As evinced by Canada’s prime
minister Mark Carney likening a planned referendum on whether Alberta should
vote to separate from the rest of Canada to “Brexit,” in which Britain seceded
from the E.U., as if the UK in the European Union were equivalent to Alberta in
Canada, political category mistakes can run rampant without being detected as
such. Referring to the referendum in the province, Carney said, “That is a very
dangerous bluff.” He was “pointing to the turmoil that followed the United
Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union.”[1]
The implied false equivalence of Canada and the E.U., as if the former too had
been formed out of countries, is as incorrect as that which Carney was more
directly assuming between Alberta and Britain. A region of a country, even if
the latter has a federal system, is not equivalent to a country that joins a political
union such as the E.U. and U.S. That Britain was once the host kingdom in the
British Empire, and thus equivalent to other members of the empire, including
Ireland and Virginia, does not mean that the UK as a state in the E.U. was
equivalent to the latter, or to other political unions consisting of early-modern-scale
countries.
Even before they became
independent countries, the thirteen British colonies that would rebel were
considered to be an empire within the British empire, and such an incongruity
was correctly believed to render the latter unstable[2]. Empires consist of (early-modern)
kingdom-scale polities, rather than of empires. The distinction between a
kingdom and empire was well established, as in Althusius’s 1603 book, Political
Digest, on federalism. It would not surprise Althusius at all that the
countries that became members of the U.S. would continue to have their own
political cultures rather than be fully homogenized at the empire-level. The ideological conviction that the 50 states
are somehow very similar culturally, as if linguistics were the exclusive basis
of cultural differences, and thus that the U.S. is equivalent to an E.U. state,
is empirically false (as are most ideological biases).
On May 27, 2026, the head of
government of California vowed “to tax any payouts that California residents
receive from a $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund that Donald Trump secured
in a settlement with his own [U.S.] Justice Department.”[3]
Newsom said, “Anyone from California that receives any of those funds, we want
to tax 100 percent of those proceeds.” A similar proposal had been made in New
York by NY Senator Mike Gianaris. It would be a grave mistake to assume that
such a bill were also being entertained by the Florida legislature, and the
reason goes beyond partisanship between the two major American political
parties.
That Newsom would make public
his proposal means that he believed that the political center of gravity in
California favored going after not just corruption generally, but also efforts
to reward people who had rioted at the federal Capitol building as the states’
respective votes for U.S. president were being counted in 2020. State populations
differed appreciably on the ideology behind Trump’s “MAGA” populist movement. That
movement had a much lower percentage of believers in say California and
Massachusetts, than in Florida and Oklahoma. Alaska and Hawaii provide yet
another stark contrast on how pervasive support for MAGA was as of 2026.
The sheer ideological
difference between the centers of political gravity of those two republics resonates
with the theoretical claim that the heterogeneity between kingdom-level
polities in an empire is not just a matter of degree, but, rather, a leap,
from the cultural differences that exist within any one of those
polities. This is why federalism, which intentionally includes governmental
means of managing inter-state cultural diversity, originated with empires
rather than kingdoms, and is better suited to empires even though some early-modern-scale
kingdom-level polities have federal systems (e.g., Germany, Switzerland,
Belgium). The cultural differences between E.U. states is a leap rather
than just a degree more than such differences within Germany and even Belgium within
which different languages are spoken (in Flanders and Wallonia, respectively). The
practical need to take account of cultural differences is greater in E.U.
governance than at the state level, and thus federalism is more valuable—more fitting—at
the E.U.-state interface than within a given state.
Back to the U.S., on the very
day on which Newsom announced his proposal to tax all of the proceeds of Trump’s
“slush fund” to his base that had sought to interfere with the role of Congress
in counting the ballots of electors from the States for in the federal
presidential election, Ron DeSantis, the head of Florida’s government,
announced his proposed tax cut that would vastly increase the exemption from
$50,000 to $250,000 on property taxes in Florida. Ben Albritton, the president
of the Florida Senate, said, “I can’t think of a more meaningful way to
celebrate America’s 250 [year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
than] the passage of $250,000 in tax relief for every Florida homeowner.”[4]
Both men were betting that any drop in school budgets from the drop in tax
revenue would be less important to most voters than paying less in property
taxes. Here again, a distinct political ideology was in play—one that would get
considerably less broadcast air-time in California where proportionally more voters
believed in a more expansive role of government and thus for government
spending by which public goods could be provided even if taxes are high. To be
sure, the ideological divide between favoring tax-cuts versus government
spending on public goods is an old one; my point is that the peoples in the American
states differed, at least as of 2026, significantly on which side should be
valued more. In fact, the European states may have differed much less in this
respect even though different languages were spoken! So much for the false
claim that cultural differences depend on linguistic differences! Belgium and the
Netherlands were much more alike on this axis of political ideology that were
California and Florida. Moreover, the differences within a given state,
whether of the E.U. or U.S., were a leap down from the differences between the
states.
Therefore, Alberta leaving Canada
(or the southern region known as Egypt leaving Illinois—which has been attempted
five times in Illinois history) is not like Britain seceding from the Union.
Even though Canada’s regions admittedly may differ culturally, an empire
consists of many polities and thus the diversity between the polities in an
empire is greater than in Canada. Put another way, Canada would come into the
U.S. as states just as every other country that has become a member of the U.S.
has (and territories that became states are legally assumed to have been
sovereign countries). Neither Texas nor Hawaii merged with the existing U.S.,
so neither would Canada merge with the United States. Neither would Canada come
in as just one state, but this is not to say that each province would translate
into a state; even if each one would, Canada still could not be classified as
an empire (unlike the E.U. and U.S., both of which have many country-level republics).
2. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire.
4.. Gary Fineout, “In One of His Final Acts, DeSantis Calls For Vote on Sweeping Florida Property Tax Cut,” Politico, May 27, 2026.
