How the U.S. and Canada threw away their national identities

A reader writes from North Carolina:

I’ve been in the U.S. for nine years, having emigrated to the U.S. from Canada in 1996. The America I thought I was going to is not the America I have come to.

Before coming to the U.S. I had thought of America as a nation with a purpose, carrying on the great western civilization and culture. At its base was the Judeo-Christian ethic. However, after almost a decade of living here, I have found the following ethos:

Instead of having a national purpose, equivalent to the post 1776 creation era (independence) and 1945 reconstruction years (WW2), the U.S. has as its raison d’etre the universal democratization of all cultures and countries. This is both external and internal. That is not an accident! The moment America decided that one of its main goals was internal racial equalization as an aspect of democratic progress and evolution, then by extension that set its external foreign agenda. There is a link between the civil rights movement within this country and its foreign affairs outlook. Condoleeza Rice is a perfect symbolic representative of those two movements—straddling both.

In the past 40 years, Canada has spent enormous sums of money (and time) to foster a bilingual, bi-cultural national framework to accomodate Quebec. It took its focus off economic and educational programs and became obsessed with the notion of turning every part of the country into a bilingual, bi-cultural region to accomodate a minority. In the process, a country with enormous natural resources suffered economically.

Likewise the U.S., obsessed with the racial problem, focussed with such intensity on “extending democracy” to the Afro-American community that it missed the fact that its economy was being taken over by Asia and its work being outsourced overseas. The U.S. no longer has as its national striving economic leadership in the world—instead it focuses on “extending democracy” to other cultures.

Both Canada and the U.S. have lost their national identities, watering them down in the process of “extending participatory democracy” to minority groups through the diminution of their own identities. A Canadian, when asked what is uniquely great about Canada, points to its health-care system. An American, when asked what is uniquely great about the U.S., points to its instinct for freedom and liberation. Two abstract concepts. Neither country now knows what it uniquely and particularly is from an ontological and historical standpoint.

As a result, I see in both countries a lack of national purpose in the citizenry. In the U.S., its main goal is to integrate minorities not into a national identity, but into the process of democratic “participation”—at home and abroad. The majority in both countries is now defined by how it deals with minorities on an on-going basis, not by the historical personality and spiritual character that the majority was born into. In some respects both Canada and the U.S. have become container shells for universal all-inclusiveness devoid of any particularity and content. I wonder exactly what meaning and purpose that gives a citizen?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2005 04:58 PM | Send