We are a province of the American Empire. By Upper Canadian Cavalier.
This talks about Canada, but it nearly all applies to Australia too.
Rome ruled through legions, garrisons, roads, and the physical occupation of ground.
The American empire rules through the things that move without an army. It is an empire of covert softpower most of whose subjects are blissfully unaware of their subordinate position. That empire maintains control:
- Through the currency the world prices its oil in.
- The payment rails every bank on earth must touch.
- The studios and platforms that manufacture what a hundred nations find funny and frightening and true.
- The defence umbrella that quietly turns an independent foreign policy into a luxury most of its members decline.
- The foundations and the NGOs that decide which causes are respectable and which are fringe.
- The universities whose faculties set the terms of every argument before a single voter ever hears it.
It lets its provinces keep their flags. It lets them keep their anthems and their parliaments and their little ceremonies of self-government, because none of that costs the metropole a thing, and a province that believes it is a country is far easier to manage than one that knows it is a province. …
Copycat politics:
Once you see the country this way, something that has nagged at you for years finally has a name. You have noticed, surely, that our politics feels like a rerun. That the arguments arrive already formed, six months late, dubbed into Canadian. The slogans on the placards, the list of what counts as controversial, the shape of every fight, all of it seems to come pre-packaged from somewhere south of here, keyed to institutions and a history that are not ours.
The Canadian left takes its vocabulary and its enemies from the American left. The Canadian right does the same in the other direction. To argue about any of it from outside the imported frame, to counter-signal the entire American script, is treated in this country as something close to blasphemy. That is what it is to be a province. The metropole ships the politics, and the province stages the show. …
The globalist uniparty ruled:
Try the other story. Over forty years the American economy (and Canada’s [and Australia’s]) was reorganized so that the money flowed away from the people who make things and toward the people who arrange things. Factories went abroad. Finance stopped being a utility that funded industry and became the industry.
A whole class came up in the gap between those two facts: the asset managers, the consultancies, the compliance shops, the climate-finance desks, the private equity partners. Men whose income arrives not from building anything but from standing between someone’s labour and someone’s capital and charging a toll on the traffic.
Intermediation, in the polite register. Skimming, if you want the shorter word.
It is very good money. It also has requirements. Open borders for goods and capital. A regulatory thicket dense enough that only the largest players can afford the guides through it. And a political class that treats all of it as weather rather than policy.
Then 2016, and worse, 2024. …
Now, led by Trump, we are challenging them:
You have been told that Trump is a vulgarian who blundered into office twice and that decent people have been holding the line ever since. That story is about manners designed to manipulate people’s emotions. It explains nothing, which is the point of it. …
Trump is a realignment. Tariffs, reshoring, open contempt for the managerial professions and the international bodies, a stated preference for the man who pours concrete over the man who writes the memo about pouring concrete. Say what you like about how he does it. The direction is unmistakable. He is dragging the American state back toward the people who work with their hands, and away from the people who take the percentage.
Which is why the reaction has never behaved like ordinary disagreement. Tariffs break the offshoring arbitrage. Cheap energy hollows out the climate-finance complex. Deregulation fills in the moat. Walking away from the multilateral bodies strips out the sinecures and the summits where that class goes to see itself reflected. Every plank is somebody’s revenue.
So the loathing is rational. It is a class defending its rents. That accounts for the intensity and the unanimity, and for how quickly people who had spent a century insisting certain rules were sacred discovered the rules were situational.
Listen carefully: there is no conspiracy. It’s just a confluence of interests, a team of aligned players who look after each other’s interests:
Now, precision, because this is where writers like me usually overreach and get dismissed for it. There is no cartel. No room, no minutes, no chairman.
What exists is a class with one formation, one enemy and one set of interests, whose members arrive at identical conclusions separately and at the same time, having never needed to arrange anything.
That should worry you more than a conspiracy would. You can expose a conspiracy. There is nothing to expose about a thousand people who went to the same schools, hold the same assumptions, and stand to lose the same money when the same man wins.
Battle recap:
In the first term they fought him from inside the building.
They said so themselves, in the paper of record. September 2018, the New York Times ran an anonymous op-ed by a serving senior official of the administration, explaining to the public that appointees were working to thwart the president’s agenda and contain him until he was gone. There are adults in the room, the author wrote.
