Trudeau Is Better Liked in America Than the Actual President! What. A. World.

Just in time for hashtag Canada 150, a Lincoln Park Strategies/ASPR pollfound that Justin Trudeau had a net favourability rating of 11 percent, versus Donald Trump's -12 percent in the United States of America. How's that for a sesquicentennial birthday present? Our brothers and sisters in America are crushing hard on our beloved prime minister. Looks like a country made up of the American Revolution's losers who promised Mother we'd start paying rent if she'd let us keep living in the constitutional basement actually got the last laugh. Put that in your hemp pipe and smoke it, George Washington, you treasonous piece of shit.

All things considered, there are a few reasons why it's not especially surprising that Justin Trudeau would come out ahead of The Donald in US opinion polling. For one, Donald Trump is a bad president and very few people seem to actually like the guy or any of the things he's doing. Even if you agree with his politics, he has accomplished shockingly little beyond trolling liberals into apoplexy—although, then again, this was probably his only real appeal. (Shout-out to the Supreme Court today for upholding his travel ban; Lady Liberty salutes you.)

The other major reason is that Canada has existed for the last 50ish years in the American imagination as a progressive foil to the United States. In a lot of ways this is totally warranted: we have a better healthcare system (but just barely); we stay out of more stupid wars; there are significantly fewer gun murders due to our tyrannical belief in controlling the sale and possession of firearms; we are generally more enthusiastic about multiculturalism and less obviously racist compared to the US ("obviously" being the key word here.)

Canada's stature as a liberal paradise has always been more myth than reality, of course. Like all myths, it relies on the fact that most of its believers don't know (or care) much about the actual details of Canadian political life—and this applies as much to Canadians as it does to liberals in the States. There is in fact a whole cottage industry devoted to selling Canada to America, whether in the form of feel-good self-flattery (like the musical Come From Away or Justin Trudeau's entire media presence) or as cynical purveyor of the truth that Canada Is Bad, Actually (whether punching right, left, or flailing wildly in all directions).

As a robot developed by focus group somewhere in a marketing lab underneath Montreal, Justin Trudeau is the perfect platform to host all these great American liberal fantasies. Just look at this latest photo from Toronto Pride! It's a work of marketing witchcraft. He even hugged a rainbow unicorn on a publicly broadcast children's show! Trump wouldn't be on Sesame Street more than ten minutes without the Cookie Monster filing a sexual harassment lawsuit.

(Small wonder that the only politician in the LPS/ASPR poll with a higher favorability was Barack Obama, another master of progressive projection despite presiding over some truly monstrous shit.)

Trudeau is the North American iteration of the Alt-Center wet dream—a charming Frenchman who respects women as well as the technocratic efficiency in privatizing public assets. Canadians drink it in because it satisfies this country's truest and most fervent desire, which is where our more popular and successful big brother finally admits that they're actually jealous of us and that we were smarter to stay home with mom because rent was cheaper and we didn't have to brutalize as many slaves and we handled our Indigenous peoples politely by getting them to sign treaties and gently starving them to death instead of massacring them at Bloody Island and Sand Creek and Camp Grant and Wounded Knee and that it's definitely preferable to put a happy smiling face on the systematic extraction of wealth from the poor and the marginalized instead of the brutally honest grimace of a Republican administration who wants the sick and the weak to die in some kind of nightmare circus of gladiatorial eugenics.

It's a powerful aphrodisiac among American liberals right now because everyone is looking to escape the democratically existential terror of the country's politics and the easiest and most cathartic way to do that is to flagellate yourself with another country's guilt-soaked national narrative about you. What is the Canadian story, really, if not a long list of all the ever-shifting ways in which we're better than the States? We reflect on one another like funhouse mirrors but it's also the only way we have to define who we are. If it weren't for misrecognition, there'd be no recognition at all! Wakka wakka.

To most Americans, it doesn't matter that Trudeau™ is a smoke and mirror show masking a cynical and ideologically bankrupt political class chugging forward on nothing but the inertia of its own self-interest, smashing promises and expectations as it sees fit while the prime minister manages to materialize in totally spontaneous and not-at-all staged photo ops for overworked and underpaid content miners to eat and digest and shit out in their chase for another precarious paycheque. The actual substance of Trudeau matters as little to them as it does to us.

If you want further proof that they don't actually care about real Canadian Content, just read the rest of the poll. They're only 50/50 on hockey, they hate our "objectively superior" beer, and none of them have ever encountered poutine, unquestionably Quebec's greatest gift to their ungrateful Anglo overlords.

Give the Americans pictures of the prime minister's socks for their budding liberal foot fetish and leave them to their national decline. We have more pressing matters to attend to, like arguing about whether or not to putting a giant rubber duck in the water outside Toronto is an appropriate expression of national pride.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.