Keep Sir John A. Standing

The founding, and our key founding father, play a crucial role in shaping our national soul. This is why the narratives around them have to be aspirational, contra their iconoclastic detractors.

Macdonald and the Statue Wars 

The way you’re supposed to begin a piece like this is with a sort of penitential act. I should begin a discussion of Sir John A. Macdonald with a confession of his various sins and crimes, before offering an apology, and a reluctant defence of our first prime minister that essentially boils down to “history matters,” without actually explaining what that history is or why it matters.

If you do this you’ve already lost the historical fight, because you’ve willingly ceded the narrative to Macdonald’s detractors, and fallen back to a defence of history in some abstract sense, instead of a defence of Macdonald himself. This kind of Girondin impulse is far too common amongst many liberals and conservatives now, especially in elites institutions and fields like journalism and academia.

It’s a timid and completely pointless way of engaging in public discourse, and while it is often done for understandable reasons, it’s totally self-defeating. By refusing to respond in kind to moral and substantive claims, you are admitting defeat by allowing one side to monopolize moral discourse.

This matters, because history, and historical memorialization especially, are in large part about narratives. To cede the narrative is to eventually just cede history itself.

One of the many battlefronts in the COVID induced summer of discontent that we are in the midst of has been the statue wars. Iconoclastic mobs in America have targeted not just confederate statues, they’ve gone after the likes of Abraham Lincoln. In the UK Winston Churchill became a target. Canada is no stranger to the statue wars, and battles over statues and memorializations of Macdonald have been taking places for quite a few years now. 

There are currently ten Macdonald statues across Canada, and Macdonald’s name is on a plethora of government buildings, schools, pubs, and other establishments as well. There used to be eleven, but in 2018 the City of Victoria removed their Macdonald statue.  

Macdonald statues across the country are frequent targets of vandalism, and online petitions and news stories circulate on a semi-frequent basis calling for his removal. The charge that is levelled against Macdonald, like the charges levelled against the various historical figures iconoclasts want to tear down are invariably the same. These figures were racists, colonialists, white supremacists, and so on. Macdonald is no exception. The charges levelled specifically against Macdonald are that he was “an architect of Indigenous genocide” as well as a racist who held all sorts of intolerable views often followed through with in policy and political decisions, like the imposition of a head tax on Chinese immigrants. 

Macdonald, Architect of What? 

No one, including me, claims that Macdonald was a saint, and Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people and migrants in the early days of Confederation was racist, and wrong. I doubt any serious person would deny this. But even on these questions, Macdonald’s record is complex. Tristin Hopper, wrote an excellent and accessible piece in the National Post simultaneously laying out both the bad things Macdonald was responsible for, and also Macdonald’s paradoxically ahead of his times views on Indigenous voting rights, and recognition of the terrible plight of Indigenous peoples. 

But this is only part of the story of Macdonald, and the crucial role he played in our history. Too often this is all that gets discussed, ceding the narrative to Macdonald’s detractors and dooming him to inevitable damnatio memoriae. This is why, in the name of defending our history, we cannot simply defend capital H History, we have to defend the substance of our actual history.

Macdonald’s central role as the key architect of Confederation, and our country, is not well known because Canadian history, especially the history that led to confederation, is not well known by Canadians. It’s a national embarrassment, and in this vacuum it is easy to build incomplete and partial narratives about what Canada is and what Canada means. 

Macdonald is best described as “the indispensable politician.” Confederation was not inevitable, it took adept figures like Macdonald to make it happen. Macdonald was not an ideologue, and his political career was defined by his masterful ability to forge coalitions and working compromises between seemingly intractable groups. He was an important political figure in the United Province of Canada (the union of Upper and Lower Canada), and proved adept at balancing and forging coalitions with the warring and disparate factions from Upper and Lower Canada forced into an uncomfortable union. He resisted, but worked and ultimately partnered with uncompromising reformers in the province like George Brown, while ultimately laying the groundworks for constitutional reform that Brown, though principled, could almost certainly never have achieved. 

Macdonald was a central figure at the Charlottetown Conference, and was the principal author of the Quebec Resolutions that became the basis of the 1867 Constitution. This made him our indispensable founding father, but it was Macdonald the coalition builder, incrementalist, and compromise forger that got the disparate colonies and political figures to Confederation in the first place. 

The union that was achieved at Confederation and gradually grew to be what it is today is the principle legacy that Macdonald gifted us. As Conrad Black aptly put it: 

[Canada] is the only bicultural transcontinental parliamentary confederation in the history of the world; it has endured without major modification to its political institutions for 153 years, longer than any other large country except the United Kingdom and the United States. And in that time, the United Kingdom lost most of the province of Ireland and the United States was just recovering from a terrible civil war in which 750,000 Americans died (in a population of just 31 million).

The remarkable achievement that is Canada could not have happened without Macdonald. Just as the story of Macdonald’s legacy is incomplete without mentioning the treatment of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, to suggest that Macdonald’s legacy is nothing but racism and colonialism is a flawed and incomplete one.  

Statues and Memorialization 

Statues are erected not simply to memorialize people, but to memorialize something that person represents or stands for. This is ultimately what debates over statues are about, and the key question when examining statues is what they memorialize, not just who. So the question around the ten remaining Macdonald statues, just as with statues of Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and confederate statues, is what is being memorialized in their personnage. 

The statues of Macdonald were erected to commemorate Confederation and the union Confederation created. They memorialize Macdonald as the key architect and founding father of Confederation. They are not memorials of white supremacy or racism, they are memorials of the union that created the only bicultural transcontinental parliamentary confederation in the history of the world, one that united a disparate and heterogeneous collection of peoples. 

