What Does Loyalty Look Like In A Nation That No Longer Asks It Of You?
An extended reflection on the nature of loyalty, nationalism, and cultural defence; when nobody else is coming to help.
A lot is made about Canada’s loyalist heritage, and rightly so. The basis of Canada’s national character is built off the way of life embodied by the United Empire Loyalists, refugees of the loyalist cause following the American Revolutionary War. Their Protestant work ethic, quiet conservatism, strong emphasis on political unity and institutional loyalty, still shape Canadian life and politics to this day.
So, it being the case that our national origin lies in these United Empire Loyalists. What happens to this nation when its government ceases to demand loyalty from its people? Further, what happens to that same nation when its government not only penalizes national pride, but takes an active role in the emboldenment of seditious elements in its society?
We find that in such an environment, there emerges the confused and orphaned Canada that we presently inhabit. A country rife with traitors, where our political representatives consistently fail to represent the country they are meant to serve. We see the importation of foreigners en masse, and the weaponization of our education system for the purpose of quelling sentiments of pride.
Only when the financial interests of the political establishment are threatened do we see any momentum to rally our inherent sense of identity. Otherwise, such feelings are seen as inconvenient roadblocks to the ushering in of a “post-national” Canada.
Globalism, which has become the status quo in Canada, is directly opposed to nationalism - especially so if the country is an inheritor of an imperial legacy, like the case of Canada. To correct this, the establishment and academia pull the levers of power to re-educate us, and extinguish feelings of identity before they can fully emerge. This takes many forms, but it is most apparent in our education, where Canadian heroes are villainized, individuals who contributed so greatly to Canada’s story are either ignored or made out to be monsters.
Instead, we are meant to revere mediocrities, for if we were to emulate great men, we may be inclined to emulate their “backwards” ideas. Emulating mediocrities keeps the masses mediocre, and prevents them from threatening the establishment and its interests. Thomas Carlyle says in his book On Heroes, that “we cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him.”
Thus, the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in the square must go the way of the dodo, too his visage on our $10 bill will be expunged and replaced by an effigy of national shame in the form of Viola Desmond. It matters not who the man was, so long as he did something great and terrific in service of Canada or the Empire, he must be found culpable of some greater shame against the holy writ of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
Upon facing a country where national pride is so widely condemned and persecuted, many take the route of Americans. They seek solace in the ideology and way of life offered by economic liberalism. This is the inclination of the modern Conservative Party of Canada; where individualism, NIMBYism, and libertarian sentiments run wild.
Whether it is opposition to proposed national projects, consistent appeals to budget, or cries for the implementation of “small government.” Generally, we see the Conservative Party, which was once the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and the National Policy - a platform for competent, consistent, and efficient maximization of Canada’s economic and state potential - is now the party of regression, and perpetuation of the Staples Economy.
They see the Liberal Party’s failures as representative of government overreach, not betrayal of fundamental principles. In reaction, the conservative bloc will hone in on the idea that they are isolated agents existing within the Canadian state. These feelings are particularly saturated in regions where there is an intersection between high economic output and low population density, namely Alberta and rural Ontario.
It is from this debased mindset that the pursuit of political aims for personal gain emerge: 51st staters, Albertan separatism, government deregulation, and privatization of systems. These ideas are all subjectively beneficial for their advocates, but ultimately harmful to the communities to which they belong, and the nation that their communities are a part.
Economic liberalism, as first posited by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, can be simply summarized via the following quote from Smith: “Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.” It is this attitude which acts as the basis of nearly all forms of contemporary individualistic philosophy, and the driving force of these individual focused political projects in Canada.
What this liberalistic framework, which is often erroneously dubbed “fiscal conservatism,” fails to apprehend, however, is the inherent contradiction of its premises. Smith purports in the Wealth of Nations that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”
Yet, in his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he directly contradicts the praise of self-interest when describing the nature and origin of human misery as arising from “avarice over the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation.”
So how can we take this philosophy seriously when at one moment it is said that “every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command… [he] naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society,” and the next it is said that “the person under the influence of [avarice, ambition, and vain-glory], is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires.”
Ultimately, I agree more heartily with the assertions of Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and therefore assert that an individualist worldview is intrinsically incompatible with the Canadian nation. As for those who seek absorption into the United States, their individualistic attitudes likewise draw from economic liberal philosophy.
“Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire;” is a liberalistic sentiment which directly contradicts the previous inclination of the Canadian nation during the National Policy, and the praxis of Canadian economic theory through Harold Innis’ proposed Staples Thesis. Innis speaks on how Canada’s weak economy as a consequence of trade reliance “to the highly industrialized areas of Europe and latterly the United States…has been responsible for various peculiar tendencies in Canadian development.”
This peculiar development began in the fur trade, and continued until a response was concocted under Sir John A. Macdonald, in the form of the National Policy. Macdonald felt that “Canada, with its agricultural resources, rich in its fisheries, timber, and mineral wealth, was worthy of a nobler position than that of being a slaughter market for the United States,” and he said the attitudes of his opposition amongst the Liberals who advocated for that same free trade would “inevitably result in the annexation of this Dominion to the United States. Its friends in the United States urge as the chief reason for its adoption that unrestricted reciprocity would be the first step in the direction of political union.”
So, as it was in the earliest years of Canadian Confederation, it is now; where “veiled treason” seeks unity with the United States, or the dismantling of those peculiarities of Canada, those unique attributes of loyalty which distinguish us as a “loyal band of British subjects, who gave up everything that men most prize and were content to begin life anew in the wilderness rather than forego allegiance to their sovereign.”
Ironically, a better example of an embodiment of Canadian attitudes are those which implicitly reject Canada’s nationhood. Advocates of a globalist, “post-national” Canada are exercising a general loyalty to institutions, even despite the institutions’ own treachery.
At the time of the United Empire Loyalists, the institutions of Canada to which they held loyalties were guided by the British Empire. In the centuries since, however, the institutional authority that was once wielded by the British has been supplanted by various international and academic organizations which push an anti-Imperialist, anti-White, and fundamentally anti-Canadian message.
Despite this shift, the general inclination of Canadians to adhere to the ordinance of established authority means that a large swathe of Canadians are now inducted into a worldview of anti-Canadianism. A people that have been bereft of their original purpose, now - out of their innate loyalty to Canada, denigrate it and proudly state that the land which it inhabits is “stolen.”
But, as Ontario’s motto “Loyal she began, Loyal she remains” states, these people are still loyal. This was demonstrated when those same Canadians were able to be efficiently mobilized against the United States during the threats of annexation, without any hint of seeing the hypocrisy in their actions.
Laurentian elites have promoted globalism throughout Canada, utilizing immigration as a pawn in global economic games played among various establishment groups, be they found in the World Economic Forum, or the Universities of the United States. An ascendant global post-liberal order serves as the new herald of institutional consensus, displacing the old Imperial order and wishing to tear their antecedents out of the history books. All the while, Canada and her people are listful; acting as the lamplighter to their internationalist cause.
Yet, for us as people whose loyalties lie in something deeper than ourselves as lone individuals, but not so superficially loyal so as to follow our establishment into oblivion, we must be able to quantify what precisely loyalty is, what a nation is, and how to identify civilizational treason in all its various forms.
For the purposes of this essay, loyalty can be understood in a few central forms: Personal, as in to a particular individual or cause; Institutional, as in to a polity or entity, and Civilizational, which is identical to cultural or ethnic loyalty, and takes the form of loyalty to one’s people writ large.
Personal loyalty can be identified in the movements of both economic liberalism and royalism, where economic liberalism is loyalty to themselves and immediate relations, which can be called “fidelity”, and royalism is loyalty to a particular monarch or their house, which can be called “fealty.” Institutional loyalty describes the kind of loyalty seen amongst the Canadian people in the contemporary period; who are loyal to Canada’s institutions even to the point of suicide. Civilizational loyalty, however, is unique and can be represented by the term “nationalism.”
Nationalism is a term whose use has become glib, now it can mean anything from “civic nationalism,” which places emphasis on a nation’s culture as being its defining element, separate from heritage; all the way to “Christian nationalism,” which can be simply put as “Protestant Integralism” - removing the separation between Church and State.
Without any qualifiers, however, nationalism can be simply understood as an exercise of dogmatic loyalty to one’s nation and civilization. I include the “and,” because usually nationalism is bound up with the civilizational conventions of a particular nation.
