Andrew Potter: The American Karentocracy
Our neighbours to the south are the last people on Earth to realize that the problem is them.
By: Andrew Potter
A few years ago on a family vacation in Alberta, my son and I were enjoying ourselves in the outdoor pool at the Jasper Park Lodge, which has to be one of the most spectacular places to sit in a pool on Earth. Off to one side, a small group of American tourists were talking loudly about this and that, when one of them overheard my observation that the view certainly beat anything back home in Montreal.
“Yuur frahm Mahnntreal!?” one of them drawled. I answered in the affirmative, at which point the complaints began. “Yew need to dew something about yer faahrs!” “Kweebeck needs to put out thar faahrs!”
That summer had seen record-setting wildfires across Canada’s boreal north, with every province and territory affected. The damage ran to the billions, almost a quarter million Canadians were displaced, and thousands of international firefighters travelled here to help. Eight firefighters were killed in the effort.
But what was really eating up these Americans were the air quality alerts in a number of their cities, including New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. I mumbled something about “well we’re trying,” but it didn’t cut any ice with our poolmates. “Put out those dahm fahhrs!” they insisted.
At this point, it was clear where things were going. We bailed on the swim and went back to our room, since any minute someone was going to start demanding to speak to the manager.
The “Karen” has been so thoroughly flogged as a meme that it is worth being precise about what a Karen actually is, since it isn’t mere rudeness or obnoxious behaviour. What distinguishes the Karen is that they justify their own aggression as a response to a perceived injury or offence. They are not making a demand, they are seeking redress. And crucially, they have no conception of how they appear to anyone else: not to the 17-year-old at the till, not to the people behind them in line staring at their feet, fuming.
By almost any measure, this is now the governing creed of the United States of America: pure, unadulterated grievance. The behaviour of the American political class toward its allies over the past 18 months makes very little sense as statecraft and near-perfect sense as a customer-service complaint escalated well past the point of reason.
Consider the record.
Asked last April about Canada’s negotiating strategy, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick replied that “they suck,” mocked Mark Carney for getting on a plane to China, and reminded everyone that America is a $30-trillion economy and “the consumer of the world.” Canada’s economy “leans on” America’s, he explained later under Senate questioning, yet in the same breath complained that Canadian liquor stores were not stocking American spirits. He has elsewhere called Canada a “socialist regime” that has been “feeding off of us for decades upon decades upon decades.”
Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, for his part, seems to understand his duties as something akin to a Karen-at-Large. He told a Halifax business audience he was “disappointed” to have arrived in a country where it was “very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship.” He had earlier explained, in Bellevue, Wash., that Canadians declining to visit the United States or buy its bourbon was why the president and his team “referred to Canada as being mean and nasty.” This is pure Karentocracy: It isn’t the ongoing annexation talk, the schoolyard insults, or the gangster threats that are the problem; it is Canada’s response to them.
(And lest one think this is just a bilateral Canada/U.S. thing: In January, the president threatened to put tariffs on eight NATO members for the offence of sending troops to help defend Greenland, noting that Denmark “currently have two dogsleds as protection, one added recently.”)
Which brings us back to the fires. Canada’s north is burning again this summer, the smoke is back over the Eastern Seaboard, and Americans are once more complaining to the manager.
Senator John Hoeven brought a resolution to the Senate floor calling on Canada to fight its wildfires harder. Senator Bernie Moreno introduced a bill requiring the president to determine whether Canada had failed to control its fires and, if so, to impose sanctions, revoke visas, and have the Secretary of State consider declaring Canadian diplomats persona non grata. The president called the smoke “willful negligence,” said the United States was “being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” declared that the cost “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” and posted a picture of the border sealed off with an enormous furnace filter.
