Stop caring about America!
For it cares nothing for you
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In the UK, European Union, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and a good dozen other countries, there is a yearning to believe that America will return “to normal” and become a reliable ally once again.
The terrors of the world could recede, if only a short distance. We could go back to “living within a lie” – as Mark Carney so acidly put it. In return for defence against autocratic and criminal regimes, open sea lanes, free trade and a stable financial system, we would pretend that America didn’t break the rules whenever it wished.
If only Trump would go, the US would defend Ukraine and Europe from Russia, South Korea from North Korea, and Taiwan and the rest of east Asia from China.
I am here to tell you that there is no normal America to go back to.
Normal America is dead and its grave – and you need only look at the American left to know that.
It is effectively a mirror image of Trumpism. The likely nomination of Francesca Hong as the Democrat candidate for governor of Wisconsin, and the actual victories of Abdul El-Sayed in the Democrats Senate primary in Michigan, and of Zohran Mamdani in New York, show that politicians associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have created a genuinely powerful left.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, it is so lost in hatred for US power, it is deeply isolationist.
It is easy to get that way. You look at the undoubted crimes of Western governments and think that nothing else matters beyond destroying your own sick society. Francesca Hong in Wisconsin is already providing a case study of how deep that hatred can bite.
Like a duck paddling furiously against the current, she is now backtracking on her previous policy positions in a desperate attempt to appear less threatening to the voters. A few days ago she had to renounce her call for the abolition of Thanksgiving – the holiday celebrating the survival of British puritan settlers in the winter of 1621 with the help of native Americans.
“Should have done this in 1621,” Hong wrote in a Twitter post. “If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader even that killed Indegenous folx [sic] and women so be it.”
What she said was true in its way – white settlement led to mass murders and smallpox, measles and typhus pandemics . But her miserablist and carping insistence on destroying other people’s simple pleasures speaks to a mind that can see no good in her society.
Suppose a European politician were to demand the abolition of Christmas on the grounds that “we should stop celebrating” a religion that persecuted heretics, Jews, witches, Muslims and free thinkers. Christianity did all that, to be sure. But people aren’t celebrating the burning of witches when they celebrate Christmas anymore than Americans are celebrating the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee when they celebrate Thanksgiving.
To suggest that they do, is to display a leftist misanthropy – a deep dislike of your own society that borders on the insane.
I can see how people get that way. Insanity seems a fitting response to a country that elects Donald Trump not once but twice. But politically it is a disastrous response.
Needless to add, Hong also wanted to defund the police as a first step toward abolishing them. And needless to add once again, her Republican opponent cannot contain his glee, and believes that her extremism will hand him (and Donald Trump) a famous victory.
To my mind, it is self-indulgent and hugely irresponsible to run candidates who play into the hands of the extreme right. If Trump cannot make the American left take the world seriously, then it can never be serious and is doomed to play infantile games for eternity. Like the German communists of the early 1930s who helped bring Hitler to power, they would rather fight the moderate left than the far right.
For outsiders the main point about the US left is that, if it believes its own country is so contaminated by genocide that its holidays should be abolished, and if it believes its law enforcement is so irredeemably racist, it too must go, then it will have no more time for America’s traditional alliances than Donald Trump does.
On this reading, NATO is simply a means by which a racist and imperialist state bolsters its malign power. Why should the US left care for it? Why should it commit to defending Ukraine from Russian imperialism when its ideology holds that the only imperialism that matters is US imperialism?
As the American writer Noah Smith noted: that ideology is not necessarily the antidote to MAGA.
“Yes, if DSA types held national power, things would be different. The disastrous Iran war would end, which would be a good thing. But on foreign policy in general, a faction that sees America as an evil empire seems unlikely to restore the liberal alliance system that Trump has thrown in the trashcan. Recall that the DSA blamed the United States and NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and called for withdrawal from NATO.”
They are as much Putin’s friends as Trump is.
You might object that mainstream Democrats are not like this. But the same forces that operate on the left operate on them. If they return to power, they will need to engage in a huge programme of domestic reform to clean up the Mafia-state levels of corruption and abuses of power Trump has created.
They will not want to commit time,blood and treasure to foreign alliances.
We should leave them to it.
The world’s obsession with America is bizarre. The US is a visibly declining power, burdened with debt neither of its political parties dares tackle, and riven by intense partisanship that makes government next to impossible.
It is a deeply strange country which outsiders do not begin to understand. And yet the European left imports its woke policies, even though many of them make no sense in countries that lack America’s history of slavery and apartheid, while the right looks to Trump for inspiration even though European publics despise him.
On the one hand, I meet educated American progressives who, for all their supposed cultural sensitivity, are either entirely ignorant of the outside world or, if they think about us at all, believe we should follow the latest version of American progressive morality
On the other hand, all over the planet there are tens of millions, people with an obsessive interest in US politics, even though nothing we say or do will have the slightest effect on American politicians.
Our obsession with the US is a type of forelock-tugging or cultural cringe before the centre of imperial power. We should look to our own cultures and countries as we should look to our own defence and care less about America – for it most assuredly cares nothing for us.
I for one would find it a blessed relief if I never had to think about it again.
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First order of the day is to rejoin the European Union. Britain needs to be part of a powerful bloc in the absence of a reliable NATO alliance. Once that's done, the EU needs to form a more effective military alliance. America is yesterday's story.
Nick, great piece with which I agree entirely. I think it is about time we redefined the terms "left" and "progressive". I am not sure they make much sense these days. I have no idea what to replace them with. I consider myself to be "social democrat left", but much of what passes for "progressive" and "left" is not something I would want to be associated with.