Officials of the executive branch announced in public that they were obstructing the elected head of the executive branch, and respectable opinion thanked them. On an NBC panel that week a Democratic commentator said on air she was disturbed by what looked like a soft coup, and grateful for it. Their own people reached for the phrase. They just thought it was warranted, because they had spent two years explaining that the man was an emergency, and an emergency excuses almost anything.
Keep one thing straight, since the lazy version of this argument dies here. Those were Republicans. Generals and oilmen, not progressives … What carries over is the reflex, the settled conviction among people formed in the same institutions that when the electorate returns the wrong answer, the institutions are entitled to correct it.
By the second term that door was welded shut. He came back having learned the lesson of the first four years precisely. Appointments went to people picked for loyalty rather than for the approval of the editorial page. The inspectors general were cleared out. The departments were staffed against the possibility of internal sabotage, and the legal ground had moved his way. … You cannot run the 2018 playbook in 2026. …
The new globalist tactic — Carney!
So a class with the same interests, the same enemy, the same certainty of its own legitimacy, and nothing left to work with at home. It did what capital always does when a jurisdiction turns hostile. It went offshore.
Think about what an allied government can do that a dissenting deputy secretary cannot. It can impose real costs. Withhold cooperation. Coordinate with Brussels and Berlin. Aim economic pain at American voters in the handful of states that decide American elections, and do all of it under a foreign flag, out of reach of every agency the President had just taken back. Same instinct. New jurisdiction. Someone else’s colours.
That is the globalization of the resistance, and it needs one thing in any given country. A government at the top of a useful one, run by a man of the class …
Which brings us to the least examined event in modern Canadian politics.
Winter 2025. The most despised governing party in the country, twenty points down, saddled with a leader the public was finished with, needs a prime minister. What it produces is a man who has never held elected office. Never run in a riding, never sat in the Commons, never faced a voter in his life.
He is handed a G7 country in the smoothest transfer of power anyone can remember, at the exact moment a hostile realignment is underway in the capital of the empire, and at the exact moment the losing faction in that empire has run out of ground to stand on.
A party in that much trouble does not reach for a central banker. Unless a politician was not what it needed. …
Mark Carney made the riskiest gamble in Canadian politics without hesitating. He launched his political career on American television. He prioritizes American papers and lets his ministers clean up after him at home. He restricted the Prime Minister’s office to function more like a corporation and filled it with an American Democratic operative who also handles the American file. He also closed a Washington-cohosted summit in Toronto with [the Candian] press locked out. …
He spent a year waging the most expensive confrontation in modern Canadian history, and not one dollar of his own wealth rides on how it turns out for Canada. Ninety-one percent of it sits in the [U.S.]. Whatever this costs, it does not reach him. …
Provincial status:
We are already a province of the global American empire. This is not a formalized empire, which is exactly what makes it so durable.
A paper annexation would come with two senators, thirty-odd congressmen, a vote in the American system and standing to make trouble inside it. What we have instead is the structural arrangement described at the top of this essay: our money, our media, our universities, our defence procurement and our professional class all wired into the metropole, and no representation anywhere.
We pay our tribute without a seat, taxation without representation. That is not a better deal than statehood. It is the worse one, and we congratulate ourselves on it every July. …
No empire can exclusively administer a province with imperial staff. It is too expensive and too obvious. It needs locals. Men of standing in the provincial capital who are already inclined to see things from the centre’s point of view, who require minimal supervision, and who understand that their own advancement runs through the metropole rather than through the province they govern. …
Look at where the careers actually go. The academic whose funding, citations and reputation depend on American institutions. The NGO officer whose foundation money and whose entire sense of which causes are respectable arrive from New York. The consultant billing an American parent for advice on a Canadian file. The columnist auditioning for an American masthead. Nobody in that chain has been bought. That is what makes it hold. Their careers simply point south, so thinking from a Canadian interest first never occurs to any of them as a live option, and the few who try it find there is no institution in this country prepared to pay them for it….
Like One Nation?
The Conservatives cannot solve it. Their movement runs on prairie populism, which is itself an American import, brought north to help prairie elites organize against the East with a crude us-and-them and a standing grudge against the cities. It does not believe in elites at all. A movement that disbelieves in elites cannot produce the governing class that a complex, advanced civilization requires, and so it might win the occasional election but can only crudely administer the same machine.
Mark Carney reminds me of Malcolm Turnbull.