"Who are we?"

Modern democracies need civic nationalism. And national stories.

In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the 1962 classic, Lawrence is a British officer struggling to get the various Arab tribes to unite and revolt against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War.

Key to his plan is Auda Abu Taya, the volatile leader of the Howeitat tribe. Lawrence wants Auda to lead his army across an impassable desert to seize the Turkish Red Sea port of Aqaba. Auda sees this as a scheme that would only benefit Feisal, the nominal leader of the Arab revolt, who is from a different tribe.

Why should Auda do it?

Auda (left) with Lawrence (centre.)

“We do not work this thing for Feisal,” Lawrence insists to Auda.

“No?” smirks Auda, played by the legendary Anthony Quinn. “For the English, then.”

“For the Arabs,” Lawrence shoots back, passionately emphasizing the final word.

Auda raises his eyebrows. “The Arabs? … The Howeitat, Ageyli, Rualla, Beni Sahkr. These I know,” Auda says, naming Arab tribes. “I have even heard of the Harith,” Auda adds, naming the tribe of a man beside him as a subtle insult. “But the ‘Arabs’? What tribe is that?”

Lawrence laughs. Auda is pleased.

“They are a tribe of slaves,” Lawrence says. Fury crosses Auda’s face.

It’s possible to read this scene as a British officer doing what’s best for Britain, playing up an “Arab” identity in order to expand the revolt. But note that the movie was released in 1962. That is key.

An ideology called “Pan-Arabism” came to its apex in the 1950s and 1960s. Pan-Arabism insisted all Arabs were one people and called for this people to have one state. That meant the present-day countries of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and more would form a single country. Within Western countries in that era, Pan-Arabism was seen as a progressive force and was popular on the left — in part because its leaders, like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, tended to lean left, but also because Pan-Arabism opposed empires and colonialism in favour of “a people” becoming sovereign on its own land. So when Lawrence calls on Auda to abandon old tribal identities and take up Arab nationalism, he is expressing a popular view that tribalism is hopelessly fractious and old-fashioned, that the “true” identity of all the tribes is “Arab,” and this people, this “nation,” should rightfully become a single nation-state.

To most in the audience in 1962, Lawrence is the progressive bringing enlightenment. Auda is a reactionary who needs his eyes opened.

I’m parsing this scene because I think it offers insight into questions much bigger than identities in the Middle East: Today, in the liberal democracies of the West, where immigration has brought unprecedented cultural diversity, questions of national identity are seldom addressed directly but they are there, grinding away slowly, like tectonic plates. It’s impossible to understand the fracturing of the left, or the rise of right-wing populism, without recognizing that the question “who are we?” is now pushing at the margins of consciousness to an extent not seen in generations. Or for a century or more, in some countries.

So I want to offer a few thoughts about nations and national identity. I’ll focus mostly on Canada because I am Canadian, but also because, particulars aside, the Canadian case is not unique. These issues are urgent in every modern liberal democracy from Australia to Germany.

Canada is merely a vivid illustration of what’s involved — and how well-meaning liberals and progressives like former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are making a terrible mistake.

A young Stephen Leacock looking suitably professorial.

I have a history of Canada entitled Canada: The Foundations of Its Future. It was published in 1941. As a guide to the centuries that preceded its publication, it has only modest value, but it is quite insightful about Canada in 1941.

The author is Stephen Leacock. For a decade or two after the First World War, Leacock was the most popular humourist in the English-speaking world. But Leacock was also a lifelong political scientist with a decidedly conservative bent.

More revealing, however, is who paid Leacock to write the book.

Samuel Bronfman was born onboard a ship crossing the Atlantic to a mother and father fleeing Czarist pogroms in Russia. In Manitoba, the Bronfmans made a living selling various goods until a teenaged Samuel got into the liquor distribution business. When Prohibition in the United States sent customers – mostly bootleggers – flocking north, Bronfman set up shop in Montreal. By 1928, Bronfman was wealthy enough to buy Seagram from its famously rich founder, Joseph Seagram. And he turned Seagram into a global giant.

But Bronfman remained an immigrant Jew in a society where neither immigrants nor Jews were particularly welcome. To achieve social standing commensurate with his wealth, the fierce patriotism and the funding of good works was called for. A privately published patriotic history of Canada by Canada’s most famous writer fit that bill nicely.

