A memorial to a nation in pain. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
I intend, however much provoked, never to have a fight on a plane. It’s so undignified: even the biggest of men can’t find the space to land a real blow. Hemmed in by seats, they flap about foolishly and end up banging their knuckles on some random hard surface before giving up and being pulled away by long-suffering cabin staff. CNN showed a montage of these conflicts on their domestic news channel, ending with one chap who sat back in his seat, almost tearfully, before snarling like a dog and eating his mask.
The proximate cause of this upsurge of air rage is masks of course. We Brits have our own mask conflicts, but they usually end with some tutting or a sarcastic tweet. Americans bash each other in the aisles.
What are they thinking? The CNN air-rage compilation was shown the night before the 9/11 anniversary. On planes around the nation – perhaps some of the featured flights — families of the victims would have been travelling to Pennsylvania, to Washington DC and to New York. Among them was Deborah Borza who lives on the west coast. When we talked last week, she told me how much she missed her daughter Deora, who at the age of just 20 had managed to get a standby seat on a flight across the nation to see her mum. It was Flight 93.
There was a real fight on Flight 93.
At the Pennsylvania memorial ceremony, President Bush didn’t specifically mention the political weaponising of the pandemic measures but he did say this:
“A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”
An example of what he meant: The Federalist, a Right-wing website with a big readership but no clarity about its funding, suggested in a headline on the very day of the 20th anniversary ceremony: “The Left hates America and ordinary Americans at least as much as the 9/11 hijackers did, and for some of the same reasons.”
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SubscribeThis is one of the most confusing and disjointed articles I’ve read on Unherd.
The title is “Why Does America Hate Itself?” and I assumed that would be the theme of the article. The author begins, however, with an account of increased passenger violence on US flights and notes (I suspect correctly), “The proximate cause of this upsurge of air rage is masks of course.” Fair enough, but I’m not sure that even comes close to addressing the issue of why America hates itself. I could speculate that the violence is one manifestation of this hate but I don’t think that would be correct. Frustration with the pandemic and the way it has been handled is mostly behind people fighting about mask mandates.
The author then turns to former President Bush’s 9/11 memorial speech, including the line, “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment.” Perhaps that would have been a better starting point for an article on why America hates itself because it seems closer to the answer.
As an example of this naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment, the author cites the conservative publication The Federalist: “The Left hates America and ordinary Americans at least as much as the 9/11 hijackers did, and for some of the same reasons.” The author characterizes this statement as “this smearing of a wide group of people so offensively, so callously, is breath-taking, or would have been back in the days before 9/11.”
The sad reality is that The Federalist did not “smear” anyone with its statement. If the rioting, the cancel culture, the deplatforming, the forced indoctrination with critical race theory over the past few years, especially since the pandemic begun, has taught us anything it’s that “The Left hates America and ordinary Americans at least as much as the 9/11 hijackers did, and for some of the same reasons.” This is a terrible, depressing fact, but it’s a fact nonetheless. Yet the author would have us believe acknowledgment of this awful truth is itself evidence of the same type of hateful behavior.
And by his reference to “the days before 9/11” the author seems to suggest it was national anger arising from that tragedy that has given rise to the divided nation of today. He even states: “It’s as if the anger and frustration that welled up that day, spending 20 years rushing around the world, never quite finding a proper satisfying target, has boomeranged home.”
What evidence does he have for that suggestion? The roots of social division in the USA predate 9/11 and are mainly found in economic inequality and divisive critical race theories that grew within the universities. If anything, 9/11 briefly drew the nation together.
The author then briefly reviews Evan Osnos’s book which suggests, among other things, that inequality fuels the division in America. Good point but why did the author take so long to get there?
Eventually the author concludes with some musings on the 9/11 memorial: “the first job, as it was when the memorial was proposed, is to be clear about the enormity of what happened.
Then: to gather up the wreckage and start afresh.”
The author seems to suggest again that 9/11, and the anger and fear generated by that event, somehow caused America’s social division, but I see no evidence to support that idea.
