It wasn’t about race

The Storming of The U. S. Capitol was not about white su premacy, whatever Canadian pundits say

Canadian political neuroses are never more evident than when some political cataclysm unfolds in the United States, such as Wednesday’s mob assault on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. When news first breaks, the initial response on social media typically presents Canada as the respectable teetotaller living upstairs from a pair of boozy rageaholics having their nightly punch- up. But then, like clockwork, there comes a second wave of commentary, this one insisting that we are, in fact, fully complicit in America’s sins. “As Canadians, we shouldn’t be smug,” read one viral tweet on Wednesday. “What’s happening in the (United States) could easily happen in Ottawa. White supremacy and white supremacists call Canada home, too.”

Two display- text shoutouts on Thursday’s Toronto Star front page hit the same theme. “Could it happen in Canada?” asked one writer, warning readers of a “contagion that will require more than border closures.” A second columnist went further, dismissing the very idea that Wednesday’s goonery was rooted in anything so banal as mere politics. The problem, she told us, lies with “white people” themselves. ( The two words appear eight times in her first two paragraphs.) And since — spoiler alert — Canada also contains white people, we’re co- conspirators: “White supremacy has been the continuous thread weaving through the history of democracy in the U. S. ( and Canada) from its founding to the present. It’s ever-present and its proponents — whether overt or sheathed in politeness — know it is theirs to evoke.”

Just to get this out of the way: I was as appalled as anyone to see the Capitol get taken over by violent conspiracy theorists seeking to overturn a democratic election. The spectacle was a disgrace to Donald Trump and all the Republican toadies who signal- boosted his demagoguery. And while I’m sorry lives were lost in the process of re- establishing law and order, what exactly did this mob expect when it staged what, in at least nominal terms, was an amateurish political insurrection?

Their own propaganda casts the United States as a jackboot socialist dictatorship whose leaders seek to snuff out the flame of liberty. The irony is that if the United States really were the genuinely ruthless autocracy they claim it to be — like, say, Venezuela, Syria or Russia — government workers would still be hauling bullet- riddled bodies off the Capitol grounds.

But while it’s sad that such a scene would unfold in a country that many Canadians once looked up to as a democratic beacon, the idea that it has any relevance to Canadian political culture — or that it signals some sort of inveterate malignancy among “white people,” as the Star would have us believe — is nonsense. It’s now been more than five- anda- half years since Trump announced his presidential campaign. His politics are toxic, but they are no longer ascendant or even novel, and Wednesday’s fiasco will only discredit them further. If right- wing populism really were going to metastasize northward in a meaningful way, it would have happened by now. But it hasn’t.

The most prominent conservative politicians in Canada ( all of whom would be dismissed as socialists if their policies were put up for discussion among U. S.

Republicans, by the way) rightly distanced themselves from Trump long ago, and spent Wednesday producing widely circulated denunciations of Washington’s mob violence. In the 2019 Canadian election, the closest thing ( and it wasn’t that close) to a Trump-style political movement on offer was Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party. He ended up getting 1.6 per cent of the national vote and losing his own seat. And as far as I know, the only white dude who sent Parliamentary MPS fleeing for safety was a guy called Michael Zehaf- Bibeau. The details of his agenda escape my memory, but I don’t seem to recall him quoting The Turner Diaries or the oeuvre of Ernst Zündel.

One reason why Canadian pundits become so agitated following American political meltdowns can be traced to the dissonance that arises from our daily immersion in U. S.- saturated social media. On one hand, we feel an immediate, real- time connection to everything that’s happening south of the border. But when it comes time to actually setting our thoughts down in any kind of structured way, we’re stuck with the fact that we live and work in a completely different country with a completely different political culture. If you’ve got 800 words to churn out, the most facile way of getting around that dissonance is to pretend that the Trump phenomenon exists as a continent- wide ideological pandemic. Indeed, at the woke fringes of the Canadian journalistic spectrum, incidents such as Wednesday’s Capitol fracas now elicit quasi- religious rituals of racial penance and self- abasement. One newspaper editor in Toronto responded to Wednesday’s violence in Washington by Tweeting — and I am not making this up — “F--k white people.” ( This is a guy who, it is worth mentioning, is himself whiter than a Pink Floyd tribute band.)

Racism is a real problem in all countries — including Canada and the United States. And it will never be completely eradicated because human brains are wired for tribalism. But as anyone who’s actually bothered to look at U. S. voting data knows, the 2020 election actually featured a welcome narrowing of racial voting differences: Despite his often genuinely racist rhetoric, Trump picked up voter share among nonwhite voters, as compared with 2016, while losing a large portion of his white base. Moreover, as numerous experts have argued convincingly ( including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who I don’t think has yet been cancelled for white supremacy), the Trump phenomenon maps pretty well onto the areas of the United States that have been decimated by outsourcing, automation, income inequality and downward mobility. These root causes don’t excuse racism or mob violence. But it’s worth noting that they’re exactly the sort of issues that leftists ( including those at the Star) once used to care about, before they realized they could earn more hand- clap emojis by tracing every spasm of political discontent to this or that Protocol inscribed by the Elders of Whiteness.

In his recent documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?, African- American writer Shelby Steele offered a convincing explanation as to why Americans, on both sides, remain so fixated on race. When confronted by violence and suffering (such as the killing of Michael Brown, Steele’s central case study), he explained, we all tend to retreat to “poetic truths” that offer deceptively simple explanations for complex problems. For the Antifa mob that tried to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland (with people inside it, I should add), the poetic truth of America is that of a racist hellhole fatally infected with the twinned diseases of capitalism and white supremacy. For the mob that took over the Capitol on Wednesday, the poetic truth of America is that of a proud and free society captured by sinister leftists. Both sides trade in lurid hyperbole, and denounce the other side’s extremism as pathological, while defending their own thug tactics as brave and morally justified. Neither acknowledges that they are the other side’s exact mirror image. (Indeed, when I tweeted out a comparison between Antifa and the Capitol mob on Wednesday, I was delighted to see that extremists on the left and right alike saw my “both- sides- ism” as equally offensive.)

One thing I love about Canada is that, while we are far too puffed up with our own brand of national hubris and sentimentalism, we’ve never gone in much for poetic truths. Even the fathers of Confederation didn’t really pretend that Canada was anything except a pragmatic union of geographical and commercial convenience, which is why so much of our founding constitutional literature reads like a law firm partnership agreement. (“There shall be assigned to each of the other Provinces such a Number of Members as will bear the same Proportion to the Number of its Population as the Number Sixty- five bears to the Number of the Population of Quebec.”) This history has led to a dull and often bloodless brand of politics. But, on the plus side, Parliament’s Speaker’s Chair has never been occupied by a shirtless guy in Viking horns. Please remember that the next time someone demands that you offer penance for the shrieking babble emitted by street poets on the other side of the border.

THE DISSONANCE THAT ARISES FROM OUR DAILY IMMERSION IN U.S.-SATURATED SOCIAL MEDIA.

Win Mcname / Getty Images The idea the mob assault on Capitol has any relevance to Canadian political culture — or that it signals some sort of inveterate malignancy among “white people,” as the Star would have us believe — is nonsense, Jonathan Kay writes.