For example, American nationalism is inherently different from Canadian nationalism, despite the fact that their founding peoples are nearly identical. American nationalism, interestingly enough, more generally fits into the categories of personal and institutional loyalty, because the American “nation” is now broadly recognized to be propositional - even in cases of American ethnic identitarians; whereas, Canadian nationalism - which can be typified as a contemporary manifestation of loyalism - is loyal to the Canadian nation as represented by the four founding nations of England, Scotland, Ireland, and France, in addition to the core institution of the Canadian Confederation via the Crown, and a general loyalty to the civilizational continuity established by the British Empire across the globe.
Canadian nationalism is loyalty to the Canadian nation in particular, but also loyalty to the institution and civilization which facilitated its genesis. American nationalism bears no such extended loyalties, and therefore cannot be fully counted as existing among the ranks of civilizational loyalty.
So given we understand loyalty and its particulars in the context of the Canadian nation, how does one identify sedition, treason, or other varieties of disloyalty?
Disloyalty takes a variety of forms, in the same way that loyalty does, but in the Canadian context, it is simple to identify. It can be broadly defined as any action which harms the nation’s civilizational patrimony. Mass immigration for the purpose of replacing the founding people; denigration of our national heritage and Canadian heroes; demonization of colonialism and imperialism seeking to debase us from the underpinning of the genesis of the Canadian peoples.
Further, disloyalty can also be seen in loosening the bonds of the Canadian Confederation, or weakening the strength and power of the Dominion of Canada; rejection of the central Canadian institutions that signify our origin in the British Imperial civilization; or placing greater value in any entity, ideology, group, individual, or cause which runs against the collective interest of the Canadian people.
With this definition in mind, we can see that disloyalty has become rampant throughout Canada, both in government and outside of it. For all the reasons heretofore mentioned, both significant political parties in Canada have become gripped by disloyalty; both to the Canadian people, and the Canadian civilizational patrimony. A concerted effort has been made to instill a deep disloyalty amongst one of the people in which loyalty to loyalty is a great virtue.
What, then, does loyalty look like in a country that does not ask it of you?
To investigate where our loyalties ought to lie, I want to take a moment to look at Yukio Mishima’s On the Defence of Culture. In the essay, Mishima tackles a variety of issues relating to the crisis of Japanese culture at the time of his writing. The aspects that are useful to us relate both to his contrast between “culture” and “culturalism,” in addition to his argument on the proper perspective towards the Japanese monarchy in an increasingly democratic Japan.
We will follow the argument in the order that Mishima sets it out, starting with the definition of culturalism. Mishima defines culturalism as: “that tendency which seeks to sever culture from its bloodstained womb of life and reproductive acts and judge it by some pleasant humanistic product. There, culture transformed into something harmless and beautiful, the shared property of mankind, like a fountain in a plaza.”
In this definition, we can plainly see the modern tactics of the government to separate “Canadian-ness” from Canada’s history. Why are Canadians depicted as loggers? Not because of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its mercantilist policy, but simply because Canadians are loggers. Why are mounties a national symbol? Not because of the treacherous journey across the Canadian plains during the March West, but simply because mounties are a national symbol.
Following the argument, the end goal of this process of culturalism is what Mishima dubs culture as an object. He defines the term as follows: “It is like the principle of art for art’s sake of the indulgent enjoyer, who appreciates culture mainly as works and objects. There, naturally, hobbyistic contribution is not obstructed. Culture was safely managed as an object, and peacefully propelled in the direction of becoming ‘the shared cultural asset of mankind.’”
Canadian-ness therefore is not Canada and her people as they emerged through time, but a crystallization of a concept of Canada as though it had appeared fully formed in the 21st Century. Being “the shared cultural asset of mankind,” anybody can be Canadian; you need not claim descent from the factors of Rupert’s Land, you can merely don a buffalo plaid shirt and you are just as Canadian as them. The campaign hat of the mountie is tossed aside in favour of a Sikh turban, and nothing of value is lost. Because the mountie is not the descendant of the Northwest Mounted Police who needed those hats to block the sun on that long march, the mountie is what tourists take pictures of during a musical ride.
This is the severance from the “bloodstained womb of life” that Mishima talks about. Everything uncomfortable and challenging about the concept is expunged, taken at face value. Mishima sums it up quite succinctly when discussing the culturalism which occurred in Japan following the conclusion of the Second World War. “[Occupation policy] severed the links of ‘the chrysanthemum and the sword,’ used only the parts that were effective in the formation of citizen’s morality, and suppressed the harmful parts. Simultaneously with various political and social reforms, it was thought that the tendency to revert to the sources of culture had been extinguished. This is when culturalism began. When it became impossible for anything to be harmful.”