From Bronfman’s personal — and so-very-purple — foreword:

They are high objectives which the future holds for Canada. To encompass them the vision of the early pioneers must be with us still, for where there is no vision, the people perish. It is the vision of a free Canada, a united Canada, a mighty Dominion. To-day as we come to grips with the barbarian foe [Nazi Germany], not only of the Empire, but of all mankind, we shall find in these the pages of our history the signposts which shall serve us, not only during our struggle, but also after the inevitable victory. Here are enshrined the ideals of liberty and democracy up which our way of life is based, and here in the activity of our people, are manifested the various groups of different origins and separate creeds, working together in harmonious unison, each making its own contribution to the completed achievement which is the Canadian mosaic. Here, too, the firm resolve of all to follow the one increasing purpose of progress, and to develop still further the untold possibilities of our country, a blessing to ourselves and a boon to all mankind; and here above all glowing upon every page, is courage, courage to defend our rich heritage, and maintain what is dearest of all, our freedom and our principles. These, indeed, are the “foundations of our future.”

No one could doubt Samuel Bronfman’s patriotism.

But notice also that Bronfman’s vision of Canadian identity is open and inclusive. “Our people” are made up of “various groups of different origins and separate creeds, working together in harmonious unison.” He could have added, “e pluribus unum,” if that hadn’t already been taken. Instead, he used a “mosaic” metaphor. In Canada, that would become a cliche 30 years later, in supposed contrast to the American “melting pot” metaphor, when multiculturalism became official state policy.

Bronfman’s patriotism is “nationalism,” in the sense that we usually use the latter word today. But in another, older sense of “nationalism,” this was something quite different.

In the 19th century, “nationalism” was built on the idea of “the nation” defined not as a state — as in “the nation of Canada” — but as a people.

What made any particular group “a people”? It wasn’t their numbers. It was their origins. People who shared a common language, culture, and history — a common ethnicity — were “a people.”

That’s why Lawrence tells Auda he should act for “the Arabs.” The Arabs share language, culture, and history, so Lawrence, using the original definition of a “nation,” thinks Arabs are a people. And it is only fitting and proper that “a people” should have their own state.

That is “nationalism” as the idea developed in Europe, particularly in the second half of the 19th century.

Consider Italy. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, it had never had unified governance but instead consisted of a confused and constantly evolving patchwork of city-states, principalities, and kingdoms. Still, 19th century nationalists argued that Italians shared a language, a culture, and a history. That made them a people. And the Italian people, the nationalists argued, should be united within a single Italian state.

The same was true for Germans. And for the many others in the 19th century who “discovered” their identity as “a people” and demanded their own national state.

But however much nationalists liked to talk about “discovering” national identity, these movements imagined and created at least as much as they discovered. An anthropologist who looked at 19th century Italy — or Germany — would have seen enormous linguistic, cultural, and historical diversity. To see only a singular people required considerable determination. But nationalists were nothing if not determined.

That scene from Lawrence of Arabia exemplifies this sort of nationalism. Auda isn’t wrong to identify the tribes as important groups with their own identities. They all spoke Arabic, but their Arabic varied from tribe to tribe. Their cultures varied from tribe to tribe. As did their histories. Lawrence’s Arab nationalism glossed over enormous diversity.

But still, progressives mostly backed that sort of nationalism. Away with feudal kingdoms! Down with multi-ethnic empires! Let nations have states, and let the people vote to determine who will lead those states. In Canada — late to the game, as usual — this sort of nationalism blossomed into Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, promoting the belief that francophone Quebecers were “a people” who deserved their own nation-state.

The problem with this nationalism, of course, is that it necessarily excludes as much as it includes.

Who belongs to Quebec’s “nation”? For many early nationalists, the answer was unabashed: The nation was defined by ethnicity. Those who weren’t pure laine — “pure wool,” or descendants of the original French colonists — may be welcome to live in the future independent state of Quebec, but they were not really, truly, fully “one of us.” ¹

The world discovered nationalism’s tendency to exclude after the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson’s principle of “the self-determination of peoples” drove the creation of a series of new nation-states amidst the ruins of multi-ethnic empires.

