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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.

Canadian hockey fans had been good sports about their not winning a Stanley Cup since 1993. In recent years, a large number of NHL champions have been America Sun Belt franchises, such as Florida, Vegas, Colorado, and Tampa Bay sweeping the five titles in the 2020s. But Trump’s bumptiousness has recently outraged normally good-natured Canadian hockey aficionados, who have lately taken to booing during the American national anthem.

American chuds have become accustomed to denouncing Canadians as wimps. Yet the National Hockey League is a violent sport, just about the last team game to tolerate and even encourage bare-knuckle brawling. But NHL fans are a cut above. A waiter at a huge sports bar/restaurant in downtown Los Angeles next to the old Staples Center told me that his worst customers showed up on rap concert nights, while NBA fans were okay. But NHL fans, many of them Canadians taking a winter vacation in California, were a waiter’s dream.

I’m in favor of people who treat waiters well.

Similarly, Norm Macdonald (1959–2021) was one of the English language’s conservative comic geniuses in the tradition of Swift, Waugh, and Wolfe. He was, unsurprisingly, a Canadian patriot.

But Norm was also a major fan of Justin Trudeau’s dad, Pierre, Liberal prime minister for fifteen years. Why? Because Norm was an Anglophone born in Quebec, and during Norm’s youth, the elder Trudeau, a bilingual, defeated the anti-Anglophone Quebec separatism led by René Lévesque. Trudeau père kept Canada together, much to the advantage of Quebec Anglophones like Norm. The great comedian tweeted in 2018:

Peace to you, my Canadian brother. I love Canada and the US, too, always have. But I am, at heart, a Quebecker and felt what it was to live 2nd in my country of birth, felt that inferiority to the bone. Mr. Trudeau taught me what I could be and Mon Cher Rene taught me who I was.

I.e., presumably René Lévesque taught Norm that in separatist Quebec he would always be the bad-guy oppressor, while Pierre Trudeau let him understand that in a united Canada he could be a proud Canadian.

Canada is its own separate country and has its own very complicated politics. I was never a huge Pierre Trudeau fan, but I will defer to Norm’s far better-informed views.

In recent generations, the U.S. and Canada have thrived by being vaguely friendly without interfering too much in each other’s business.

In contrast, most of the new immigrants that Justin Trudeau invited into Canada over the past decade would hardly mind Canada being annexed into the USA. They didn’t move to Canada because they think it’s better than America. They only immigrated to Canada because they couldn’t get in here, where the really big money is. So they moved to America Jr. as the next best thing.

Similarly, many Canadians who look down upon red-state Americans would start to recalculate their opposition to America annexing Canada once they realize that Trump’s bluster about how “[Canada] will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State” is just an opening negotiating tactic.

Canada has recently overtaken California in population due to Trudeau fils’ pedal-to-the-metal immigration policy. In reality, in any nonmilitary annexation, the ten provinces of Canada would become the 51st through 60th states, with Canada’s three territories perhaps becoming the 61st. (Possibly Quebec, which I’ve come to admire for its orneriness, would opt out for independence.) That would add 18 to 22 Canadian seats to the United States Senate, more or less turning the U.S. politically blue, into Greater Minnesota forever.

All hail President Walz!

Moreover, the most ambitious globalist Canadians would find that they’d love to have the roads to D.C., New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles opened wide to them.

Note that the latest prime minister of Canada, Liberal Mark Carney, was head of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. Hey, it was a promotion from heading the Bank of Canada, so what does a little thing like national loyalty matter relative to career advancement? Carney’s career trajectory was much like Stanley Fisher’s as first an MIT professor, then head of the Bank of Israel, and then, under Obama, vice-chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

In contrast, there are Canadians who love Canada not because it’s not as bad as back home in Bihar, nor because they believe it’s morally superior to America.

No, they love Canada for a really simple (if unfashionable) reason: because it’s their country.

For example, a couple of decades ago, I conversed frequently online with a brilliant Canadian journalist named Colby Cosh from Edmonton, Alberta.

Edmonton is a major-league city, best known in the U.S. as the place where Wayne Gretzky set all those ice hockey records in the 1980s. But while most Canadian cities are close to the U.S. border at the 49th parallel, Edmonton is almost 54 degrees north, more than 300 miles north of the border. It’s also at 2,200 feet of elevation, which lowers temperatures by about seven degrees Fahrenheit versus sea level. Hence, Edmonton’s winters are severe: New Year’s Day averages less than three hours of sunshine and a high temperature of 22 F.

I suggested that for the sake of his career he move to New York, or at least to Toronto.

But, Edmonton was his home.

George Orwell expressed the distinction between nationalism and patriotism well:

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.

And yet, nationalism is probably too small-scale for today’s economies of scale. Plus, cross-border warfare is obviously economically disastrous.

This would imply that continentalism is perhaps best suited for today’s level of technological development, just as planetarism would be smartest in the distant future when we are squaring off against alien Bugs. As Ronald Reagan orated to the United Nations in 1987:

I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

It currently makes sense for continents to form free trade zones among peoples of roughly equal levels of development, such as the European Union and NAFTA.

But the problem with continentalism today is that, much as it makes sense economically, it sounds racist.