Philip Resnick, The Politics of Resentment

The Politics of Resentment: perfect title for the world today, right? This analysis from political scientist Philip Resnick will help you make sense of -- no, see you need the subtitle, which is British Columbia Regionalism and Canadian Unity, and the publication date, which is 2000.

Like all good nonfiction, and good academic work that's focused on its own present, The Politics of Resentment is a really effective time machine. Resnick went to great lengths to generate a careful, thorough study of BC attitudes toward its own identity, toward Canada, and toward Quebec, including a detailed analysis of citizens' oral and written submissions to BC's 1997 BC Unity Panel, and this slim, highly readable book -- highly readable for nerds, anyway -- does a really good job of laying out the nuances and options that were in place in the late 1900s at the turn of the century.

Some things have changed since then, such as the non-existence at that time of social media, but actually I think that Resnick's distinctions and categories have proven really durable. In general, he's arguing that the majority of BC'ers see the province as different from other parts of Canada, but that we don't see it as a nation (or a nation in waiting). We remain annoyed at the idea of an Ontario-centric vision of Canada culturally, economically, and politically; we remain annoyed to be lumped in with Alberta or other prairie provinces as "the West"; we remain divided about how to handle Indigenous rights and claims (and I think he's right that this is because if BC doesn't see itself as a nation, a natural consequence is that BC doesn't know how to see Indigenous peoples as nations, either).

In other words, I found it a really helpful refresher on where we were and how we got to where we are now. The good people of Reddit had lots to say about this book back in 2014 for some reason, so go there for more heat and fire, and its initial reviews weren't always positive, but I appreciated what Resnick was trying to accomplish.

But social media, tech oligarchy, and the intensifying concentration of capital aren't accounted for in this book from, as I say, the end of the last century.

As well, my much-less-well-informed sense of things is that Resnick didn't grasp the intensity of difference among BC's regions, and how they manifest. He's almost there, but not quite.

Basically: BC sees itself as a unique single region when it's seeing itself in relation to other large entities, like Canada or the other provinces or clusters of provinces (the Maritimes, the Prairies, the North). Generally speaking, by and large, under those conditions we're Canadian nationalists.

Once we find ourselves looking at BC itself, though, without those larger comparators, we immediately break down into smaller regions with their own regionalisms. BC would never join Alberta as a sovereign unit, but if Alberta were to secede, some BC regions further from the Pacific might prefer to go with them. If Canada were to splinter, BC's interior would reject the coastal regions, but Vancouver Island would be likely to reject the Lower Mainland.

It's only in the context of national unity, which after all is a phrase from Resnick's subtitle, that BC's internal regionalisms don't come to dominate.

Even so, though, settler culture in BC contains no nations to parallel how Quebec overall thinks of itself. Resnick does a great job of articulating the historic reasons why that's so, and I'm expecting to feel much better prepared going forward when faced, as I too often am, with rhetoric or claims about Alberta separatism.

The combat continues, though, against social media, tech oligarchy, and the intensifying concentration of capital. Let's do this.