Collections of this Kind

Letter to America

While Trump and the American Right are certainly to blame in a proximal sense for the current situation, the climate in America1 has been worsening for decades. In the 30 years I've been regularly going there, it's become more and more of a fascist-lite state, but like the frog in the proverbial pot few seem to have noticed the temperature being turned up (and, indeed, that they themselves have reached up out of the pot to turn it).

It's not even that the government or religious groups have been driving the change; it has come from everyday Americans working through, like clockwork, on the fundamental axioms they've eased into the foundations of their society. Even within academia, generally the most left-wing community worldwide, while there are a good many folk on the left, there are a surprising number of American academics that won't question those foundations and the logical consequences that are likely to play out from them2.

These foundations clearly go back to the American revolution, and earlier3. The liberal republican intelligentsia of Europe spent so much time lauding America in the late 18th and early 19th century, that the Americans came to believe they really were the home of the free and could therefore do no wrong – something that doubtless appealed to the thin threads of residual religious self-righteousness they inherited from the Puritan founders, and the independence of the more general Colonial Migration influx. This, in turn, seems to have led to a self-satisfied and unreflective national psyche that laid the groundwork for where we are now. It is, as far as I can see, a society founded on the following resultant traits4:

• - An internalised, axiomatic, fundamentalist belief they can do no wrong and no one should impose rules upon them; confusing the freedom from imposition for the largely incompatible freedom to exist.
• - A resultant general distrust of the influence of others, including other states, which has enhanced heterogeneity, and, paradoxically, enhanced an over-exaggerated respect for the office of the ultimate individual, the president, rather than recognising the responsibilities of the broader government as we see in most Western democracies. Ironically, the president has more power than a king would, as the latter continually fears revolution.
• - A resultant distancing of the population from the complexities of the rest of the world, which combines with their belief in individualism to produce a performative over-respect for those risking their lives serving their nation elsewhere5. The embodiment of the armed services as the vessel of a nationhood ("U.S.A.! U.S.A.!") brooks no space to think through alternatives and predisposes them to a militarism backed by a willingness to invest in the military which only encourages, and turns to practice, their exceptionalism.
• - A powerful church-based social structure that has changed little since the 18th C, when it capitalised on rural isolation to quietly squash any real individualism and prevent the rise of atheism seen in much of the rest of the, more urban, West6.
• - An natural wealth largely untapped until after the Industrial Revolution, that has allowed a growth in the mindset that money is power. Along with the slow growth of a implicit belief in prosperity theology since the 19th C, this has encouraged the resultant belief that America should be allowed to dictate to the rest of the world how it acts – which is largely in line with American religious sensibilities and capitalist needs.
• - A mistaken belief that national exceptionalism combined with a freedom to succeed implies a personal exceptionalism, which then encourages that worst and most easily induced of human foibles: the belief that, relative to ourselves, the richer are a community open to anyone and the poorer (and different) are to blame for us not getting there.
• - All of which has led to a Calvinistic approach to social and medical safety nets, which seem resisted to a point way beyond any sane civilization and any self-interest voters might have.

This is all very different from Europe, where we've had the same fundamental culture, but in a wide variety of nuanced forms, for 700 years, and have had the time to realise we're not perfect, even if we thought we were. It's also the case that segregation of government and language across the continent has offered a certain degree of protection from the times we've failed to realise that7,8. Wherever a community has been temporarily convinced of its exceptionalism (NAZI Germany; Early 90s Serbia) it's rapidly been beaten out of them by neighbouring countries when they tried to prove it; America has neither had the time nor the powerful neighbours to mature; the only reason it has got away with it outside its borders for so long is that America's desires have generally (with some notable exceptions) aligned with those they've imposed on, and we've allowed them to have their way to our mutual advantage.

The current situation in America can't persist; the money and the driving forces (I hate to use the word 'philosophy') are different. As we've seen, they can't be both Dark Enlightenment Tech Bros running EV factories and Right Wing Christian Technophobic Climate Deniers9, but other cracks will open because they've powered a government on hate and self-interest as the common denominator of too many groups with contradictory desires; there's no tolerance in hate. Our one hope has to be they destroy each other before they destroy us.

Perhaps this is the mental purge American needs, but I doubt it. I really hope AOC and Bernie start a fundamental rethink of the American psyche, but I think the general lack of self-understanding is fundamentally entrenched. Like all extreme popularists, Trump's promise is the id run wild, but he didn't invent that id. Most American liberals would probably object to the above description, or regard it with pride, and that's entirely the problem10. Sadly I'm 99% certain America will come out of this period and reset to standard Republicanism11, not the braver new world and beacon for excellence they could become.