According to the Eyrbyggja Saga, when the Icelandic peninsula of Snæfellsnes was plagued with ghosts and zombies (specifically Thorir Wooden-leg and his undead companions) disrupting daily life and harming the economy, Snorri Þorgrímsson solved the problem by taking them to court and submitting them to trial by jury. Always the proceduralist, Snorri was best known for his fair judgements in cases of blood feuds, boundary disputes and the endless squabbles over firewood. The zombie problem was just another such case. The Eyrbyggja Saga is not one of the best known of the Icelandic sagas, but it would appeal to any lawyer or political journalist. I read it in 1992, and then twenty years later I hiked extensively in Snæfellsnes, treading footsteps in most of the places the saga mentions. I’m returning to Iceland ten days from now, for another visit to that magical little country, so it’s much on my mind, and so is old Snorri. Today, Canada is menaced by a plague of ghosts and zombies, originating south of the border. The ghosts are an assortment of old and stupid ideas, the zombies are the marching morons of Trumpism and the morally corrupt legislators of the U.S. (mostly Republican, but quite a few Democrats as well). We could use a Snorri to sort things out.
Among the old and stupid ideas is the belief that the financial system is “burdened with excessive regulation”. It’s been a full ten years since the financial meltdown on Wall Street plunged the world into recession. Canada and Australia were the two countries that best weathered that crisis ― thanks to the retention of regulations in those countries. In the U.S., millions lost their homes and savings. Little Iceland was taken to the cleaners. It’s financial system had been captured by ideological zealots espousing the crackpot theories of American Conservatism, and in such a small country there were no countervailing forces to deaden their impact. The whole country went bankrupt after these zealots used their country’s banking system to launder cash for Putin’s criminal empire, and to loot pension plans in Britain and the Netherlands. To their credit, the Icelanders subsequently had the courage and good sense to jail some of their bankers, though the biggest offender managed to flee the country. The results were different in the U.S., where the Obama administration came in on the strength of an understanding with Wall Street that the banks would be bailed out and none of the criminals would be punished. But in 2010, that Obama administration passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This provided a small degree of regulatory oversight, and limited at least some of the proprietary trading within commercial banks, whereby deposits are used to trade on the bank’s own accounts. It is precisely this type of shenanigans that had created the 2008 crash. Conservatives screamed in agony at this tepid level of policing financial crime, and they have vowed bloody vengeance ever since it passed. Now, trading on the fact that the American people have the attention span and memory-retention of goldfish with Alzheimer’s Syndrome, the Republican Party (with the help of corrupt sell-out Democrats) is about to ram through its “Financial CHOICE Act”, which essentially wipes out Dodd-Frank and returns everything to 2007 ― and it guarantees more and more disastrous financial crashes in the future. This is all happening in the background, virtually invisible because of the continuous circus freak-show in the White House.
Now for the zombies. Trump has long been manipulating the credulous suckers who constitute his “base” with nonsensical slogans and absurd promises of impossible things. The Republican Party doesn’t care what nonsense he spouts, because they know that Trump has no knowledge of anything, will say anything and then say the opposite ten seconds later, and has filled the White House with a “team” of ignorant boobs, cranks, and incompetent nitwits. The Republican hierarchy is only concerned with pursuing the agenda of its corporate backers: “tax reform” that will transfer all of the country’s wealth into the hands of a tiny aristocracy, and “deregulation” that will destroy all of its functioning civil society. The end result will be to turn the U.S. into a backward hell-hole like the old Soviet Union, or its successor, Putin’s Russia. Not surprisingly, they have looked to Putin to help them do this. The latest proclamation from Zombie-land is announced tariffs on steel and aluminum. This contradicts every supposed economic notion pushed by Conservatives for the last half-century, but it’s meant to drum up more support from the suckers who voted for him in the decaying industrial regions. They have been fed years of bullshit about how their jobs have been destroyed by nasty “liberals” ― instead of the combination of Conservative policies and technological changes that actually destroyed them. Most of these suckers are convinced that these tariffs are “against China” ― a country that Trump and his family have consistently sought out deals and graft from while at the same time they denounce it. Trump alternates between giving rousing speeches to unemployed coal workers about the evils of trade with China and then telling his billionaire buddies how much he adores Xi Jin-peng and admires that Communist tyrant’s recent ascension to Dictator-for-life.
