America is still an English country
From
Julian@julianlzb87@gmail.com to
alt.buddha.short.fat.guy on Wed Jul 1 08:56:46 2026
From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy
Americans have been enjoined, as we approach our countryrCOs 250th anniversary, to be a bit more grateful. Good advice. It is not just the freedom of speech and the purple mountainsrCO majesties we should be
taking stock of. It is also our knack, in recent decades, for
miseducating ourselves, failing to read the signs of the times, making
wrong choices rCo and then profiting from the fallout.
In the global financial crisis that ran for a decade after 2008,
blunders in American financial engineering, from complex derivatives to mortgage-backed securities, bankrupted debtor countries and cost several others their sovereignty, most notoriously Greece. The worldrCOs investors responded with the so-called rCyflight to quality,rCO pouring their national savings into American financial products and enriching the very bastards
who broke the world economy. After 2019, the Covid epidemic arose in
China from another foolish American idea, rCygain-of-functionrCO research, which set scientists the task of making dangerous viruses more
dangerous, the better to design vaccines for them. The pandemic killed millions and idled billions, but it will wind up earning trillions for
the American biotech industry.
So, although it is a cause for worry, it is not necessarily a cause for despair that we are approaching our quarter-millennium mark under the
shadow of the craziest foreign-policy error in American history. When a
head of state, without ever laying out a coherent war aim, dresses
himself up as the Prince of Peace while threatening to exterminate an
entire civilisationrCa well, that does go beyond the predictable forms of hubris to which all empires are liable.
The Iran war will exact a high price for the United States if thererCOs
any justice in international relations. Luckily for us, that remains a
big rCyifrCO. Misreading situations has become a habit. As Haven Hamilton,
the preposterously bespangled country-and-western crooner played by
Henry Gibson in Robert AltmanrCOs Nashville, sang in 1976, rCyWe must be
doing something right to last 200 yearsrCO rCo but he didnrCOt know what that something was, and we have no clearer idea half a century later. We tend
to think of the United States as the greatest common denominator of all
the worldrCOs virtues, particularly those involving freedom. rCyWe think theyrCOre American values,rCO said Hillary Clinton in 2014 when she was promoting a book about her time as secretary of state, rCybut in my view, theyrCOre universal values and we need to stand up for them.rCO Of course,
if they really were universal values we wouldnrCOt need to stand up for them.
Lyndon B. Johnson had similar thoughts. rCyThe land flourished because it
was fed from so many sources,rCO he said in the mid-1960s. But thatrCOs not true, either. Culturally speaking, the US is a varied place rCo at least during its periodic bursts of uncontrolled immigration. But as a constitutional matter it is not diverse at all. What makes the US great
is a very specific set of institutions, intuitions and cultural habits
that it inherited from one country: England.
Constitutionally, America is still an English place: Lockean in peace, Hobbesian in war. That is why it has managed to last for 250 years while
both infuriating other western nations and inciting their envy. The
English are an outlier among European peoples, especially in their idea
of liberty, which was until quite recently as absolutist as ours and
difficult for other quite advanced civilisations to understand. (This
was before Keir Starmer began sending armed police to arrest pensioners
for their Facebook posts.)
No continental nation has ever been so strongly allergic to political censorship as the British were a century after their own civil war, when
we were writing our First Amendment. Nor was there ever a nation-state
with the reverence for unfettered trade that the English had rCo
especially with the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, which
came as the American Revolution was beginning. (The other great thing
that happened in 1776, coincidentally or not, was the publication of the Scotsman Adam SmithrCOs The Wealth of Nations.) In the 18th century, those most inclined to agitate for commercial adventurism were the very Whigs
who made up the revolutionary elites of the 13 colonies. When the
revolution succeeded, their ideals were radicalised by the fact that the conservative opposition to them had been chucked out. So American ways
are not wispy universalisms. They are cultural achievements, if we can
use that word for the fervently held prejudices of the most acquisitive subgroup of the most irrational people in Europe.
