How is America coping, post-Trump? Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty

All British foreign correspondents who live in America for more than a few years write a book about it. It’s compulsory. They are invariably fuzzy focus takes on road-trips in which our charmed modern-day de Tocqueville meets a range of characters chewing corn dogs in the sun and declares that America, while barmy, and without a functioning health service, is still quite fun.
I wrote two of them, both hugely optimistic about the place. One is literally called Have A Nice Day. I hailed Americans’ sobriety and the gentle virtues of their system of government. It was published in 2009. How was I to know they were about to get high on Fentanyl and elect Donald Trump?
Anyway, it is with some annoyance that I have to tell you my friend Nick Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent, has written the antidote to all these vapid takes, mine included. Nick comes across on the news as a bit of a lad — actually he is a bit of a lad — but he is also a historian with a deep understanding of what makes America tick. And When America Stopped Being Great is an absolutely belting achievement for a hack, and an Englishman to boot. It is, as the title suggests, an elegy for a lost nation and a lost cause. The Washington Post gave the book a long and favourable review, calling it, “riveting, often revelatory, crammed with facts, occasionally personal, and almost always depressing”.
It is also wrong.
Not in its description of modern-day America, which Bryant knows well and captures superbly. The inequality, the intellectual poverty, the extremism, the mass shootings, the end of civility in debates on abortion or guns or anything. But he is wrong about the constitution. He points out — rightly — that it’s under pressure from modernity. A good example: Democrats can win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but the Republicans have nominated 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices. “That is why,” Bryant writes, “talk of a reboot or a reset of the current obsolete operating system is so misplaced.”
Really? Tinkering could sort things for another hundred years or so. Fixing the Senate to reduce the impact of the rural minority won’t be decorous or easy, but is it impossible? Might an America that conquered the empty(ish) spaces in the first place not manage to reinvigorate them, repopulate them with businesses no longer tethered to coasts — or physical places at all — and so rebalance political power?
Others have also thought the place was going to the dogs. I mean properly believing the system to be broken. So perhaps the answer to the current crisis, as Dennis Rasmussen suggests in his thought-provoking book Fears of a Setting Sun, can be found in the fears of her founders. The men who invented America mostly thought their invention a disaster, a mess from the start. As Rasmussen points out, even in George Washington’s time hatred poisoned everything: “The two main parties saw and treated each other not just as opponents who advocated the wrong policies, but rather as enemies of the Constitution who actively sought to subvert the basic principles of the Revolution… Newspaper polemics included ‘some of the ripest vituperation in American literary history’, in the words of one scholar. Cries of treason entered virtually every political debate, fears of foreign plots abounded, and physical violence was lamentably commonplace.”
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