The Polish people got a Polish state. The Finnish people got a Finnish state, the Czechs a Czech state, and the Ukrainians (very briefly) got a Ukrainian state. And so on.

But these new states were carved out of multi-ethnic empires so, within their borders, there were substantial numbers of people who did not share the majority’s ethnicity. How did these people fit into the new nation-states? Were they full citizens, no different than others? The logic of nationalism suggested not.

What followed in many of these new countries was discrimination, persecution, even ethnic cleansing. It didn’t stop until, after another world war, borders were shifted and whole populations were driven from one place to another, ensuring that the territory of states better matched the ethnicity of those within them. No minorities, no problems.

One man who understood this logic perfectly was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was a citizen of Austria but only a resident of Germany until 1932, when he became a citizen for legal and political reasons. His disinterest in citizenship reflected his ideology.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler insisted he was a nationalist but not a patriot in the sense of loving one’s country — meaning the state, the land, and all its people. For Hitler, as for all rabid nationalists, the state is merely an instrument for giving expression to the will of das Volk, “the people.” What truly matters, what one should put above all else, is “the people” — and “the people” does not include all people within a country. To a nationalist like Hitler, a Jew could never belong to das Volk no matter what his citizenship, and no amount of patriotism or patriotic sacrifice, not even military service, could make up for alien ethnicity. Those people could never be one of us.

Such bald ethnic nationalism was never an option in every country.

After all, it was possible, with considerable effort, to cobble together nationalist tales of cultural and ancestral unity for “the Germans” or “the Italians.” But for nations like Canada, Australia, and the United States? No eye was blind enough to ignore the diversity of their origins and populations. Even Great Britain could not easily indulge in ethnic nationalism as Britain was itself a combination of at least three “peoples,” the English, the Scottish, and the Irish (with the Welsh forever annoyed that they they are always left off the list.) And in the countries spawned by Britain, those of British descent of any sort were joined by many others who were decidedly not British. In the case of Canada, there wasn’t even have a shared language.

In an era when nationalism rooted in ethnicity was such a potent force, how could these countries forge a shared identity and love of country?

The obvious answer was “civic nationalism.”

Rather than idealizing “the people” and focusing on ancestry, civic nationalism uses the principles the country stands for as the flag around which its diverse people can unite. Thus, the answer to the question “who are we?” becomes “we are the people who stand for this.”

The United States has been particularly effective at cultivating civic nationalism, thanks in part to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which, ever since their drafting, have been treated as the ultimate statements of what it means to be American. In 1966, the sociologist Robert Bellah argued that America had created nothing less than a “civic religion.” Picture Washington and the Founding Fathers as Jesus and the Apostles. And note the capitals always present in both “Founding Fathers” and “Apostles.”

That’s the theory, anyway. Historically, civic nationalism has seldom been as inclusive as theory suggests it can and should be.

In part, that’s because any satisfying answer to the question “who are we?” requires a compelling story. A compelling story — a story capable of forging identity — requires clarity. Clarity requires simplicity. But “what we stand for” necessarily changes over time — just look at how radically American interpretations of the Constitution have changed over the centuries — ensuring that any account that is at all historically accurate will be complex.

So how do you extract a strong, emotionally resonant story that answers the questions “who are we?” by pointing to what we stand for when what we stand for is complicated and controversial and constantly evolving over time?

In the past, that was usually accomplished by omission. In particularly, it really helps to push to the margins — or exclude entirely — those people whose experience contradicts the nation’s stated principles.

You see Bronfman’s phrase, “the various groups of different origins and separate creeds”? In the civic nationalism of Bronfman’s day, it was fine and admirable to make passing statements like that. But what you didn’t do was get into the messy details. Leacock’s history of Canada illustrates nicely.

To take the most obvious example, there are almost no indigenous people in his telling of Canada’s history. Leacock explains why in his opening chapter, entitled “The Empty Continent.”

He writes:

As late as at the first establishment of Manitoba (1870) Captain Butler could write of our North-West, “there is no other portion of the globe, in which travel is possible, where loneliness can be said to dwell so thoroughly. One may wander five hundred miles in a straight line without seeing a human being.” Such, and no more, is the meaning and extent of the Indian ownership of North America.

