The Trad Marxism of George Grant

Part 1: Canada is Already an American Colony

The reaction will be more severe when we realize there is no centralizing driver, and therefore no centralized limiter, on modern dissolution.

~George Grant, Lament for a Nation (1965)

George Grant is a prophet of national lament. He predicted the gradual and then sudden destruction of the nation state. He spoke against traitorous elites more loyal to global cosmopolitan ideology than their neighbors. He saw his nation as an inevitably disappearing ghost. His story of elite and market betrayal sparked a populist movement, rekindling protectionism and national identity.

George Grant did not intend his 1965 work Lament for a Nation to be prophetic or revolutionary. He was simply commenting on the current events of 1960s Canada.

No class in Canada more welcomed the American managers than the established wealthy of Montreal and Toronto, who had once seen themselves the pillars of Canada.

So much did they identify their branch-plant society with the Kingdom of Heaven that they did not pay sufficient attention to the farmers or the outlying regions. Such regions existed for them as colonies of Montreal and Toronto. The Conservative victory was accomplished by local businessmen who felt excluded from their own country by corporation capitalism.

There’s a reason 1960s Canada echoes around the world now. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, father of Justin Trudeau, described Canada as a “mouse next to an elephant”. The economic, cultural, and geopolitical forces inevitably bound Canada to the whims of the American people. America had the inevitability of a Lovecraft monster in Grant’s philosophy. The relative smallness of the Canadian man and the Canadian state rested at the core of his lament.

The Canada-America relationship was a Historical inevitability, dissolving Canadian society through downward pressure on cosmopolitan elites, who moved the general public in turn.

When the nation is the intimate neighbour of a dynamic empire, this necessity is even more obvious … In the 1960s, state capitalism organizes a technological North America. The ruling classes are those that control the private governments (that is, the corporations) and those that control the public government which co-ordinates the activities of these corporations.

Now, the internet is to America as America was to Canada.

Acidic Globalism