What if William Howe, the dithering British commander, hadn’t let the American army escape in the Battle of Long Island in 1776? What if he had nipped the whole damn thing in the bud? In that case, as dual Canadian-American citizen Adam Gopnik complains in the New Yorker, ‘We Could Have Been Canada’.
That’s not exactly a hill to die on, but it’s catnip for other dual nationals such as Malcolm Gladwell, who some years back produced an amusing plea for Canadian World Domination in the Washington Post.
Gladwell wrote that in 1993. Gopnik’s essay is more recent. The earlier essay was light-handed and witty. Gopnik’s was ponderous and dry. But the big difference was the snotty anti-Americanism that Gopnik’s readers in the New Yorker have come to demand.
Canadians invented anti-Americanism in 1783, as sore losers. There isn’t much of that left today, however, and it doesn’t come close to the home-grown hatreds of the American left. I also am a dual citizen but think that this kind of cross-country comparison might need a rest. In particular, the conceit that Britain would have brought an end to slavery more quickly and without a civil war seems like special pleading.
