(If Biden wins, do liberals have what it takes to put America back on track? Interesting and thought provoking article by Justin Webb. f.sheikh)
What if America rejects Trump but cannot find a new way to live: a new direction, a balm, a form of healing? There are some conventional reasons to fear American carnage, to use the president’s memorable inauguration speech phrase. If the United States unravels — if the Left is as incapable of re-establishing solidarity as Donald Trump has been — then it is not going to be sending aircraft carriers to sort out the Straits of Hormuz or to police the South China Sea. Someone else might have to — or no-one — a rebalancing of world power that won’t make us any freer.
But that’s not the biggest problem for the rest of us, and nor is the loss of American soft power. Hollywood can wither away or (likelier) get lost in its own fundament. We would survive. US universities might dominate international league tables but hey, Oxford and London, not Harvard and Yale, are bringing us (let’s pray) coronavirus vaccines.
No: the reason America dysfunction matters is less tangible but psychologically so much more powerful: the United States is owned by all of us in what we might roughly term the free world. We are of it. It is of us. The experiment in self-government that America (imperfectly) represents seems somehow vital to all our futures because we are invested in it — we have feelings for it, and feelings against it.
Some love it and some loathe it, but more importantly: billions of people around the globe do both. When it comes to America almost no-one is uninterested. We are involved. But it’s equally true, in the George Floyd era, that almost no-one is an out-and-out fan. We feel invested in the project because the project is so huge and boisterous and naïve and inspiring and yet sickeningly flawed at the same time.
When the flaws come to the fore you don’t have to be a psychotherapist to see how our reactions might be affected by our disgust at ourselves — call it Netflix angst. We wish we had not been so keen on the damned place and we want to atone. We should not have loved the Beachboys, or Obama, or been so blind to the horrors of racism and endemic poverty.
As the German publisher and emic Joseph Joffe once wrote of the causes of anti-Americanism, “Seduction is worse than imposition. It makes you feel weak, and so you hate the soft-pawed corrupter, as well as yourself.”
So the question arises, as Trump teeters and the world watches repulsed and attracted in equal measure: what kind of a nation is America? Actually is. Not should be or would be or was: just is. If you opened up the hood, as my American-schooled children would say, what would you find?
Well, most Americans are socialists, at least according to a book out next month — a book not as batty as that sentence makes it seem. The central argument of Evil Geniuses, by the journalist Kurt Andersen, is that by the standard definitions used by Republicans to describe socialism – that’s where most folks on main street actually are.
They want more regulation of Wall St. They want a wealth tax. They think corporations should pay more too. And in a big change — a sea change since the days of Reagan — most think that “circumstances beyond their control cause people to be poor”. When shown the slogan “Communism is American power plus electrification,” most Americans swoon.
Oh alright, I made up the last one. But the view of poverty is eye-catching (it’s from a regular survey conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute) and even more so when added to a Gallup poll in 2018 that found a solid majority wanted to reduce inequality.
I had always thought that inequality was of no interest at all to most Americans. I hoped so too, for mainly anthropological reasons: it made them more interesting. But I may be wrong, and perhaps they are, in fact, as dull as us.