This is basically a zombie attack on Canada, because China’s sales of steel and aluminum to the U.S. are insignificant. It is Canada that is overwhelmingly the largest foreign supplier of steel to the U.S., exporting $4.3 billion of it last year. This is not a “trade imbalance” for the U.S., because Canada in turn imports even more American steel. This is because there are many different kinds of steel made in different forms for different purposes, and the industries on both sides of the border that use steel are tightly integrated. An automobile chassis may be shipped back and forth between the two countries six or seven times before it is completed. In the case of the aluminum industry, there is a different configuration. Producing aluminum requires cheap electricity and bauxite mines in places accessible to maritime bulk trade. Canada has both. The U.S. has limited supplies of bauxite, most of which are not accessible to the sea. Furthermore, it’s electricity has long been expensive because of complicated swindles in its oligarchical power industry, created largely by its Conservative ideological nutbars. The U.S. cannot possibly produce enough aluminum to supply its industries, and imported 3.2 million metric tons of it from Canada last year, for a total of $7.2 billion. This is essential to American industry and supports hundreds of thousands of American jobs. In fact, the Canadian aluminum industry is fully integrated with that of the U.S., and the Pentagon considers Canadian aluminum production a strategic military supply.
So when Trump claims that “we lose a lot with Canada. People don’t know it. They have you believe that it’s wonderful, and it is — for them. Not wonderful for us — it’s wonderful for them.”, these are either the demented ravings of a lunatic, the willful lying of a professional con-artist, or the ignorant burblings of an ignoramus. Few people believe that these tariffs will actually be imposed…. otherwise the stock market would not just have dipped on their announcement, it would have collapsed. Trump’s White House originally announced that the tariffs would be enacted without exceptions, then shortly after that they might have “some exceptions, but not on a national basis” then somewhat later that “there might be exempted countries”, and finally that the tariffs on Canada might “potentially exempted for security reasons.” Now the White House is issuing statements that Trump is “flexible”. But he had, as usual, an elaborate and infantile public ceremony to sign a meaningless document.
Iceland’s largest industry today is aluminum smelting. Because it has extremely cheap electricity from both hydroelectric and geothermal sources, and because it sits in the Atlantic midway between Europe and Canada, it is practical to ship bauxite there in bulk and refine it. A Canadian aluminum company was the first to see this opportunity, way back in 1969, opening a plant at Hafnarfjörður, which I hope to visit. In 1998, and then 2008, two American companies built plants, and the latest new project is a Canadian-Swedish consortium. Iceland exports more than a billion dollars of un-alloyed aluminum annually to the U.S.. While Canada will probably end up exempted from Trump’s loony tariff, there is no sign that Iceland will, which will be a disaster for that little country. Zombies threaten Iceland once again. Snorri Þorgrímsson, where are you?
