My colleagues and I were in Washington last month to discuss the North American relationship, spanning trade, security, and broader cultural and strategic alignment.

We, at MLI, are all for the view that America is our closest ally, necessary and irreplaceable partner on trade, defence, security, and much more. But that is not to say that taking a wider lens on history, there is not a good deal of criticism to go around.

Unlike many conservatives – who I would characterize as liberals of yesterday – I view the United States as the chief proponent and cause of the borderless, rootless, expressive individualist, extreme liberal worldview that many who call themselves conservative claim to take issue with, to varying degree. Though the roots of its philosophy certainly have a long tail, in the social, economic and technological changes that preceded it in Europe, it is a revolutionary order, which makes a kind of radical freedom its north star.

On this panel, we discuss many things, including the nuts and bolts of border security and public safety, but the deeper differences and similarities between Canada and the United States were primary.

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Our nations are both products of the Anglo-American constitutional inheritance, Christianity, common law, European settlement, and modern liberal democracy. We are much more similar than either would sometimes admit.

Yet, differences abound. Canada is founded on Peace, Order and Good Government, and the United States Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Canada is in fact more peaceful, and in continuity with the past than the United States. The US is dynamic and innovative, the land of opportunity, but also of extremes.

The United States was founded through rupture. Canada was founded through continuity. The American story is revolution, written constitutional supremacy, separated powers, and the language of individual liberty. The Canadian story is Crown, Parliament, responsible government, federal accommodation, and Peace, Order, and Good Government.

I would argue that the landscape is far more mixed with respect to the level of loose liberality in our two countries than American conservatives might tend to think.

The bigger story, in my view, is that the United States has often treated freedom and dynamism as ends in themselves. Of course, there are republican traditions of virtue in American political thought, and deep commitments to the inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem. But there are also strong Enlightenment, deistic, and revolutionary strands in the American founding. Jeffersonian ideas lean more heavily toward abstract rights and revolutionary universalism; Hamilton and Washington were, in different ways, more continuous with older traditions of order, authority, and institutional life. Yet, however one parses the founding factions, the long-term results are increasingly clear.

The American pursuit of freedom and dynamism has given it such great power that sets the tone and culture for all other western countries through the creation of a global, international order based on constant and rapid movement: trade, communications, and entertainment culture that are all broadly American in flavour. It is a homogenizing force, and it is progressive and liberal.

A force that is exported around the world by American international companies, a corporate elite, and international trade, which it has until just recently wished to be as unrestrained and as possible. If anything is more promoting of rootlessness and fraying of the ties that bind us to one another, it is a social order whose primary value is the maximization of the frictionless exchange and movement of goods, services, and people.

The US drives all major global social trends through its global corporate and trade culture, and those trends are predominantly the progressive and liberal ones. The ’60s takeover of the universities, and all attendant liberal social norms – or norm-breaking – come from its professoriate, who in turn shape the business, government and culture-making elite. It disseminates though Hollywood and its entertainment culture the message that life is about the subjective pursuit of pleasure and that ‘me, myself and I’ are the things upon which the world turns.

Since all other western nations have deeper roots, with their more characteristically premodern communal orientation, thicker culture and institutional inheritance, and more homogenous societies, they are more easily captured by this dominant ethos, and so it’s no surprise they end up with more consistent liberal positions on many issues.

The nuance here is that the United States also contains the most robust and fulsome ‘outposts’ of the healthiest communities, marked by strong families, community ties, civil society participation, and religiosity, but only in pockets. And this is still a countercultural, and not majoritarian force.

What explains this in my view, is the strong rugged individualist orientation and deep-seated mistrust of government and collectives, borne of its revolutionary founding against king and country. Coupled with the demographic profiles of founding groups that included various highly pious sects in the north, and in the south, more hierarchical and communitarian founding groups – the result is that the United States is home to the strongest communitarian and small-c conservative subcultures. But they are just that, subcultures, not the driving cultural forces.

And you can see this in the results. Canada produces much more conservatively-desired social outcomes than the US on a host of factors because it is more communitarian and common good focused. Crime rates, out of wedlock childbirth, the number of single-family households, economies of vice like surrogacy use, pornography, gambling, and the prevalence of human trafficking and prostitution, to say nothing of healthcare outcomes and lifespan – are all worse in the United States for vast swathes of the population.

But, we have fewer pockets of conservative lifestyle and culture that we know have better social outcomes from higher religiosity, marriage, civic participation, market and pro-business behaviour.

And we have worse trends on a lot of things, like our marriage rates and fertility is lower, our universities more captured, we are ‘world leaders’ in assisted suicide and euthanasia, and much worse affordability problems for the middle class.

Canadians are generally proud across the spectrum of polite, nice, reasonable and peaceful Canada, which I would say are pretty properly conservative things, in fact – high up there among the virtues.

But we’ve pursued this extreme form of social liberalism that’s common in – and indeed derived from – US coastal states and big cities. And we’ve touted ourselves on the world stage in the past decade under PM Trudeau junior as the progressive world leader.

We have relied on our boy scout and polite image, but have been seriously deficient in paying our fair share when it comes to defence; we’ve let foreign interference become accepted and prevalent. Our efforts at international humanitarianism are more symbolic than susbstantive.

Canada’s virtues are stability, civility, institutional continuity, lower violence, and a more communitarian political reflex. Canada’s vices are deference, complacency, weak strategic seriousness, and a tendency to confuse politeness with moral courage.

As we are now seeing in the United States, and in new conservative movements around the western world, the future is not to ground political philosophy and practice in unrestrained freedom, but on the deeper, more permanent things: family, faith, place, duty, order, inheritance, and the common good. It will need to take hold first in the US if we’re to see the kind of robust human flourishing we only now find in conservative demographic groups and subcultures. That would make this extant small-scale reality a broader civilizational possibility.