The American obsession with scale
Scale is virtue in US politics.
Is it a flaw or is it a feature?
America’s obsession with size, that is…
I found myself wondering about it this week—though, at first, not directly about America itself. I was thinking about the opposite: the virtue of “fit” and having a parliament that suits the national psyche; as if the land, the law, and the individual are somehow linked. Just as Britain don’t have epic vistas into which the ambitious can project their egos, we have no political system that ritualises the worst of human excess.
We have, instead, the example of Keir Starmer, a man who arguably—at least in terms of parliamentary majority—holds a greater mandate than the US President, yet he is already bending before discontented backbenchers angry at the direction of the Labour government. And that’s within a year of coming to power.