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America has always been a basket case The nation often appears deranged and unstable — only to come up trumps

How is America coping, post-Trump? Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty

How is America coping, post-Trump? Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty


April 14, 2021   6 mins

All British foreign correspondents who live in America for more than a few years write a book about it. It’s compulsory. They are invariably fuzzy focus takes on road-trips in which our charmed modern-day de Tocqueville meets a range of characters chewing corn dogs in the sun and declares that America, while barmy, and without a functioning health service, is still quite fun.

I wrote two of them, both hugely optimistic about the place. One is literally called Have A Nice Day. I hailed Americans’ sobriety and the gentle virtues of their system of government. It was published in 2009. How was I to know they were about to get high on Fentanyl and elect Donald Trump?

Anyway, it is with some annoyance that I have to tell you my friend Nick Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent, has written the antidote to all these vapid takes, mine included. Nick comes across on the news as a bit of a lad — actually he is a bit of a lad — but he is also a historian with a deep understanding of what makes America tick. And When America Stopped Being Great is an absolutely belting achievement for a hack, and an Englishman to boot. It is, as the title suggests, an elegy for a lost nation and a lost cause. The Washington Post gave the book a long and favourable review, calling it, “riveting, often revelatory, crammed with facts, occasionally personal, and almost always depressing”.

It is also wrong.

Not in its description of modern-day America, which Bryant knows well and captures superbly. The inequality, the intellectual poverty, the extremism, the mass shootings, the end of civility in debates on abortion or guns or anything. But he is wrong about the constitution. He points out — rightly — that it’s under pressure from modernity. A good example: Democrats can win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but the Republicans have nominated 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices. “That is why,” Bryant writes, “talk of a reboot or a reset of the current obsolete operating system is so misplaced.”

Really? Tinkering could sort things for another hundred years or so. Fixing the Senate to reduce the impact of the rural minority won’t be decorous or easy, but is it impossible? Might an America that conquered the empty(ish) spaces in the first place not manage to reinvigorate them, repopulate them with businesses no longer tethered to coasts — or physical places at all — and so rebalance political power?

Others have also thought the place was going to the dogs. I mean properly believing the system to be broken. So perhaps the answer to the current crisis, as Dennis Rasmussen suggests in his thought-provoking book Fears of a Setting Sun, can be found in the fears of her founders. The men who invented America mostly thought their invention a disaster, a mess from the start. As Rasmussen points out, even in George Washington’s time hatred poisoned everything: “The two main parties saw and treated each other not just as opponents who advocated the wrong policies, but rather as enemies of the Constitution who actively sought to subvert the basic principles of the Revolution… Newspaper polemics included ‘some of the ripest vituperation in American literary history’, in the words of one scholar. Cries of treason entered virtually every political debate, fears of foreign plots abounded, and physical violence was lamentably commonplace.”

Perhaps we became too used to the idea, in the post-Watergate era, of America as stable. A nation always there, indispensable, wise, mostly well run. But it was not in its early years and it has not been oftentimes in its history. Nevertheless: hey, it survives. And, with a few twists and turns, it prospers.

Rasmussen’s book is important because it reminds us not only that the founding fathers were disappointed with their creation but that they had reason to be. It really was a basket case (a “shithole country”, to use Trump’s terminology). With the notable exception of James Madison, Rasmussen writes, all of America’s early leaders, including Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, were pessimistic that the American experiment in republican democracy would endure. They thought that Americans were too venal or stupid to cope with politics. They thought the federal system would buckle. They thought factions would bring the whole edifice down.

“The founders,” Rasmussen tells us, “frequently predicted that the republic that they had established would not last beyond their own generation — that the union would soon be sundered, that a new constitutional convention would have be to called, or that the government would gradually lapse into a hereditary monarchy.”

They also thought foreigners would interfere with American elections and affect the results. Ok, not Russia, but still, the idea of “intrigue” from abroad is not new. Nor is the idea of hereditary rule — of the kind that pits Trump children against Biden children or Clinton children or perhaps even Obama children into the distant decades. Adams predicted it; he thought it inevitable. He would not be delighted by the news that Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew wants to be New York state’s next Governor, but he would not be surprised.

And on and on the jeremiads go; down the ages they echo. Even Jefferson, the most optimistic of the founders, succumbs to disillusion in old age. Only Madison stands up for America and thinks it might work out alright, and he does so because, Rasmussen says, he compares the place to other regimes, not to some idealised perfect system of government.

Perhaps that is the key.

So how are they doing now, the Americans, post Trump? Better or worse than China on freedom; than Russia on state sponsored crime; than the EU on technological achievement? America is indeed badly governed and horribly divided, but is it moribund, as Nick Bryant argues, or merely troubled? Bryant suggests that if his young daughter wanted to see the most thrusting nation in the world, China might be the place to visit — though he hopes she would recognise the cruel authoritarianism of its system. Otherwise she could go to Australia for its lifestyle, an Asian mega-city for a glimpse of the future.

These places all have their strengths — though China will strike many as a pretty unconvincing role model — but none is anything like as vibrant as America, where everyone has come to play. America, where anything might happen — from a school shooting to the conquest of cancer. A nation that can combust with coronavirus but then invent and manufacture multiple vaccines and distribute them in huge numbers. A nation that can delegitimise government and then (perhaps, under Biden) rediscover its importance. A nation often deranged, but seldom stumped for long.