From this long sleep the continent was awakened by the tumult of the age of discovery that brought the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1491.

So much for the Indians.

The other sort of Indians are mentioned only in passing by Leacock, and only to describe efforts to keep them out.

Hindu immigration to British Columbia was ingeniously side-tracked by the “continuous voyage” rule, as smart a piece of legislation as any that ever disenfranchised negroes in the South. The Hindus were free to come, but only on a ‘through’ ship; and there were no through ships. Just before the war of 1914 somebody, or some government, supplied the money to fetch a direct ship with brown samples to Vancouver. The fat was in the fire but at that moment the war pot boiled over.

If that sounds like Leacock is endorsing the exclusion of “Hindus,” you get the idea. Leacock even praises Americans for realizing earlier than Canadians that Japanese and Chinese immigrants were a “yellow peril” that had to be kept out.

As for black people, it probably won’t surprise you that their existence goes unmentioned in Leacock’s history, despite the fact that black people have been in Canada as long as there has been something we would call Canada. And despite the fact that Leacock spends considerable time on John Graves Simcoe, the founder of modern Ontario: Simcoe became the first colonial governor in the British Empire to pass legislation abolishing slavery after an enslaved black woman named Chloe Cooley was sold to an American, an outrage brought to Simcoe’s attention by Peter Martin, a black Loyalist who had fought for the Crown in the American Revolution before fleeing to liberty in Canada. From a Canadian perspective, this could be powerful story, and indeed a very positive one since it involves abolition many decades before the Americans got around to it. But that would require acknowledging the existence of slavery in Canada. And the existence of black Canadians. Which Leacock was apparently unwilling to do.

With minorities mostly invisible, and events and institutions that make us feel uncomfortable mostly unspoken, Leacock’s history does more or less what Bronfman wanted it to do: It tells a heartening tale in which “various groups of different [unspecified] origins and [unspecified] separate creeds” came together in Canada and built a proud nation whose glorious future is assured.

This is civic nationalism of sort. But it’s a civic nationalism in which, while all are ostensibly welcome, some are decidedly more welcome than others.

In that sense, it’s typical of history books of a certain vintage, in Canada, Britain, the United States, Australia, and other countries where unvarnished ethnic nationalism would not do. They told a simple story of moral uplift and progress untarnished by hypocrisy, shameful deeds, and tragedy. They promised that membership in this noble community was open to all. But the national stories they told effectively restricted starring roles to certain ethnicities, with others were grudgingly given only walk-on parts, while a few were hustled out the theatre.

These stories were first challenged in the 1960s and 1970s, as “black power,” “women’s lib,” the American Indian Movement, the “homophile movement,” and other organized efforts for fuller civic participation of marginalized groups got rolling.

History was an integral part of these social changes.

Was North America really “empty” when the Europeans arrived, Mr. Leacock? Was Australia “terra nullius” — land belonging to no one — as they said in Australia? What promises did the United States make to the Indians and was there a gap between what the government promised and what it did? People who started pulling at threads like these soon found the tidy old stories unravelled.

At the same time, among historians, scholarly ferment that had started in the 1920s came to a full boil.

What does the study of history consist of? Traditionally, the concern of historians was power. That meant politics, war, and money. That’s what history was. The study of the powerless was almost by definition not history.

So women were (mostly) left out. So were black people. The poor. And lots of others. And I do mean “left out.” The historian of technology Ruth Cowan, who got her start in the 1960s, recalled how even into the 1970s, when she described her research on labour-saving technologies used in the home, she would be told flat-out by older historians, “that’s not history.” (Nevertheless, she persisted, and published More Work For Mother, a seminal book in the history of technology. I’m honoured to note Ruth’s also a subscriber to PastPresentFuture. Hi, Ruth!)

An explosion of social history transformed the field in the last decades of the 20th century. As a graduate student of history in the mid-1990s, I attended a lecture where an eager young grad student asked a prominent social historian whether social history would ever get the respect and prominence of the stodgy old disciplines. The historian looked bemused and said something to the effect of, “is this question from 1975?”

