After leading a 10 day cultural tour through England, Clay assesses how Brits view America in the Fall of 2024.
Ludicrous though it is to try to assess Britain’s views of the United States in the autumn of 2024 on a 10 day tour, I had good conversations with a range of people, and I watched a fair amount of British television commentary while I was there, and read Britain’s outstanding newspapers. Here is what I heard:
Ten Big Things
1. They recognize the wealth and power of America and hold it in some awe, as everyone must. But they regard us as trigger-happy colonialists who have infinite wealth and power but need more refinement or capacity for nuance. This assessment goes all the way back to celebrated English visitors Charles Dickens (1841) and Francis Trollope (1827), who were repulsed by U.S. Senators spitting tobacco on the carpets of the U.S. Capitol. And, of course, there was the issue of slavery. Even now, Britain regards itself as Greece (refinement, art, beauty, subtlety) to our Rome (gross power, lots of concrete, gladiatorial sports).
2. The British cannot understand why we don’t have universal health care for all, like every European country. It makes no sense to them that in America, some people have superb health care, and tens of millions of others have none or not much. They find this fact genuinely perplexing.
Their concern is not so much the moral question — why would we not see that everyone deserves basic health care as much as social security, adequate schools, or farm subsidies? — but more about logic and efficiency. Wouldn’t it just be easier, cheaper, and more integrated if we had one system for the entire population rather than the hit-and-miss, catch-as-catch-can, and “Emergency Room as health care access for the poor” hodgepodge we boastfully call “the best health care system of the world.” Nobody can say those words without blushing unless you add “for the Haves.”
The British are aware that their system, the National Health Service (NHS), is in trouble. There is not enough money, crumbling and neglected facilities and infrastructure, underpaid and restive nurses and doctors, increasingly long queues for less urgent care, and poor morale. But they remain truly proud of the NHS, and not even their right-wing politicians dare talk about scrapping or privatizing it.
3. The Brits cannot understand our funding system for higher education. They subsidize virtually all higher education, believing, as I do, that it is a wise investment in innovation, productivity, social security, and equality of opportunity. When they learn that a recent college graduate in America might have run up several hundred thousand dollars in student debt, they shake their heads in disbelief. A young Swiss friend of mine goes to a superb university for $700 per year. Here it is $70,000. Who believes this system is sustainable?
Enough Brits want what we want in terms of fast food — Starbucks, Burger King, Five Guys, KFC, Subway, etc. — that those American giants have an unavoidable physical presence in English cities. Of course, those American fast food joints in the heart of London and Oxford would close their doors if there were not enough customers to make their large profits.
4. The Brits like to shake their heads about the Americanization of the planet, and they show considerable schadenfreude when America stumbles, as we seem to do with regularity these days. They would not leave Afghanistan in so shambolic a fashion. The great British historian Niall Ferguson has argued that America lacks the stamina to be a great world power, that if you are going to invade Iraq and/or Afghanistan and create order and “democracy,” you have to be prepared to spend a century occupying those countries. The model is the Raj, not Afghanistan 2021. America, he argues, gets impatient and “up and leaves” after just a few years, often leaving things worse than when we intervened.
5. They love both America’s hard power (military presence in Europe and the Middle East, policing the international shipping lanes, paying the bulk of the West’s defense costs) and its soft power (movies, fashion, fast food, software). Still, they reserve the right to criticize them, if only to preserve their superiority. Like most Europeans, the British are glad for us to be the world’s hegemon — so much safer and less expensive for them — but they reserve the right to criticize, mock, question, and condemn America’s every move in the world arena. They’d be begging us to stay if we offered to leave Europe to its own history of madness and turn entirely inward, as some isolationists are advocating.
6. American movies dominate the world. Television not quite as it did 20 years ago, but all the channels I surfed in four British hotels showed endless streams of Law and Order, Bones, Friends, NCIS, and suchlike. Except for Masterpiece Theatre and the BBC (news and entertainment), British television (telly, they say) is measurably inferior to the U.S. But they bunch up their commercials, which are often much more clever than ours, so the programs do not seem so chopped up and interrupted.
7. All of Europe is worried about the 2024 election. With the sole exception of Hungary, all of Europe, this side of Russia wants Donald Trump NOT to be re-elected president of the United States. They are individually and collectively bracing themselves, making contingency plans for a post-America Europe. They regard Mr. Trump as a menace to world peace and the norms of diplomacy, foreign policy, and the world economy. There are probably some Trump supporters in Britain, but you’d have to search rather hard to find them. The Brits saw their own Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Trump Lite or Mini Trump, but they have a smirking affection for Johnson’s antics and none for D. Trump.
Donald Trump knows of Europe’s disdain for him, of course, and he uses it for good political effect. There are millions of Americans who don’t give a rip about Europe, nor even the sovereignty of Ukraine, and they don’t like America paying Europe’s security bills. To the extent that they know what NATO’s mission is, and its funding formula, they share Trump’s desire to leave NATO, or at the very least demand that every European country pay its fair share (as we define it) if they want us to assist them in their times of trouble. Many of these same people wonder why we have troops in Germany, Japan, or Korea. Donald Trump decried America’s “endless wars” and announced his intention to pull back into comparative isolationism. His followers largely agree.
