Anglosphere

In the Canadian case, the Anglosphere temperament that values stability, paternalism, and ordered freedom is stronger than the competing strand that values individualism, enterprise, and a more [libertarian] concept of freedom. In the UK, the two temperaments are roughly matched. In the USA, the former temperament is a distinct minority and the latter is more prevalent. This causes many people to believe that one temperament is or should be seen as expressive of a “national culture”. But the members of the minority temperament are also part of national life, and each have created a valid expression of that temperament’s values in national politics.

–Jim Bennett

Jim Bennett has a great post about the perils of importing institutions:

One could take that point further. Canada’s constitution now combines the British parliamentary system’s stong prime ministership, which with a well-disciplined majority can pretty much push through whatever legislation it wants, with an American-style supreme court with very strong powers. Rather than serving as a check upon each other, they seem to act together in creating a ratchet toward a single set of solutions for any problem — more interventions by the federal state, no matter how ineffective or obnoxious previous ones have been. Either the historical British system, or the historical American one, have been more effective in balancing government actions with freedom and an effective civil society. The Canadian hybrid seems to have imported the vices of both with the virtues of neither.

Jim Bennett corrects a would-be critic.

Update: Someone who does get it: Mr. Barone.

Update 2: John O’Sullivan comments.

Also: I was unfair to characterize Mead as a “would-be critic” or intellectual borrower. He makes his own case, which overlaps Bennett’s but is independent of it, a point that O’Sullivan takes pains to make.

From an American standpoint, what is most relevant about the medieval period is the experience of England, since this was the proximate source of our ideas and institutions. English and continental politics of the Middle Ages had much in common, but differed sharply at the outset of the modern era. On the continent, far from advancing the cause of freedom, the Renaissance ideas of kingship and related institutional changes almost destroyed it. In France and Spain, the chiefly German “Holy Roman Empire” and the city-states of Italy, neopagan concepts of absolute authority came to the forefront, denying the medieval view that there were, or should be, limits on the secular power. In England alone, the struggle would produce the opposite verdict.

We are used to thinking of England as the home of representative government; less familiar is the idea that England enjoyed free institutions at the on-set of the modern era because it had retained them from the preceding era. While Renaissance notions were triumphing on the continent, the English experienced, in Maitland’s phrase “a marvelous resuscitation of the medieval law.” That they did so was in large measure … the doing of the church, which in Britain produced a remarkable series of statesman/clerics — from Becket and John of Salisbury in the reign of Henry II to Langton, Grosseteste and Bracton in the century to follow. The doctrine that they imprinted on English constitutional theory was that “the King is under God — and under the law,” and not entitled to rule by personal edict. This was the essence of Christian teaching about the state and it became the guiding precept of England’s common lawyers.

M. Stanton Evans, The Theme is Freedom

Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedling

I have a post on this topic over on Albion’s Seedling. It is in part a response to Mr. Rummel’s earlier post here. One commenter thinks I have sullied Canada’s honor. Check it out.