I’ve read a number of Unherd articles by this author. He always writes about America and was a BBC correspondent in the US for several years. But he seems to view America through a glass darkly, as the saying goes. His vision is somehow distorted. He doesn’t see the true facts but a weird kaleidoscope of facts and mistakes them for America.
The US is, indeed, terribly divided, but the cause wasn’t 9/11.
Yep. The fundamental cause for almost all of the US’s ills is central banking money printing.
Excellent point Jeffry!
Money Printing, the ability to spend more than is taken in has had a vast set of consequences – and almost all the problems can be laid at its feet. Really Nixon in 1971 taking US off the ‘Gold Standard’ to fund Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ and the Vietnam War. Both these make the rich richer. The Military Industrial Complex goes directly to the wealthy, and the increased Social Spending $ always trickle up wile paying the poor to be poor traps them in poverty.
And so it has progressed till the National debt is 28$ Trillion! About equal to 8 years of all USA’s tax revenues. At the current ZERO percent interest it takes 1.5$ Trillion to service the debt! About half of all the Fed Tax revenues! Biden wants to add 4.5$ Trillion on human infrastructure (waste, pork, corruption, and free money to minorities, to trickle to the super rich (and China, via Amazon and Walmart)). This on top of the monthly 120$ BILLION purchases of Treasuries and mortage backed securities the Fed buys – and the 1-3$ Trillion budget deficit! (If, when, interest rises to 5% it will take all the gov tax revenue just to service the national debt – )
Anyway, the printed $ all rise to the super wealthy, they get all of it. The poor just get addicted to the drug of the Welfare Trap, and become multi-generational poor. The working class and middle class have all their savings and pensions harvested by the stealth Tax called Inflation (now officially 5%, but really 9) because interest must be kept at Zero for the debt to be serviced. So all workers savings get eaten up by inflation Tax of 5% – (minus the bank and bond interest of 1% = MINUS 4% savings growth). Their pensions and savings melting like snow as the printing inflates the money supply….
But the above just scratches the surface of the harm. USA will eventually lost ‘Reserve Currency Status’ over this. The foreign trade deficite is a Trillion – how can that continue – the hard assets and Equities so inflated – and the wealthy own them. The ritch have hard assets which appriceate, they carry HUGE debt at 3% interest wile inflation eats the debt basis away – and Dividends, so make money wile everyone goes broke.
This is what Lefty/Liberal MMT is doing – the death of America. The Left economics is always same as Stl* lin – all the money to the elites, and the rest broke.
PS, in history EVERY time a National Central Bank has to print money to service the National Debt the currency collapses.
USA at debt at 138$ GDP HAS to borrow from now on to pay the interest on its debt!!!!!!!
That is the death spiral, having to borrow, to increase your debt, to service your debt! This is Wiemar Germany, this is Zimbabwe and Venezuela and all the members of that suicide club. And most of the world right now, except Modern Germany (which learned that lesson) and a couple others, even China is in very weird territory – remember the chain of interlocking treaties which made Arch Duke Ferdinand’s assassination trigger WWI? Well this is a Domino Chain, and one Central Bank collapsing may trigger all to fall. (and god knows what multi Trillion $ Derivative holding Bank could go with no warning)
Clear informed review thanks. 30 (?) years of steady disenfrancis ement both economiclly and culturally might have had something to do with it !
It’s an odd mix of what seem to be old notes
FYI, the ‘under God’ part of the phrase ‘one nation, under God’ was inserted in the 50’s by the Eisenhower administration. It immediately effected millions of school kids like me, who every morning stood and, with hand on heart, delivered in unison the ‘pledge of allegiance’. ‘Under God’ was not the domain of the ‘framers’, but of the emerging GOP in post war 50’s. Reagan trumped it with his ‘city on the hill’ rhetoric, followed by Trump’s MAGA plea.
Any country who pleads about its greatness and its unique linkage to ‘the creator’ has got to have its head examined, to save itself from a self-inflicted descent into mumbling hubris. The rest of us will watch and hope, but I am doubtful.
Now yours is a piece I would sip tea over. I’d slip tea onto the piece you are responding to.