Madison’s other gift to modernity was a belief that politics could be a constant, unending argument without any shared understanding of the common good — but still work. He saw all America’s bipartisan talk as nice to have but unnecessary. Perhaps America was never meant to be united, free from factions, common in purpose. Perhaps it was always best seen as a herding of political cats, hissing and fissiparous from the start.

Seen through that lens, Donald Trump looks less frightening. As Rasmussen suggests of the modern era: “We no longer face repeated, serious threats of secession and civil war. Political violence is far less common today … No contemporary election can compare with the presidential election of 1800 — a contest between Jefferson and Adams, two of our most revered founders — in terms of sheer viciousness. Today’s much-maligned ‘mainstream media’ is in reality far more responsible and fact based than the newspapers of the 1790s.”

America’s problems are more intractable but less existentially threatening than many suppose. They were there from the start. They are there today. And tomorrow?

I am not betting against the place. Nick Bryant says he fears more American Carnage, to use Donald Trump’s memorable phrase from his inaugural speech. It is true that some on the American Right have given up on their fellow citizens — particularly those with darker skin who have more recently arrived. It is also true that plenty on the Left have done the same thing, with rural white folk, whose “deaths of despair” can feel rooted more in lost status than lost life chances. It is true, too, that too many people are shot — or shoot themselves — though you have to be careful here. Most American lives are free of violence and the number of households with guns — around 42% — is not much changed from decades ago: they just have more of them.

Neither Rasmussen nor Bryant reach firm conclusions. This is wise. There is no American denouement in the offing. Any properly terminal decline, or reset towards revivification, will be imperceptible at first, and argued over forever. That’s always been the point of the place. The argument about the best path to political progress is not always edifying but is always, and forever, worth having. And America, forever, will be the place to have it.


Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four. His Panorama documentary “Trump the Sequel”, is available now on  Iplayer

JustinOnWeb

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Cho Jinn
Cho Jinn
3 years ago

It is true that some on the American Right have given up on their fellow citizens — particularly those with darker skin who have more recently arrived.”

I made it this far, and should be congratulated. The author needs to cease reading NYT’s Twitter, or Twitter altogether, actually.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

Yes, this was a very racist and unfair comment. He also fails to mention that the vast majority of gun deaths occur in the inner cities and are caused by one particular group shooting others from the same group. This is something the media will never acknowledge.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

I thought the majority of US gun deaths were suicides.

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Mr. Perkins–
Correct. Latest data shows 61% of firearm deaths are suicides.
Interestingly, in comparison with other industrialized nations, the U.S. has relatively low rates of assault violence but high firearm mortality rates.
Even when firearm homicide rates were at their highest in the mid-1990s, they were not higher than those for firearm suicide.
Here is the key point that explains everything: Firearm homicide and suicide rates vary demographically and geographically. If you’re not aware of something, it is not your problem.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ernest DuBrul
Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

6 in 10 gun deaths, I read. Over 90% of them by white people (60% of population) Though I don’t know how many were in inner cities. Does suggest the biggest threat from firearms to white people is suicide. More than three times as many white people use guns to kill themselves than are killed by other people with guns, in US. But, gun control is most strongly opposed by white men. Go figure.

William Harvey
William Harvey
3 years ago
Reply to  Last Jacobin

How white are these “white men” are they of Scandinavian descent and therefore very “white”… or are they more Southern European and not quite as “white”

I really like a lot of your posts but i have to say it….You sir are a racist but are unable to see it. May be one way would be to look at your posts and substitute the word “white” (whatever that means) for black (whatever that means)

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
Reply to  William Harvey

The data I saw on firearm suicides, from Statista which was sourced from the CDC, broke down the figures by White, Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaskan Native.
The data on gun control views came from the Pew Research Centre (some of it via London School of Economics US Centre): By 2016, 61 percent of whites said that “protection of gun rights” is more important than controlling ownership of guns while only half as many blacks and Latinos provided the same response. Their stats broke race down as White or Black non Hispanic and Hispanic and by gender.
I can’t see how my post was racist but if you point out where I was being racist I’ll gladly reconsider. If I substitute the words black for white in the post it would mean the same but with the races reversed.

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago
Reply to  Last Jacobin

Mr. Bridgeford–
Does suggest the biggest threat from firearms to white people is suicide?
Absolutely!
Go figure.
It’s pretty obvious — Who ever thinks to protect themselves from themself? If a person is suicidal, protecting himself is not in order. If not suicidal, it is never viewed as a problem.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Could be why the right is giving up on some things. Reading about the criminals in USA being the modern heroes does not make me feel that way about them.

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Also didn’t Trump increase the Republican vote among minority groups? People like the author ( and he is absolutely a type) are why people stopped watching BBC. He has the mind-set of a very narrow media group who only want the left-wing candidate to win & refuse to even think there are many people who just don’t think like this

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  kathleen carr

So Samira Ahmed feels ‘haunted’ that the BBC by allowing people on whose views she doesn’t share contributed towards Brexit.As though people don’t get their political views from a variety of sources.

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Why is it racist, Fraser?

Robert Pay
Robert Pay
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

This is the canard being pushed to reracialize America for political ends…and it can take in an intelligent observer such as Webb.

