Any other business | 6 August 2011

The greatest nation? This debt fiasco makes Washington look like a parish council

I love America, and if you look at my Wikipedia entry — which I have neither the vanity nor the knowhow to bother to edit — you might suspect that I’ve been brainwashed to say so,
because I am ‘a leading figure within the British-American Project’. I am indeed active in that excellent networking organisation, which has never been anything like the sinister
Reaganite propaganda vehicle that Pilgerists and Guardianistas imagine it to be. And it has given me valuable insights into the national characters of movers and shakers from both sides of the pond
who form its membership.

The Brits, mostly arts graduates, tend to be argumentative free-thinkers with opinions about everything. The Yanks, many of them lawyers, are more courteous, less comfortable in adversarial debate,
more inward-looking, and more respectful of their leaders and institutions. At one of our meetings they decided to sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’; when ‘God Save the Queen’
was called for in response, half the Brits left the room.

But if there is much to admire about Americans in that comparison, they can also be irritating: I winced when I heard Barack Obama tell his countrymen that ‘We live in the greatest nation in
the history of the world.’ They don’t, and neither do we, and all of us should leave that judgment to future historians. More to the point, what they live in is probably no longer even
the world’s greatest capitalist economy, since it has been so damaged by the shenanigans of its own financiers and is rapidly being overtaken in manufacturing strength by China. Only a
handful of innovative US companies with global reach — Google, Apple, Boeing — still stand as beacons.

As for the American way of government, it too often looks ramshackle and small-town.