In Mishima’s framework, culturalism rejects what he christens the “Three Characteristics of National Culture.” Reflexivity, where culture is not just something that is witnessed, but that alters its participant; Totality, where culture is something that pervades all aspects of one’s life, from how one carries himself, to the way that government enacts and enforces law; and Subjectivity, that even though there is a visible continuity of culture between individuals, it ultimately manifests itself differently in each of its adherents.
All of these characteristics are only possible when there exists a high degree of homogeneity within a given society. In multicultural societies, there is no unified national culture, because there is no unity in heritage and experience. What is reflexivity in a country where this is absent, and there is no authoritative culture to impress itself upon the individual? It is nothing, it ceases to act in any coherent direction.
Totality follows the same course. A culture cannot extend into all aspects of life when there is no agreement on what that life entails. Law no longer reflects a people, institutions no longer embody a way of being, and public life is reduced to a cargo cult that has no groundwork upon which to substantiate itself.
Subjectivity, too, becomes unmoored. Variation presumes a shared foundation from which it departs, yet in its absence, there is no continuity to depart from. What remains are individuals whose modes of being bear no necessary relation to one another, each formed in isolation from anything resembling a common culture.
Foreigners carry their own national cultures, friction between different national cultures is what tempts states to adopt culturalism - to fashion identity into a product which can be marketed and adopted universally. As Mishima put it; culture becomes a “pleasant humanistic product.”
Canada began the dive into culturalism in 1965 with the replacement of the Canadian Red Ensign by the present Maple Leaf Flag, and it was institutionalized in 1988 with the enactment of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.
These actions explicitly abandoned the pursuit of retaining or developing a Canadian national culture; the red ensign - which had been recognized as Canada’s flag since the most remote days of our history - was cast off, removing the emblazoned symbol of Canada’s ethnic heritage in the process. In the eyes of the government of the day, this symbol was too ethnically charged - too bound up with history that could be seen as uncomfortable to the global objective of a culturalized Canada.
Together with the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which was explicitly instated in order to suppress distinction and discretion regarding Canadian identity, these actions demonstrate the plan of our leaders to set forth laws for the purpose of internationalizing Canada’s culture as an object.
Thankfully, Mishima sets out an action plan for what to do when faced with culturalism which has successfully transformed culture into an object. His antidote is to embody the characteristics of culture in its defence. “There must be the possibility of the ultimate realization of the identification of the defender with respect to the defended.”
Within any effective defence of culture; reflexivity, totality, and subjectivity must abide. Mishima defines this as the “unity of creation and defence.” Essentially, wherefore culture cannot be stagnant without descent into culturalism and the crystallization of culture as an object, its defence must therefore be animated and versatile. “If the present state of the object to be defended is perfect, if it is a passive being to be only defended, that is, if there exists in the object to be defended neither the possibility nor the subject of the development of its life, then the act of defending such a thing will surely ultimately end either in defeatism or the destruction of the thing to be defended.”
What this means in practice is that the defence of Canadian culture cannot merely take the form of nostalgia or passive remembrance. Mishima warns that “if there exists in the object to be defended neither the possibility nor the subject of the development of its life,” then defence decays into defeatism. The task therefore is not to preserve Canada as though she were a museum exhibit, but to continue the living continuity of Canadian civilization.
A people loyal to their nation ought to found families, build churches, preserve local customs, maintain civic organizations, establish schools, write literature, raise monuments, and participate in public life in a manner that reflects the totality of Canadian culture. If Canadian nationalism merely seeks to freeze the Dominion at some arbitrary point in the past, then it too becomes culturalism, reducing Canada to an object of aesthetic appreciation rather than a living inheritance. The unity of creation and defence means that loyalty to Canada must itself produce Canadians. It means that the defence of culture is inseparable from the continuation of the people who embody it, and that every act of genuine national creation is itself an act of resistance against cultural dissolution.
To conclude his essay, Mishima discusses the Japanese Emperor in relation to his theory of national culture and culturalism. In this section entitled; “The Emperor as Cultural Concept” he sets out how one can be loyal to the Emperor “as a cultural concept,” without necessitating direct obedience to the ordinance and direction of the state. To do this, he cites several examples from Japanese history of the contradiction of a certain kind of ‘loyal resistance.’
