The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by staff writer Adam Gopnik, who spent part of his childhood up north, titled, “We Could Have Been Canada: Was the American Revolution such a good idea?” The notion that liberals hate America is an intellectually lazy ad hominem attack indulged by far too many on the right. But when you dedicate 4,500 words to Gopnik’s premise, well, let’s just say it becomes a lot harder to protest should people start unkindly questioning the man’s patriotism.
Aesthetically, Gopnik is a first-rate writer, but being explicitly self-congratulatory about engaging in “taboo” thoughts requires a remarkable degree of sanctimony. And so right off the bat, we are treated to this daring thought experiment in counterfactual history:
Now historical counterfactuals are provocative and rhetorically useful, but they prove next to nothing. And they almost always oversimplify; for instance, it’s true that the British empire, to its everlasting credit, ended slavery sooner than America did. However, that didn’t stop the British empire from prospering significantly from trade with its former colony for decades after it ended slavery elsewhere. Had America remained a British colony, the massive economic incentives for keeping slavery would have been more directly felt by the British empire. And who knows whether they would have been so keen on ending slavery earlier then?
It would be one thing for Gopnik to harp on slavery, but it’s worth asking why he wants to denigrate America’s greatest contributions to world peace and prosperity. The article is full of asides that amount to little more than petty digs at the United States. This one is beyond the pale: “That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.” No disrespect at all to Canada’s justly proud military tradition and their people’s sacrifice at Juno Beach, but is Gopnik kidding with this? One gets the sense that he feels he can get away with bashing the heroism of American World War II soldiers because precious few of them are alive anymore.
And Gopnik all but gives up the game here:
In other words, for Gopnik, the widespread appreciation for America’s founding is really just misguided mythologizing. Indeed, one thing that’s made America great is that we have always had a comparatively fearsome self-conception of ourselves, and Canadians are painfully aware of it. As The Tragically Hip, arguably Canada’s most beloved rock band, once sang: “Me debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?”
It’s probably fair to say this proud self-conception has made American history less equitable and more sanguinary than it needed to be, but Gopnik revels in unseemly examples of this—America is hardly the only place where 18th- and 19th-century mores look brutal by contemporary standards. But at least in the last century, it’s hard to argue that, with some regrettable exceptions, America walked the fine line between cultural confidence and arrogance necessary to stand up to other pernicious cultural forces such as fascism and communism. Not that Gopnik doesn’t, incredibly, see the American conception of freedom as equally pernicious as the murderous excesses of contemporary history: He writes, “[The founders were] a group of men who, in spirit and psychology, were not entirely unlike the ‘reformers’ in Communist China, open to change for the purpose of reinforcing their own power in an intact hierarchy.” Fortunately, we don’t need to resort to what-ifs to know that without America in the 20th century, the entire world have been less equitable and more sanguinary.
Aside from military might, Gopnik’s piece is strangely silent on how America’s founding ideals created the most innovative economic powerhouse the world has ever known. The relationship between economics and politics is profoundly consequential, and there are important contrasts between America and Canada. In Canada, you don’t have to pay for health care, if you can get it. We pay for health care, and the result is that there are more MRI machines in Pittsburgh than all of Canada. It’s simply assumed—and Gopnik undoubtedly knows the New Yorker audience well—that Canada’s democratic socialism is preferable to America, and not just “Donald Trump’s America.”
In the end, the only clever thing about this piece is that much of the knee-jerk criticism it’s engineered to provoke will reinforce the smug liberalism that motivated it in the first place. In fact, right now, someone’s probably even bashing out an email to Gopnik with that other bit of lazy right-wing ad hominem: “Love it or leave it.” There’s still a lot of injustice, and strictly speaking, no one can or should love everything about America. However, it’s not too much to ask that if you want to complain about the place, you try a lot harder than this.
