Falling Out of Love With America
4th November 2012
Simon Kuper, Brit, writing in the Financial Times (think: the Wall Street Journal run by the staff of The Nation) is seriously disappointed that the U.S. hasn’t gone down the same lefty road that Europe has.
When I went to study in the US in 1993, I did what we members of the “transatlantic generation” were supposed to do: I fell in love with America. I liked how you could talk to someone at a bus stop without their thinking you were a serial killer. I liked living in a rich, optimistic country. I liked brunch. Yet the US also seemed reassuringly familiar. I felt I’d known it for ever, and not just thanks to Archie comics. In politics, both candidates in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, could have slotted seamlessly into the European political scene. Indeed, in Britain the right instinctively backed Bush and the left Clinton.
Yeah, many of us felt the same way. (That is not a compliment.)
After I left the US, it took me a year to get over it. But now, viewing the elections from Europe, the US feels like an alien land. “The Atlantic seems to have got a bit wider,” says Daniel Keohane, head of strategic affairs at the European think-tank Fride. It’s become hard to say “our shared western values” without smirking.
That’s because we kept them and you abandoned them. It takes two to share.
Simon: It’s not us; it’s you.