“This sort of Emperor System as a cultural concept, fulfils the two requirements of the totality of culture, and that, along with the temporal continuity being connected to religious rites, spatial continuity at times comes to even accept political disorder.”
Mishima understood that loyalty to a cultural concept could, under certain conditions, demand resistance to the state itself. “When state power and order have placed state and people in a condition of separation,” he writes, “the cultural concept that is the Emperor acted as a principle of reform that sought to restore the non-separation of state and people.” This distinction is essential for Canadians to understand. Loyalty to Canada cannot merely mean obedience to whatever policy is handed down by Ottawa, because institutions can themselves become alienated from the civilization which produced them.
The Crown in Canada therefore must be understood not simply as a constitutional mechanism, but as a symbol of civilizational continuity. It is the living residue of the British Imperial civilization which established Canada, settled her frontiers, founded her institutions, and united her peoples beneath a common political inheritance. The tragedy of the contemporary monarchy is not that it has ceased to exist, but that it has increasingly been severed from the people whose continuity it once represented.
Yet Mishima demonstrates that this severance does not abolish loyalty itself. Rather, it transforms loyalty into what might be called loyal resistance. Just as the Japanese patriots who acted in the name of Emperor Kōmei sought to restore “the non-separation of state and people,” so too must Canadians seek to restore the continuity between Canada’s institutions and Canada’s civilization.
This is why loyalty to the Crown as a cultural concept can coexist with opposition to the present political order, Mishima says “‘Elegance’ was the cultural quintessence of the Court and admiration for it, but in times of emergency, ‘elegance’ even took the form of terrorism. That is, the Emperor as a cultural concept is not only on the side of state power and order, but even extended its hand to the side of disorder.” The object of loyalty is not bureaucratic management, nor the transient ambitions of governments, but the enduring continuity of the nation itself.
The examples from British and French history demonstrate this same principle repeatedly. The Cavaliers who fought for Charles I after his execution did not merely fight for a man, but for an understanding of England rooted in hierarchy, continuity, and sacred kingship. The Jacobites who rejected the Glorious Revolution did so because they saw Parliament’s settlement as an assault upon the organic continuity of the British peoples. Likewise, the United Empire Loyalists did not flee to British North America because King George III was flawless, but because rebellion against the Crown represented rebellion against the entire civilizational order from which they drew meaning.
Walter Stewart writes of the Loyalists in his book True Blue: The Loyalist Legend, in this work he characterizes the loyalist attitude as following: “The Loyalists stood, not for England and King George, but for Unity of the Empire. Unity of the Empire stood for many things, but at heart it stood for one main conviction ‘To Hell with the Yanks.’”
In this framework, the loyalist cause is not necessarily bound to the King as an individual - which would be royalism, but the King as a political technology, and - to once again take from Mishima - a “cultural concept.”
The King acts as the personification of the British people in North America and throughout the Empire, by rejecting the King, republicans (in the sense of opposing monarchy) are rejecting Britishness itself. This attitude typified many of the middle class supporters of the loyalists in British North America. Stewart specifically points at a Missionary by the name of John Stuart who “strenuously opposed the entire thrust of British policy from 1763 onward, but remained faithful to ‘the British connection.’ The king was wrong, but he was still the king.”
For the men of God among the loyalists, there was another conviction which compelled their loyalty to the King - that being the King’s status as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. In the writings of Reverend Thomas Chandler we can see this same understanding of loyalty expressed through the language of Anglican Christianity. Loyalty is not merely political expedience, nor attachment to authority for its own sake, but a moral duty inseparable from the maintenance of social order itself. Chandler’s insistence that the Church of England had “never stained” itself with “treasons and rebellions” reflects a broader understanding that disorder against legitimate authority inevitably corrodes the civilization from which that authority emerges.
This attitude mirrors the framework set out earlier regarding institutional and civilizational loyalty. The loyalists did not understand themselves merely as subjects of a government administration, but as participants within a sacred continuity stretching through Church, Crown, and people alike. Chandler’s emphasis upon liturgy, prayer, and ritual remembrance demonstrates Mishima’s principle of totality in practice; loyalty permeated all aspects of life, from governance to worship. Even the yearly commemoration of deliverance from rebellion acted as a form of cultural continuity, preserving the reflexive habits of loyalty across generations.