9. The British are flabbergasted that the U.S. blandly accepts unending domestic gun violence, including weekly, at times daily, mass shootings. European parents and grandparents do question whether their young ones are safe visiting a nation so in love with violence that we wince, wring our hands, and then shrug after every school shooting. I’ve heard these conversations. The Europeans do not regard America as safe. They are bewildered by our casual embrace of gun violence, and they regard justifying widespread mayhem because of a constitutional amendment crafted in the age of the single-shot musket as merely insane.
At the moment, gun violence is almost always the first serious criticism a British person will make of the United States.
10. They love our National Parks, which represent, as Ken Burns put it, one of “America’s Best Ideas.” They love our natural wonders — Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon, the Redwoods, El Capitan, and Death Valley. They love America’s frontier history (at least with tongue in cheek) and want to visit Tombstone, Arizona, or the Little Bighorn Battlefield. They love the immense (almost infinite) open space of America. They love renting big cars to drive America’s essentially empty highways, compared to Britain’s eternal congestion and zero parking spots. We take Devils Tower and the Petrified Forest for granted. No European would do that.
What The Brits Conclude
They do have a point. After our abysmal withdrawal from Afghanistan — the echo of our appalling 1975 rooftop departure from Saigon — they have lost a considerable amount of respect for America. They sense growing international weakness in America and a growing weariness of our global responsibilities. They wonder if America will really keep its word, per Article V of the NATO charter, to consider an attack on any NATO member (currently 32) as an attack on all NATO members. Mr. Trump has said he thinks Article V is no longer operative. Europeans, including the British, are deeply concerned that the U.S. will reduce or eliminate its support for Ukraine in its war of national survival against Russia or force Ukraine’s President Zelensky to accept a further partition of his sovereign territory. Partly because of that, they do not want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States, except NATO member Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Certainly, since the high water mark of America’s global dominance (circa 1990), the European people have watched the United States appear to decline in world power and turn away from the “liberal world order” that we helped to engineer after the two cataclysmic European wars of the 20th century. Our closest friends in Europe honestly wonder if they can rely on America. That breaks my heart.
Smaller Things
When I lived in England several decades ago, there were no cell phones and there was no internet. Most places in England got mail at home twice a day! I called home to western North Dakota a couple of times a year from the urine stench of the red telephone box just across from my college gate. We wrote something called “letters” then. But as Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times not long ago, “The age of proper correspondence has ended, and there’s been no pan-ecumenical service [i.e., funeral] to mourn its passing.” Today, everyone in Britain is glued to their smartphones, just like us, though not quite as desperately. When I was there in the 1970s, the Brits (that I knew) didn’t bathe all that often and their hair (especially the men’s) was frequently oily and matted. We all know that British dentistry lagged far behind the best practices in the U.S. — you will remember the bad British teeth jokes in the Austin Powers movies. But Britain has caught up both in hygiene and in dentistry.
It should be noted that the British are less obese than we are. The U.S. currently ranks fifth in obesity, at 41.2% of the population, while Britain ranks 35th at 21.7%. The Brits have cars that average just under 2/3 of the size of American vehicles, and, except on the farms, almost no pickups, the official vehicle of American masculinity. The Brits have superb bookstores, even in relatively small communities.
In some ways, this year’s election matters more to the rest of the world than it does here. Whoever wins, Walmart will bulge with bargains, gas prices will be comparatively affordable, and a majority of people’s lives will not be greatly affected by the election outcome. However, though the candidates are not talking about it, the election will tell the rest of the world who we are, where we are heading, and whether they can count on us to prop up the fragile world order. We are a deeply provincial and inward-looking nation. Just give the next hundred people you meet an outline map of Europe and ask them to identify the countries. And then give them an outline map of Africa. We do really believe in American exceptionalism, that it’s mostly about us, and the rest of the world is a bit of a nuisance. Most Americans don’t think of themselves as world citizens. And about half would liquidate the United Nations.
The world still looks to us, especially in soft power. Everyone secretly covets the spectacularly resilient American economy and is addicted to American innovation, invention, ingenuity, and the production of pleasure. But for most Europeans, we are no longer the Shining City on the Hill. We are a nation that can spend two weeks talking about immigrants eating cats and dogs in a midwestern town, a country where more than 40% disbelieve the Theory of Evolution, where we nominate felons for political office, and where a U.S. Senator holds up a snowball on the floor of Congress and says, “there’s your global warming.” We are no longer the City on the Hill in their eyes but now a reckless prosperity engine with a paralyzed government, a burgeoning economic class system, and widespread gun violence.
Still, for all that, the word America is still magic throughout the world.
It would be easy to compile counterarguments about what we Americans think is absurd or misguided in Britain and Europe. But this is a report on how they see us at this critical juncture in our national destiny. They will be scrutinizing the election returns on November 5. It’s always worth looking in the mirror through the views of non-Americans about our habits, values, and systems, even when we disagree.