Inevitably, the old “hooray for us!” patriotic histories were challenged quite directly.

In 1980, American political scientist Howard Zinn published A People’s History, which can best be understood as a compilation of all the nasty material the “hooray for us!” histories left out. As a corrective, it was probably necessary. As history, it left much to be desired.

The historian Eric Foner called Zinn’s book a valuable addition but noted it was as limited as the earlier histories because it was defined by them. “The book bears the same relation to traditional texts as a photographic negative does to a print: the areas of darkness and light have been reversed.” Heroes become villains, or are pushed aside, the marginalized are brought to centre stage, and that which makes modern hearts glow is downplayed or ignored altogether while spotlights shine on everything that makes us wince and shake our heads. “History from the bottom up, though necessary as a corrective, is as limited in its own way as history from the top down,” Foner wrote. What is needed is “an integrated account incorporating Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Woodrow Wilson and the Wobblies, in a continuous historical process, in which each group’s experience is shaped in large measured by its relation to others.”

Almost half a century has passed since Zinn published A People’s History. Much has changed.

Academic historians tend to be hyper-specialized and the writing of grand-scale national history of any sort is badly out of fashion. Few academics even attempt to engage the broad public directly.

Meanwhile, in political speech and popularizations, polarization rules: Many conservatives long for the old “hooray for us!” national histories and want more statues of heroes; progressives demand the Zinn-style opposite and want to tear down statues.

In Britain, this dynamic means Winston Churchill is either a peerless hero or a racist monster, while Britain’s relationship with slavery is either a story of the Royal Navy gloriously battling the evil trade in the 19th century or British ships stuffed with gold and human flesh in the 18th century.

In the United States, it pits Donald Trump’s drum-beating “1776 Commission” and his planned “National Garden of American Heroes” against Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project defining the dawn of slavery in America as the nation’s creation point and framing device.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, asked to comment when Trump’s 1776 Commission released its report, nailed the Commission — but also its mirror-image opponents. “It reduces history to hero worship,” he told the Washington Post about Trump’s commission. “It’s the flip side of the polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a slavocracy, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history. It’s basically a political document, not history.”

Polarization makes the telling of national history dangerous. A quarter-century ago in Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired the ambitious documentary series Canada: A People’s History, but in recent years it quietly buried that production, and I’m quite sure that in 2025 CBC executives would sooner disembowel themselves than produce a new national history. I’m almost as sure the same is true for ABC executives in Australia or BBC executives in Britain. And officials in many other Western, democratic countries, both in the public and private sectors.

Amidst political polarization, it’s so much safer and easier to simply say as little as possible about national history. And don’t even think about imagining what a national story that answers the question “who are we?”

Which brings me, naturally, to Justin Trudeau, the exemplar of both the modern, progressive politician, and the failure of that sort of leader to respond to new realities.

Soon after taking office in 2015, The New York Times published a profile of Trudeau that neatly summed up the hipster progressivism that made Trudeau a rockstar on the centre-left for several years. “There is no core identity, no mainstream, in Canada,” Trudeau told the Times. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what makes us the first post-national state.”

That phrase — “the first post-national state” — clung to Trudeau like a lingering odour long after his rock-star status had faded. Conservatives cited it constantly as proof Trudeau was hostile to national identity, wanting Canada to be nothing more than, in the phrase of the author Yann Martel, “the greatest hotel on earth.” Martel intended that to be a compliment. Many observers — I’m one — saw it as an expression of cluelessness about nations and national identity. Conservatives felt Trudeau was the rockstar of cluelessness.

I think that’s a touch unfair. In context, I think Trudeau was saying that Canada no longer has a dominant ethnic majority whose identity is the default Canadian identity. That is simply a factual observation. But there is a national identity, in Trudeau’s formulation. It consists of the values he listed. That is standard civic nationalism. But then Trudeau added that extremely unfortunate phrase, “the first post-national state,” which, taken out of context, allowed his words to be portrayed as nothing less than a dismissal of national identity.

But I’m not entirely defending Trudeau here. Not by a long shot.

