Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in anger at the fall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was defeated in his re-election bid due to backlash over his refusal to accept US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. According to Grant, Diefenbaker’s “actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood.” It was no ordinary political defeat, in Grant’s view. He believed that it signaled the end of Canada as a distinct political and moral project.   

But the lasting significance of Lament for a Nation rests not with its analysis of the forces that orchestrated Diefenbaker’s downfall — “the concentrated wrath of the established classes” — nor even with the author’s prognosis that Canada was fated to disappear, if not formally annexed by its neighbor, then so culturally and economically integrated with the United States as to lose its distinct identity. What has caused it to retain its relevance for more than half a century is what emerges in its later chapters, as it shifts gears from parliamentary drama to political philosophy and Canada’s fate becomes a case study in a much larger story about the modern world’s direction of travel.

Born in Toronto in 1918, Grant was destined to become one of Canada’s best-known philosophers, his reputation built largely on the fame of Lament for a Nation. He was educated at Oxford and served as an air-raid warden during World War II. Reeling from the horrors of war, he was led to Christianity by a profound religious experience in the English countryside. After earning his doctorate, he returned to Canada to begin his academic career as a self-described Christian Platonist, persuaded that it was the task of philosophy to analyze modern civilization from the perspective of the eternal moral order that our modern dynamism obscured.

When the Diefenbaker debacle unfolded in the summer of 1963, Grant was teaching philosophy and religion at McMaster University in Ontario. He was in the midst of research on the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, about whom he planned to write a book. Grant was so incensed by how the “wealthy and clever” Canadian elites had capitulated to American pressure that he put aside that never-completed Weil book to turn his full attention to writing Lament for a Nation. But one of the central themes of Weil’s mature thought became the pivot of his argument.

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For Weil, a clear-eyed view of the world must recognize the distance between necessity and the good. Even if certain historical events are necessary, she argued, that doesn’t make them good. Grant took this to repudiate a crucial tenet of modern progressivism: the belief that the forces driving history — including those forces driving Canada ever more tightly into the orbit of the United States — inevitably carry civilization toward higher stages of development. “If history is the final court of appeal,” Grant wrote, “force is the final argument.”

This point mattered to Grant because he believed the Diefenbaker affair had revealed the necessity of Canada’s disappearance, due to “the impossibility of building a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” Yet widening his gaze beyond the particularities of Canadian politics to examine the deeper currents of Western civilization, Grant concluded that Canada’s fate was sealed by the inner logic of modernity itself.

Around the time of Diefenbaker’s defeat, Grant wrote a major essay on the then-recent debate between the philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojève on ancient and modern tyranny. Strauss’s argument was another major philosophical influence on Lament for a Nation. Strauss dreaded the advent of what he took to be the ultimate modern tyranny, which he, borrowing Kojève’s language, called the universal and homogeneous state. This term names what Grant took to be the true end of modern politics, in both its Marxist and liberal guises.

This state is universal because it aims at a single, unified global order that renders international conflict impossible. It is homogeneous because all people enjoy formal equality, are essentially interchangeable, and serve a common purpose: the limitless expansion of human power over nature, including human nature. In Lament for a Nation, Grant argued that this state is the highest object of striving for the modern project. The United States occupies a central place in his analysis. As the nation most committed to open-ended progress, it is the “spearhead” of the universal and homogeneous state.

Western capitalism, in Grant’s view, was much more “progressive” than Marxism, since the followers of Marx still assume that human flourishing has a determinate shape that technological progress ought to serve. Liberal capitalism, in contrast, tolerates no checks on technological dynamism, which is why Grant anticipated the eventual victory of the West in the Cold War. Since liberalism holds the human essence to be our freedom to remake both the world and ourselves, any doctrine that imposes limits is rejected.

The universal and homogeneous state promises to deliver us from suffering, scarcity, and grueling toil through technological science. Yet its promise is double-edged, warns Grant, for a civilization whose highest purpose is technological mastery must culminate in global tyranny.

Local communities are among the first casualties. “Liberalism,” he observed, “is the ideological means whereby indigenous cultures are homogenized.” Along with these cultures goes the possibility of genuine excellence. Authentic nobility, he believed, can flourish only in societies shaped by traditions that orient us toward something higher than ourselves, but liberalism recognizes nothing higher than the human will.

Even so, the much-vaunted freedom liberalism promises can be exercised by most of us only in the private sphere. “Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys,” Grant wrote, “as long as we cause no public inconvenience.” But permissiveness in private is coupled with coercive uniformity in public, as politics in the classical sense disappears and debate over competing goods gives way to impersonal administration. Questions that once required political judgment are reclassified as technical problems to be solved by experts.

Grant couldn’t have known the particulars, but the logic is familiar to us from the Covid lockdowns. Genuinely political questions — such as how to weigh the protection of the vulnerable against the harm done to school children, community life, and people’s livelihoods — were displaced by the injunction to “listen to the science.” Disagreement was pathologized, debate was suppressed, and administration triumphed over politics.