Every time this BBC bloke writes a piece on America I rush to pen a comment about how strange a view he has of it, and to question how relevant his credentials now are. This time I do not have the energy to add to my previous comments on his previous writings, (indeed I would not need to add just regurgitate,bit like old Justin does).
And yet time and time again they wheel him out and off he goes scribbling incoherent opinion.Is it deliberate to wind us all up? I am reminded of a saying I once heard,”Time goes by,reputation increases,ability declines”.
Perhaps, for dear old Justin, it should be,
” Time goes by, relevance decreases, inanity increases”.
I guess it is good to get a different opinion on such matters, convoluted and illogical though it be.
not really i think he only spews out the same stuff in different order… he doesn`t have anything new to add to what he has said so many times before. then again he has to earn a $
I wonder what he’s paid to sit at his desk and read the NY Times.
Agree with all you points. And why the dig at the Federalist, using the oft-repeated talking point that the financing is obscure? Why?
Thanks for pointing this out. I also wondered if the funding of all left-wing think tanks is transparent, and if not, why does Justin Webb single out The Federalist?
…unfortunately, the Left now believe that telling the rest of us that we are vile, bigoted morons who ought to keep quiet, do as we are told, and believe those things that they require us to believe…is actually an act of helpful instruction to the “low-information” masses, not an expression of hatred and contempt…I think perhaps because so much of the “work” they delude themselves that they are doing involves self-castigation for their various moral failings…sexism, racism, transphobia and the rest…usually under the direction of some Guru of cutting-edge feminism (the kind that doesn’t actually believe that Women are a thing), CRT or some such.
Since we mostly start in a completely different place…it is mostly as though they are abusing us in a language we cannot understand…not least because most of what they say is either idiotic or incomprehensible…and we quite reasonably get pretty bl##dy irritated about it..!
The mask fights were simply an example of the undignified and aggressive way some Americans treat each other even on a day they should remember in a sombre way.
Simply repeating that it is a ‘fact’ that ‘the Left’ (whom I don’t agree with on many, probably most issues) hates America, is not an argument but an assertion. It is also a statement that achieves nothing continue fighting the culture war, and inevitably further reducing America’s power and influence (which in world history have been largely good). Most Americans voted Left in 2020, which is a fact, albeit one that reduces some Unherd commentators to paroxysms of rage.
It would be more accurate to say the Right think they represent what is best about America, and so do the Left. They have entirely incompatible visions. But the majority of US citizens actually don’t identify with either of the extremes, but unfortunately a very adversarial political and media landscape tends to force polarisation.
Breaking news! Stuck up Beeb Brit writes article to crap on America. Unfortunately, incoherent rambling leaves Americans amused, Brits shaking their heads, and Justin Webb feeling even more smug. More at eleven!
🙂
Please, Please, Unherd, get a Fox News reporter to go to UK and write an article on the British and their Government and society. It would be a pleasure to read.
No thanks. While the BBC is too left leaning for my liking, though I believe that’s more due to journalism as a whole becoming a middle class pursuit rather than a deliberate policy, the news outlets in the States don’t even pretend to try and tell the news anymore. I’d rather that hyper partisan nonsense from both sides didn’t infect the rest of the world
Fox is truth, BBC is Fake News.
Fox (and most other American “news” outlets) are entertainment, and should be viewed as such. You’d get as much useful info on world affairs reading The Beano as you would watching those half the time
I started reading the article without checking who the author was. When I got to the bit about The Federalist I knew it must be Justin Webb and stopped reading. We British know what to expect from him.
…and DeToqueville’s primacy in the Foreigner Views America department continues unthreatened .
I visit Unherd to get away from beebthink. But the buggas just follow me.
I read UnHerd because it has writers of different views. I don’t want it to become an echo chamber
Fair enough and I agree, but my annoyance with this article is that we already know what Justin Webb thinks, and yet it seems every few weeks they wheel him out again.
He obviously still considers he has some higher credentials to speak on US affairs, when I think those credentials have waned greatly.
Let him contribute next in six months time when he might at least have a fresher take on things! But even then I just cannot for the life of me see how that would be of greater worth than the opinions of many new – others who could be invited to contribute, just because he once lived and worked in the USA. Time and events have rapidly moved on since he was out there.