It’s interesting to inform this farce with a little Canadian-American trade history. When Canada first came into existence in 1867, its trade was primarily with the United States, but its financial institutions were modeled on those of Great Britain and some of its high-end industries were British owned and managed. It’s most advanced enterprise was Cunard Lines, a Nova Scotia-based company which dominated trans-Atlantic passenger shipping for a century, with financial backing in both the U.S. and Britain. By 1899, British investment in Canada had grown somewhat, though trade in commodities and manufactured goods remained mostly with the U.S.. Two men and two parties dominated the political life of Canada before World War I: John A. Macdonald’s Conservative Party and Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal Party. The Conservatives were extremely hostile to what we would now call “free trade”. The United States, at this time, was a high-tariff nation, one of the most extreme protectionist countries in the world, and Macdonald wanted high tariffs to match the American ones and protection for fledgling Canadian industries. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, was committed to a policy of “reciprocity”, that is negotiating the lowering and removal of all tariff barriers between the U.S. and Canada. While Macdonald was a hard-core canny politician, much given to wheeling and dealing, Laurier was much more of an intellectual, given to optimistic visions of liberty and advancing civilization: “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality… Nothing will prevent me from continuing my task of preserving at all cost our civil liberty.” Free trade seemed to him to be a cornerstone of this liberty. His administration negotiated much lower tariffs with the U.S…Good timing, because the Great Lakes region was about to spawn a new industrial revolution. The automobile was essentially a fusion of small motor technology and carriage making. Carriage-making had long been a large-scale industry in the Toronto area, and small marine engines a specialty in Detroit. Both areas began manufacturing automobiles in 1901. By 1908, the Ford Motor Company in the U.S. adopted and refined the assembly-line mass production methods that the McLaughlin Company in Canada [soon to become General Motors] had developed for carriage making. Simultaneously, McLaughlin began manufacturing automobiles. From the very beginning, industry around the Great Lakes region had a strong trend of integration, since these inland seas supported massive fisheries and marine trade, which the automobile and steel industries amplified and elaborated.
Despite this growing economic involvement with the U.S., Laurier was an enthusiastic supporter of the British Empire. Though he fought strenuously to preserve Canada’s political independence from Britain, he sincerely believe that the Empire could be transformed into a grand federation of equal and independent nations, with French and English Canadians, Bengalis, Jamaicans, Australians, Africans, Irish navies and Lancashire workmen all on the same footing. You can imagine how this went over in the halls of Westminster and Buckingham Palace, where the conception of the Empire was considerably different. Laurier died in 1919, suspecting that the Empire would never be more than an exploitative racket, and demoralized by the Great War he had dreaded for a decade and tried every diplomatic strategy to prevent. The Great War soured many Canadians on Britain, and in the booming 1920s, the U.S. became the focus of Canada’s trade and cultural ambitions. After WWI, Niagara Falls, at the border of these two countries, became the epicenter of a technological and social revolution that would rapidly transform the world. The American inventor and industrialist George Westinghouse had championed alternating current for delivering electrical power, and made good use of Nikola Tesla’s AC induction motor/generators and the polyphase alternating current transmission system to start power generation on the American side of Niagara. But electric generation still remained localized and aimed more at industrial than domestic clients. On the Canadian side appeared Adam Beck, an industrialist, Conservative politician and civil engineer. Starting in 1906, Beck was a vocal proponent of publicly owned electricity grids, opposing the privately owned companies as potentially exploitative and corrupt monopolies. He also wanted to see Niagara Falls harnessed on a large scale, and power grids extended over wide areas, including the revolutionary concept of rural electrification. Rural electrification was soon to transform agriculture across the world. After WWI, both nations built massive power generating facilities on either side of Niagara, and it was in these projects that all the detailed technology of long-distance power transmission was developed.
By the end of the 1920’s, Canadians had come to think of themselves as more or less twin brothers and sisters of Americans with no more than a symbolic connection to Britain. The country was growing rapidly, making a fortune exporting wheat from its expanding western provinces, and industrializing in the eastern cities. What’s more, a flood of immigrants had given it a demographic pattern similar to the American Midwest. The Canadian accent in English was only a minor variant of the American Midwestern accent. Popular culture and the patterns of daily life were largely shared. Canadians felt perfectly at home walking the streets of Chicago or Minneapolis. However, the other America, the South, largely rural, racially segregated, and far from the industrial world of the Canadian-American border regions, remained utterly alien and incomprehensible to them. Nor did they at all understand the great wound of slavery and the Civil War that perpetually haunted American life and politics.