Modern immigration is changing the populations of Western democracies rapidly. Not only are rates of the foreign-born at all-time highs in many Western countries — ranging from about 15% in the US, 16% in the UK, 18% in Germany, 20% in Sweden, 23% in Canada, and 31% in Australia — but the sources of immigration are very different from what they were half a century and more ago. As a result, ethnic diversity in these countries has exploded.

To be clear, I am not bemoaning this transformation. I am simply saying it is a transformation. And a challenge.

A strong, resilient, vibrant, peaceful, cooperative, prosperous country requires a shared identity. People can be different religions, ethnicities, skin colours, sexualities, whatever. But in the midst of all that diversity, there must be an “us.” All of us. Together. To have a sense of us, we must answer the question, “who are we?” In modern, diverse liberal democracies, a shared national story is more important than ever.

So what did Justin Trudeau do about that? He raised Canadian immigration rates dramatically and loved to repeat the cliche “diversity is our strength.” But what was his answer to the question, “who are we?”

It’s right there in that Times profile of Trudeau: He provided a banal list of abstract concepts.

Openness. Respect. Compassion.

That’s nice. And it’s a start, I suppose. But a list of abstract concepts is only a list of abstract concepts. It’s not a national story. It cannot inform and inspire. It cannot rally a community. It cannot give us a sense of “us.”

In my view, this was Trudeau’s worst failing in almost a decade as prime minister. He never even attempted to articulate a national story.

In 2017, Canada marked its 150th birthday. The federal government spent a lot of money celebrating. What was the story it told? If you’re Canadian, you can’t remember. Because there was no story. There were lists of abstract concepts — Openness! Respect! Compassion! — and lots of cheerleading — The best country in the world! — but there was nothing remotely like a national story.

Even the event ostensibly being commemorated went unmentioned. What happened 150 years earlier? The answer was “Confederation,” the series of negotiations that led to the creation of modern Canada. But Trudeau didn’t dare tell that story because it involved so much that had become politically sensitive. Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister and father of the country was rapidly becoming the scapegoat for the national shame of residential schools and it was impossible to talk about Confederation without talking about Macdonald. How unfortunate. And Confederation was entirely the work of white men whose politics sometimes looked awkward or offensive in 2017. Even stating unapologetically that the creation of Canada was a good thing would draw the anger of those who see the country as an irredeemable crime of settler-colonialism. And Trudeau was never willing to confront the radical left.

It was so much easier to stick with the list of abstract concepts. So that’s what Trudeau did.

As the years rolled by, Trudeau repeated that performance often. Abstract concepts. That was the national story. For Trudeau, history scarcely existed.

With one exception: Whenever activists demanded apologies for wrongs in the past, Trudeau was quick to oblige.

On the left, this sort of thing is treated as a way to include the formerly excluded, so one could say the intention is good. But absent a national story, it doesn’t include so much as fragment. Each ethnic group gets official recognition of its own particular history, its own particular stories, its own particular grievances. And each competes to have its history given greater prominence in public schools and public commemorations. But what transcends all these particularities? Where is the national story that draws all the particular stories into the story of us, all of us, together? Absent a determined effort to answer the big question — “who are we?” — there isn’t one. This approach to history creates no story shared by all, only dozens of stories of separate communities. It is Balkanization. With all that that word implies.

The other problem with the progressive embrace of apology-as-inclusion is the false image of history it creates.

Trudeau’s apologies were always reactions to political demands that were, if nothing else, politically expedient. Meanwhile, Trudeau ignored other history, even history which could and should be a source of enormous national pride — such as the invention of insulin by a Canadian war hero who gave away the patent, and the fortune he could have made, for the good of humanity. It was the greatest story in Canadian scientific history. Yet Trudeau let its 100th anniversary pass with scarcely a mention.

As a result, Trudeau’s litany of apologies piled up, decontextualized and unbalanced by other stories. And whether Trudeau intended it or not — I think not — this accumulation started to tell its own story. In that story, Canada is a country whose history consists of little more than a litany of crimes and indignities. A country that has little or nothing to be proud of. A country that can scarcely justify its own existence.

The apex of this approach was the handling of “genocide” allegations in the past and present. I’ve detailed this previously so I won’t repeat myself. Whatever your view on thosee issues, I think it’s indisputable that Trudeau and his government — along with MPs from other parties, to be fair — were incoherent, unserious, even silly.

