But that’s not the biggest problem for the rest of us, and nor is the loss of American soft power. Hollywood can wither away or (likelier) get lost in its own fundament. We would survive. US universities might dominate international league tables but hey, Oxford and London, not Harvard and Yale, are bringing us (let’s pray) coronavirus vaccines.

No: the reason America dysfunction matters is less tangible but psychologically so much more powerful: the United States is owned by all of us in what we might roughly term the free world. We are of it. It is of us. The experiment in self-government that America (imperfectly) represents seems somehow vital to all our futures because we are invested in it — we have feelings for it, and feelings against it.

Some love it and some loathe it, but more importantly: billions of people around the globe do both. When it comes to America almost no-one is uninterested. We are involved. But it’s equally true, in the George Floyd era, that almost no-one is an out-and-out fan. We feel invested in the project because the project is so huge and boisterous and naïve and inspiring and yet sickeningly flawed at the same time.

When the flaws come to the fore you don’t have to be a psychotherapist to see how our reactions might be affected by our disgust at ourselves — call it Netflix angst. We wish we had not been so keen on the damned place and we want to atone. We should not have loved the Beachboys, or Obama, or been so blind to the horrors of racism and endemic poverty.

As the German publisher and academic Joseph Joffe once wrote of the causes of anti-Americanism, “Seduction is worse than imposition. It makes you feel weak, and so you hate the soft-pawed corrupter, as well as yourself.”

More from this author

Coronavirus has driven America mad

By Justin Webb

So the question arises, as Trump teeters and the world watches repulsed and attracted in equal measure: what kind of a nation is America? Actually is. Not should be or would be or was: just is. If you opened up the hood, as my American-schooled children would say, what would you find?

Well, most Americans are socialists, at least according to a book out next month — a book not as batty as that sentence makes it seem. The central argument of Evil Geniuses, by the journalist Kurt Andersen, is that by the standard definitions used by Republicans to describe socialism – that’s where most folks on main street actually are.

They want more regulation of Wall St. They want a wealth tax. They think corporations should pay more too. And in a big change — a sea change since the days of Reagan — most think that “circumstances beyond their control cause people to be poor”. When shown the slogan “Communism is American power plus electrification,” most Americans swoon.

Oh alright, I made up the last one. But the view of poverty is eye-catching (it’s from a regular survey conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute) and even more so when added to a Gallup poll in 2018 that found a solid majority wanted to reduce inequality.

I had always thought that inequality was of no interest at all to most Americans. I hoped so too,  for mainly anthropological reasons: it made them more interesting. But I may be wrong, and perhaps they are, in fact, as dull as us.

“America today is not a center-right country,” the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr wrote in 2018, but rather “a country with a center-right economic elite” that dominates. Throw off the influence of that elite — Kurt Andersen’s eponymous Evil Geniuses — and the nation would become, well, what it was in the good old days before they had control.

I am not so sure.

More from this author

What if Trump loses the election?

By Justin Webb

There is a Left — a roughly social democratic Left — in America: of that there is no doubt. Andersen writes eloquently of labour unions and social solidarity among working people, ironically a solidarity whose apogee was reached under Nixon in the early 1970s. The Nixon who built on rather than challenging FDR’s New Deal, and who was happy to spend on social programmes. Nixon was not himself a liberal, of course, but as Andersen writes, he was “a canny stone-cold cynic going along with the liberal flow”.

Then the flow stopped. Those Evil Geniuses hijacked the nation and the rest is history. Andersen (and many others on the American Left including Joe Biden) suggest that the re-finding of social democracy is a matter of returning home to normality.

There is one problem, however.

Let us assume for a moment that Donald Trump loses in November and the Republican Party spends some time licking its wounds, out of power not just in the White House but in Congress too. What do the Democrats want to do with America?  Do they embrace the Andersen retro programme?

What if they do not? What if the new American Left is — as the philosopher Richard Rorty put it, exhausted? Rorty thought that the old social democratic American Left “collapsed during the late sixties under the burden of the conflagration surrounding the Vietnam War” and was replaced by one that thought the only way forward was a “complete dismantling of the ‘system’”.

The opening sentence of Rorty’s magisterial Achieving Our Country, published back in 1998, reads “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.”

And, he argued, national pride in America is just what the American left had lost — and if that was true in 1998 it is true with knobs on in 2020: to quote the great philosopher, “a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left” understands the nation in a way that “leads them to step back from their country and, as they say, ‘theorize’ it. It leads them to … give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”

Suggested reading

Is QAnon on the brink of power in America?

By Travis View

Rorty, who died in 2007, was not an complete enemy of the new Left’s keenness on race and gender — he thought they had a point — but he knew that it would end in tears. He knew that identity politics would ditch the uncomfortable, sweaty-smelling folks in the unions, the welders and electricians and carpenters and that those (mainly white) men would in turn ditch the Democrats. And so it came to pass, and now we might be post-Rorty with no road back.