Terry M
Terry M
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

Precisely. The NYT has admitted, post the 2016 election, that it is a biased and blind journal. Recent policies and resignations only confirm that judgment. Moreover, the US media have fallen into pure political propaganda mode, and it is only by sampling quite a variety of sources that one can construct a true picture of this country on almost any topic.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

That jumped off the screen. Ample evidence shows that the recently-arrived darker people have left the natives in the dust. Because the new arrivals were not conditioned in the politics of perpetual grievance and victimhood.

Richard Brown
Richard Brown
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

That’s a consequence of all immigration. Those who have the gumption to up and leave their native land use all the same gumption to succeed in their new home, usually at the expense of the natives.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

So you say open your borders and the best of the world will stream in making your land hugely successful?

Andre Lower
Andre Lower
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Exactly. No matter how much entitled those that “arrived first” may feel, they stand little chance to beat the sheer determination and resourcefulness of newly-landed immigrants.
It still baffles me that the “exceptionalist” USA citizens of today carefully avoid remembering that none of them descended from heaven. They were once despised immigrants, with the exact traits I listed above.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

Not all, not by a long shot. The legal type of immigration on which America was built is in line with your comment; the type involving the mass importation of people for nakedly political reasons is quite different.

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

‘Legal immigration’ – if I understand your meaning correctly is normally restricted to those who have already got sufficient resources (financial or proven evidence of skills that required resources to gain) to overcome the barriers to immigration deliberately put up to stop poorer people. So,many of those legal immigrants already have bit of a head start.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

do you know anything about USA? If you are talking about people from India I guess I sort of see what you are thinking, but have you visited the Southern Border recently?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I only live here so it’s possible I know something. The southern border is not the sum total of immigration or dark-skinned people. It’s not about skin color at all; it’s about importing people for no practical purpose. Immigrants of any color who come in legally do not bring along the left’s dystopian view of the US.

David Hartlin
David Hartlin
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

The author appears to be unaware of darker skinned conservatives.

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

Quite stunning how well Nigerians do in general compared to native American Blacks. Seems immigrants don’t know they are victims so they prosper well in their new country. Pity Webb isn’t aware.

Val Cox
Val Cox
3 years ago
Reply to  Cho Jinn

Me too.

Marcus Leach
Marcus Leach
3 years ago

“A nation that can delegitimise government and then (perhaps, under Biden) rediscover its importance”
Well let’s look at what Biden and Democrats have has done so far.
Biden has circumvented Congress by issuing an unprecedented number of executive orders to enact major policy.
The Democrats have produced the: For the People Act. The Act is a grotesquely coarse attempt to remove protections against voter fraud and malpractice.
The Democrats are setting about fixing the system in their favour by considering granting admission of Washington DC and Puerto Rico as new states. In order to do this it is proposed that the Filibuster is dispensed with.
The US border has been thrown open to admit millions more potential Democrat voters.
The Democrats eschewed bipartisanship to pass a $1.9 trillion spending bill touted as a Covid 19 relief bill but with $1 trillion in pork to bail out financially irresponsible Democrats states, enrich Democrat donors, and expand “progressive” programs.
Biden has set up a commission to investigate increasing the number of the Supreme Court justices, with an eye to packing it with Democrat “progressives”.
The Democrats have denounced the USA and its institutions as “institutionally racist” and based from its inception on “white supremacy”, The police in particular have been denounced as “systemically racist” and characterised as a oppressors and killers of black people.
I presume the: “A nation that can delegitimise government” is a dig at Trump. But what did Trump actually do to “delegitimise government”? I suppose his accusations of voting fraud could be characterised in such a way at a stretch, but what else? Offhand I can’t think of anything.
Bypassing a Congress controlled by Democrats to issue a raft of executive orders like a medieval monarch: corrupting the voting process by inviting fraud; fixing the system in its favour by court packing and the admission of new Democrat voting states; abandoning bipartisanship and threatening the Filibuster; denouncing the US and its institutions as riddled with racism and “white supremacy” and rotten from its very inception – that is the delegitimization of government on a grotesque scale.

Last edited 3 years ago by Marcus Leach
Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

The writer is one of the MSM true believers, and you have to read their stuff in a mirror to get the truth. Take Biden and gun control. He wants to ban the AR-15, the most popular, legally owned, long gun in USA, although they are responsible for the least number of shootings of any kind. Almost all shootings are from semi-automatic pistols, and almost no criminal shootings are from legally owned firearms. 100% of what Biden is doing is harmful. But as we know, as America goes, so fallows Europe. They will find out themselves how the attacking of traditional values works out.

Joe Lynn
Joe Lynn
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

What traditional values? You had twice impeached dimwit in a WH, who, in between moronic tweets, was fantasizing of doing his own daughter.
The obsession with guns in States is quite puzzling.

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

No response to Webb’s point about the Supreme Court?

Sidney Falco
Sidney Falco
3 years ago

Trump was possibly the final attempt to arrest the decline.

Brian Villanueva
Brian Villanueva
3 years ago

There are so many things in this article that are completely wrong:

“Madison’s other gift to modernity was a belief that politics could be a constant, unending argument without any shared understanding of the common good — but still work.”
Aaron Burr believed this, but not Madison. The latter was supportive of a diversity of means, but not of ends. To see the difference: homelessness is a solvable political problem, as long as the solution involves reducing it. However, a faction arguing in favor of homelessness is a situation for which political compromise is far more difficult. Federalism got us around the issue of slavery (a profound disagreement about ends — specifically the nature of Man) for 70 years, but after SCOTUS took political compromise off the table with Dred Scott, we were shooting each other 36 months later.

