00:00:00.000I'm going to talk to you today about loyalism and how that contrasts and intersects with
00:00:04.120liberalism. That word loyalist gets thrown around a lot lately. We've adopted it as a
00:00:09.860Canadian counterpart to the American patriot, dropping it in the replies when our friends
00:00:14.240make good tweets, usually accompanied by a salute emoji. It's great. I love it. We all love it. But
00:00:20.660what does this mean? What is a loyalist in the modern world? Loyalism is of course Canada's
00:00:26.880founding ideology. Upper Canada was settled by the United Empire Loyalists, who held their oaths
00:00:31.880of fealty to the British Crown, the British Empire, the British Constitution, and the Church of
00:00:35.440England to be more sacred than the sacred liberties our American cousins initiated
00:00:39.220their world-shaking revolution in the name of. French Canada followed a parallel track,0.52
00:00:44.920rejecting the French Revolution in favor of traditional Catholicism and their own feudal
00:00:48.660attachment to the English monarchy, which they might not have seen as ideal, but was preferable
00:00:53.060to the madness of the terror. Canada's reactionary origin makes it almost unique in the New World.
00:01:00.280Every other large state in the Americas was founded upon revolutionary liberal ideals.
00:01:04.420The United States was the prototype for this, and the Bolivarian revolutions of Latin America
00:01:08.440explicitly took the American Republic as their model. In contrast to this, Canada explicitly
00:01:14.660rejected liberalism, opting instead for tradition, hierarchy, and fealty. It probably sounds a bit
00:01:20.700weird to paint Canada as a reactionary liberal country. Modern Canada is the liberal state
00:01:25.420par excellence. Decades of patient social engineering have steadily abraded Canada's
00:01:30.260loyalist past. It's barely even a memory now. Most Canadians understand ourselves as being
00:01:35.400defined by our passionate advocacy of liberalism, and everyone else in the world understands us as
00:01:40.200the gayest country on the planet. So before going any further, it's necessary to define
00:01:45.640just what we mean by liberal. That isn't something we usually think about, because
00:01:50.240are all liberals. Liberalism's triumph has been absolute. We swim in liberalism like fish in
00:01:55.900water. Liberalism is the ideological scaffolding that holds up the firmament of our political
00:02:00.940theology. The left are liberals, but conservatives are classical liberals. To be fiscally conservative
00:02:07.540but socially liberal actually means to be fiscally liberal in the old sense, that is to say,
00:02:12.140to favor an economic model based upon free markets. Dissidents to the liberal and conservative
00:02:16.700mainstream often style themselves as libertarians, who are really hyper-liberals in a right-wing
00:02:21.960direction. In the other direction, leftists will often call themselves communists or even anarchists
00:02:29.480who simply take liberalism to its logical conclusions in the other direction. Even those
00:02:36.280of us who consciously reject liberalism per se tend to call themselves illiberal or post-liberal,
00:02:42.540which is to say that they define themselves in reference to liberalism. Some call themselves
00:02:48.760reactionaries, and they are reacting against what? That's right, liberalism. None of these labels
00:02:53.340really tell you, or more importantly, anyone else, anything about the positive content of
00:02:58.040these ideologies. This brings us to a branding problem. Conservatism sounds stuffy and unimaginative,
00:03:04.780raising the obvious questions of conserve what and why. That's beyond the fact that conservatism
00:03:09.860hasn't actually conserved anything, not even, as the old joke has it, the women's restroom. So
00:03:14.640conservatism also has the stink of long failure about it. Meanwhile, to call yourself illiberal
00:03:20.620is to imply that you hate liberty. People like liberty. It's good to be free. Why do you hate
00:03:27.700good things, Mr. Post-Liberal? I'm sure you have a 5,000-word essay explaining that, but can you
00:03:33.560lay it out in a five-second elevator pitch? I can't, which is why you're hearing a 5,000-word
00:03:39.480essay. Liberalism is usually understood as being defined by a few core propositions. The first and
00:03:47.000most axiomatic is the moral equality of man. Originally, this didn't mean equality in the
00:03:52.360modern sense, where we have to pretend that everyone is exactly the same, although it
00:03:56.180inevitably developed into that. Instead, it started by reducing the category man to a sort of abstract
