Like many other Canadians, I watched last Saturday’s Canada-US 4 Nations game and was looking forward to tomorrow’s rematch. (FWIW, I think the outcome will probably come down to Hellebuyck.)

And then former Edmonton Oiler and US general manager Bill Guerin started talking. From the Toronto Star:

After Fox’s Bill Hemmer suggested that Trump should attend the game in Boston, Minnesota Wild GM Bill Guerin agreed, saying that the team would “love it if President Trump was in attendance.”  

“We got a room full of proud American players and coaches and staff, and we’re just trying to represent our country in the best way that we can,” Guerin said.  

Fans in Montreal loudly booed the American national anthem prior to Saturday’s game, which drew the ire of American players and fans alike. Guerin called the booing “inspiration” for his team, who ended up edging out the Canadians in a skillful — and fight-laden — contest. 

“If you let it get the better of you, then you’re in trouble, but I really do think the players used it as inspiration,” he said.

Matthew Tkachuk, who anchors the American attack alongside his younger brother, Brady, visited the White House as a member of the Florida Panthers earlier this month, which he called “an incredible day.”

“Canada-U.S. is a huge rivalry in hockey,” Guerin said. “You know, I think there was a little bit of a political flare to it, it’s just the time that we’re in.”

After Guerin’s comments, I’ve lost all interest in watching Thursday’s game. And I want to explain why, not least to myself. Because there’s a lot to unpack in Guerin’s comments that go far beyond the usual international sports rivalries.

Corporate nationalism

I’ve been a hockey fan for decades. I’ve seen games in Mexico City, in Berlin, in Buffalo. I braved last Sunday’s snowstorm to take in some juniour hockey. I’ve designed and taught a course on politics and sports. So I’m not naïve as to the role nationalism, plays in hockey. Or fighting, for that matter.

Professional sports leagues in North America have encouraged this conflation of their business and nationalism for decades. It’s a mutually beneficial bargain for the state and for professional leagues, most of the time. Nationalism sells, and countries are always looking for ways to reinforce their citizens’ sense of attachment to the nation-state.

Equating hockey, in this case, with nationalism makes hockey something that people identify with. It becomes part of who they are. In Canada, thanks to a laissez faire attitude toward culture, hockey is pretty much the only vehicle regular Canadians have to express overt feelings of a shared identity. Which makes it the only tool in the tool box to deploy when that identity is perceived to come under attack.

Across the border, Americans have never been shy about expressing their nationalist pride. They call their national baseball championship the World Series, as if the United States is the entirety of the world. And in a sense, to many Americans, it is. The idea of American exceptionalism is mother’s milk. The shining city upon the hill. The belief that, given the choice, everyone would choose to be an American. The idea that they are a chosen nation, with a Manifest Destiny to rule the continent, if not the world.

Until very recently – let’s say November 5? – these US nationalist feelings were, if not completely harmless, mostly harmless, at least within the contours of professional hockey. We cheer for our country’s team, they cheer for theirs, one wins, the other says next time, and we all go for beers and talk about next Saturday’s Rangers-Sabres game.

We might even boo the other team’s national anthem, in the same way we’d boo a hometown hero who’d left for greener pastures.

There might even be fights (heaven forefend!) during the game, as one team seeks an edge, or wants to settle a score.

What all of these things have in common is that they take place within the context of the game itself. Nationalism here is little more than a pro sports team identity.

The real thing can burn you

But of course, nationalism is more than that. Nationalism is the single most potent force in politics and society. In the past two centuries, it has sparked more wars and led to more death than religions. Class identity – the obsession of Marxists – pales in strength compared to nationalism. If given a choice between fighting for their material class interests and their nation, nation wins every time.

To play with nationalism is to play with fire. It can warm, but it can also leave you with third-degree burns.

As we’re seeing right now in the 4 Nations Face Off.

I don’t have to explain this to Canadians, but for any Americans reading this, it is impossible to overstate how offensive and threatening US President Donald Trump’s threats are to Canadians. Completely unprovoked and justified by false (fentanyl and illegal immigration) and ever-shifting (trade imbalances) reasons, they are being interpreted – correctly, I’d argue – as a direct assault on Canada’s sovereignty. Constant talk of annexation, Canada as a 51^st state, and using coercive economic power make this threat appear very real to Canadians, even as it’s dismissed or treated lightly by far too many US academics and pundits.

Canadians see how Trump and Musk are systematically dismantling the US government itself, facing little opposition. The lesson here is that what seems impossible today – the complete collapse of US democracy – could happen tomorrow – the subjugation of a truculent northern neighbour who won’t play ball on resources, or platform governance, or whatever. And in the midst of this we see supposedly serious news outlets analyzing the effect the annexation of Canada would have on the balance of power in Congress.

It’s delusional, both a coping mechanism that allows Americans to avoid acknowledging that they may already have lost their own democracy while also indulging in age-old American exceptionalism, that of course everyone would just love to join their country, if only they could be so lucky.

All this to say, pretty much nobody in Canada sees any of this as a game. Almost to a person – from the First Nations in Canada to Québécois nationalists – everyone sees this moment as an existential crisis, and the United States as the threat to Canada’s continued existence. That is, to Canadian nationalism.

