For friends of America these are not easy times. The disgraceful denouement of the Trump presidency, that began with his man-child refusal to accept defeat in November and deteriorated via a buffoonish incitement to riot at the Capitol building on 6 January, has made for a compelling but deeply disturbing disaster movie. How will it end? Have the writers gone too far? Is there a sequel? At times in the last ten days it has seemed as though the world’s leading democracy is undergoing a collective nervous breakdown.
But let’s get this into perspective. Next week, barring a plot twist in the script such as an alien invasion, the next president of the United States will be inaugurated. In Washington there will be a transition of power. This time next week Donald Trump will be an ex-President. And then he will discover, like a fallen character in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, how brutally the American system can deal with transgression and the previously powerful who, through misjudgment or corruption, have made themselves weak and vulnerable to prosecution.
America is a government of laws, not men, according to the phrase used by John Adams, although that is not quite right. Primarily, it is a nation of lawyers, in which the potential to be sued, tied up in court cases, monstered by the US Department of Justice, and generally litigated to death, is endless. Donald, it’s your turn.
Of course the scenes at the Capitol ten days ago were shocking, particularly viewed live, partly because they were a social media riot, refracted through the lens of smart phone footage, with coddled man-babies in ridiculous costumes rampaging through the halls of power. Most of those who broke in looked like confused day-trippers who have consumed too many sugary drinks in the queue for Disneyland. Others were militia men, real domestic terrorists, who targeted out-numbered police officers and urged on parts of the crowd to extreme violence.
But lunatic political violence is hardly a new concept in America. The racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, anti-catholic Ku Klux Klan flourished in the 1860s, again in the 1920s and then in the 1950s and 1960s, until it was infiltrated and reduced to a rump. New far-right groups have flourished since. The militia techniques are attacked by the far left, but the far left is just the mirror image. It has been having a moment of its own in the name of Communism chic, smashing up small businesses and rioting, infiltrating legitimate protests last year.
Even at a more peaceful and pedestrian level, the notion of rampaging populists taking on Washington, or of ordinary American wanting them there politicians taught a lesson, is a persistent theme in the Republic’s turbulent history.
The stately idea of America, the concept of a dignified and constitutional nation, is a relatively new notion for all it is fashionable to venerate the glories of the flawed Founding Fathers and their project. This is the US, a country that fought a civil war only 160 years ago, with industrialised slaughter and horror on a ghastly, innovative scale pointing the way to the European war of 1914-18. The US is also a country that struggles still to accept and deal satisfactorily with the legacy of slavery.
Add on top of that contemporary hyper-partisanship; the destruction by arrogant big tech of local news that gave tens of millions of Americans facts about where they live and its replacement with conspiracy theory madness; the Republican party selling itself it (and now regretting it) to the narcissist Trump; and much of the Democratic party being captured by woke maniacs; and the situation is – how can one phrase this politely? – suboptimal.
Sure. But for all its current discontents and drawbacks, all the drama and discombobulation, I’ll take the United States any day, every day, every time, always, over China and the monomaniacal totalitarians of the Chinese Communist Party.
The recent American Presidential election may have have been noisy and messy but it was an election where the punters decided and a whole lot better than the Chinese Presidential election. Wait, there wasn’t a Chinese Presidential election, because Chinese elections aren’t allowed. It’s a Communist dictatorship.
My long-standing and wise friend Steve Moore put his finger on it this week, writing for Reaction: there is a danger that we find the disaster movie in the US so exciting and engrossing as a viewing experience that it consumes all our attention and distracts us from the bigger story. That bigger story is an increasingly assertive China, and its regional and global transgressions. What matters most next is how the democracies form a united front to defend freedom against the menace. America will lead.
As the historian Francis Fukuyama put it last year, in a landmark essay for the American Interest, the trick is going to lie in forming an alliance of democracies that can resist China without, if at all possible, engaging in direct conflict. In essence – form a strong alliance, and stand well back. After attempting a stabilisation of the domestic scene mid-pandemic, the incoming Biden administration’s first task will be that rallying of the democracies. It will mean removing China from our supply chains and infrastructure where possible, constructing a regime of sanctions and strengthening our defences against Chinese incursion. The British government’s initiatives announced recently by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on blocking goods made with slave labour in China are a very encouraging start.
The European Union, and its outgoing and serially over-rated leader German Chancellor Angela Merkel, did not get the Fukuyama memo or the Biden memo and a few weeks ago signed a new investment pact with China, an incredible move so inept and ill-timed that it goes straight in at Number 1 in my personal top ten of Merkel’s worst geopolitical moves with damaging potential consequences in history. The Chinese Communist Party surely cannot believe its luck that Merkel was so desperate for a legacy she engineered an EU deal with China at the behest of exporting German car manufacturers, just when new US President Biden is trying to build a coalition against China.
The headline of this newsletter is “In Praise of America” and I’m aware that I’ve spent more time lamenting America’s shortcomings than listing its many virtues. My personal list of American cultural virtues and favourites is too long, although I’ll mention in passing the work of Chuck Berry, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Rick Hall of FAME Studios, Katherine Hepburn, Thomas Edison, Wilson Pickett, Henry Clay Frick, Brian Wilson, Hank Williams, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, the bar of the Carlyle Hotel, the Martini, H.L. Mencken, Peggy Noonan, James Thurber, Diane Keaton, Alistair Cooke (sort of British), Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Steven Spielberg, Emmylou Harris, the Simpsons, Dolly Parton, Howlin’ Wolf, Laurel and Hardy, and Woody Allen.
One of the main virtues of the place is the inherent messiness of its disputatious, innovative, noisy, democratic culture, a product of freedom – that’s freedom exercised within a framework of laws and a balanced constitution, where most disputes can be settled by law, voting and a transfer of power without central diktat.
Even the arguments about American capitalism since the 19th century illustrate its inherent virtues and adaptability. Today, the tech giants have grown too powerful and there is a political and regulatory struggle underway. Again, this is not new. After the industrial revolution in Europe, and then the American surge post-Civil War, new economic power disturbed the political equilibrium and prompted a shake-out, a fight over questions of economic equity and political power. Teddy Roosevelt and others trust-busted concentrations of economic interest, breaking up monopolies to guarantee competition. Something similar is required again for big tech, to ensure that it works for us rather than us working for it. The Democrats suddenly like big tech, because it has turned on Trump and turned off his Twitter account. But the new electoral cycle has begun, the midterms are under two years away and the Republicans if they can rebuild will target taking down the technology giants.
There are numerous reasons to be deeply worried about the place. But as I said: give me America and its troubles over Chinese power, any day.