00:04:02.980wireframe model, stripped of all identifying characteristics of race, class, sex, nation,
00:04:08.460language, age, ability, and so on. What you're left with is a featureless androgyne whose only
00:04:13.660characteristics are the basic drives to seek pleasure and avoid pain, together with a certain
00:04:18.580facility for reasoned logic, which our abstract entity applies in the service of maximizing
00:04:24.000pleasure and minimizing pain. From this beginning, liberalism posits the existence of inalienable
00:04:33.100and universal, natural, or human rights. As with the concept of equality, this concept of human
00:04:39.040rights has been expanded dramatically over the centuries, but in its original conception,
00:04:43.140as laid out by John Locke, the primary rights were the right to life, in other words, to not be
00:04:48.920murdered, the right to property, that is, to enjoy the use of one's possessions and the fruits of
00:04:54.000one's labor, and the right to liberty, that is, the right to do as one pleases with one's life
00:04:58.340and one's possessions. It's his last right to liberty, from the Latin libertas, from which
00:05:03.160liberalism takes its name. To be liberated is to be free from constraint, to be unbound from
00:05:12.820obligation. Charles Hayward likes to characterize liberalism as the emancipation from unchosen bonds,
00:05:19.120and indeed those were the first forms of bondage that liberalism sought to dissolve,
00:05:22.820as obligations that you haven't chosen are interpreted as axiomatically despotic in liberal
00:05:27.760thought. For example, serfdom consists of hereditary attachment to the land. You are a serf
00:05:33.160because your father was a serf and his father before him. Nothing you do yourself can change0.97
00:05:37.580that fixed condition. Liberalism promised, and delivered, freedom from serfdom throughout the0.95
00:05:42.900old world. It later applied the same principle to emancipate the chattel slaves toiling in the0.99
00:05:47.400plantations of the new. As liberalism proceeded, however, even chosen obligations have been0.99
00:05:53.940gradually dissolved. Marriage is no longer an irreversible vow to form an irrevocable bond
00:05:59.680through good times and bad until death do both parties part, but can be dissolved at a whim,
00:06:05.360for any reason or no reason at all, and at a moment's notice. Marriage is not an unchosen bond.
00:06:12.540To the contrary, lovers enter into it freely, even joyfully, and always have. Yet liberalism
00:06:18.700came for marriage regardless. This was baked into the premises. Liberalism directly implies
00:06:25.640the freedom to choose. An irreversible decision, as for instance to enter into an unbreakable
00:06:30.920contract, imposes a constraint upon choice, and ultimately that constraint must be removed if
00:06:36.660liberty is to be maintained. To this foundation of moral equality and natural rights, Locke added
00:06:44.000a thought experiment borrowed from Hobbes, which he called the state of nature. This posited a
00:06:49.800pre-cultural state of dissociated human atoms with no pre-existing social connections between them,0.89
00:06:56.240who then sit down and have a nice civilized negotiation, as autistic Anglo philosophers0.88
00:07:01.620are wont to do, about how they should organize their interactions. From this, Locke derived the0.99
00:07:07.640social contract, the idea that society should be constituted as a broad agreement to accept some
00:07:12.940minimal restrictions upon natural rights in order to ensure that no one would infringe upon the
00:07:17.640rights of another. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. That's where we get
00:07:22.620that idea. Under social contract theory, the state's legitimacy is founded upon its ability
00:07:28.320to safeguard these natural rights. All of this sounds great, of course, you know, for all that
00:07:34.220we like to style ourselves as post-liberal. I don't think that there are all that many of us
00:07:38.560who dislike the idea that we have rights and that the state should respect and guarantee them.
00:07:44.000The events of the last few days in which the Canadian government and the municipal government
00:07:47.800of Hamilton have done their level best to interfere with our rights to freedom of assembly
00:07:52.080and freedom of speech are illustrative enough of this disposition on our part. We assume as a matter
00:07:58.040of course that, as free men, we possess these rights, and we become outraged when those rights
00:08:04.040are violated. Do you want to give up your rights? I sure don't.