“Perhaps America was never meant to be united, free from factions, common in purpose.”
I would point you back to Federalist 51. Madison was creating an institution he believed would be free from factions, or at least from factions being able to subvert the common good. He was wrong about that and blind to his own leadership of a faction, but that was his express goal.

“The Constitution is under pressure from modernity.”
It isn’t modernity that has undermined the Constitution, it is the Civil Rights Act, which codifies an alternate Constitution of group rights instead of individual rights. Intended as a specific redress for slavery and Jim Crow, the group-rights genie was soon enslaved to countless other minorities.
Only a believer could call that “modernity” as if it’s the inevitable march of Progress. To many it’s a reactionary throwback to the pre-Enlightenment days before “all men are created equal.” We have yet to reconcile these competing visions.

Like the author, I believe the “end of America” thesis is overblown. The govt will certainly survive Trump and Biden and BLM and Proud Boys, likely very much as he describes (neutering the Senate, expanding the courts, etc…) but having succumbed to the group-rights genie, the republic of Madison or Jefferson it shall no longer be.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. “Our republic is for a moral and religious people and wholly unsuited for the governance of any other”. We are no longer either.

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
3 years ago

Well reasoned comment. The divisiveness is healthy leading to compromise, a now foreign notion but likely temporary.

Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
3 years ago

An entertaining 1000 words of not a whole lot. I feel, as someone living next door to political enemies (but otherwise friendly acquaintances) deep in the American south should, proud that when English collectivists presume to take facile shots of dim reproach and faint praise at our beloved republic, they do it without really saying anything.

Robert Pay
Robert Pay
3 years ago
Reply to  Mikey Mike

Webb was at his best on road trips but the comment about the rural states and the senate shows he doesn’t get the Republic. The BBC, with its cut and paste Guardian view of the world, uncritically parrots the NYT and CNN who rarely leave their offices and would like the USA to be China. One party, thought control, crony capitalism and a social credit system -of course, this will be outsourced and there will be no internment camps. Most Americans are ignorant of the Constitution, our history is being rewritten, and 95 percent of the media presents a single narrative full of distortions and half truths or hoaxes. I hope the people resist.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  Robert Pay

Interestingly, the latest Project Veritas expose of CNN appears to be a massive story right now, and is trending number two on Twitter. (I”m amazed that Twitter hasn’t shut it down).
Of course, it only tells people like us what we have known for some years, but it does seem to have come as a bit of a shock to some people.

Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
3 years ago
Reply to  Robert Pay

His tone in this piece is pretty stunning considering he chose to write it for an ideologically mixed audience at Unherd. It’s as if his over-exposure to, as you put it, the “cut and paste Guardian view of the world” has made it impossible for him to hear how stupid Guardian-view demagoguey sounds to people outside of his echo chamber. Like, you can call me a bigot to your friends, but when you say it to my face you better duck.

Last edited 3 years ago by Mikey Mike
Saul D
Saul D
3 years ago

The lesson of the Trump presidency is that America is very very difficult to change. Stronger forces are at play than mere politics can deal with.
And this is part of the current problems America is having with itself. Decisions get taken with no apparent political involvement – from children in cages, to involvement in overseas wars, to mass surveillance or interference in foreign elections. No politician stands for this stuff, yet it happens.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

Perhaps the biggest threat to the US comes from the digital yuan and rouble, and the associated payment systems, that the Chinese and Russians are creating. These are designed to circumvent the Swift payment systems and to avoid the need to buy and sell oil and other goods in dollars.
Over the next few years this could cause the dollar to lose its reserve currency status. No longer will the US be able to go on print and borrow with impunity. Alexander Mercouris did a very good podcast on this yesterday.

Last edited 3 years ago by Fraser Bailey
G Harris
G Harris
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Agreed.

The engineered end of ‘exorbitant privilege’ is America’s elephant in the room.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  G Harris

Reports of the $ death have been greatly exaggerated. The reserve will continue, faute de mieux, to be Greenbacks for a great time yet.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

So is nothing needed to back the new digital currencies? I do know China is amassing gold, and that is the only way I could see for the $ to be ended as the Reserve Currency, and us gold loons know it would mean $15,000 gold, and shake the world (I have been buying some Gold Miner Junior ETFs in case), but like all preppers will likely be dissappointed.

I await the Bit-Coin collapse as China will not like it in competition with its crypto. But still, any fiat, digital or paper, ultimately has to be backed by some reserve (excepting the $, but that is not something easily replaced that way as it backs up every currency existing)

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

I’ll take my life in my hands and offer some limited support for this article.
Yes, some aspects of the author’s characterization of America seem cribbed from the pages of The Guardian, but he does make a valid point about America’s resilience. The USA has gone through very tough times in the past, including major cultural changes beginning in the 1960s, but it has weathered the storm and remained a global leader. It’s possible America will survive and prosper after the latest attack on its culture and beliefs. To be honest, I have my doubts, but maybe America will surprise me.
As other people in this thread have noted, we should be careful to avoid Unherd becoming an echo chamber for any particular set of beliefs. Alternative viewpoints are always welcome, if only to provide the opportunity to subject them to rational analysis.
My problem with the author of this article is his style. He is my least favorite author on Unherd because his articles always seem to be cobbled together from glib soundbites and clichés borrowed from the MSM. That might be fine when presenting a radio show (that seems to be his main gig) but it appears shallow when compared to most other contributors on Unherd.

