Democracies around the world are in decline and populism is rising. As America's neighbor, Canada is at great risk, but the secret to guarding a healthy, democratic future lies in strengthening what makes Canada distinct.
What does it mean to live beside an eroding democracy? As this powerful and timely book argues, that is the question that will shape the next generation of Canadian politics. As a congressional speechwriter in the United States, Rob Goodman watched firsthand as a rising authoritarian movement disenfranchised voters, sabotaged institutions, and made a coup thinkable for the first time in living memory. Now, as a political theorist who makes his home in Canada, he has an urgent warning for his adopted country: The same forces that have upended democracy in America and around the world are on the move in Canada, too. But Canada can protect its democracy by drawing on a set of political, cultural, and historical resources that are distinctly of this place.
In Not Here, Goodman outlines four such resources. First, the rejection of the dangerous idea of one "real" Canadian people. Second, the refusal of political charisma and founder-worship. Third, a relatively strong social safety net that empowers neighbours to see one another as equals. And fourth, Canada's longstanding search for independence from the great power with which it shares a continent.
Today, that great power is a democracy in decline, and so asserting differences from the United States matters in this generation in a way that it has rarely mattered before. Canadian difference is not a curiosity, a luxury good, or a vanity item: it is a democratic immune system.
Laying bare the historical roots of contemporary politics, and making an urgent case for action, Not Here is a roadmap for safeguarding a democracy under unprecedented threat.