00:08:11.440The problem, however, with all this good stuff, is that all of these abstractions and thought
00:08:16.060experiments upon which they're based are so much airy nonsense. Locke's state of nature never
00:08:21.040existed. Perhaps if he'd had access to the anthropological research of subsequent centuries,
00:08:25.640he wouldn't have made his little thought experiment in the first place. There was never
00:08:29.500some Edenic state in which men existed alongside one another and free from some set of custom
00:08:34.520social mores and laws. Every society, every Neolithic tribe, even our hominid ancestors
00:08:41.260had some kind of nomos by which they organized themselves. From this it also follows. The
00:08:46.680abstract model of the generic universal man is also nonsense. Every human who has ever existed
00:08:52.300was born to specific parents who came from specific lineages, speaking a specific language,
00:08:57.240belonging to a specific tribe, professing a specific religion with its own specific mythology,
00:09:02.380history, customs, rituals, laws, sexual mores, parenting practices, technologies, and so on.
00:09:08.460These specificities are not accidental features that can be stripped away from the model,
00:09:14.260but absolutely mandatory elements, the very foundations of identity without which a human
00:09:19.420does not and indeed cannot exist. These are necessary constraints, because they are what
00:09:25.680define a human as who he is rather than some other person. The universal man in the state
00:09:33.320of nature never existed, but what's interesting is that as liberalism has proceeded, it has
00:09:38.200probably inevitably formed the world in the image of that state of nature inhabited by
00:09:44.040those formless generic human atoms. Liberal man is profoundly deracinated. Without any of the
00:09:50.520strong attachment to a specific place tying people or country, he is not a member of any
00:09:55.280community organizations, volunteer groups, or fraternal societies. People move in and out of
00:10:00.220his life like phantoms. He has few close friends, certainly none so strongly bonded to him that they
00:10:06.020would die for him if need be, and kill for him if asked. His romantic relationships are similarly
00:10:12.040tenuous. He dates girls, he breaks up with girls, and if he gets married, he gets divorced and
00:10:16.000married again and divorced again. Or, you know, these days he doesn't even bother dating because
00:10:20.860even that's too much trouble. In work, he has no particular loyalty to his employer, nor does he
00:10:26.360expect any in return. In religion, if he has any interest in the subject, which he usually doesn't,
00:10:31.020he floats from one cult to another, trying on ersatz spiritual traditions from wherever and
00:10:35.920whenever, mixing and matching as his fancy takes him. His only strong convictions are that no one
00:10:40.960should tell him how to enjoy himself so long as his enjoyment does not directly harm someone else.
00:10:47.560But really, how does this affect you? Liberal man is a gooner.
00:10:54.960The dissolution of the social order into this Lockean state of nature presents a profound
00:11:00.340practical problem. Society is in practice formed from interwoven webs of mutual obligation.
00:11:06.140With those obligations dissolved, the only way for society to function is for bonds to be reimposed
00:11:10.300via the force of the state. Take marriage again. In a pre-liberal society, marriage was an
00:11:14.760indissoluble bond in which the husband was expected to provide for his wife, a wife was
00:11:18.680expected to serve her husband, and both of them were expected to cooperate towards the end of
00:11:23.020protecting and nurturing their children. Liberal man does not feel himself to be bound by these
00:11:28.060obligations, if he doesn't want to be bound, and which taken to its natural conclusion would result
00:11:33.840in large numbers of starving homeless children. Thus the state intervenes to force divorced fathers
00:11:38.920to pay child support, and when the father cannot pay, or when paternity simply cannot be determined
00:11:43.620to support the single mother's children directly via social welfare programs paid for, of course,
00:11:48.160by taxes taken from primarily, of course, fathers. Obviously, the problems with liberalism go well
00:11:55.860beyond this. DEI in the universities and the workplace, the fertility collapse, replacement0.97
00:12:01.500migration, all of these are downstream of the acidic effects of liberalism, proceeding from
00:12:06.560and justified by the discourse of rights and the doctrine of equality. I could go into this in
00:12:10.600detail, but you've heard it all before. And one of history's greatest ironies, the rapid societal
00:12:18.100dissolution precipitated by liberalism is forcing liberal elites to behave in an increasingly
00:12:23.520illiberal fashion in order to maintain a semblance of a functioning society. Again,
00:12:28.280well-trod ground. You've heard all of this before. The elites of liberal democracies no longer believe
00:12:34.740even liberalism themselves. Liberalism has transcended itself, liberating itself from
00:12:40.540the tyranny of unchosen bondage to its own foundational ideals.
00:12:47.440Let's go back to that notion of rights and its connection to the concept of libertas.