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
3 years ago

This article is hipster nonsense written by someone who’s read a few America-Bashing books, and maybe lived there and eaten a Corn-dog or two, but who should be writing for the NYT, not unherd, not on my dime. Perhaps this guy might try Charles Kessler’s The Crisis of the two Constitutions (keep the Federalist Papers handy) and Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement to learn just a little about what the Founders actually thought about the republic they created and how we got from there to here since the early 1900’s and its “progressive” movement.

And then, just maybe, this moron might begin to understand what Trump was up against and what he was trying to fix and to do, and why 75mm people voted for him. Also, if you control for California’s lopsided vote, the popular vote differences quietly disappear – that’s right, one or two far-left states that are currently social disasters account for all of it.

G Matthews
G Matthews
3 years ago

If I want to listen to the views of the BBC, I will buy a TV license. Surely the whole point of “unherd” is to have some voices who are “unheard”, not the same old same old? I for one have become totally disillusioned with unherd.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

A very good point. Too many of the voice here are the same old, same old voices that caused us to abandon the MSM,

Terry M
Terry M
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

I also disagreed with this article, but without representation of these types of views Unherd would become an echo chamber. Is that what you want?

Marcus Leach
Marcus Leach
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

I take your point. However, the importance difference is that the BBC offers no right of reply, whereas Unherd gives the opportunity for people to dismantle the nonsense of Leftists/”Progressives”/radical feminists and show it up for what it is.
In the context of these articles I would suggest that the unheard are the commenters who have an opportunity to express opinions that are typically excluded from the MSM.

G Matthews
G Matthews
3 years ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

Not really, many of my comments have been deleted by moderators.

William Harvey
William Harvey
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

Im not so sure about that. Its worth reading stuff like the nonsense in this article, with its stark Trump Derangement Syndrome leeching out, just to ground oneself. It makes you think very hard about why all those CNN/BBC watching Guardian readers see things as they do… despite all the evidence to the contrary

To be fair to the author ..he does need to try and earn a living in the UK Far Left media. He may not fully believe all he writes.. but if writes something different he will just get cancelled by the twitterati that he parrots

Last edited 3 years ago by William Harvey
Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
Reply to  William Harvey

. . . also in the UK the definition of ‘far left’ is very different from that in the US.

David Platzer
David Platzer
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

With the exception of Douglas Murray, most of those given slots on Unherd give us the same old dried-out chestnuts without any of the amusement and excitement that used to make me eagerly buy the Spectator on Friday mornings in the later 1970s.

Last edited 3 years ago by David Platzer
Joe Lynn
Joe Lynn
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

You poor gammonflake, is someone invading your safe echo-chamber?

David Hartlin
David Hartlin
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Lynn

You seem easily triggered, so much so that you can not offer rational criticism but rather offer what seems like an uncontrolled emotional outburst.

Joe Lynn
Joe Lynn
3 years ago
Reply to  David Hartlin

I’m triggered by your post. I do get triggered by abject stupidity.
Anything else, my little stalker?

David Hartlin
David Hartlin
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Lynn

My you are fragile ! I suppose you feel you are a victim?

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Lynn

Mr. Lynn–
Thank you for a new word (gammonflake) to add to my vocabulary of Britishisms.

John Mcalester
John Mcalester
3 years ago
Reply to  G Matthews

Yet you’re still here.

From Unherd’s mission statement:

“It’s easy and safe to be in one or other of these two camps – defensive liberal or angry reactionary – but UnHerd is trying to do something different, and harder.

We want to be bold enough to identify those things that have been lost, as well as gained, by the liberal world order of the past thirty years; but we strive to be always thoughtful rather than divisive.”

It’s good to have wide and varied debate, but if you just want articles that fit your viewpoint there are probably better places on line to find them.

G Matthews
G Matthews
3 years ago
Reply to  John Mcalester

That mission statement gives precedence to things lost. The USP is the focus on the lost, leading with the lost. There are plenty of places, e.g. the entire MSM and social media, to celebrate the things “gained”. I think the idea is to celebrate the lost but acknowledge positives were they exist. To give voice to “UnHerd” points of view. Not to allow the platform to be taken over by propagandists from the MSM promoting their own books.

Nigel H
Nigel H
3 years ago

“BBC person says BBC things” shocker. Come on Justin you can write better stuff than this surely…

William Harvey
William Harvey
3 years ago
Reply to  Nigel H

He’d get cancelled if he did…and he probably has large bills to pay

Brian Bieron
Brian Bieron
3 years ago

Well done! America (not unlike democracy) is the worst country, except for all the others.

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago
Reply to  Brian Bieron

Mr. Bieron–
One always needs perspective, both historical and geographical, before making an analysis or judgment. You seem to have both.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago

It’s almost a punchline how the people who claim to “get” America often don’t. The biggest obstacle is the lack of a comparable nation to measure the US against. Many things here are structurally different from much of the rest of the world, from individual liberties to the makeup of the population and so forth. There are certainly problems, no argument there, and they are likely to intensify before leveling out. At this point, we’re a bit like exes forced to live in the same house.