The significance of this becomes apparent when contrasted against the contemporary Canadian condition. Modern liberalism attempts to reduce loyalty to procedural attachment towards abstract institutions detached from any deeper inheritance. The loyalists, by contrast, understood loyalty as emerging from an entire way of life. Their fidelity to Crown and Church was civilizational.
Too, the Quakers publicly swore an oath of thanksgiving to the King for the religious tolerance that was extended by the monarchy towards them and others residing within British territories.
“Remember that, as under divine Providence, you are indebted to the King and his royal ancestors, for the continued favour of enjoying your religious liberties, you are under deep obligations to manifest your loyalty and fidelity; and to discourage every attempt which may be made by any, to excite disaffection, or disrespect to him.”
Religious causes for monarchist counter-revolution also show themselves in French history. Following the French Revolution of 1789, a contingent of the peasantry in the Vendée region of France rose against the revolutionary government. Vendeans who revolted as part of the Catholic and Royal Army signified themselves with blazons of the Sacred Heart of Jesus alongside their motto “Dieu, le Roi,” or, “God, the King.”
Revolutionary France was obsessed with the dispossession of the Church of their holdings and traditional sway over French statecraft, which drove the remainder of the French aristocracy and the French working class to unite in the name of the King’s restoration - who they saw as a protector of the Church’s natural rights.
François de Charette, a general of the Catholic and Royal Army and veteran of the French Navy, delivered a speech explaining the values of the Vendeans, which provides us insight into the particular French perspective of loyalty.
“Our fatherland is our villages, our altars, our tombs, everything that our fathers have loved before us. Our fatherland is our Faith, our land, our King.” Charette demonstrates the distinction between nationalism as civilizational loyalty and nationalism as mere abstraction. For Charette, the nation was not an ideological proposition existing in the realm of theory, but an inheritance rooted in land, kinship, memory, religion, and continuity.
While the revolutionaries conceived of France as an idea which could be reconstructed according to abstract principles. “But their fatherland, what is it? Can you understand it? They want to destroy customs, order, tradition. So what is this fatherland that jeers at the past without fidelity, without love? This fatherland of disarray and irreligion?”
Vendeans understood France as something organic and inherited, something which emerged through history and therefore could not be severed from the civilization which produced it. “For the [revolutionaries], the fatherland seems to be merely an idea; for us, it is the land. It is in their brains, we have it under our feet.” Their loyalty was not merely to the Bourbon monarchy as an institution of governance, but to the entire civilizational order embodied by throne and altar alike.
From his discourse we can see and understand many of the same aspects which Mishima sets out in respects to the defence of culture; “the youth of tradition,” that is to say, the reflexivity of culture; “everything that our fathers have loved before us,” the totality of culture; “the freedom of the inner man,” the subjectivity of culture.
Joseph de Maistre, writing in opposition to the French Revolution, argued that “the constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, is made for man. Now, there is no such thing as man in the world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians… but as for man, I declare I have never met him.” The revolutionary attempt to create universal political systems detached from inherited peoples and traditions therefore necessarily results in destruction, because it rejects the concrete realities through which nations actually exist.
The same process is visible in Canada today. The post-national conception of Canada treats the nation as an administrative zone inhabited by interchangeable individuals. Charette’s conception, however, reminds us that a nation is fundamentally particular. It is a people rooted in a distinct inheritance. Canada is not merely a legal framework or economic market, but a civilization founded by concrete peoples carrying particular traditions, loyalties, and memories.
In contrast to a revolution of bureaucrats and liberal ideals, what is to be done when it seems that the King himself is no longer the steward of reflexivity, totality, and subjectivity? Or that his power to act in its defence is diminished to the point of invisibility? A look at history can likewise provide insight into this.
“In this hall, Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, Speaker of the House of Commons, author of Utopia, was condemned to death, 1 July 1535” runs the plaque which rests on the floor of Westminster Hall in London. During the English Reformation of the 16th century, Thomas More refused to swear fealty to the newly established Church of England. He did this out of remaining conviction to the Papacy, denoting him as being among the English “recusants.”
However, despite the King behaving such as to directly shirk what More saw as his obligation to the Church of Rome, More nonetheless refused to eschew loyalty to the crown. Famously, at the time of his execution, his final words were “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first;” alluding to the fact that even despite persecution, harassment, trial, and death sentence, More never once spoke out against the King or state.