Grant also foresaw that the project of mastery would inevitably turn inward, as modern science no longer confines itself to the transformation of non-human nature. It seeks control of heredity, psychology, and social life itself. Advances in biochemistry and the behavioral sciences give administrators a “prodigious power to universalize and homogenize.”

Long before the term “transhumanism” became fashionable, Grant foresaw a world in which human nature becomes raw material, as we “transcend ordinary humanity and produce creatures half flesh and half metal.” His argument dovetails with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, another work that influenced him: the conquest of nature ends in the conquest of some human beings by others and ultimately in the abolition of the human.

Grant’s conclusion was bleak: conservatism is impossible in the modern age. Conservatism once meant guarding goods not subject to perpetual change — virtue, tradition, and a stable account of human nature. But technological civilization depends on continuous upheaval. Those who call themselves conservatives cannot govern without allying themselves with the very forces that dissolve what they claim to defend. Any hope they may have of political influence requires them to genuflect before a technological project that “produces such a dynamic society that it is impossible to conserve anything for long.”

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Given Grant’s somber pronouncement of the death of Canada, it’s ironic that the publication of Lament for a Nation in 1965 sparked an intense revival of nationalist sentiment. For a while, he became a darling of these new nationalists. Yet Grant disclaimed such a motive for his book. He insisted that it was not a political tract, but a work of philosophy, an attempt to understand the present in the light of truths that our present moment occludes. He later expressed regret that it “was written too much from anger and too little from irony.”

That Lament for a Nation still unsettles readers 60 years on is a measure of Grant’s prescience about the society he saw taking shape even then. The specific quarrels he anatomized have faded from memory, but the logic he uncovered has only intensified. The universal and homogeneous state is no longer merely a philosophical hypothesis. We encounter evidence of its coming to be at every turn.

Grant’s diagnosis is uncannily contemporary. In an era of global platforms, algorithmic governance, transhumanist visions, and a polarized but uniformly liberal political class, his account clarifies why our debates feel increasingly superficial. We conduct our arguments within a horizon that treats technological expansion as destiny, expert administration as neutral, and dissent as irrational. Lament for a Nation endures because the world it diagnosed has only become more fully realized in the intervening decades.

Yet Grant no longer stands quite as alone as he did in 1965. As the modern project he described becomes more fully realized, its costs become harder to ignore. There are signs of a renewed unease with a world that recognizes no goods beyond limitless technological expansion and the libertine possibilities it enables. There are revolts in the name of what has been lost.

Ironically, as the United States grows more nationalistic, Canada has moved the other way, its political identity defined by loyalty to the globalist order that Washington now challenges. Does that mean that the United States has ceased to be, in Grant’s phrase, the “spearhead” of the progressive modern project? Or has that project merely changed its institutional form, as the universal and homogeneous state now advances through the private power of corporate interests, based in the United States but with transnational reach, shaping speech, commerce, and social life with minimal public accountability?

No longer can the questions that Lament for a Nation presses upon us be dismissed as reactionary grumblings from a grumpy philosopher nostalgic for a vanished past. They articulate the disquiet felt by growing numbers of us as we survey the world around us.

The phrase “sleeping with an elephant” has come to define US-Canadian relations in the minds of many Canadians. But since President Trump launched his second term in Oval Office, the elephant has been neither friendly nor even-tempered. In fact, its twitches and grunts have recently become more like angry kicks and menacing roars, especially with Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada.

Rather than meek acceptance, however, the response in Canada has been a surge of nationalist sentiment. Only, at the helm of this patriotic revival is a new prime minister, Mark Carney, for whom the substance of Canadian identity amounts to little more than . . . globalism, multiculturalism, and liberal proceduralism.

Trump has offered varied justifications for his punishing tariffs. He alleges an uncontrolled stream of illegal immigrants and fentanyl pouring across the border, notwithstanding the Canadian government’s serious efforts at interdicting such flows. He is on much firmer ground when he points to the trade imbalance between the two countries, with Canada running a significant trade surplus with the United States; about 20% of what Canada produces is consumed by Americans.

At a meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Justin Trudeau, the recently ousted prime minister, protested that such tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy”, eliciting from Trump a suggestion that Canada would be better off as the 51^st state. This line was initially heard by most people as a jest, but Trump has become fixated on the idea. Remarks about the US-Canadian border as an “artificially drawn line” have fueled fears that his real endgame is annexation.

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Perhaps Trump is just trolling, something that certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him. But a recent post on his Truth Social website signals that he may mean business. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State”, he wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear”. Trudeau, for one, takes Trump at his word, stating that he believes the real aim of the tariffs is nothing less than “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.

Trump’s tariffs and his annexation rhetoric have had consequences that he surely did not intend. Canadians have never been big flag-wavers, but sales of Canadian flags have skyrocketed, American liquors are being pulled from store shelves, grocery stores are slapping labels on domestically produced items, and many people are scrapping travel plans to the United States. A movement to boycott US goods is underway.

