Listening to former Canadian trade negotiator Chrystia Freeland's interview with Ezra Klein yesterday on his podcast, I received a sharp reminder of what it means to be part of a nation that is morally disgracing itself on the global stage. As a friend of mine would put it, there may be no such thing as collective guilt—but we are certainly experiencing collective shame.
Like the majority of my fellow Americans (Klein cites polling to this effect on his show), I entirely take Canada's side in the trade war. Most Americans view Freeland's nation in friendly terms. We know they had been a good neighbor and ally and trading partner to us for decades—until Trump staged a gratuitous and unprovoked attack on their economy—for the explicitly stated (and completely deranged) purpose of trying to undermine their sovereignty and forcibly incorporate their territory into the United States.
But precisely because most Americans know this and will say this in opinion polls, it was somewhat galling to hear Freeland address us as collective agents of Trump's trade aggression. "You, yourselves, are choosing to make electricity more expensive," she says, "[...] the initial thing that you want to do, and you are seeking to do unopposed, is actually bad for you."
Who is "you" supposed to be referring to here? Me? The person who opposes everything Trump does? Us? The American public who reject these tariffs by overwhelming margins? We all already know these tariffs are terrible and unjustified and wrong-headed. Why are you trying to convince us? We're on your side!
But the answer of course is that "you" here is shorthand for the collective entity of the United States, which—however much we may hate the fact—is symbolically represented on the global stage by our government and our president. Whether we like it or not, Trump does in some sense speak for us, now that we have elected him as our chief executive.
We, of course, routinely refer to other countries in the same way. We say: Russia did this; Iran did that; China plans to do X,Y,Z—forgetting every time we do so that "Russia" as a collective noun includes those dissidents now languishing in Siberian prisons because they marched against Putin's war; or that "Iran" includes thousands of people whose loved ones were gunned down in the streets for protesting the Islamic Republic; "China" includes imprisoned dissidents, etc.
As Dwight Macdonald writes in his essay The Responsibility of Peoples: "modern man attributes to a nation or a people qualities of will and choice that belong in reality only to individuals."
This is an obvious injustice—it ascribes collective guilt to innumerable individuals who did not want to have any part in the deplorable actions of our government. What Lord Byron wrote of Ireland many of us Americans could say likewise of Canada, after all:
My voice, though but humble, was raised for thy right,
My vote, as a freeman’s, still voted thee free,
This hand, though but feeble, would arm in thy fight,
And this heart, though outworn, had a throb still for thee!
We don't want a trade war with you Canada, we like you! We support your sovereignty and independence! So why are you blaming us?
The answer, again, is that this notion of "collective responsibility," however unfair to individuals, serves a heuristic function. It "reduce[s] mysterious and uncontrollable forces to a level where they may be dealt with," as Macdonald writes.
And if we commit this injustice for heuristic purposes upon the inhabitants of various authoritarian states around the world—we have even less warrant to protest against it when it is applied to us, since we don't even have the excuse of being forced to submit to our noxious government by force. Trump only rules with the consent of the governed. We elected this man.
This is part of the reason too why Freeland seems to feel that her beef is not just with Trump—but with "America." A majority of voters installed this guy in the White House, after all; even though he campaigned on exactly the kind of unhinged nationalism and crude self-puffery that he is now implementing. And many of our elite institutions notoriously "bent the knee" to him in the first months of his second term.
As Freeland puts it: "the capitulation to the president seems, across all of America, much more widespread than it was in the first Trump administration. [...] And for America’s friends and allies, it makes people ask: Is this just about the president, or is this about the whole country?"
But no, we say, it's not about the whole country! We all hate Trump as much as you do! We're trapped with this lunatic on even more uncomfortably intimate terms than you are!
Dwight Macdonald in his essay goes on to consider whether ordinary U.S. citizens are responsible for crimes like the internment in concentration camps of Japanese Americans, the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities, or the turning away of Jewish refugees from U.S. harbors. "But this is monstrous," he imagines his readers retorting, "I can accept no responsibility for such horrors. I and most of the people I know are vigorously opposed to such policies and have made our disapproval constantly felt in the pages of the Nation and on the speaker's platforms of the Union for Democratic Action."
To which Macdonald responds: "Precisely. And the Germans could say the same thing. And if you say, but why didn't you get rid of Hitler if you didn't like his policies, they can say: But you people (in America and England, at least) merely had to vote against your Government to overthrow it, while we risked our necks if we even talked against ours."
The result, Macdonald concludes, is that no one is guilty, yet everyone is blamed. "Not for many centuries," he writes, "have individuals been at once so powerless to influence what is done by the national collectivities to which they belong, and at the same time so generally held responsible for what is done by those collectivities."
Of course, some intellectuals, schooled in Christian dogmas of "original sin," would say that collective guilt—guilt hopelessly and ineluctably imposed on us from birth by actions not our own—is simply part of the human condition. Max Scheler, in his book Ressentiment—that slim compendium of all illiberal thought—offers a bold defense of the concept of "hereditary guilt," which he re-christens by the more sonorous term "moral solidarity."
"Conversely, it is a sign of 'slave morality,'" he insists, "[...] to limit responsibility as much as possible, to reject all guilt for the acts of 'others.'"
Whatever, man. For myself, I tend to agree with Thomas Hardy: "though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter."
(But then, I suppose, Scheler would see Hardy—and, doubtless, me—as a prime example of the "man of ressentiment" who nurses a grudge against God. Hardy himself would not have apologized for this; he wore it on his sleeve. And to all of Scheler's psychologizing of his liberal and radical opponents, one can always respond with Arthur Koestler: "[E]thical imperatives cannot be invalidated by reducing them to factors operating on a different level[.]")
My own view is that only Trump is to blame for his own actions. Canadians should understand that the American people are still the same friends and allies to them that we have always been.
But if we dare to ask other countries to extend the privilege to us of keeping this in mind—we ought to extend the same to all other countries as well.
We have to keep in mind, when we complain about "Russia" this, or "China" that—that "Russia" includes the woman quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, who responded to a Ukrainian drone strike in her city with these words of exquisite humanism: "War has come to us as well [...] Now we too will feel what it’s like to be residents of Kyiv. I’m surprised we didn’t feel it sooner."
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