Indeed, the deterioration of American democracy and the relative stability and normalcy on display in Canada would seem to me to undermine the claim that the American way of doing things is inherently superior to the Canadian way.
And as for Britain, they are currently absorbed with the Brexit issue, an issue that doesn’t really concern us or have any relevance for our politics. So there is really not much to draw on there.
So why not go it alone? Why not craft a distinctly Canadian conservatism that is separate from it’s US or UK counterpart? I think it could happen. But to do it, the right in Canada must first bury once and for all the old cultural cringe.
