In July of 306 the Roman emperor Constantius died on campaign at York. His army did not wait for Rome. They did not wait for the Senate or the other emperors. They stood over his body, turned to his son, and proclaimed him Augustus on the spot, at the cold northern edge of the known world, in a province Rome had spent three centuries treating as the end of the line.
Within a generation that son ruled the entire Roman world. He founded a new capital on the Bosphorus that outlived the western half of the Empire by a thousand years. He is the reason why Rome adopted Christian. His name was Constantine. One frontier garrison in Britain made a decision that set the religious character of Western civilization today.
Empires renew themselves from the peripheries. Trajan came out of Spain. Severus came out of Africa. When the third century nearly finished Rome off, it was hard men off the Balkan frontier who put it back together. While the Imperial core produces Elite decay, New Elites from the provincial frontiers will emerge to restore that Empire.
Canada sits on the periphery of the Anglosphere. We are near enough to Washington and London to matter to both, far enough from either to have escaped what each did to its own people, and large enough to recruit the right counter Elites while giving them the right resources to build a political apparatus capable of restoring the empire. Anglo Canadians were sedated by the Laurentian class but we have never been defeated.
Generations of Laurentian propaganda was engineered to sedate us and suppress our cultural inheritance, to convince us we are a nation of apologies and nothing more. But there was no actual defeat. There was no conquest, no surrender or other instrument of capitulation. The Anglo fire has been dimmed but it is not out and that dimmed fire is actually very easy to bring back with the right counter Elite apparatus.
Where I part ways with you is the second delusion. Viewing ourselves as part of a dormant imperial family doesn't condemn us to assimilation. It is the precondition for any of this working. You must have an imperial mindset and cannot surrender your mind to provincialism.
If we give up the Imperial framing, we give up the only scale the Anglosphere is able to act on. What's left is a mid-sized North American country with a flag and a grievance. The Global American Empire would be delighted. A nation that thinks small is a nation that is easily managed by corrupted Elites.
The Loyalist inheritance has never provincial. Strachan and Robinson were not building an enclave. Simcoe laid out Upper Canada as the seed of something continental, wanting to use Upper Canada as a bastion to defeat the American Revolution over a longer period of time. Macdonald wanted a kingdom here with its own monarch, drawn from a cadet branch, living on Canadian soil, and he wanted it inside the imperial system.
We can still keep the nation, the ethnogenesis, the counterrevolutionary tradition. These are all the stone foundations under all the liberal rot. But they have to be kept as the frontier of something larger.
Quebec nationalism does not look upon his inheritance in this manner, and it is this failure of imagination I have laboured to correct. What was given was a continental inheritance, French civilization planted in North America and carried from Louisbourg to the Illinois country, Catholic, seigneurial, and imperial in its ambition. What he has made of it is a province. Separatism is the narrowest expression of that reduction, a smaller room chosen over the restoration of French civilization on this continent and the imperial inheritance that was his by right.
Frontiers of empires produce emperors. A tidy provinces on the continent produce premiers.
An emperor was proclaimed at York once. He will be proclaimed at York again, on the shore of a great lake. Maybe another one could be proclaimed on the St Lawrence.
Something thats always irked me about the history of Anglo Canadians, particularly in their ethnocultural homeland of Ontario and the Maritimes, is this tendency to reduce themselves to an appendage of somebody else’s empire.
It goes without saying that Canada is, was, an Old World nation planted in the New World, a living bridge between two continents. Our British-derived and imperial character has been with us from the beginning. It motivated our separation from the Americans and remained fundamental to our development even as a distinct Anglo Canadian ethnogenesis unfolded, with successive waves of Irish, Scottish, and English settlers being assimilated into the foundations laid by the Loyalists.
But this investment in the imperial identity also obscured a nation that emerged beneath it, exacerbating the malaise that allowed the internationalist liberal regime to take root.
What so many people forget is that the Loyalists were already meaningfully distinct from both the British and the Americans during the Revolutionary War, in their outlook, social ideals, and the foundations of what would eventually become a separate ethnicity.
They are unique in the Anglosphere for having cultivated a counterrevolutionary political tradition, reactionary, paternalistic, and traditionalist in its opposition to the Enlightenment liberalism of the American Revolution and its British Whig equivalents.
This is obvious in the views of John Strachan, John Beverley Robinson, John Graves Simcoe, and Frederick Haldimand. Consider the aristocratic ambitions of the early colonial establishment, the desire to fill Ontario with a landed nobility, to reward distinguished military officers and soldiers with great houses, to cultivate a hereditary political order with its own House of Lords.
This vision continued in Sir John A.’s vision of a unitary state, a separate kingdom within the empire, a monarch of its own drawn from a cadet branch of the royal house living on Canadian soil.
It is this political foundation, combined with the ethnogenesis of the Anglo Canadian people, that makes Anglo Canada so distinct. This is why I have devoted so much of my content and whatever influence I possess to cultivating a national consciousness rooted in that inheritance.
Without it Anglo Canadians are condemned to drift into one of two equally miserable delusions.
1. The downward spiral into the postwar liberal republican gravity well of the United States, whose immense cultural influence dissolves whatever remains of an independent Anglo Canadian identity. This is where you get the historically illiterate, rootless slopulists who think they’re nationalists while embracing the American political and cultural assumptions that’ll eventually extinguish their own people as a demographic and historical entity.
The second is the tendency to indulge in romantic nostalgia of being the sword of an empire that no longer exists, as though Anglo Canadians were just a colonial garrison awaiting orders from London. An empire that had long since abandoned most of the paternalistic, conservative Tory inheritance of order, corporatism, communitarianism, and nobless oblige that led to its greatness.
We should honour our imperial origins, celebrate our ancestors’ service to the Empire, and defend the traditional institutions we inherited from it, but we must do so as a people with our own history, character, and destiny, rather than as some amorphous Anglo diaspora, interchangeable with Americans, Britons, Australians, and New Zealanders just because we share a language and common ancestry.
Those of you who have read David Mills and Robert Passfield will understand what I mean when I say that beneath all the bullshit of the last century, the ancient stone foundations of Anglo Canada endure.
The Anglo Canadian race persists, like a knight of Arthurian legend sleeping beneath an ancient mountain, awaiting the hour when his people remember his name and summon him once more.