The debate over health care has brought out the worst in Americans. Nutbars have shown up at town halls and rallies with photos comparing Barack Obama to Hitler. At one presidential rally in Phoenix, a dozen people arrived packing heat.
George W. Bush was also subjected to Nazi comparisons. This is always a contemptible diminishment of one of the great evils of human history. If you would hold up a photo of either president with a Hitler mustache, then we know you didn't fight at Normandy or Monte Cassino and probably don't have a father or uncle who did, because you'd know better.
But it's also true that Americans and Canadians have different brains. One example: Even in the heart of Alberta, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who believed Canada should completely scrap public health care and move to American-style private insurance.
And you won't find many Americans who want to adopt Canadian-style universal public insurance, even though almost everyone 65 and older has Medicare.
But that's just a symptom of something deeper. Canadians seek to avoid big political fights. Americans revel in them.
Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff agree about everything that matters. Their approaches to health care, education, equalization and other social policies are identical. They concur on the fundamental assumptions about employment insurance, although we may wage an election on the details. Canadian foreign policy, to the extent we have any, is largely bipartisan.
America is a culture of profound divisions: between the majority who treasure their right to bear arms and the minority who abhor gun violence; between those who want less government and those who want more; between North and South and Southwest and Great Plains and Pacific Coast; between older and younger and richer and poorer and black and white and Latino and Asian.
America is an argument that never ends.
The differences between the two political cultures - ours of accommodation, theirs of confrontation - contribute to the anti-American streak that infects too many Canadians. We are polite, consensual, communal, caring, goes the stereotype; they are loud, rude, violent, rabidly individualistic.
This is not only false; it misses a crucial distinction between the two societies. Americans yell at each other in full confidence that their country is the finest place on Earth and that it will always endure. Canadians keep their voices down for fear an honest argument would wreck the country.
Because we started out as a union of English and French - two cultures that had been at war for centuries - Canada never congealed as a nation. There are advantages to this. We may be the most tolerant place on Earth precisely because we have no strong sense of who we are. Nonetheless, we are left with a residual fear of Canada's fragility.
The United States may be the most national state on Earth. For all their many divisions, Americans are bound together by an idea: that they are free. Historian Simon Schama observes that the American Revolution was actually the last English civil war. In each conflict, the issue was individual liberty pitted against the authority of the state. Liberty always won.
That is why there are so many Americas. People are free to strap on a pistol in Arizona, attend a same-sex wedding in Vermont, not pay state income tax in Texas (because there isn't one), receive publicly funded health care in Massachusetts, obtain government services in Spanish in California but not in English-only Tennessee.
The sanctity of individual liberty is why American society is so dysfunctional and so robust. Canadians believe we are a free people, and we are. But at a certain level, we defer; Americans don't.
The United States has some big problems to solve. It is embroiled in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the immigration, education and health care systems are deeply flawed; its structural deficit threatens to bankrupt the country.
But Americans have gotten themselves out of far worse jams. Anyone who has bet against this country has lost.
Put it this way: How confident are you that, 100 years from now, the United States will still be here? How confident are you that Canada will still be here?
Exactly.
John Ibbitson