The relevant facts are that roughly 900 fires were burning in Canada at the time, most were out of control, and most were in remote areas that no amount of political will can reach. Meanwhile, Nicholas Dale, a helicopter pilot from Sooke, B.C., died on July 12 when his aircraft went down while he was fighting the Gold Mountain Fire in southwestern Colorado. Three days later, with the people of Sooke still in mourning, four Republican members of Congress from Michigan wrote to Mark Carney to announce that “we are done accepting apologies in place of action.”
It does not matter that the same week Dale died, the Border 2 fire crossed from Washington State into B.C., burning hundreds of hectares and pouring smoke into the Fraser Valley. Because there is no winning against a Karen. Offer a remedy on some general “customer is always right” rationale and you have only validated the worldview and invited the next demand. Push back, and the pushback gets metabolized as fresh injury, which invites escalation up the chain. Either way you get no credit for being reasonable, which is why Mark Carney’s run of unilateral concessions has earned us nothing more than more tariffs and getting called “nasty.”
The unfortunate truth is that the only real defence against a Karen is to decline to do business with them at all. Don’t sell them the ticket, don’t let them in the store. Which is also, of course, why we are where we are, since that option is not available to a country that sends three-quarters of its exports to this particular customer. You cannot refuse service to the United States. You can only slowly diversify and wait out the tantrum.
As for Americans, they could maybe take a cue from one of the big vibe events of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. One of the major narrative motifs in the film is the fear of the “people from the sea” — mysterious, feared marauders that the Greek city-states dread as destroyers of civilization. As a shattered Odysseus realizes upon his return to Ithaca, he and his men are the true people from the sea, they are the ones everyone has been afraid of.
That has been interpreted by many critics as a metaphor for Trumpism, but that overly dramatises what is happening. Americans have spent the last year and a half complaining about how they have been treated by their allies. What they have not yet worked out, but what the rest of the world concluded some time ago, is that Americans are not ones being wronged. They are the ones in line at Costco, red-faced and enraged, holding the receipt and demanding to speak to somebody in charge.
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I'm not sure how far I would generalize this to Americans at large, but the attitude that the Trump administration has had toward Canada and most or all of its allies is one that's recognizable to anyone who has ever dealt with a tyrannical boss, a toxic family member, or an emotionally abusive partner. Really anyone hell-bent on abusing a power differential in their favour.
The standard for you is one of deliberately impossible perfection. Anything short of that is cause for a total over-reaction as an excuse to abuse power and inflict pain on you for its own sake. Which makes sense because the goal is to both have you cater to their every whim, and also constantly remind you of the power imbalance. Only a veneer of a reason is required, and what that is, is decided purely by them. If they can't find anything, they just increase the standard until something appears, and the reaction is the same.
Meanwhile they have no standard for their own behaviour toward you, because you don't matter. They are allowed to do and say the most egregious shit, behave in the dumbest and most irresponsible fashion, and you just have to silently take it. Push back even a bit, regardless of how restrained or polite you are, or point any of this hypocrisy out, and the abuse just gets worse.
The problem with that suggestion is that in making it, Mr Potter is making the same mistake of which he is accusing Americans, taking the whole instead of more closely examining the parts of the whole.
There are indeed many Americans, including the current president who can indeed stand so accused. But there are also many who do understand at least a good bit of what is happening, the problems with it, and the impact it is having on the rest of the world.
America is the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted. As such it is both a vast hope and, to some extent, an internal contradiction. It is also a remarkably new experiment. It took over two thousand years for any group larger than a big village to try anything like it, and another two thousand before a bunch of white guys in funny suits and weird whigs decided to try to make a nation based on the idea that human beings en masse might be able to rule themselves from the bottom up.
The American story is thus both relatively short and immensely complex, and it is perhaps not to be wondered at that they have ‘gotten it wrong’ at least as often as ‘they have gotten it right’.
No nation in the world has ever had entirely clean hands, although some have certain been far cleaner and some far dirtier than others. But the project upon which we were the first nation on earth to set ourselves is, as Tom Paine noted, to begin the world anew, and the whole world became then part of it