00:12:52.660Liberalism's blind spot is that every right implies a responsibility. If you have a right
00:12:58.020to free speech, such that no one can compel you to say something or not to say something,
00:13:02.520then it follows that you are the only one who is responsible for your own words.
00:13:07.980Liberalism is completely silent with respect to responsibilities. It recognizes the concepts of
00:13:13.680what one is allowed to do, what one is free to do, what one cannot be prevented from doing,
00:13:18.920but says nothing at all about what one should do, what is right to do, what one must do.
00:13:24.980The result of that is a lot of terrible behavior and a lot of ad hoc efforts to
00:13:29.880impose order on this by means of utilitarianism or critical theory or effective altruism or
00:13:35.640whatever the current moral fad happens to be, most of which tend to result in just more
00:13:40.380terrible behavior. So if we take this concept of responsibility, duty, obligation, you go back to
00:13:48.540Latin because that's, you know, that's where liberalism came from, libertas, you know. So
00:13:53.280let's go to the back to the Latin. What do we have? We have officium. That's duty in Latin,
00:13:57.560officium that's terrible that gives us officialism that's terrible branding so okay we're not going
00:14:01.880to do that okay okay english maybe you could say dutism or obligationism but that's that's that's
00:14:07.720also no one's going to sign up for that there's a lot another latin root that captures our
00:14:13.080essential meanings though is fides which is faith trust confidence honesty belief or loyalty
00:14:19.000not necessarily faith in like a religious sense but like faithfulness faith to one another right
00:14:23.240and that of course gives us loyalism which rolls off the tongue very nicely particularly here in
00:14:30.880Canada but what does it mean what does loyalism mean right so we started talking about at the
00:14:36.020beginning of this and I don't think it can really mean like attachments to the old symbols of crown
00:14:42.020and altar although I don't think we should discard them but it's not it's not that alone you know
00:14:48.540those have been hollowed out you know you look at the king and you know and you know does anyone
00:14:55.320really think mark carney is a loyalist because he invited charles iii for a throne speech
00:15:01.260i don't think so you know or are members of parliament are they loyalists because they
00:15:06.700pontificate about westminster democracy come on you know like they don't they don't really believe
00:15:12.180any of this stuff doesn't mean anything to them and then there's the church of england you know
00:15:16.260okay well that's let's be honest it's dead it's it's it's a mausoleum of empty churches haunted
00:15:22.980by elderly lesbians and you know maybe we can reclaim this one day but that day is not today0.97
00:15:31.340you know maybe tomorrow but it's not today so we have to do without them we have to find something
00:15:35.880sort of a little deeper than those symbols specifically so if you poke into the thought
00:15:42.500of the early Canadian loyalists you actually can extract something from the kind of taking the
00:15:48.340trace of their thought a bit more abstract if you will which is kind of a perverse thing to do with
00:15:53.300the ideology that is very concrete but you can you can do that and this has actually been done
00:15:58.900not by me by this guy Robert Passfield who wrote a book called The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory
00:16:05.160Mind that was his PhD thesis in like 1975 or something but he didn't get around to publishing
00:16:10.200it until 2018 and i found out about it like a year ago from fortisax who will go into a lot of the
00:16:16.440details about this yes he's been shilling this book hard to anyone who will listen very interesting
00:16:21.720book so what what passfield did is he went back through like all the the sermons and correspondence
00:16:27.480and memoranda left by our early intellectual elites and you know these guys were like you know
00:16:34.520They were jurists and colonial administrators and churchmen, you know, most prominently Bishop John Straughan that like, you know, I never was told about this guy when I was, you know, learning Canadian history.
00:16:48.080Turns out he educated basically our entire elite in the first half of the 19th century and like put like a deep stamp on this country's personality.
00:16:59.000They kind of airbrushed him out, you know.
00:17:01.200So I mean, these were busy guys, they didn't have time for like abstract political philosophy,
00:17:06.780their hands were kind of full, you know, you've got like these thinly scattered illiterate
00:17:11.580settlers who were, you know, like in these tiny settlements across a frozen wilderness
00:17:16.820and you're trying to like organize them and carve out civilization from that.
00:17:19.580They had their hands full with the practical matters.
00:17:22.200But you can kind of like read between the lines and see the little comments they make