History is inescapably about questions of narrative, and this is ultimately what debates over statues and historical legacies should be about. On one side we have people who want to reduce Macdonald’s legacy, and by proxy the statues of him, to memorials of racism and white supremacy. Those of us that defend Macdonald’s legacy, and statues of him, do not dismiss or reject the darker parts of his legacy, but we reject that this is what Macdonald memorializations represent. Statues aren’t just about abstract history, they memorialize something specific, and statues should be judged on the basis of the legacy or thing they memorialize. 

This is how we can easily distinguish, for example, between a statue of Macdonald, or Lincoln, or Churchill, versus say a statue of Jefferson Davis. Confederate statues memorialize a regime that seceded to preserve race based slavery, an evil and horrific institution. No amount of lost cause revisionism can change this. They memorialize something evil, a statue of Macdonald, Lincoln, or Churchill does not. 

There will always be debates and disagreement about these legacies, and in a free and democratic society we should have these debates. But to have them we have to be willing to actually engage in substantive arguments about that history. Increasingly it is only ascendent progressives who make these arguments, while the right abandons the ramparts and retreats to procedural or abstract arguments about history. 

Foundings and National Mythologies 

It’s not entirely accurate to paint Macdonald’s detractors as only interested in adjudicating Macdonald’s himself. Their rage is ultimately directed at the Canada that Macdonald statues represent. Macdonald statues do indeed symbolize Confederation, and that is why they must go. Canada is built on racism, colonialism, and white supremacy and for these people, it isn’t just Macdonald that must be dismantled, Macdonald is a symbol of what must be dismantled.

This is why battles over historical memory, and narrative are so vital. A few weeks ago Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the New York Time’s 1619 project, an attempt to recast slavery as America’s true founding, tweeted this out: 

Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.

The 1619 project is, in the words of Damon Linker an attempt to “reframe American history so that this appalling history stands at the very center of who we are as a country...with the cumulative result resembling agitprop more than responsible journalism or scholarship.” Linker’s assessment is correct, but Jones is not wrong to describe it as an exercise of narrative and memory shifting.

Foundings matter, but they matter not just because of the institutions or constitutions they produce, foundings are ultimately an exercise in political imagination. Structures and institutions shape behaviour, but a constitution is ultimately just a piece of paper. What props it up is the moral and discursive power it holds over the political imagination. 

Every political community has a collective story it tells itself about where it came from. These stories are always to some extent mythical. They define the boundaries of a community, help define its aspirations, and provide something to constantly draw back on in the face of failings or challenges. Foundings do not just define the structural boundaries and limitations of a political community, they define its moral, normative, and imaginative boundaries as well. 

Canada, like America, had a founding in 1867. Foundings aren’t ex nihilo moments of creation, but they are pivotal moments that shape the national soul in what is an exercise partially in history, but ultimately in national myth making. This is why they are so important, and why battles over the narratives that define history are so important. 

The foundings of democratic regimes have to be aspirational and the memory and myths we tell ourselves have to be aspirational to form the basis for common citizenship. Citizenship is more than just a passport, it’s also about membership in a political community, and democratic citizenship can only be genuinely inclusive if it is something that all citizens can share in, which can only be built on shared values and aspirations.

Foundings thus ultimately have to be about ideals. Democratic citizenship cannot be built on shortcomings, it has to be built on the aspirational ideals of a political community. The American founding is built on ideals that America has constantly fallen short of, but aspired to, and America’s national story and soul has to be built on the constant striving for a more perfect union, not on its original and irredeemable sin. 

Canada is the same in this respect. Our founding must be built on ideals and it must be celebrated, and this narrative must form the basis on which we strive to overcome our shortcomings. But this isn’t accomplished by making our sins the central story of who we are, it can only be done by celebrating Confederation, and Canada, and holding up this aspirational idea of who we are and want to be, and work to make sure that all Canadians can share in this story as well. 

This is ultimately why we must defend our founding, and founding father, from those who seek to tear him down. A country cannot be built on its sins, but it cannot ignore them either. Only an aspirational founding and national story can form the basis both for democratic citizenship and the basis on which we can overcome our shortcomings. Tearing down Macdonald amounts to a rejection of our founding and our ideals, and replacing them with a national story based on sins, not aspirations.

A country cannot be built on this, and we have to begin reasserting and defending Canada as the remarkable success story and accomplishment that it is, and refuse to let our history be redefined by its shortcomings. But this requires both knowing and being willing to defend our own history, which can only be done by not ceding the moral ground to radicals. Tell the full story of Sir John A. and the Canada he built. These are the only foundations on which he can continue to stand.

Weekly Recommendations

• An excellent discussion hosted by the Manhattan Institute between Ross Douthat, Coleman Hughes, and Wesley Yang (along with MI president Reihan Salam) about the “Successor Ideology.” Yang is the originator of the term.

• A Conversation on Cultural Marxism (Providence). A good talk (and transcript) between Mark Tooley and Samuel Goldman on “cultural marxism.” Goldman’s key point, correct in my view, is that the attempts to paint the various critical and radical theories that have left the American ivory tower and entered the real world since the 1960s as German imports are wrong, and it’s much better understood as having distinct American roots. I am going to write about this myself another time, but the world right now makes much more sense if you understand this radicalism as an American export, not a German import.

• Harvard Creates Managers Instead of Elites - Saffron Huang (Palladium). Another good piece at Palladium touching on many of the themes from the elite overproduction newsletter a few weeks ago about one of the key problems with actual elite production at an institution like Harvard.

• It’s Time to Revive the Anglosphere - Andrew Roberts (Wall Street Journal). It’s paywalled but if you can get behind it I’m recommending this piece not because I agree with it, and I suspect Roberts was being deliberately provocative to get a discussion going, but because I am going to be discussing CANZUK next week.