The Great Depression struck both nations. The droughts that crippled the American West were even more devastating in the Canadian West. However, there were some contrasts. Canada’s banks were more strictly regulated, and there were zero bank failures in Canada while there were over 9,000 in the U.S.. American production rebounded quickly, but its unemployment remained high throughout the 1930’s; Canada’s employment rebounded quickly, but its productivity was slower to rise. But the single most important event was not the stock market crash of 1929, it was the Republican Party’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. This was a massive enactment of protective tariffs in the United States. Just as with today’s Trump Tariff scheme, the majority of economists considered it foolish, and leading industrialists begged President Hoover not to enact it. Economic historians are divided as to whether it significantly lengthened or worsened the Great Depression, but there is no dispute about its effect on Canada. As with today’s Trump Tariff, the principal victim was America’s largest trading partner to the north. Canada’s immediate response was, of course, retaliatory tariffs, but its long-term response was to shift both its trading and political orientation. With the Statute of Westminster (1931) Canada severed its last direct legislative ties with Great Britain, making its independence complete, but at the same time it entered comprehensive trade agreements with Great Britain and Australia in which each guaranteed to co-ordinate their trade policies and abolish barriers. This was essentially a new configuration…with Britain a large industrial market for Canadian and Australian resources. At the same time, Canada’s new industrial production could share in Britain’s market with Australia. Australia was not yet industrialized, but it benefited from preferential deals for its agricultural goods, which, on the whole were not in conflict with Canada’s different products. Canada invested heavily in developing telecommunications, partly to preserve unity across an immense and still sparsely-settled territory. Ironically, Laurier’s dream was at last being fulfilled, at least in a limited way. Canada was now facing away from the U.S. in precisely the ways it had previously faced toward it.
The beginning of World War II multiplied this effect, at first. The responses of the two countries were profoundly different. Canada immediately entered the war and geared up for it. It rapidly accelerated its transformation into a industrial power, and channeled virtually all of this development into the war effort. Soon, factories in Toronto were turning out Lancaster bombers at frenetic speed, and Canadian women pilots were ferrying them to England through swarms of spitfires.
In the U.S., it was a different story. The F.D.R. administration was sympathetic to Britain’s plight, and opposed to Hitler, but it had to deal with a substantial popular movement called America First. This should be of special note to today’s readers, because Trump’s “America First” slogan was consciously devised as a historical reference to this movement of the 1930s. Trump himself may be clueless about history, but his ideological gunslingers, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, certainly knew what the phrase meant. The America Firsters, as they came to be known, flooded the media of the time with propaganda and staged hysterical rallies. The message was clear: Hitler is our friend. Germany and America should co-operate. Jews and godless “liberals” are scheming to drag America into war. Uppity negroes, Mexicans and immigrants with garlic breath and funny accents are the real enemies, not the noble Nazis. If you have ever seen a Trump rally, you get the idea. The America First movement was surreptitiously financed by both the Nazi Party in Germany, and its faithful ally, the Communist Party. Both Hitler and Stalin dispatched agents to infiltrate the local America Firsters and direct their energies to their interests. As a consequence, though Roosevelt was able to devise some “lend-lease” policies to help Great Britain, the U.S. stayed out of the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor deflated the America Firsters. The conclusion of that war, with the U.S. participating, was to change the political and economic landscape of the whole world.
When the war ended, the United States and Canada were the only two substantial industrial powers left standing. The former industrial powers of Europe and Japan were devastated ruins. Britain, France, and the Netherlands had not yet lost their overseas colonial empires, but everyone expected them to soon. Britain lived with food shortages and ration stamps for a decade after the war. For the next generation, the global leadership of the United States was self-evident, and the return of Canada to its fold was unquestioned. Canadians became, once again, parallel Americans. Australians felt the same pull. There emerged in the world a clear “gold standard” of life. This centered on the United States, which despite the embarrassing persistence of racial injustice, and poverty and segregation in it’s southeastern quarter, offered the world a vision of a decent life for the ordinary worker and family. This was characterized not only by a wide distribution of consumer goods, but a general assumption of social equality, strong unions, busy factories offering high-paying jobs, quality public education, excellent public infrastructure and government services, affordable housing including widespread ownership of single-family homes, a banking system now regulated against fraud and speculation by the Glass-Steagall Act, and a creative and highly democratic popular culture mimicked around the world. Every dance craze dreamed up by California teenagers was soon taken up in Turin and Tokyo. Canada, Australia and New Zealand shared in this new prosperous and egalitarian lifestyle, characterized by a steadily narrowing gap between the richest and the poorest. Suburban life in Milwaukee, Melbourne or Montreal was essentially the same. Despite threatening the world with nuclear holocaust and creating a global cold war, the Soviet Union offered nothing to the world that people wanted. Everyone knew that despite its weapons and space program, it was a backward dump that no sane person would choose to live in.
