The No Kings protest on Boston Common on March 28 was the first time in a long time that I’ve been to a protest march. I was moved by the joyful spirit of defiance there, and I thought especially of the Canadian anti-American anger that I wrote about a couple weeks before. I was moved to make a short video – amateurish by TikToker standards, no doubt, but sincere – aimed at Canadians, reminding them that we left-leaning Americans are as alarmed by Trump as they are. I shared it on Substack Notes as well as on Instagram, which posted it to Facebook in a way open to the public. The video went modestly viral (as in 600+ views on Facebook)… and of course, it drew many comments.

I am aware of the perils of open social-media comments sections, and as I read I was reminded of the attached meme. There were several heartwarming messages of support from both sides of the border, and at least as many juvenile trollish comments from Trump supporters – including many Canadian Trump supporters (a point that will be quite relevant to what follows). But I knew the Trump supporters were out there. The commenters who saddened me this time were other Canadians.

On Facebook I heard “We will boycot ,you let this happen and we will not be intimadated by that oranage prick,you left Canada,you deal with it!” “Too little too late AND YOU are on your OWN. We will be boycotting into the next 100 years. Our grandchildren are learning of the betrayal of Yankeeville towards Canada.” And “You treated us wrong. Smarten uo”. One said “this is the fault of ALL Americans (yes, even the good ones). You ALL let this happen, either by action (MAGA) or inaction (everyone else)” – as if this person would somehow have been able to do something different if they lived on this side of the border.

And I thought: this is how it begins.

Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything makes the thought-provoking claim that while every known human society has had deadly violence, not all of them have had war. In many hunter-gatherer societies, violence takes the form of individual acts of revenge, punishment, and the like. What distinguishes war is that it is not individual: you are not trying to kill or harm that person, you are trying to harm a category of people, a tribe, a nation. You might or might not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, but if you’re fighting a war, it doesn’t matter which specific person you kill, only that you have killed someone on the other side. Graeber and Wengrow are sometimes a little cavalier with the evidence, so I’m not entirely sure that the societies they describe actually did lack war in that sense. But the analytical point stands regardless: it’s when your fight is against a group and not an individual that you get war.

These Canadians’ angry comments reminded me of this point, because their intent is to deny Americans the significance of their individuality – to hold Americans collectively responsible for Trump, including those of us who have done far more to stop and fight Trump than those Canadians ever have. They’re furious even at those Americans who oppose Trump, in a way that spares the Canadians (on that same comment thread) who support him. They are learning to hate Americans as a group. And that’s the mentality that produces war. It’s the way that Israelis typically think about Palestinians and Palestinians typically think about Israelis. “Always remember what they did to us.”

Canada has indeed been better governed than the United States for pretty much my entire lifetime (and in the large scale of things that probably even includes the brief period where it was run by Stephen Harper while the US was under Obama). That was true even before the American government went nuts and it’s doubly true now. And there’s a reason for that: the US does have a startling number of crazies (nearly 40% of the population at current count!) who think that Donald Trump – from detaining innocent American citizens without trial through imposing arbitrary tariffs with no reason to invading Iran without a plan – is doing a good job as president. A larger number, in absolute and relative terms, than Canada has.

But the Canadian Trumpers are also there, on the same comment thread – and people with that mindset have always been there in Canada too. It’s a difference of degree and not kind. And while I’d say the US’s history is overall uglier than Canada’s, Canada does have its own crimes to answer for. The US has the Trail of Tears and other atrocities against its native peoples, but it never entirely wiped a people out, the way Canada’s forerunners did to the Beothuk. Even Hitler never succeeded at eliminating the Jews or the Romani or the gays. Canada beat Hitler at the genocide game. Your house’s walls might not be glass, but they’re flimsy enough that you’d best still be careful about the stones you throw.

Mark Carney was right that the governments of middle powers need to band together to protect liberal democracy. But it’s not only about governments. Some of those same middle powers – the UK, France, Germany – may well be under the control of Trump-sympathetic governments before long. The ideological wars of the 20th century were fought between national governments, but this one seems to be taking place within them. Canada so far seems to be relatively safe – Pierre Poilievre may well become Prime Minister one of these days, but he’s pretty innocuous compared to Farage or the AfD, let alone Trump or Modi – but don’t be too sure that it’s immune. The last time fascism was cool, Québec had its own fascist-adjacent government, and when asked how many Jewish refugees Canada would save from the Nazis, a federal government official told the media “None is too many”.

The fights to save democracy, personal freedom, a rules-based international order – these are international struggles. Just on sheer numbers, there are more people in the United States who are bitterly opposed to Trump than there are in Canada. We’re here, we vote, we give money to the opposing side: we are the ones who can make all of this stop, and we’re working on it. In the meantime, Canadians, as I said in the video, boycott the US if you think that’s going to help. (I don’t think it will, but that’s a matter of tactics, which can reasonably be debated by people working together on the same side.) But don’t be an Ugly Canadian. In a world where fascist-adjacent governments are on the ascendant, including in your closest neighbour, all of us worldwide who still believe in peace, order and good government need all the help we can get. That is true wherever any of us live. Here in the US, we’ve been trying for a decade to tell our government: build bridges, not walls. Now we’re saying the same to you.