Paired ideology? We should be so lucky.

Babble on.

As I was obsessively checking my Technorati profile yesterday, I noticed a french-language blog called La sphère des idées J.H. had linked to mine - through the Blogging Tories no less. How very, very cool.

Since my days at RMC, where I worked diligently to become functionally bilingual, I have lost the vast majority of my french. Still, unless I've totally misunderstood him, J.H. makes an interesting connection between Quebec sovereigntists and sixties socialists:

En lisant des souverainistes sur des forums, on a l’impression que si le prochain tombait encore, ce serait alors la fin du monde. On peut voir une telle fatalité dans leurs paroles qu’on voit quasiment un message de détresse suicidaire, c’est très malheureux d’être ainsi prisonnier d’un symbole, d’un drapeau, d’une nation.
...
On a l’impression en écoutant les Loco Locass, les Cowboys Fringants, les Zappartisites, Paul Piché et tous les autres artistes souverainistes (et péquistes) que la souveraineté du Québec, c’est un État qui serait plus interventionniste – pour régler tous les problèmes sociaux, à savoir de premiers chefs : la pauvreté et la dégradation de l’environnement. C’est la mentalité des années 60, croire à un État-providence qui veille à tous les maux.
Veut-on d’un État encore plus interventionniste?

He hints at a most interesting question: if the separatists are almost uniformly for a more interventionist state, and if heavily interventionist states are becoming increasingly discredited as unwieldy and ineffective, then are separatists fighting against a worldwide political tide on more than one front? And if the younger separatists choose to abandon their socialist fantasies of a huge machinery of state, how can they successfully reconcile that shift with their perceived need to defend Quebec language and culture from the rampaging anglophone hordes surrounding their besieged bastion of sanity and civilization? He seems to feel they somehow know this will be their last kick at the can.

If the Quebec separatist movement is inextricably tied to the worldwide socialist movement, it makes me feel a whole hell of a lot better about the prospects for Canada in the long run. Because with an anchor like socialism around its neck, separatism isn't going anywhere.

Babble off.