In the actions of Sir Thomas More we can see what loyal disobedience can look like, how even despite the King’s actions leading to the rejection of a principle which More held dearly, that would not push him to reject his own principles of loyalty.
As for the diminishment of power, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 demonstrates precisely why loyalty to the Crown must be understood differently from personal fealty to the King as an individual. When James II was deposed by Parliament and replaced by William III and Mary II, the English political tradition underwent a transformation in which sovereignty increasingly ceased to rest within the person of the monarch himself and instead became bound up with Parliament and the broader constitutional order.
For the Jacobites, this represented a betrayal of hereditary legitimacy and sacred kingship. Yet even amidst this crisis, loyalty to the British state itself did not vanish. Many who rejected the Revolution Settlement nonetheless continued to understand themselves as Englishmen, Scotsmen, and subjects of the British Crown. Their quarrel was not with Britain as a civilization, but with the alteration of the relationship between monarch, parliament, and people.
This distinction is essential for Canadians. The contemporary Canadian monarchy no longer operates according to the older understanding of patriarchalism defended by Robert Filmer in Patriarcha, wherein the King acts as the direct paternal head of the nation. The Crown instead functions primarily as a constitutional and cultural institution. Its importance lies not in the private virtues or failings of Charles III as an individual, but in what the monarchy represents historically.
The Crown signifies the continuity of Canada’s civilizational inheritance. It ties Canada to the Loyalists, to Confederation, to the British constitutional tradition, and to the imperial civilization from which the Canadian nation emerged. Thus, loyalty to the Crown today ought to be understood primarily as nationalism rather than fealty. The object of loyalty is not blind obedience to the King’s personal will, but preservation of the institutional continuity which the monarchy embodies.
Thomas Hobbes writes in Leviathan that “covenants, without the sword, are but words.” What preserves nations is therefore not abstract declarations alone, but institutions capable of maintaining continuity across generations. The Crown functions as precisely such an institution. It acts as a political technology preserving the memory and legitimacy of the Canadian polity even amidst governmental decay.
Thus, one may reject the direction of the present Canadian state, oppose the actions of particular governments, and even criticize the monarchy’s present weakness, while nonetheless remaining loyal to the Crown as a civilizational institution. This is not contradiction, but continuity with the broader loyalist tradition established throughout Canadian history. Loyalist is general loyalty to the established order in the face of revolt, and it is clear that the actions of the Canadian government for the past 60 and some years definitively constitutes a revolt.
Drawing from Charette, our government has behaved in a manner no different to that of the French revolutionary government. For them, “the fatherland is an idea,” an idea which can be shared with the whole world without consequence, an idea which postures Canadian culture as an object; removing anything that makes it distinct - extinguishing Canadian-ness in the process, an idea that is irreligious and disloyal, an idea without connection to our founding nations, our Canadian soil, and our distinct nationhood as born from our history.
For us, “our fatherland is our villages, our altars, our tombs, everything that our fathers have loved before us. Our fatherland is our Faith, our land, our King.” That is what loyalty looks like in a country that does not ask it of you. It means embracing those things which governments cannot sever; your Faith, your land, your King. They have and will continue to attempt to strip all these things from you, but they persist in the inner self, they are the reflexivity, totality, and subjectivity of Canada’s culture.
In the scripture it is written “except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.” Canadians who seek the personal gain of independence or unity with the United States - at the cost of their loyalties, will be those who suffer the consequences. Disloyalty begets disloyalty, and the chaos which befell America and France in the aftermaths of their revolutions act as testimony to this fact.
Loyal resistance therefore cannot merely consist of internet discourse, electoral fixation, or abstract ideological posturing. If the Canadian establishment has embraced disloyalty, then loyalty must be reconstituted from the ground upward. Canadians loyal to their civilization ought to build parallel forms of cultural continuity capable of surviving amidst institutional decline. Churches must become centres of communal life once more, local associations and civic organizations must be strengthened, families must be encouraged to place roots within their communities, and schools independent of ideological managerialism must be established where possible.
Canadian history must be taught truthfully, monuments preserved, local traditions revived, and the symbols of our inheritance carried openly without shame. Mishima writes that “culture exists in its totality,” and therefore its defence likewise requires total participation. A nation survives only so long as its people continue behaving as though it deserves to survive. The task before Canadian loyalists is therefore not revolutionary destruction, but national restoration; to preserve continuity long enough that Canada may someday remember herself again.