I think his knowledge of American affairs is vastly overrated.
Vast amounts of writing is now churnalism. A certain number of words on a page written by someone with a lack of knowledge and experience.
Compare Webb’s writing on America with Sir Mark Tulley’s on the Indian Sub- Continent who really does know his subject.
Webb’s article indicates that he has never shared a beer with a fireman, policeman or a blue collar worker or made an effort to understand them. Whereas Tully is highly regarded by people from all walks of life in the Indian Sub-Continent.
The same unfortunately applies to policy makers with no field dirt in their eyes
“What made them do their duty?”
That is the title of a piece, from Autumn 2001, by Victor Davis Hanson, from the City Journal website that has been republished for this month, for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. One paragraph in particular caught my eye. And if I may quote from it:
“The rescuers’ simple patriotism offers another favorable contrast with some of their elite observers. We do not hear from New York’s heroic firemen and police any sophisticated nonsense that we brought the two towers crashing down upon ourselves because of our arrogance or imperial political ambitions. They do not tell us that we must change our sinful ways and abandon our friends. …. Most seem to accept that a magnificent city such as theirs, in a nation as free and humane as their own, naturally invites the envy of lesser people and thus must be defended from those who hate what we are rather than anything we have done. Seeing the rescuers display their patriotism at Ground Zero, where they have carefully displayed American flags and patriotic slogans, swells one’s own national pride.”
Is that depiction of patriotism from the heart of New York city twenty years ago what former President Bush means, from his Pennsylvania speech two days ago, when he mentioned in a sentence “our nation and our future together”?
Thank you for adding that.
If only President Bush had remembered that brevity is the soul of wit. The “nation and future” bit was one felicitous phrase in a very bad speech.
As a professor, I recognise this kind of writing. Many intelligent students will satisfy the word count with elegance but without saying anything.
Almost totally devoid of insight. Indeed, I can’t see any insight in it.
He might for example have compared empowering citizens in Missouri and Texas with judicial review in the UK instead of tainting it by association.
He might also have asked why law-abiding citizens in the UK should be prevented from owning and carrying firearms.
He might have questioned why we are not allowed to sue our police for kneeling and failure to protect public property such a statutes in Bristol.
True (and quite a few profs and the rest of us do too if we’re honest).
Compared to other sites, I find the articles and the comments here at Unherd to be very high quality. Ordinarily, I avoid the comment sections but there are several names here that I recognise and look forward to hearing from. That has not been my experience (or maybe I am wilfully blind:-)).
True. But US commentators on this issue appear to offer not much hope either. Why, blow me down, one offered to slop tea over one of my inputs. Yes please – milk no sugar.
Education, Education, Education. All over the west children are spoon-fed a mix of Marxism and postmodernist rubbish by their very woke teachers. I don’t understand the surprise.
The Federalist has “no clarity on its funding”? Well, it never occurred to me to enquire about that on the many occasions I’ve read the Federalist. I just judged whatever case they made on its own merits. But OK, I guess before we consider any argument being put for any position, we need “clarity” on the author’s income. Accordingly, I’ll be wanting detailed bank statements from Justin Webb about his salary, his investments, his tax returns and any and all income into his household.
“A measure passed by the Republicans who run the state gives people accused of federal gun crimes the right to sue local police if they co-operated with an FBI investigation but that investigation eventually found no wrong.”
Well the Democrats have declared war on the 2nd Amendment, which is the first thing EVERY Tyrant in history has done. Disarm the citizens. Germany, China, Russia, Cuba, all tyrants disarm their citizens as they know the people are their enemy.
This is just to stop the state agencies, as they become captured by Soros funded DAs and such, from colluding with Democrats from outside of the State to disarm Missourians. I agree.
BBCs North American Editor… What next? Get Iranian TV do an article on the state of America?
But is it actually incorrect? It seems spot on to me, and by the way, the 1999 “hanging chad” election – which predated 9/11 – was the first one when we saw that the left only tolerates the results of elections if it wins.
I’d go back to Nixon. If Watergate had been a Democrat job the media would have looked the other way.
