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June 4, 2020 - 7:00am
American politics has an outsize presence in this country. As Ralph Leonard writes in UnHerd, the British Left has a habit of eliding the differences between the two countries in discussions of police brutality, which is why this week we have seen protestors in London chanting the American slogan “hands up, don’t shoot” at police officers who are (famously) unarmed. Moreover, Britain is one of only a handful of countries worldwide in which police do not routinely carry guns. These same activists speak confidently of “Miranda rights” (the caution), “police badges” (warrant cards), and “pressing charges” (supporting a prosecution), not realising that these are terms learned from American fiction and media.
The British imitation of American political discourse goes well beyond race. The trans movement as a political entity is also a product of America, with sex reassignment medical technologies and the academic theory that props up the movement all imported to this country. But the movement does not translate well to the British context for several reasons, one of which is the fact that, while American trans people still face discrimination in areas such as housing and employment, these civil rights battles have already been fought and won for LGBT people in Britain, with various pieces of legislation passed almost a generation ago, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. British trans activists have embraced wholesale a political movement designed for an entirely different political landscape.
But Britons raised on a diet of American TV and now immersed in social media dominated by American voices have a bad habit of assuming that they “know” America, forgetting the important distinctions between our two countries. For instance the American feminist and LGBT movements can only be properly understood as part of a reaction against an opponent that simply does not meaningfully exist in mainland Britain: the Christian Right.
When American feminists dismiss any criticisms of porn and prostitution as “prudish”, or figures like Lena Dunham make deliberately provocative comments such as “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had”, it is in the presence of this spectre. But here, where abortion rights are well established, and the key critics of the sex trade are Left-wing feminists, such rhetoric is nonsensical. Still, it continues to be imitated by British feminists and LGBT activists who, desperately looking to America for guidance, find themselves sparring against an imaginary enemy.
There is something rather embarrassing about watching Britons jogging along in the wake of Big Sister America, gripped by their news cycle while they pay us very little notice. Online discourse has a tendency to bleed together and, as the most populous Anglophone country, we should expect American political vocabulary, priorities, and assumptions to dominate. But there is no need for us to further entrench that dominance. This is a country that most Britons have never been to, and that the vast majority of us do not really understand; America being a far stranger and more foreign place than casual consumption of their TV and social media would suggest.
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SubscribeI have cognitive dissonance where Brits are concerned. On the one hand I am proud that they had the guts to leave the EU. I’ve worked with various EU agencies myself and can only describe its leaders as an arrogant bureaucratic elite who believe they know what’s best for all Europeans.
However, on the other hand, I was amazed at how timid they were about the coronavirus lockdown and conforming to the rules. I’m an ex-Brit living in the US South, and I just love the free-thinking, free-wheeling independence I see exhibited there. It reminds me of how things used to be before political correctness sucked the fun out of the world.
The American mode of binary thinking has been exported to Britain (and also spreading to Western Europe). You’re either for us 100% or against us. No nuance is allowed. And surprisingly this is coming mostly from the demographic that labels itself ‘liberal’. I have to say at this point I would much rather suffer the company of the most rabid Trump supporters than spend time being lectured by lachrymose know-it-all academics postulating about systemic racism and white privilege. They’ve set themselves up as the world’s moral guardians and as such will never stop sermonizing us. C.S. Lewis said it much better than when he wrote this:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
The Lewis quotation is fantastic, but to be honest I think the fetishisation of the untrammelled free market in the past forty years has created a group of ideologues who are simultaneously robber barons and moral busybodies. They are the kind of people who can look at mass unemployment, job insecurity and impoverishment and accept these things as part of a quasi-providential order, as if the invisible hand were the Hand of God.
Whilst I accept the existence of the “fetishisation of the untrammelled free market.” I also see there are no unregulated environments. The untrammelled fee market is apocryphal. Even trammelled free markets are very a niche.
Excellent. Thank you. I have been thinking this for along time and it’s important point that needs making. American cultural imperialism has had a huge effect on our national psyche and eroded our own sense of self perhaps why younger people seem so lost. You only have to look at the Disney films you watched as a child to see the underlying theme of American good, everyone else bad or stupid. As a child you don’t realise the subtleties and what sort of effect has that overt propaganda had? Now you can look here at channel 4 or E4 and the constant pumping out of even the most innocuous American sitcoms which offer absolutely nothing yet which are overly consumed by today’s teenagers and carry the same underlying messages as you point out. The other effect of this has been that we look more and more at our culture (whatever that is) and maybe even our history as being less exciting or shiny or glamourous.
And the endless pieces in
broadsheets that discuss news and debate from the USA without any attempt to identify why the events or conclusions drawn are of direct relevance to UK or Europe.. I realise this increase readership of those papers in the USA,, but I believe it reinforces the lazy belief that we are the same because we consume a similar culture..on the issues mentioned why not look at France Germany Sweden etc
The Guardian being a prime example.
Totally. Sadly it’s become a left wing tabloid with no better editorial quality than The Sun. Used to be quite a good paper as I recall.
I agree with this in an ideal world the problem is that the left in the UK conflate the UK and the US. Hence they whinge about Trump as if he were their leader. All that did was make me gradually go from I think that Trump guy is a bit of a weird looking d**k which was my position for most of my life to, well if these people who I disagree with really hate this guy he must be doing something right.
On closer inspection he does seem to be doing largely sensible stuff and he has brought to light just how biased the American media (and their British cousins) and tech companies really are and how much we are in the pocket of the Chinese. Trump derangement syndrome made me overcome my natural Orange man weird thinking so it totally backfired and I wonder how many others that happened to also.
The madness of crowds
Luckily there has been at least one constant that will help scientists looking back at this pandemic to predict the likely course of the next one.
Very many governments locked down at almost entirely the same time, despite the fact that they could not possibly be hoping to “flatten the peak”. I suspect they were trying to avoid “acting late” by following the crowd.
Now, as the populations of those regions wander out of lockdown together (as the epidemiologists rightly predicted) we see all manner of curves to those countries statistics. The ones who went in way too early are now watching as the situation runs away from them, and some luckier ones are seeing an uptick after a relatively flat lockdown.
I suspect the factor that epidemiologists will need to reconsider is how many people rushed home at the start of lockdown, and how a mistiming could exacerbate the spread from a capital city (full of e.g. universities and young people working away from home) to smaller towns and villages.
I only hope that the study of epidemics will not become deeply politicised, such that scientists are railroaded by their universities into supporting the morally right answers, whatever those answers may be deemed to be.