@StanGable14@dr_duchesne Indigo isn’t really a colour (at least not different from violet/purple).
When discussing optics at the university level, they say ROYGBV.
It’s prudent to remember that the United States government (who are not the American people), has never wanted a strong Canada. If Canada is to be strong, they want to be the ones ultimately in control of, or significantly influential in its trajectory.
They made it clear as early as Jefferson that they believed this continent, and broadly this hemisphere belongs to them and them alone. When the U.S. army wrote up contingency plans in the event of war with the British Empire, they had intended to bomb Halifax and the Canadians who lived there with mustard gas.
When John F. Kennedy met with the liberal Lester B. Pearson multiple times at Ottawa-Washington summits to depose Diefenbaker, they set a political force in motion leading to Pierre Trudeau, the cultural revolution, the flag change, multiculturalism, erasure of canada’s British-French settler identity, mass immigration and the transformation into a post-national economic zone.
The United States government also encouraged, not just Canada but all of its western allies in particular the former European great powers would be militarily and economically reliant on them. They’re not wholly responsible, but the post-war liberal consensus’s imperial project has been a cascade of failures.
I suspect that if Canada pivots to a right-wing, nationalist position in the vein of Dominion Society and the Canadian nationalist movement at large, the American government may attempt subvert, redirect or neutralize it. Knowing a rejuvenation of Canada’s demographics, economy, military and national pride will occur.
Strength will only be tolerated so much as it is subordinate or overtly friendly to American interests, not even neutrality.
Unless the unthinkable happens, and our equivalents on the dissident right in the United States somehow end up in government, who are content and friendly enough to leave us alone.
They’ve never tolerated so much as an implied threat from a middle power in the western hemisphere, which is why the relationship with the Americans must always be cynical and arms-length.
One of the more interesting things I have observed after nearly two years on the dissident right in Canada is that ideological alignment does not always translate into cultural or regional affinity. As an urban easterner from Montreal, I may share many political views with a rural westerner from Alberta or Saskatchewan, yet our outlooks remain shaped by very different regional histories and experiences.
We may both be right wing Canadian nationalists. We may agree that the country’s ethnocultural core is the British and French majority descended from its historic settler population, that the Red Ensign is Canada’s true flag, and that the present liberal regime was largely constructed by Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, and the Liberal Party of Canada. Even so, a persistent tension remains between east and west.
My more cynical instinct is to regard westerners as insufficiently Canadian, deeply Americanized, and lacking the roots, antiquity, and historical consciousness of the older provinces. They are just as likely to regard me as an illiberal, elitist, meddling tyrant with soft hands and five dollar words. We may share a nationality and an ideology, but our Canadas are different.
The Canadian West never developed to the same extent as the East. It never acquired a comparable population or enough political influence to counterbalance the older provinces in the way the American West eventually counterbalanced the American East. Canada’s ethnocultural, political, and economic centre of gravity therefore remains in the East. Western separatists have a point when they describe the West as a colony of the Laurentian establishment.
This imbalance has produced more than alienation. It has also generated resentment and, at times, a regional inferiority complex. Westerners understand that they occupy vast territories, control immense natural wealth, and contribute substantially to the national economy, yet remain subordinate to institutions and population centres concentrated along the Laurentian corridor.
Americans have their own regional divisions, but they benefit from a somewhat more unified national culture and a more balanced distribution of power. The East, West, South, and heartland are each strong enough, both economically and ethnoculturally, to counterbalance the others.
Shared beliefs alone do not produce cooperation, loyalty, or affection. Beneath ideological agreement lie older regional, cultural, historical, and national differences. These underlying divisions continue to shape how nationalists understand their countries, one another, and the political communities they hope to build.
The same principle applies to relations between Canadian and American right wing nationalists. We may agree on immigration, national identity, liberalism, demographic change, and the failures of the postwar political order, but those shared convictions do not erase the border between us.
Canadians and Americans remain products of different histories, institutions, regional cultures, and national experiences. American nationalism often carries assumptions about continental identity, political power, and American primacy that Canadian nationalists cannot accept without subordinating their own nation.
Canadian nationalism, in turn, may appear provincial, defensive, or needlessly hostile to Americans who regard Canada as culturally indistinct from the United States.
@UCCavalier With this being said, I wouldn’t be all that opposed to the legitimists having their way if it means putting a Bourbon King back on the throne in France.
The question for me is why would you choose the Spaniard, when there is a Frenchman waiting in the wings, backed by law?
@UCCavalier It isn’t wise to pick and choose what parts of Utrecht are valid, lest Britain lose her foothold in Gibraltar… I’m with the Orleanists on this one.
Frankly, I’d go with the Bonapartists before the Legitimists. Either treaties are valid or they aren’t. You can’t pick parts out.
@UCCavalier True, but abdication/renunciation is understood under British law—tested as recently as 1936–leaving the question of why a Canadian would want to side with the legitimists? It undermines the historical British position on the issue, and contradicts our understanding of monarchy.
@UCCavalier If there is one thing I believe shall mark our generation, it is a shift away from abstract concepts of democracy and egalitarianism and towards a more pragmatic approach to objective prosperity for our own people.
Why should they expect young people to revere ‘democracy’?
@DrewSav@StatisticUrban Or vice versa. Let’s be fair here: Joe Biden tore up Keystone XL on his first day in office by reversing prior presidential approval.
The problem isn’t even necessarily Trump or the Republican Party. The problem is how politically unstable—frankly bipolar—the United States is.