As a result, Canada Day became an exercise in flag-waving cognitive dissonance management during the Trudeau years.

Canada is the best country in the world!

We’re guilty of genocide we won’t investigate and punish!

The world needs more Canada!

We apologize for Canada’s existence, indigenous peoples!

Canada welcomes the world’s immigrants!

Even though we’re all trespassing!

Directly opposite Parliament, on the far side of Wellington Street, is a building that is the perfect symbol of where Trudeau’s approach leads.

Originally the US embassy in Ottawa, the building is classical and gorgeous and almost as visually prominent in the capital as Parliament itself. When a new US embassy opened in the 1990s, the Americans departed and Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided to turn the building into a national portrait gallery. That seemed like a fine idea to me then. It would be a superb venue in which to raise the question “who are we?”

When Stephen Harper became prime minister, he scrapped that plan. I don’t know why. Chretien is a Liberal, Harper a Conservative, and that was probably enough. His alternative? He didn’t have one.

The building sat empty for twenty years.

In 2017, as the country was celebrating the 150th anniversary of the event the prime minister wouldn’t name, Canada Day approached. Some indigenous activists protested all celebrations on the grounds that Canada is basically one big colonial crime scene, so Trudeau was confronted with a political problem. His solution? He dramatically announced he was giving the old US embassy to indigenous people to become an “indigenous people’s space” that would represent indigenous peoples’ cultures. Whatever that meant. The plan was as hazy as a Fundy fog. But for Trudeau’s political purposes in the moment, it did the trick, and that was always enough for Trudeau.

It’s now 2025. A quarter of a century after the announcement of a national portrait gallery, and seven years after Trudeau ducked, one of the most prominent buildings in Ottawa now has a minor gallery and some meeting rooms but it seems to be little-used. Various ambitious schemes have been proposed and planning is proceeding. Or maybe it’s planning to plan. Whatever. I’m sure it will amount to something. Someday. I’m also sure that when it does, it will tell indigenous stories well.

What it will not do is tell the story of us — all of us — together.

“History is to the nation as memory is to the individual,” the great American historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote. “As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.”

In January of this year, as shocked Canadians realized they were suddenly facing the most overt threat of American imperialism since the 19th century, it was Trudeau’s job to speak for Canada’s very existence.

Who are we? What do we stand for? Questions that Canadians had long chewed on at their leisure were suddenly urgent. We needed strong, clear answers. Answers we could rally around.

And what did Trudeau say? “Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian,” Trudeau said on CNN. “One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”

It was one of the most pathetic statements ever uttered by a prime minister. But what else could he say? He had never even attempted to articulate a national story. That sad little bleat was the best he could do.

This is what happens in a nation denied a conception of its past.

There is an alternative. Democratic, diverse countries do not have to be nations of amnesiacs. Nor do we have to choose between the “hooray for us!” mythology of the populist right or the poisonous self-loathing and Balkanization of the woke left.

We can do what Eric Foner urged: We can construct national stories that synthesize the high and the low, the powerful and the marginal, sources of pride and shame. We can explore the principles we have claimed as our own, how we argued about those principles, how we betrayed them, fought for them, and how our thinking about them changed over time. These stories will necessarily be far more complex than those told by either the far-right or the far-left. Nonetheless, told with heart and skill, they can cohere and inspire. Without sacrificing historical accuracy.

Ken Burns is proof of that. Burns tells complex tales that speak ultimately to the great themes of the nation — the whole nation — whether the subject is something as big and sweeping as the American Civil War or as niche as jazz. His series on baseball is typical. I’m not remotely a baseball fan but I found it riveting because Burns uses baseball as a lens on the nation and a way to explore some of the biggest themes of national history. There’s plenty in the series to appeal to the old-school patriot — with elegies to the old ball park and odes to the origin of the hotdog — but there is also greed, violence, and racism. That legendary early-20th century baseball manager? His lucky charm was a piece of rope once used in a lynching. This is history as synthesis, and when it’s done well it can be every bit as powerful as the more simplistic tales of the left or right. And it is much more accurate history.