Andre Lower
Andre Lower
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Ah, the good old American exceptionalism…

Val Cox
Val Cox
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Most people who “get America” really only “get” New York, DC and LA!

David Platzer
David Platzer
3 years ago

I should be more impressed if the article’s author had long beyond the mainstream media’s biased view on Trump to have a fair look at what Trump achieved during his four-year stint,

Joe Lynn
Joe Lynn
3 years ago
Reply to  David Platzer

Like mock disabled reporter? Congratulate China and Xi on ‘handling’ CV-19? Saying covfefe? Being impeached twice? Losing WH, Congress and Senate?

David Platzer
David Platzer
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Lynn

That is the media’s portrayal. He was the first recent US president to bungle into unwinnable wars and he even made countries in the Middle East sign peace deals.

Joe Lynn
Joe Lynn
3 years ago
Reply to  David Platzer

There is a video of him mocking disabled reporters. There is a tweet from him congratulating Xi on handling Covid. There is a video of him saying covfefe and hamberders. He was impeached twice. He lost WH, C & S.
Now, I understand that you are simply denying reality because your blinkers are not allowing you to criticize your cult leader. That’s ok. It’s rather predictable, but it’s ok. As for peace deals; peace deals between countries which were not at war, those peace deals? Or the ‘peace deals’ that allowed Jared to get Qatari loan for 666 5th ave? Those ones?
By any measurable fact, the worst president in history, In his own words; ‘One term loser’.

Mark Preston
Mark Preston
3 years ago

Just because the USA hasn’t fallen to bits yet doesn’t mean that it won’t.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark Preston

Just because gravity has not reversed yet, and us all ejected into space, does not mean it won’t. But we do not use this thinking to figure out likely future outcomes. Well, unless we write for the Guardian.

Val Cox
Val Cox
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

errrm poor analogy I think.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago

Political violence is far less common today
When the USA was founded, it aimed to stay out of foreign wars. Today it’s forever engaging in them. And what is war but the continuation of policy by other means, international political violence?

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Perkins
Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
3 years ago

Americans strike me as a bunch of gullible hysterical idiots who have never grown up.
I loathe their trashy culture which always seems to end up in the UK e.g.Hollywood, Disney, McDonalds,tearful emotional celebrity confessions, air kissing, relentless positivity – to name but a few.
Now the ostentatious habit of politicians to stand in front of the national flag on every broadcast has been adopted here in the UK.
It’s all very unBritish. Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip? It seems that our Queen is the only one left to set an example of dignity and restraint.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

The National Trust now requires every employee have ‘Struggle Sessions’ (see Mao and the Cultural Revolution), attend Critical Theory classes, and even has minority youth brought in from the cities to teach the workers about racism so they may better explain the Imperial British Past to the visitors. You Brits have become a bunch of self loathing, self harming, lemmings, headed for the cliffs. I do not worry about your judgement of America. (so long, and have a good leap)

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

‘The National Trust now requires every employee have ‘Struggle Sessions’ (see Mao and the Cultural Revolution), attend Critical Theory classes, and even has minority youth brought in from the cities to teach the workers about racism’

Critical race theory came straight over from American universities, along with BLM – another one of your noisome exports.Take it with you and stick them where the sun don’t shine.
Have a nice day!

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

Actually. ‘Critical Theory’ came from the Wiemar Republic ‘Frankfurt School’, a university intellectual Marxist group at the Goethe Institute, in the 1950s moved to Columbia University USA, and is the source of all this. But check out the ‘Frankfurt School 11 points’ to see if any ring a bell.

(and I am from London, but moved to USA decades ago, and likely know Britain better than you do)

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I’m not sure, but I think ‘critical theory’ came from Europe, while ‘critical race theory’, its offspring, was born in the USA.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Critical Theory comes from the Marxist Frankfurt School, google it – Critical theory (also capitalized as Critical Theory)[1] is an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation,[2] critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School”
from wiki

Critical Race Theory uses this structure.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Critical Theory comes from the Marxist Frankfurt School, google it, it is a wild topic, and if you do not know the Frankfurt School google them, and then the Frankfurt School 11 points. This is necessary to understand the world.

The Wiemar republic gave us Fascism, Antifa (Marxist fascists), the Frankfurt School (Marxist anti-capitalists), and many more horrible things.

All this comes from the Nihilist, Existential, Philosophies (coupled with Marx and Freud) of that terrible time, the intellectuals were absolutely top caliber, as was the arts, but all leaning hard to the dark side, and loosened the greatest misery on humanity of any other. Hitler was defeated, but the others continue to destroy the world.

Critical Race Theory uses this structure.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Awaiting for approval yet again – I keep trying to take out the offending words, so will try again:
Critical Theory comes from the Marxist Frankfurt School, google it, it is a wild topic, and if you do not know the Frankfurt School google them, and then the Frankfurt School 11 points. This is necessary to understand the world.
The Wiemar republic gave us Fas* ism, Antifa (Marxist fas* ists), the Frankfurt School (Marxist anti-capitalists), and many more horrible things.
All this comes from the Nihilist, Existential, Philosophies (coupled with Marx and Freud) of that terrible time, the intellectuals were absolutely top caliber, as was the arts, but all leaning hard to the very dark side, and loosened the greatest misery on humanity of any other. Hi* ler was defeated, but the others continue to destroy the world.
Critical Race Theory uses this structure.
(see if this slides past the censors, third time lucky)

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

So was critical race theory born in the USA?

