What this episode is about
Blindfold a foreigner and shuttle him back and forth between Detroit and Windsor, and he will most likely think he never left the same city. From the skyline to the pickup trucks to the Super Bowl, America and Canada look indistinguishable from the outside. And yet one of them would rather live with an epidemic of shootings than give up its guns, while the other handed its guns and its sense of order over to the state; one can’t get universal health care off the ground, the other treats universal health care as a matter of course. Today the United States sits furthest right among developed countries and Canada is distinctly to the left. Why are these twins complete opposites on the inside?
Seymour Martin Lipset, the grand old man of political sociology, argues in Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (there is still no official Chinese translation) that the answer lies in 1776. America and Canada aren’t brothers; they are two things shaken loose by the same war of independence: America is the winner of that revolution, Canada is the one who fled it. Forty to fifty thousand Loyalists who refused to betray the King made their way north, allied themselves with Quebec’s French Catholics against a common enemy, and from their first day built a country on the negation of “American values.” America wrote down “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; Canada wrote down “peace, order and good government.”
From there the two went their separate ways, and kept drifting further apart: on the frontier, America had cowboys running out ahead of the government while Canada had Mounties running out ahead of the settlers; America, with its separation of church and state, bred the most fervent religion anywhere, while Canada, which had an official church, went religiously lukewarm; America tore out the Tory tradition by the roots and kept nothing but Lockean individualism, while Canada held on to the Tory idea that “the state is a parent,” which is why socialism was treated as a mind virus in America and grafted smoothly onto “Red Toryism” in Canada. At the end of the book Lipset delivers a confident verdict: however tightly the two economies are tied together, this divide is never going to be filled in.
Highlights
- Homicide rates, the number of lawyers, and Section 33 of the Charter—the “notwithstanding clause”: the US–Canada gulf falls precisely on “violence” and “authority,” not on some vague sense that “Canadians are more law-abiding”
- Only 40 to 45 percent of the white population actively supported independence during the Revolution, against 15 to 20 percent Loyalists; after the war forty to fifty thousand of them fled north and became the skeleton of English Canada
- Turner’s “frontier thesis” runs backwards in Canada: in 1873 the North-West Mounted Police moved into the West ahead of the settlers, and in the Klondike gold rush American prospectors had to hand over their guns at the pass
- The free-market paradox of religion: abolishing the established church made American preachers market themselves like startups, and gave American politics its “moral crusade” streak
- Why counter-revolutionary Canada ended up further left: the Tory notion that “the state is a father” fits socialism hand in glove, and most of Canada’s state-owned enterprises and its universal health care were originally pushed through by Conservatives
Jump to a section
- 00:00 Two countries that look identical and are opposites inside
- 02:29 Blindfolded at the border: identical on the surface
- 03:22 Cowboys and Mounties: two ideas of justice
- 05:36 Homicide rates, lawyer counts and the notwithstanding clause
- 09:42 Revolution and counter-revolution: the winners and the refugees of 1776
- 12:40 Why French Catholics sided with the King
- 14:27 “The pursuit of happiness” vs. “peace, order and good government”
- 15:07 Settling the West: Mounties ahead of the settlers
- 17:50 The religion paradox: separation of church and state breeds fervor
- 22:17 Why counter-revolutionary Canada is further left
- 26:42 The Great Depression and “Red Toryism”
- 28:28 Will the divide ever be filled in?
The book
- Title: Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada
- Author: Seymour Martin Lipset
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication date: 1990
- ISBN：9780415903097
Leave a Reply