Though Mr. Rifkin’s vision of a North American Union is a comforting one to the slightly more than half of blue-state voters who went Democrat in the last election, it ignores the possibility that the red-state agenda might have an explanation.
The federalist model of the United States government that Mr. Rifkin rightly denigrates was the product, ultimately, of Civil War rhetoric (“a house divided against itself cannot stand”), which was quickly co-opted by an oligarchy of Northern industrial giants to revamp the US as the big business, trade-based, imperial power it is today.
The individualistic, militaristic vision of prosperity does not dominate American political discourse because of poor frontier farmers, as Mr. Rifkin suggests, but because of the robber barons back east. Indeed, before the Christian right brought them under the Republican banner, southern and more agrarian economies (i.e., red states) have always preferred a state-centred, multilateral “European” model for the American federal government, but they have been systematically defeated by more industrialized economies (i.e., blue states) who wanted railroads and cheap food.
For the past 100 years, the red states have watched as their economies, cultures, and overall autonomy were systematically choked to death as jobs, population, and federal money fled to the coasts. Among our cultural elite, it is generally considered charming to imagine America as a wasteland between California and New York. Is it any wonder then that the people who call that wasteland home feel a thrill of satisfaction at throwing that elite into a tizzy? Before the blue states take their toys and play with someone else, perhaps they ought to ask themselves a familiar question: Why do they hate us?
The real problem in the red states is that the Christian right has co-opted genuine feelings of resentment and disenfranchisement, using exactly the sort of oversimplified that-day-will-come rhetoric of which Mr. Rifkin’s article is such a sterling example. Rifkin’s vision of a European Dream recapitulates the single worst aspect of the American Dream—that it was a capitalized, singular Dream, which would shill for any American politician’s own petty agendas.
Before we start promoting this new Dream uncritically, we ought to look more closely at the problems of multilateralism. In the US, for example, the anti-federalist model perpetuated the injustice of slavery. While there is nothing quite so dramatically evil in the European Union, the trends of rising anti-Semitism and restrictive immigration policies do not exactly jive with Mr. Rifkin’s vision of a Europe that wants to “preserve their rich multicultural diversity.” I bring this up not to criticize Europe, but to make the larger point that De Tocqueville gave the US almost a hundred years before assessing the viability of its dream. North America should now return the favour.
If, as Mr. Rifkin argues, the United States is a marriage that’s coming to an end, then Canada ought to compare notes with the blue states’ ex before diving into bed.
Stephen Yeager
Toronto, Ontario
Latvian Celebration?
Your “Outlook” notices included a listing for March 16, Legionnaires Ceremony in Riga, Latvia. I had to read the notice several times to understand your reason for including it. Initially, I assumed that its purpose was to rebuke the Latvians. This assumption was based on the opening line: “During World War II, about 140,000 Latvian men joined the Nazi war effort as part of the Waffen SS national legions.” Reading on, I continued to feel this had to be the point: “To Latvian Jews, they were Nazi sympathizers; to ethnic Russians, traitors.” After these two lines, however, the tone of the notice appeared to change considerably. It went on to say that many other Latvians regarded these men as heroes who “defend[ed] the country from Russian imperialism” and that the holiday enjoyed the official sanction of the Latvian government “for a brief period” before “pressure from the United Nations and Russia” forced the government to rescind official recognition in 2000. You summed up with an image of proud and defiant Latvian nationalists gathering at the Freedom Monument in Riga to “lay flowers” and “sing patriotic songs” in spite of the meddlesome and overbearing Russians and UN.