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago

Excellent article showing how historical perspective is always a necessary component of analysis.
I do, however, take issue with Mr. Webb’s agreement concerning Bryant’s description of America that focuses on the inequality, the intellectual poverty, the extremism, end of civility in debates on abortion or guns or anything.
Britain has no inequality? No intellectual poverty? No extremism or lack of civility in debates on transexuals, Covid protocols, Brexit? Please.
These characteristics are and always have been part of being a great, leading nation and are found in the U.S., U.K., most of the E.U., and China. You can’t lead anything without a self-vision of superiority.
(Guns we can claim for ourselves. As Mr. Webb points out, they have always been part of our culture and always will be.)

Liz Walsh
Liz Walsh
3 years ago
Reply to  Ernest DuBrul

I agree that the basic point addressed, that somehow the American Republic survives through times of threat and dissension, and even occasionally might be said to triumph, more because of rather than in spite of, its dynamic tensions. However, the writer could have made that point without indulging in cheap journalistic mythologizing about America the Dysfunctional. And as a foregoing poster noted, the writer suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome. One has to question the perceptions of a writer who implies that Trump inspired or influenced certain thoughts and actions, and yet can remain oblivious to the wonderful or appalling (depends on reader’s POV) fact that Trump’s real importance was that he (DJT) used the “bully pulpit” to give voice to the feelings of half the country which had begun to feel underrepresented. A rough analogy, perhaps, would be the many Britons who had begun to feel stifled, marginalized, deprived of personal agency by a legion of pallid, perverse bureaucrats in Brussels, and welcomed the intoxicating notion of Brexit, rough magic though it be. As in Zeno’s paradox, political arrangements are going to be perpetually lurching towards Arcadia to be actualized…It is national genius to do that in inescapably peculiar ways.

Andre Lower
Andre Lower
3 years ago

America is just fine, and will remain so forever? Sounds like the stereotypical cocaine addict, moving onto heroin and mumbling “no risk here man, I’m in control, I’ve got this”…

Last edited 3 years ago by Andre Lower
Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Andre Lower

A coke addict with a nuclear arsenal.

Brian Villanueva
Brian Villanueva
3 years ago

Like the author, I believe the “end of America” thesis is overblown. The govt will certainly survive Trump and Biden and BLM and Proud Boys, likely very much as he describes (neutering the Senate, expanding the courts, etc…) but having succumbed to the group-rights genie, the republic of Madison or Jefferson it shall no longer be.
Perhaps that’s inevitable. “Our republic is for a moral and religious people and wholly unsuited for the governance of any other”. We are no longer either.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago

I didn’t realise that hatred towards those with differing opinions (not facts) went back so far; I thought it was recent. I still think it irrational. It is surely inevitable that in a democracy there will be others with differing opinions.

Lee Floyd
Lee Floyd
3 years ago

Webb is such a Guardianista/ BBC cliché, with all the baggage that comes with his intentionally limited horizons. Why can’t reporters be interesting, and not just constrained?

mrdeanpaton
mrdeanpaton
3 years ago

America’s political system works just fine, it’s the war between Christians (and I mean Holy Thunder Book of Revelation kinda Christianity) and Secular people that keeps tearing the US apart. A lot of people living in rural areas feel completely alienated from the secular urban areas and vice versa. There isn’t an easy way forward for us

Last edited 3 years ago by mrdeanpaton
Val Cox
Val Cox
3 years ago

I wonder how much time either of you have spent amongst America’s white poor that you dismiss them so readily.

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
3 years ago

So you lecture us about gun control while you have pocket knife surrender bins, you lecture us about political dysfunction after several years of Brexit circus, you whine about our constitution after you made the mistake of forgetting to write yours down, and you lecture us about racial tensions when yours even make our self centered news. I believe the proper American response is “screw off.”

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt Hindman

The UK may have a problem with knife crime, but its murder rate is way below that of the USA. In 2018, I think, London’s rate was 1.5 per 100,000; New York’s, 3.4; DC’s, 17; and Baltimore’s, 51.1. Differences for the nations as a whole are similar, whether comparing murders or homicides.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Compare any part of the UK with Baltimore or DC. See if any differences jump out. The murder rate here is confined to predictable places involving predictable participants, a fair amount of it fueled by the ridiculous drug war.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

The difference that absolutely jumps out to me, and probably most in the UK, is that guns are everywhere in the USA. Way more guns per person (1.2) than Yemen (0.52), which is the world’s second in those terms. Scotland is 117th, with 0.06 per person, and other UK nations rank even lower. But yes, the drug war also has a lot to do with it.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

You are right Ian. A gun can kill far more people in a couple of minutes than a knife; there is no comparison.

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Ms. Johnson–
Very true. But a knife does not have the macho cachet that a gun has in the cultural, demographic, and geographic areas where the murder rate is high.
As the saying goes: Guns don’t kill people; people do. To which should be added: People don’t kill people; only certain people do.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Ernest DuBrul

Guns do not murder people, criminals murder people. And 99.99% of all legal gun owners are not using them for crime, same as in Scotland and London.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Between 1982 and March 2021, 82% of mass shootings in the USA involved legally obtained weapons.