The Vietnam War tarnished this picture, but did not fundamentally alter it. Canadians overwhelmingly opposed the Vietnam adventure, and refused to participate, angering the American administrations that waged that war. (Australia took the opposite position). But Canadians’ attitudes to Americans remained “family” —- brothers might squabble, but outside the family it was another matter. Canadians were dismayed by American racial injustice, but admired the courage and patriotic vitality of its civil rights movement. They deplored the Vietnam War, but admired the youthful American idealism that resisted it. The assumption that the U.S. and Canada were “natural allies” and economic partners remained self-evident. So too was the assumption that social injustices would one by one be defeated and relegated to the trash-heap of the past, that underneath all the weaknesses and conflicts there was a fundamentally progressive core.
The real change began with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. From this point on, the United States systematically abandoned all the principles and attitudes that had made it great. Suddenly, it was no longer a country where a factory worker could feel the social equal of any stock broker or banker, where the inventor of every new gadget and builder of every big fortune went to Centerville High and then State University, where cures for diseases came from the labs in prairie cow colleges, and where the impoverished immigrant ended up with “my son the doctor” and “my daughter the lawyer” within a few decades of setting foot on a land of opportunity. Instead, it was now a land where “the right school” and the “the right contacts” mattered most. It was now a land where “celebrities” were treated like European royalty and “important” people expected to be fast-tracked past the line-ups in restaurants and clubs. Ruthlessly piling up money by cheating people was proclaimed a moral virtue. At first, it began with symbolic things… a dress code here, a sniffy “class” privilege there, an arrogant smirk in a smug privileged face everywhere. The hard-won advances of African Americans stagnated, then began to roll back. The symbolic assaults were rapidly succeeded by real, gut-wrenching transformations, and over the course of the last forty years, America has become Anti-America, a nation displaying and espousing everything it once stood against, and everything the American revolution was fought against. It is now well on the way to becoming a third-world, backward society, ruled by a third-rate hereditary nobility ― and if Trump stays in power, a tenth-rate tin-pot puppet dictator taking orders from Moscow.
The relationship between Canadian and American societies has altered fundamentally in this process. There is no question now, that Canada is more democratic ― not because its political institutions have greatly improved (they have only marginally done so), but because American democracy has eroded so drastically. Income inequality has been increasing in Canada as well, though not nearly at the same rate. With its intimate cultural relationship to the U.S., it’s no surprise that many of the despicable social trends that plague the U.S. find echoes in Canada. But the differences between the two countries have sharpened dramatically in the last decade. There is no Trump in Canada, and nobody like him can possibly get elected. The only political Party even slightly susceptible to that kind of stuff, the Conservative Party, turned away from it pretty firmly. There is no Canadian Marie Le Pen, no Viktor Orbán, no Alternative für Deutschland, no Five Star Movement, no Golden Dawn. There are no bands of goons roaming the streets beating up immigrants. Refugees have been welcomed in great numbers, encountering hostility only from a handful of cranks. Old social injustices are still seen as matters to expose and resolve, rather than to deny and entrench. In short, it is another world from what lies south of the border.
The statistics tell a profound story. A Canadian today has considerably greater social mobility than an American. If a Canadian is born into the lowest quarter of the income scale, they have twice as much chance of moving into the upper middle quarter and three times as much chance of moving into the highest quarter. Immigrants to Canada succeed in achieving a secure standard of living at higher rates than immigrants to the U.S. Refugees show nearly the same rates, though starting with obvious handicaps. There are no racial or ethnic ghettos. Inherited wealth is half as likely to be the major factor in success for a Canadian. Small businesses have statistically better chances of success, and are started at a higher rate. Canadians have three times as much chance of becoming moderately wealthy as Americans and there are twice as many very wealthy [over $30 million in assets] Canadians per capita as Americans. The overwhelming majority of successful people in Canada went to ordinary public schools and local mainstream universities. There is no student loan crisis in Canada, and college tuitions are not a significant barrier to advancement for any level of the society. Canadians have statistically better health than Americans and live a few years longer.
