Mary is a great writer and I enjoy her articles, including this one, but reading her articles about the US reminds me just how much Europe and the US have and continue to diverge from one another and how, from de Tocqueville onward, it has been frustratingly difficult for Europeans to truly understand the US.
The US is not Europe. It is not, and never has been, one nation in the same way England, Germany, France, or Russia were. Germany is a nation with its own people, its own language, and its own culture. Germans will still be Germans whether or not they live in Germany for many generations, sometimes centuries. We can still have a sensible conversation about ethnic Germans living in France or Czechia or Poland. A conversation about ethnic Americans sounds like, and is, nonsense, unless you’re referring to the very small population of Native Americans living on reservations. The concept of how governments can come to reflect nations, cultures, and peoples is fascinating, but it presupposes that there be an underlying nation, culture, and people to reflect. I submit that in the case of the US, there really isn’t a whole lot there to reflect. What little there is, though, suggests that Trump and Trumpism are not out of character.
There are very few threads that go back more than a few decades in American history, but they do exist, and they stand in stark contrast to Europe in particular. Europe was a nation of many different religions, ethnic groups, tribes, cultures, and peoples, existing near, but largely separate from, one another, divided as they were by language and feudal societal organization. The legacy of feudalism and the reality that external threats from competing cultures and peoples produced, I contend, a certain level of deference and loyalty between people within these groups, particularly it has inculcated a higher default level of trust and loyalty shown by lower classes of people towards the upper class within their cultural group. The common observation that Europeans have more respect for their governments, civil servants, and aristocrats than Americans have for theirs is no accident.
Though most of America’s original inhabitants came from Europe, there never was a truly dominant culture. Even prior to the revolution, the US was a mixture of Dutch, Scotch, German, French, Welsh, English, and many other European peoples. They were united by nothing so much as the decision to leave their culture and homeland, presumably out of some dissatisfaction with one or another aspect of said culture and homeland, be it a religious divergence, generational poverty, or whatever other reason. Thus, the US has a tremendous complex of deep resentment built into its collective psyche. Americans may have had little in common, but the one thing they did have was a certain level of dissatisfaction with their lot in life wherever they had been. Successive waves of immigration have radically altered the culture and ethnic makeup of the country, but only further reinforced this self-selective contrarianism. It is thus difficult to understate the rebellious streak that runs through American history. Nearly everybody who is here today is here because their ancestors got fed up with some ruling class somewhere sometime in the past, so much so that they decided it was a better bet to uproot themselves and their families and leave entirely. It can be (and has been) said that burning the American flag is one of the most American things an American can do. In a nation with no culture or ethnicity of its own, the absurd becomes perfectly reasonable. Protest, rebellion, disenchantment, revolution; these are some of the very few threads that cut through successive waves of cultural change to the very bones of what makes the US what it is, a very different political animal than anything else filed under the generic headline of ‘western culture’.
The blinders come, in my opinion, from the fact that the US and Europe, due to the recent history of the World Wars and the reality of the US as a global power, share a relatively integrated and culturally hom*ogeneous “western” ruling class. Do not be deceived into thinking they or anything they do is reflective of Americans on the ground. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read any poll numbers and they will tell you that the level of trust the American people have in their government, media, and nearly every other institution where power is concentrated and exercised, is at an all time low, and getting lower. The shenanigans that our current ruling class is engaged in is not at all popular with the American people, even those like myself that aren’t particularly supportive of Donald Trump. Trump’s popularity has gone UP, not down, each and every time he has been dragged into a courtroom. I assume these people can read the news as well as I can, so why they keep doing it is anyone’s guess. Why does a man who finds himself at the bottom of a deep hole ask for a shovel? I don’t have a good answer, but generally speaking, I’d say there’s an element of misunderstanding the basic problem and a failure of imagination in trying to come up with reasonable solutions. In this specific case, my best guess is they’re using an increasingly globalized (meaning westernized, Europeanized) template to govern a people that weren’t very European two centuries ago, and are even less so today.
Here’s something most non-historians won’t be aware of. During the run up to the American revolution, America made many diplomatic overtures to England seeking to peacefully reconcile their differences. Many of them were appeals directly to the Crown, King George III to intervene and overrule acts of Parliament. The colonists by and large viewed the king as their legitimate sovereign, but felt that the Parliament was a bunch of lords and aristocrats who they had not voted for and elected and who thus had no legitimate authority over them. The colonists hoped that appealing to a monarch to break the power of aristocrats would solve their problems without the need for violence. That was two and a half centuries ago. Now, a lot of people are looking to Trump to break the power of aristocrats and overrule and override other non-elected bodies nationally and internationally. In context, it’s not such a great leap from where we started after all.
Americans never had a problem with autocracy as so long as they got to pick the autocrat, the autocrat did more or less what they demanded, and their basic freedoms were not infringed. America has had other quasi-dictatorial rulers throughout its history who ruled more like medieval monarchs (or like Putin, De Gaulle, Erdogan, or Orban) than most modern Europeans would be comfortable with, men whose power was not based on their ideas or the political system, but, like Napoleon or Caesar, on the raw force of their personality and popularity. Most of them have monuments in Washington and have their pictures on our currency, which should tell you how Americans really feel about autocracy in principle. Both Roosevelts, Lincoln, Jackson, and even George Washington himself, spring immediately to mind. I had a suspicion America was ripe for another sort-of tyrant to put the ‘fear of God’ back into the aristocrats and global oligarchs about a decade before Trump graced us with his august presence on the political stage, though I admit I hoped for better than him.
The politics of ideas that comes out of the European, particularly the British, tradition Mary speaks of in idealistic terms is a nice mental picture that Americans, being a more pragmatic lot, have historically been quite content to toss out the window whenever expedient. America and its people were never a good fit as stewards of European culture and civilization on a global scale. A globalized westernized civilization with the US at its center was bound to fail sooner or later. The Trump phenomenon must seem utterly baffling to European audiences, who are quite properly worried about what Trump might do and how it might affect them individually and collectively. Trump himself leaves much to be desired on a number of levels. Many of his own supporters would concede as much. The phenomenon of his rise to popularity and possible re-election, though is completely and utterly consistent with American history and the American character, chaotic, rebellious, and chimeric thing that it is. Consider that a warning from this American about the nature of the beast.