I wager fissiparous is not a word often used in conversations in New York or California either. What a condescending twit this contributor is “
I know, having a big Zoology background I wanted to work Viviparous into my reply to him, but then wanted to use Ovoviviparous, but ended up not bothering as it seemed a bit contrived….
Perhaps the reason is that ideological movements that were created specifically to destroy the West on behalf of the Soviet Union — the ideas of the Frankfurt School and of anti- and post-colonialist thinkers who bought into Lenin’s provably wrong imperialism theory — have gained popularity first in American academe, which had an anti-American cast since the 1960’s, and then on the American Left more broadly, coalescing into what is now referred to as “wokeness”.
It is worse than it might have been because of the unfortunate circumstance that the justifiable reaction against the attack on America’s traditional classical liberalism was co-opted by the nearly idea-free populism of the narcissist Donald Trump, who provoked an unhinged counter-reaction from the American Left and center-Left, leading to elite disdain for all of the traditional trappings of American patriotism that Trump adopted as his own — his opposition having already abandoned them before he descended the escalator to announce his Presidential run.
America’s traditional classical liberalism was co-opted by the Neoliberals on the left and Neoconservatives on the right a long time ago. Why do you think so many traditional conservatives on the right were willing to go with Trump over self styled “conservatives” like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? It was because the Republican leadership was not willing to fight for any of the classical liberal conservative values it claimed to care about. There is a good chance something similar will happen on the left with the classical liberal liberals (yeah I know, it’s an American thing) feeling increasingly alienated with the Democrat party.
As an American conservative, I understand not wanting to go with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, what I don’t understand is preferring Donald Trump to Ted Cruz. (Though I admit I am especially fond of Cruz not merely because I find his politics congenial, but because he can drop extensive quotations from the movie The Princess Bride at will for humorous effect.)
“co-opted by the nearly idea-free populism of the narcissist Donald Trump,”
Hay – what does that make Biden?
Trump had MAGA, which is good enough to me. Biden has CRT and BLM and MMT, or basically the destruction of America..
And what were Bush, Rubio and Cruz offering? More foreign wars and more of the same.
“leading to elite disdain for all of the traditional trappings of American patriotism that Trump adopted as his own”
Seriously? Just so you know, there was *no* shortage of disdain from the elites prior to Trump. Trump just enraged them by not giving a f.
The article is all over the place. The trends are not even unique to the US, where for sure they are played out more visibly and acrimoniously. But why did the US turn in on itself ideologically after the Cold War?.
With a sort of wistful atavism, we Yanks tend to follow our mother country’s fashions late and slightly oddly. A staple of lower level Modern History classes here are variations on “Why did Britain lose heart in the early 20th century? Was it upper class guilt over Edwardian excess and the abuses of the Empire?” and other such speculations. Very clumsy prompts, but we students understood that the underlay was the fear that what afflicted Britain would eventually be adumbrated by her former colony.
The left hate America. The right fight for their country. There is no debating that. The left wants to establish a totalitarian future with the “great reset”, the central bank digital currency, digital IDs tied to everything you do so you can be tracked 24/7. They will not take no for an answer. Tedros of the WHO, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab have all told us in specific terms that we are never going back to “normal”. We don’t accept this. We are living normal and ignoring them and will fight them until our deaths. This is WW3. It is either us or them.
America is divided because it’s been very badly led since 2000, and Americans are deeply upset. The hubris thing has turned out to be a dangerous myth, but American hubris still has hard-right supporters, who’ve taken isolationism and evocation of the frontier spirit into weird new regions. America needs a President who can inspire, unite and lead, and it needs an enemy it can defeat. Unfortunately, China is not that enemy.
Yet the latest display of isolationism was demonstrated by Biden, who not only pulled out of Afghanistan in unnecessary disarray, but completely ignored and alienated his traditional allies in so doing.
Biden is a ‘hard right President’ in Giles’ world.
🙂
kicked Corn-Pop’s As*
Biden is going to get his war. He has many chicken-hawks in his party (Warren) who are in thrall to the Military Industrial Complex. (although the Pharma/Medical Industrial Complex is filling their shoes to a degree)