Philip Pilkington Profile picture
Macroeconomist/investment professional. Author forthcoming: The Collapse of Global Liberalism. Host of the Multipolarity podcast, @MultipolarPod.

Apr 29, 13 tweets

1/ 🇨🇦🍁What we see in Canada is the collapse of global liberalism cranking into high gear. The collapse is now leading to the proliferation of ethnic tensions that are tearing the Anglo-liberal world to pieces.🧵

2/ For many years, the British made extensive efforts to maintain the Commonwealth identity of Canada. It was one of the final bastions of British soft power after Suez.

3/ In Quebec the French identity was more deeply ingrained and didn’t have to be “forced” because of the language. Although in recent times this identify has descended into a LARP.

4/ There’s even the afterglows of Irish identity in Newfoundland that has found recent cultural expression in popular media - although one suspects this is more amenable to the Americans because the Canadian-Irish in the show are explicitly Americanised.

5/ The reality is though that modern Canadians are basically quasi-Americans. That is how they are viewed in Europe and the rest of the world. Most people internationally cannot tell a Canadian and an American apart unless they are told that the person is Canadian.

6/ Canadians’ pre-American identity is a sort of echo of the past. It is now married to internal American culture war politics. So, you Mr Canadian, are Canadian because you oppose the awful American conservatives; you’re more urbane, tolerant and European, blablabla.

7/ All this is to say that these phantoms of a non-American identity are a LARP. Even their adoption is caught up with the AMERICAN culture war that Canada imported from the south. So how they should be read?

8/ Simply as the fracturing of the Anglo world after the collapse of Lighthouse America. As the Empire collapses, the periphery turns on the core and so tries to remake itself. But these attempts are a parody of themselves.

9/ The “proud Canadian” liberal who will “never submit” to the Orange Overlord is basically just an American liberal channelling American liberal politics into Canadian electoral politics.

10/ Canadian “neo-nationalism” is not breaking away from the United States. It is more deeply integrating Canada politically with a United States undergoing severe turmoil. But it is doing so in a way that accelerates the collapse of the Anglo-liberal project more generally.

11/ As a political system collapses ethnic tensions often emerge. These accelerate the decline of that system.

12/ But sadly for Canadians - and soon for the British, the Irish and so on - it’s always the peripheral entities that experience this increase in ethnic resurgence that get the short end of the stick.

13/ Anglo-liberalism is collapsing completely. It is going the way of communism in 1989-1991. There is no way to stop this collapse. Those trying to buck the trend like Canada will only cause further damage to their prosperity and stability. 🪦

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