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Mr. Perkins–
And mass shootings constitute a small fraction of our firearm deaths.

Colin Haller
Colin Haller
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt Hindman

If you’re waiting for the British equivalent of the Los Vegas mass shooting with a pocket knife, the sun will have swallowed the earth first.

Colin Haller
Colin Haller
3 years ago

The immensity of America defies coherent perception and assessment. Depending upon which element of its vast, elephantine corpus you grasp, your interpretation will be simultaneously cogent yet incomplete.
It contains multitudes and defies reduction; the ultimate Rorschach blot for the commentariat.

Andrew Raiment
Andrew Raiment
3 years ago

Just curious, has anyone read Justin’s other articles on Unherd? I found them to be informative and balanced, more so than the very partisan Nick Bryant.

Ernesto Garza
Ernesto Garza
3 years ago

We just flew a helicopter on Mars. Beat that!
Freedom is always messy, chaotic and even violent.
Totalitarianism is far worse. Especially violence. Keep our guns. Avoid the violence.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ernesto Garza
Greg Greg
Greg Greg
3 years ago

Growing up in the US as recently as 45 years ago, the Dems n GOP were divided more by tactics than mission. Both loved the American experiment n would defend it against all aggressors. Not so today. It’s the Marxist Dems, (yes, you read that right) vs the constitutionalist ‘others.’ The two have about as much in common as do San Francisco, CA and Butler, PA. I do, however, find it entertaining to watch the contortions into which one must trust themselves in order to suggest we are no more divided today than two centuries ago and that the growing philosophical Grand Canyon thingy which divides America is surmountable, if only one will use the right sneakers. As our beloved (and generally confused) Pres might say, “C’mon man!’ This article begs the question: ‘So, who will ya believe, America? This Brit or your lyin eyes?’

Last edited 3 years ago by Greg Greg
Michael Upton
Michael Upton
3 years ago

Very good.

Bruce Hopkins
Bruce Hopkins
3 years ago

Thanks for a fascinating read. I found it interesting also that when I read your sentence ‘It is true that some on the American Right have given up on their fellow citizens — particularly those with darker skin who have more recently arrived’ that I had an immediate reaction by thinking that something that did not come through in that phrase is that ‘those with darker skin who have more recently arrived’ were never embraced let alone ‘given up on’ by a massive number on the american right. They were made captives & brought there, so their arrival seems slightly dismissive of that ongoing horror. I question myself ongoingly as a privileged white bloody baby boomer of all people. I was born smack bang in the middle of the defined baby boom generation & although my whanau are not wealthy, we have certainly had much privilege compared to many other ethnicities world wide. I don’t react against it & I literally express my gratitude daily alongside making myself stay present to that fact & to the fact that there are billions of people human beings like you & I, who have not once been embraced by ruling authorities/races/classes & who were given up on at birth or even pre birth because of the skin colour or simple geography.
We are a very strange bunch & in my slighter wiser years, I shall never once take for granted the absolute bliss & joy I experience regularly in this life alongside as it takes place alongside the sorrow & horror I witness via our virtual connectedness as a species on this hunk of space matter we exist on. … well that went on a tangent, but again, thanks for the stimulating read.

William MacDougall
William MacDougall
3 years ago

Many of America’s problems – appalling race relations, sick obsession with guns, massacre of the Indians – have origins in the tragic mistake made in 1776.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago

The Indians who often massacred each other? Conquest did not begin on these shores. As to race relations, there are people who’ve learned that grievance is an industry, and a potentially lucrative one.
When do you stop being a victim? At some point, you have to embrace the freedoms that others achieved on your behalf. This also means accepting all that comes with it, to include the consequences of one’s own decision-making.

David Platzer
David Platzer
3 years ago

Conrad Black has suggested that had the cantankerous colonists had set tight, the North American colonies could have made the centre of the British Empire from London to New York but the middle of the nineteenth century;

Karl Schuldes
Karl Schuldes
3 years ago

Funny, I would think appalling race relations would’ve started with slavery, which began when America was a British colony.

William MacDougall
William MacDougall
3 years ago
Reply to  Karl Schuldes

But continued a generation longer than in any British colony, and ended only by a terrible civil war followed by white terrorism.

Ernest DuBrul
Ernest DuBrul
3 years ago

Mr. MacDougall-
I do not see why you would think our race relations are anymore appalling than anywhere else in the world. Up until the mid-60s, yes. But not now.
Likewise, in my 78 years I’ve yet to know any American who was obssessed with guns. The only people I’ve know who owned guns used them for hunting or target sport. If you know how to get guns out of the hands of criminals, please let us know.
Finally, Indians were not massacred. They put up a pretty good fight, as did the Saxons against the Vikings and the Normans. But the invaders oft times win. The difference is that our geography allowed the culturally very different Indians to be moved off of the productive lands where they lived which the enormous number of invading immigrants could then occupy and develop. Had the Vikings opened up Danelaw to mass immigration from the southern areas of the Continent and had the Saxons not been so organized and developed, England would be speaking a Romanesque dialect … and playing in Saxon casinos.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ernest DuBrul
William MacDougall
William MacDougall
3 years ago
Reply to  Ernest DuBrul

Look for example at interracial marriage rates, much lower than in Britain, or look at the strange phenomena of mono-racial churches.

Re Indians, look at Canada’s much happier experience.