American journalist Matt Stoller, a trenchant critic of US oligarchy and monopoly capitalism, has also argued Trump’s designs on Canada follow a certain internal logic: “The Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland all have one thing in common. The US has to defend them and has to pay for that. Trump’s view is that if we’re going to defend them we should get something for it.” By this reasoning, however, the United States should also annex much of Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, a string of countries in the Middle East, and all of the antipodes, since it also foots a large part of the bill for their defense.

Even Friedrich Engels, as far back as 1888, reached conclusions that were not so different. Reflecting on his time in Montreal and Toronto, he wrote:

It is a strange transition from the States to Canada. First one imagines that one is in Europe again, and then one thinks one is in a positively retrogressing and decaying country. Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation—the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed already socially — hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line — and when the time comes, John Bull will say “Amen” to the matter.

Beachhead of European Feudal Perfidy?

A few things have changed since 1888.

Had the United States swallowed up Canada — still fairly backward at the time Engels was writing — it could be argued that this would have been a progressive advance. And Cutrone is certainly right to celebrate the American revolutionary heritage in contrast to the trendy anti-Americanism that dominates much of today’s left. Many Jacobin contributors have similarly worked to remind the Left of that heritage — how it extends through the righteous victory of the Union over the Confederacy and into the labor, suffrage, and civil rights struggles of the twentieth century.

American revolutionaries, together with those of France, were the catalysts of modern democracy that so many other countries now enjoy. Any picket line today is not separate from the American revolution’s demand for liberty and justice — it is its logical conclusion. Tom Paine was right to say that the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind — not America as a nation but America as that collection of Enlightenment ideals that set it on a course independent from British tyranny.