A View from the Other Side of the Pond

From Martin Kettle, in yesterday's Guardian:

There has always been a much more intelligent, thoughtful side to the American response to September 11 than the one revealed by its political leaders. But the combination of an inarticulate president with a rightwing agenda, a traumatised public mood, and a misplaced predisposition on the part of many Europeans to oversimplify America have combined to obscure it for the audience on this side of the ocean...

In some ways, Europeans have always suffered from a temptation to caricature America. The British, possibly deceived by our shared language, are among the worst offenders. We put America in a box, stick a label on it and wait for our fears and prejudices to be confirmed. We often seem to have a lazy, patronising desire to portray America as a whackier, more dangerous and more irrational country than most of it really is. We also ascribe a hysteria to US life that is in many respects more truly characteristic of our country than of theirs.

We consistently fail to understand that America is not one single hegemonic culture. The US is much better understood as multifarious and dynamic, divided on gender, educational, race and regional lines. In politics, America is currently split down the middle, as it has been for much of the past decade, and as the 2000 presidential election contest revealed dramatically. What makes George Bush significant is that he is attempting to govern as though these divisions do not really exist.

This could be an expensive error. In their striking new book The Emerging Democratic Majority, the left-of-centre writers John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira have used census data, voting studies and exit polls to argue that a combination of deep-rooted modern American demographic, economic and cultural trends is beginning to stack the odds ever more heavily against the Republicans...

The America we think we know is not the new America that is emerging in the 21st century. This poses a challenge to reflexive anti-American stereotypes. It also cautions against the temptation, on both sides of the Atlantic, to pretend that America and the rest of the world are engaged in an apocalyptic struggle on behalf of good and evil. That isn't the case either. The real America is more ordinary, more normal and more sensible - and getting more so every day. The problem with America is its government. What they, and we, need is regime change.