Or read Jill Lepore’s gripping, brilliant These Truths, a single volume that tells a centuries-long tale of Americans struggling to define themselves and what they stand for. Lepore has no use for the simplifications and omissions of the right or the left. Her story is complex. And yet there is also clarity. Reading These Truths, America emerges as a country that inspires pride and shame, a country of promise and failure and contradiction and triumph. It is a fascinating country. It is a country worth fighting for. And improving.

I have no doubt the same could be done with the national histories of other countries.

Remember that story about John Graves Simcoe and the abolition of slavery in Ontario? When Justin Trudeau was prime minister, a private member’s bill passed that marked August 1 as “Emancipation Day.” These sorts of bills are churned out constantly and most such honours are instantly forgotten. Trudeau’s response ensured this would be yet another footnote: His office issued a short press release that treated this as exclusively black history and gave a patronizing congratulations to the black Canadians who care about it.

But what if that same story were told as a national story for all? Simcoe was part of a British generation that slowly turned against slavery, banned the trade in 1807, and banned slavery itself across the British Empire in 1834. Abolition took effect on August 1st, 1834, which is why August 1st is Emancipation Day in much of the Caribbean to this day and was a widely celebrated holiday in Canada and the United States until the events of the American Civil War overshadowed it. That is a complex story of both slavery and liberation. And the people involved reflect that complexity, from Chloe Cooley, the woman whose sale prompted Peter Martin, the black Loyalist, to bring the outrage to the attention of John Graves Simcoe — the lifelong abolition who would later command British troops fighting Haitians rebelling against slavery.

There’s nothing simple about that story. It’s both a moral horror and a moral triumph. It is full of squalid compromises, hypocrisy, and people struggling to do what’s right. It is a landmark in the history of the world.

But that is precisely what makes it an astonishing, wonderful, human story. It is the kind of story around which a collective identity for a diverse population in a nation committed to human rights and human dignity could be constructed.

If only a leader would tell it. Or encourage others to tell it.

Or at the very least, recognize that we urgently need it.

Like nature, identity abhors a vacuum, so “who are we?” is a question that will be asked and answered, whether we do so intentionally or not. The only question is whether the answer is inclusive and makes the country stronger — by encouraging all its citizens to see each other as partners in a shared project worthy of their passion and dreams — or whether it weakens the nation by encouraging Balkanization.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson noted that any collective identity is necessarily the product of imagination and story-telling. Which means the lines that separate “one of us” from “not one of us” may be drawn where we choose.

When Auda pointed to the Arab tribes and Lawrence pointed to Arabs, neither was “wrong.” They were simply drawing different lines which could be justified with different stories.

So it is with modern, diverse, democratic states. We can choose to craft a collective identity that coincides with the country’s borders and population by telling a national story that includes all citizens as “one of us.” Or we can draw different lines.

The woke left emphasizes ethnic and racial identities and says little or nothing positive about a national identity that transcends ancestry. That’s a recipe for Balkanization and fracture. The populist right, by contrast, is nostalgic for “hooray for us!” history, but the only way to foster that sort of identity is to simplify, omit, and lie. Ethics and intellectual integrity aside, that cannot work in modern, diverse countries where no minority group will accept subordination and erasure. Like the woke left, the populist right is far likelier to exacerbate internal division than foster unity.

A future in which the identitarian left and the populist right dominate is a future in which answers to the question “who are we?” will get increasingly narrower, angrier, more exclusive, more resentful. And more divided.

Those of us who believe in liberal democracy and pluralism must do better. We need to deliberately cultivate civic identity. And as with any identity — individual or collective — the raw materials for such work lie in the past.

Those who hope to make their nations stronger in the future must explore history in the present.

And tell a national story.

1. Modern Quebec nationalists, still pushing for independence, now insist theirs is a civic nationalism and people of any ethnic background are part of “the Quebec people.” To say this set of beliefs is incoherent is understatement, and when a prominent nationalist, Yves-Francois Blanchet, calls Canada an “artificial country with very little meaning,” unlike Quebec and its “people,” he gives the game away: If membership in the “Quebec people” is truly open to anyone, Quebec and its people are no different than Canada and its people, and if Canada with its civic nationalism can be breezily dismissed with a wave of the hand, so can Blanchet’s Quebec.