This is a new situation for Canada. None of those statistics would have been true a generation ago. What is more, only some of them can plausibly be attributed to social or political progress in Canada. They result much more from the comparative decay of American institutions and society. One cannot pursue the sick, anti-democratic and anti-American ideology concocted by American Conservatives for four decades and expect to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave. Mindless worshipers of a self-styled super-duperman like Trump can never be brave, and certainly have no interest in freedom. The core principle of American Conservatism, which boils down to “if a billionaire enters the room, get down on your hands and knees and prepare to suck his dick”, is fundamentally nothing but sniveling cowardice. And once you are in that position, crouched on all fours, it does not matter much if the billionaire wears a cowboy hat, tweets his orders from a Park Avenue penthouse, or mutters them in Russian from his Residence Riviera dacha in Sochi.
Will Americans turn a corner and recover their honour? As a Canadian, and a friend of many Americans whom I admire, I am convinced that they will. But it will take a long time. A majority of Americans are true in their hearts to America’s most noble ideas, but they have, like battered wives, become accustomed to accepting their dishonour as ineluctable fate. A minority of bigoted fanatics wave AR-15s at them, scream at them from the Fox Network and church pulpits, and sneer at them from the halls of Congress; a demented child tweets at them from the White House or a golf course; and they cower in their homes, afraid to stand up, afraid to assert their heritage as Americans, afraid to vote out a gang of traitors despoiling their country. Demonstrations are fine, but it is political organization, purging the Democratic Party of sellouts, getting out the vote and putting real patriots in office that will accomplish something. The American historian Timothy Snyder has rightly said that “America has been colonized. Americans are in the process of accepting their status as a colony.” He has compared America’s current situation to France in the time of Vichy, when many Frenchmen pretended that everything was normal, that nothing had happened, that Marshall Pétain’s rule was just another French administration. “It is only very slowly” Snyder has said “that one comes to understand what being colonized means.” And the longer it takes, the deeper the wound and the shame will be, and the longer it will take to recover.
Which brings us back to aluminum and steel. It seems unlikely that Trump’s insane tariffs will actually be foisted on Canada. The bulk of Trump’s backers and the Republican Party elite stand to loose money if that happens, though some stand to gain. They can usually finesse, distract, or talk Trump out of anything they really disapprove of, because Trump has no knowledge of any policies. You get something from Trump by flattering him, giving him a parade, and letting him sign something. But Trump is not reliably controllable. He uses random destruction as a habitual tactic, and can summon up an army of zombies to denounce anyone he takes a dislike to, ruining their chance of re-election and future graft.
It is unwise and dangerous for Canada to assume the danger is passed. The United States is going to be in a chaotic state for many years, no matter what happens next. During this period, Canada will be constantly vulnerable to nasty surprises and economic chaos. When this happened before, back in 1930, Canadian politicians and business were clever enough to shift their perspective and seek out new alliances, and the country survived.
This is one of the reasons I am about to visit Iceland, visited Australia last spring, and hope to make visits to Scandinavia and New Zealand reasonably soon. I seek to understand these societies as deeply as I can. This is because a glance at a single chart tells me which countries should be the focus of Canada’s attention, and which should be considered natural allies. Our current administration, conventionally-minded, looks to where the money shines, thinks that carving out deals with the big players is the desirable strategy. Canada’s prestige in the world has definitely been rising, as the U.S. sinks, but currying favour with Japan, India, or the European Union is not going create any configuration of power that Canada can rely on, and anyone who thinks they can play poker with Xi Jinping and win is just a plain fool. It’s not trade deals as such that Canada needs. Canada’s products will go where the market for them is, and our political leaders will never have much influence on where that will be. What matters is with whom one has solidarity, with whom one reliably keeps a two-way flow of information, and keeps culturally connected to. This was the basis on which Canadians acted in the economically challenging 1930s, and then again in the prosperous 1950’s and 60’s.