The tariffs have also been a godsend to the governing Liberal Party. Trudeau’s plummeting approval ratings threatened to deliver his party a crashing defeat in the election to be held later this year. But when Trudeau’s unpopularity prompted his resignation, the Liberals were forced to replace him as party leader and prime minister. Mark Carney, an economist and banker with no previous experience in elected office, won in a landslide in the party vote. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Liberals are now inching their way back up in the polls, though they still face a steep uphill climb.

Carney’s victory speech on 9 March tapped into the rising nationalist sentiment. Switching back and forth from English to French, Canada’s two official languages, he called out Trump for “trying to weaken our economy”. But more than the Canadian economy is at stake, he warned: “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.”

What exactly did Carney mean by the phrase “our way of life”? Hockey, maple syrup, Tim Hortons, and politeness come to mind. But the features of Canadian identity that Carney highlighted were all political or institutional, such as universal health care and the country’s strong tradition of social programs and wealth redistribution. He also lauded Canada’s much-vaunted policy of multiculturalism: “America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic.”

“America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape, or form”, he declared to an enthusiastic audience. He made it clear that the future of Canada now depends on pivoting away from economic integration with the United States to seek more “reliable” trading partners.

Carney also sought to attach the odor of Trump to the opposition party, insinuating that the Conservative standard-bearer Pierre Poilievre “worships at the altar of Donald Trump”. To accuse Poilievre of kneeling before the US president may be an overstatement, but he has voiced support for many of Trump’s policies and has a reputation of being cozy with MAGA types. He recently accepted the endorsement of Elon Musk, an action that may come back to bite him.

Still, Carney is an unlikely champion of Canadian nationalism. Born in the Northwest Territories, he spent most of his adult life outside Canada, studying at Harvard and Oxford, then working for Goldman Sachs in London, New York, and Tokyo. After a stint as the governor of the Bank of Canada, he in the same role at the Bank of England. He holds both British and Irish citizenship, making him an EU citizen.

From the perspective of nationalism, it is noteworthy that he stoked controversy at the helm of the Bank of England when, prior to the Brexit vote, he decried leaving the European Union as the “biggest domestic risk to financial stability”. Many interpreted his remark as a political intervention that overstepped his job description.

Carney also has strong ties to globalist elites, with memberships in the G30, the World Economic Forum, and the Bilderberg Group. In short, he is the quintessential Davos Man, a cosmopolitan technocrat and financial bureaucrat with a newfound fondness for nationalist rhetoric.

Arguably, what Carney defends as “our way of life” is a vision of Canadians as good global citizens pulling their weight within the rules-based international order that Trump seeks to dismantle. As Canadian political scientist Tyler Chamberlain has observed, “Canadian identity is bound up very closely with multilateralism, international organizations, and free trade. That’s the kind of nationalism that is playing well today”. Meanwhile, Canadians watch American television, cheer American sports teams, and “think like Americans in many ways that really matter — but we have health care.”

Carney is a specimen of what Canadian political philosopher Ron Dart calls liberal nationalism, which is of relatively recent vintage, the chief precedent for the present moment being Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s trade disputes with Richard Nixon. “Liberal nationalism usually emerges from a position taken by the United States at a given moment that threatens certain elements of the Canadian economy”, says Dart. It tends to be reactive and narrowly focused on economics.

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It differs from what Dart calls High Tory nationalism, “which comes from a much deeper grounding in the Canadian soul”. Its most prominent exponent in the 20^th century was the philosopher George Parkin Grant, but it harks back to the founding of Canada as a nation that sought to preserve British and French traditions that were foreign to the society taking shape in the United States. Instead of placing a premium on liberty and individualism, like the Americans, the Canadian High Tory tradition aspired to a more orderly society oriented toward the common good of the whole.

Over time, however, Canada was transformed into what Grant called a “branch plant satellite” of the United States, a supplier of raw materials to the superpower that had emerged postwar as the “spearhead” of the dynamic liberal capitalist order. As early as 1965, Grant lamented that Canada was ceasing to exist as a sovereign nation. Dependent on the United States for both markets and defense, Canada was being absorbed, culturally and economically, into the behemoth to its south. Canada’s formal political independence might still persist for some time, Grant thought, but only due to a kind of inertia.

Grant believed that Canada was being swallowed up into an emerging global order helmed by the American hegemon. In a surprising twist, the American republic that now threatens Canadian sovereignty is a nation in open revolt against that liberal hegemonic order. Living within the gravitational field of the United States, Canada has always retained ties to its older roots in Europe. Ironically, Trump is now forcing Canada to become more internationalist in the name of Canadian nationalism.

But Dart believes this current upsurge of liberal nationalism is shallow. Though intensely felt at the moment, it is also likely to be ephemeral, lasting only as long as MAGA’s reign, since it is motivated by an external threat rather than a living memory of older Canadian traditions. “If you have no memory of anything”, he says, “then what holds you together? What holds Canadians together at this point is anti-Trumpism.”