Thanks to decades of nurturing by the NHL, media outlets and the Canadian government, hockey is currently the most powerful, perhaps the only, way ordinary Canadians have of expressing both their national pride and their absolute fury at the US government and those who are enabling its anti-democratic, anti-Canada policies.

Are Canadians going to boo the US national anthem at hockey games? You’re goddamn right we are.

US exceptionalism and fascism rear their ugly heads

On the US side, meanwhile, overt nationalism and American exceptionalism are the order of the day. Of every day. And they combine two things that, as I said, are usually merely annoying to non-Americans but when chained to an authoritarian government like the one that’s currently in place in the US can lead to some very, world-historically ugly, places.

It might be helpful to contrast our current ugly moment with happier times. Remember South Park’s (Oscar-nominated) Blame Canada song?

I will speak for all Canadians when I say that we loved every single glorious second of this song, from its utter ridiculousness to someone finally having the guts to take Anne Murray down a notch. (I kid. Anne Murray is a national treasure.)

One of the reasons we loved it is because it combined the absurd – what American would be stupid enough to think that Canada posed a threat in any way to the US? – with what every Canadian knows every American, in their red, white and blue hearts believes: “They’re not even a real country anyway.”

It’s a line that has the thrill of breaking a taboo, of joking-not-joking.

It scanned as a joke because Americans knew that Canada did not pose a threat to them in any way, shape or form. And Canadians knew that Americans may not really consider other countries to be as real as theirs, but it’s not like they’d actually act on it. And certainly not toward their northern, white neighbour.

All this made Blame Canada a sharp satire of US nationalism. But right now, when Trump seems intent using Blame Canada as a policy guide, it reads differently.

Which brings us to the past week.

Again, in normal times, Guerin’s non-Trump comments could be seen in the context of a that good-for-marketing, self-contained corporate nationalism. But the reality is that Canadians’ booing was very, overtly and explicitly political. It was aimed at the United States as a political entity and Donald Trump in particular, not the players. It had nothing to do with hockey.

To paraphrase Arrested Development, Canadians don’t hate Americans; we kind of like them. (If you want to extend the analogy further, Lucille is Trump, trying to turn Canadians and Americans against each other.) Every single US player plays on some Canadian’s favourite team.

Guerin, as well as Brady and Matthew Tkachuk, are grown-ass men and should be treated as such. The fact that they’re hockey players does not give them a pass for anything they say. It matters that Brady Tkachuk both shook hands with Trump and praised him effusively. He didn’t have to do that. Neither he, nor his brother, nor Guerin can claim not to know what Trump is doing to their country, and how he is threatening Canada. Explicitly linking Trump to Team USA’s strategy and performance – using the Trump-motivated booing as inspiration for his team to play a stupid game – is the act of someone who is mixing politics and sports.

Like it’s 1936

Guerin leaned into US nationalism and US exceptionalism in their response to Canadians booing the US national anthem. US exceptionalism in that they probably don’t see what the big deal is about the 51^st state talk: who wouldn’t want to be an American?

As for the nationalism, the motivational speech practically writes itself:

They’re booing your song, your country! Are you going to stand for that? We’re the greatest country in the world! The president – your president – is in the crowd tonight! We’re going to teach the Canadians a lesson!

And in normal times, when the other side’s fans were booing you just because you’re the other team, that would be the end of it. Every good story needs a bad guy.

But sometimes, like now, the boos mean more. Sometimes politics matters.

Imagine the same speech coming from the head coach of the German national ice hockey team in the 1936 Olympics, playing against France:

They’re booing your song, your country! Are you going to stand for that? The Führer – your Führer – is in the crowd tonight! We’re the greatest country in the world! We’re going to teach the French a lesson!

Context matters.

Some might say (and some have said) that Guerin is an idiot, that most hockey players don’t have two brain cells to rub together, and that we certainly shouldn’t look to pro athletes for political or moral guidance. All of which may be true.

But idiots are fascism’s foot soldiers. Unthinking patriotism, mostly benign or even beneficial in normal times, can easily be weaponized when the object of that patriotism is unworthy or malign. Patriotic support for an authoritarian leader is support for an authoritarian. Nationalistic support for a Nazi regime is support for a Nazi regime.

The US players, and even Guerin, may not fully understand what they are attacking when they drop their gloves against their opponents. These grown-ass men might not even fully understand the implications of directly linking Trump to all of this.

It doesn’t matter. For whatever reason, the US hockey team’s nationalism, in treating politics as a game, as just another thing to get the team going, in tacitly endorsing Trump’s eradicationist view of Canada, sends a message to Canadians: they don’t really care what happens to our country, or by extension anyone in it. That they haven’t thought deeply about any of this doesn’t really matter. If your country is authoritarian, then standing up for your country means standing up for authoritarianism.

On one level, of course, this is still just a hockey game. But symbols matter, and hockey players aren’t the only ones who embrace an unreflexive nationalism or sense of US exceptionalism. (Nor are Canadians when it comes to nationalism, but that’s an issue for another day.)

They’re Americans, and they’re going to stand up for the flag and their president, no matter who he is or what he’s doing, to Canada or even to their own country. They’re going to skate out there and play, for the flag, and for the Führer. And that’s something that I don’t care to watch.