The Economist Intelligence Unit calls upon an impressive pool of journalistic, academic and political sources to compile it’s annual global Democracy Index. It ranks and classifies countries as Full Democracies, Flawed Democracies, Hybrid Regimes, and Authoritarian Regimes, using 60 indicators, any of which might be debatable for some reason, but which altogether are accepted as reasonable by most people with a serious interest in the progress or regress of democracy. The Economist table does not try to measure anything as nebulous as “freedom” and does not at all depend on the obscene notion peddled by ideologists that “economic freedom” can be conceptually separated from “political freedom”. It concerns itself strictly with the bricks and mortar of political institutions that are relevant to democracy. Countries drift up and down in this tally, and it is alarmingly significant that, for the first time, the United States has slipped down into the Flawed Democracies category. This does not appear to be the product of any simple-minded cultural anti-Americanism, which the EIU has never, to my knowledge, been been guilty of. The decay of American democratic institutions is apparent to everyone who is observant, including most thoughtful and patriotic Americans.
There are countries that have consistently remained in the top tier of the Full Democracies category: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Norway routinely holds first place, with a reputation for painfully honest governance. All these countries have fairly long histories of stable democratic institutions. All of them are wealthy countries with productive, innovative economies and strong social safety nets. All of them have sophisticated telecommunications infrastructures, access to the sea, and maritime traditions. Among them, only Denmark and Australia can be implicated in overseas colonialism. Denmark’s hands-off relationships with its dependencies, Greenland and the Faeroes, have not triggered criticism or complaint. Australia has some embarrassments concerning Papua-Niugini, but is now well-behaved. All but two have some historic experience of being colonies or dependents. None have ever pretended to be world powers or thrown their weight around. All have experience in dealing with minorities. Three have been long-term immigration-based societies. All have accepted refugees. All have high standards of education. Canada has routinely co-operated with all these countries in various ways. Together their population amounts to about a hundred million people, which is considerably more than either Germany or France.
All these countries have resisted the trend of increasing income disparity (though Canada is perhaps the weakest example). They demonstrate the falsehood of the ideological snake-oil which claims that increasing income disparity is necessary for prosperity. They are all living laboratories that show that Neo-Conservative [or “Neo-Liberal”, as it is absurdly called in Europe] economic theory is a crackpot fraud, in exactly the same way that Marxist economic theory is a crackpot fraud. The two fraudulent “systems” in fact share many false assumptions and operate in much the same way, justifying the ascent of an aristocracy and the exploitation and looting of the people under a pretense of “equality”. Both are profoundly collectivist.
But most important, these countries have been relatively free of the plague of authoritarian, racist, leader-worshiping, immigrant-hating, theocratic, violent, lgbt-persecuting and mystical nationalist political movements that are currently circling like vultures to destroy existing democracies and advance the agendas of existing tyrannies.
These nations should form a mutual association explicitly committed to maintaining and protecting the democratic practices that have put them in that top tier, explicitly rejecting authoritarian political movements and the economic and social theories associated with them, self-monitoring and mutually monitoring each other for signs of corruption, protecting systems of universal public education and public health, and promoting the laws and regulations and practices that protect these high standards. There should be no need for such nations to lecture others or engage in moral crusades outside their borders. The best teaching is by example, and the best argument the fait accompli of peace and prosperity.
If the top tier of Full Democracies acquires a collective identity and visibility, it may be the clarion that turns the tide. Everything that clarifies the distinction between effective democratic governance and corrupted democracies-in-name-only will be crucial to the survival of the democratic idea. The United States is in no position to do this, and will be “offline” for some time to come. Democracy has been on the run around the world, and unless it turns around and fights, the whole world is in danger of sinking into barbarism. We will have a planet of Xis and Putins and Trumps clinking champagne glasses while they dance on the rotting corpse of civilization.
I am tempted to send a copy of Eyrbyggja Saga to U.S. Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller. He may just be America’s Snorri Þorgrímsson.
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