The Fundamental Problem with Nationalism
With his annexation bluster, Trump is alienating the Canadian patriots we most want for our friends.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
April 09, 2025
A fundamental problem with nationalism is that it tends to pit natural nationalists against each other in stupid spats, when they’d be better off forming loose coalitions against globalists.
For example, aggressive American nationalism, such as Trump’s talk about “annexing” Canada as the 51st state, annoys the Canadians we most want to be our friends: the ice hockey fans, the Norm Macdonalds, the Canucks who took Juno beach while our boys were dealing with Omaha and Utah beaches on D-Day.
Before Donald Trump returned to the White House and started free-associating about his ambitions to take over Canada and Greenland, Canada’s Conservatives, led by the talented 45-year-old professional politician Pierre Poilievre of Calgary, were 25 points up in the polls.
But now that Trump is waging a trade war on Canada with the intent of annexing the country, the Liberals, winners of the last three elections under now-unpopular former prime minister Justin Trudeau, are about five or ten points in the lead in the snap election new prime minister Mark Carney has called for April 28.
Read the whole thing there.
Norm’s view of nationalism was formed while playing football for one of Quebec’s few Anglophone schools, when the conscientious and historically-minded Francophone students would take it upon themselves to demonstrate to him practically how the Battle of the Plains of Abraham ought to have ended.
You say that
In recent generations, the U.S. and Canada have thrived by being vaguely friendly without interfering too much in each other’s business.
Unfortunately, Trudeau the younger loved using his position as Prime Minister to involve himself in American politics. He could not resist commenting American failings, using US school shootings as reason for more gun control (we have few mass shootings of our own) and very publically opening our borders to refugees on Twitter to contrast with Trump expelling Haitians.
A lot of left wing Canadian nationalism is just a form of this sort of stupid on upmanshipt.