As prejudices go, these are ancient ones. The Englishmen of the 13
colonies took up universal male suffrage long before anyone in the old
country thought to. We codified the duties of our chief executive before
the French declared an end to kings in 1789. As a result, America, for
all its superficial modernity, is more tightly bound than other western countries to more traditional forms of social organisation. It was set
up when peoplerCOs ideas of right and wrong owed as much to the
Renaissance as to the Enlightenment. A mix of monarchical sentiment and classical republican ideals was coursing through the hearts of the early columnists, as the Harvard historian Eric Nelson showed in his 2014 book
The Royalist Revolution.
NelsonrCOs Harvard colleague, the political theorist Harvey Mansfield,
called American liberal democracy a rCymixed regimerCO, balancing the Aristotelian categories of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. The
historians Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin argued 50 years ago that
the FoundersrCO understanding of classical republican virtues was indeed
in vogue in the 18th century, but in the early part of the century. So
by the 1780s, these ideas were already a bit fogey-ish, and certain
patriots might have professed them as a defence against accelerating
change. Today, the persistence of American hegemony even in the face of
the countryrCOs economic and cultural decline mystifies many people. But perhaps AmericarCOs antique, pre-democratic elements suit it to a period
in which we seem to be witnessing the close of the 250-year-long
Enlightenment parenthesis.
Europeans, including Brits, have older cultures than ours, but newer
political cultures. In recent years they have been slower to take up the American progressive brainstorms of the post-Cold War era rCo from
wokeness to gender ideology rCo but have clung to them even as those
novelties have grown slightly ridiculous in the US. Why is this? We
should recall what we were saying about the radicalising effect of
expelling an opposition. America, after the flight of the Tories in the
1770s and 1780s, became a narrower-minded but more purposeful, more streamlined Britain.
History offers plenty of other examples. Consider the sudden
conservatism of Francisco FrancorCOs Spain rCo which had been for more than
a century a hotbed of anti-clericalism rCo after its Civil War ended in
1939. Or consider the way Russia has evolved in a more nationalist
direction since the Ukraine war, with the self-exile of its cosmopolitan elites to Berlin, Istanbul and elsewhere. (It was one of Vladimir
PutinrCOs more savvy acts of statesmanship that, rather than insisting his adversaries share the sacrifice of the war, he let them flee it, and
with it their share in the running of the state.)
In the wake of the second world war, the countries of western Europe
were refounded in such a way as to exclude those elements incompatible
with international rules laid down by the US. These rules were devised
by the most gifted State Department diplomats of the generation of
George F. Kennan and Dean Acheson, and elaborated by the most gifted
nonprofit technocrats of the generation of George Soros. The result has
been the remaking of the civilised world as liberal AmericarCOs
caricature. Does Germany, for instance, owe more to Frederick the Great
and Bismarck than it does to JFK and LBJ? No one who witnessed the
adulation of Barack Obama on the streets of Berlin in 2008 will consider
the answer obvious.
Elements of populist America, and not just Donald Trump, have grown
uneasy with the progressive drift of Europe, its evolution into a
borderless and even nationless space. American conservativesrCO more
general preoccupation about Europe is of longer standing. If Christopher
Lasch is right that liberalism is parasitical on conservatism, relying
on it for stability, predictability and common sense, then the American
Empire depends similarly on cues from the more traditional cultures out
of which it was built. Victory in the Cold War robbed the US of this
resource, unleashing the character-sapping, empire-eroding power of consumerism, much as the Spanish discovery of silver in Potos|! unleashed
the character-sapping, empire-eroding power of inflation. Too bad.
Preserving republics has been understood through most of history to mean preserving specific peoples and their specific virtues.
The US has, over the past 250 years, followed much the same course as
Britain, only slightly later. We, like the British, built an empire in
the 19th century rCo we just tend not to notice it because it turned into
our country. From the present perspective, the quarter-millennium of US history breaks down into three periods of roughly 80 years apiece,
separated by two ruptures. There is the constitutional era that was
ended by the Civil War rCo LincolnrCOs refounding of the country. There was
an industrial era, ruled over by railroad men and Wall Street
financiers, that reached its culmination with the second world war rCo Franklin RooseveltrCOs refounding. This brought an imperial era, ruled
over by technocrats and techies. As in Britain a century ago, a debate
seems set to begin on whether this empire, too, has run its course.
Christopher Caldwell
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2