FIRST READING: The last time U.S. reputation was this low, a Canadian stood up for them - National Post
Canadian broadcaster Gordon Sinclair. Photo by ArchiveArticle contentFirst Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
Every once in a while, the pollster Gallup asks the rest of the world what they think of the United States. And the latest reviews are not good.
Of their non-American respondents, a record 59 per cent now hold an “unfavourable” view of the U.S.
Pew Research has found much the same. Their latest 36-country survey found that even among the United States’ closest allies, significantly fewer respondents see the country as a “reliable” partner anymore.
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The last time it got this bad was the mid-1970s.
Then, the U.S. was in the midst of engineering an ignominious exit from Vietnam secured in part thanks to a devastating bombing campaign conducted over the Christmas holidays. At home, domestic politics had become dominated by the Watergate scandal. All the while, the value of the U.S. dollar was in free-fall.
And in this darkest hour of American self-esteem, it was a Canadian who told them to buck up, take pride and ignore the haters. Although almost entirely forgotten today, his angry paean to American exceptionalism would wind up becoming one of the most influential Canadian speeches ever delivered.
“I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name to me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?” said Gordon Sinclair in a 1973 radio editorial that would later come to be known simply as The Americans.