Does the American Left have what it takes to knit together the nation when its modern iteration so clearly dislikes so much about it? After the statues ,what else must fall? What other horrors must be uncovered? The jury is out, to put it mildly, on whether American atonement might be over soon or just beginning. If the question is between social solidarity or continued struggle, plenty of modern Democrats have had it with the former and are willing to embrace the latter.

They may or may not be right, or justified, but if America finds no comfort and no direction we will all suffer the consequences.   There’s a lot riding on the Biden presidency, if it comes. For them, and, as ever, for us.

The poor woman was soon dead, but P. T. Barnum was on the way to fame and fortune. The man we associate with the circus was much more than an entertainer; he was a principal actor in the construction of an all-American tradition: the blurring of truth with fiction.

America is the home of magnificent human achievement. I used to complain to the BBC that our coverage of it contained little besides stereotypical stuff about guns and poverty: why, if the place was as ghastly as we portrayed, was it so successful? So rich? Why did half the world want to live there? Why San Francisco, rather than Irkutsk?

Go and tell us, the BBC said, and for many years, as North America Editor, I did. But a decade later, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, I realise that the real story of America cannot be told by separating out the rational positive stuff from the dross. It’s all one, folks. It’s a show. The greatest show on Earth in some respects but in others the most dangerous, the most distressingly foolish. A show that entertains us, hypnotises us, and might eventually destroy us all.

More from this author

What hope for America's Deplorables?

By Justin Webb

One book above all others knits together the strands of American thinking — and lack of thinking — that combine to bring us this uniquely peculiar brew of madness and sanity, kindness and cruelty, civilisation and dystopia. Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen, was a rip-roaring success among the NPR-listening New York Times-reading metrosexual elites, when it was published in 2017. As one reviewer observed, “The people who should read this book won’t — because it’s a book — but reality based citizens will get a kick out of this winning romp through centuries of American delusion.”

That’s the point, and the joy of Fantasyland. In a literary world weighed down by formulaic, squealing Trump-phobia, this is a work of history that tells us why Trump is where he is and why this is an entirely predictable consequence of how America is. There is nothing new about the Donald. Nothing unique. Nothing, even, that is outside the normal. This is the conclusion, baleful as it is, of Fantasyland.

P.T. Barnum was, as Andersen tells it, “America’s first great commercial blurrer of truth and make-believe.” Soon to be followed by another. William F Cody — stage name: Buffalo Bill — really did kill “Indians” in battle. But he also played the part of himself in a stage entertainment. And then — this is really crucial and wholly American — he went back to killing Indians, but did it while wearing the kit of his stage character. And then he went back to the theatre alongside Indians he recruited to play the part of themselves.

Suggested reading

Why Trump's Greenland bid is good business

By Mary Dejevsky

Andersen calls the Buffalo Bill phenomenon, “a key milestone in our national evolution”.  He suggests that no other nation has even attempted the blurring of reality and fantasy in its public life that America has achieved.

Is he right? Plainly there have been moments — long moments — of national hysteria or myopia in other nations at various stages of their development. But Andersen suggests that America is special. No other nation has combined fake news with real news and cared less about the difference. The point is simple but often missed: America’s rational brain and irrational heart are not in conflict. They are essential organs in a deeply strange body. Lose one and the whole enterprise falls apart.

That does not, of course, mean that this jolly jape can carry on forever. The darkness of America — its ability to go off the deep end, to believe things that are not true and to disbelieve things that are — feels, long term, like an existential threat.

The shiny positivity can sometimes blind us to the madness that lurks beneath. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the social media revolution that began on America’s West Coast. We are slowly waking up to the downside of tech and the contempt that its overlords have for freedoms expressed through democratic government. But when people complain about the power and the irresponsibility of the tech world, they should remember that this world grew out of a 60s hippy culture that valued personal experience above all else. It prized the right to believe absolutely anything — to mix up fiction and reality at will — as Americans always had. Not to be governed. To do your own thing.

Suggested reading

The truth behind Trump's victory

By Peter Franklin

UFO hunters. Anti-vaxxers. 9/11 truthers. They didn’t come into being with the tech revolution: their worldview is part and parcel of the West Coast motto, ‘do what feels right and seems true to you and hang the consequences’. But they are also part of the wider American tradition for mixing fact and fiction, and respecting non-facts as well as truths. Andersen suggests it comes all the way from the Puritans who brought with them to the New World all the dotiness of a group of people who were already — by definition and self-selection — in a mental world of their own before they set sail.

Of course, America is not alone in facing the challenges of fakery. But there is something unique about the American predilection for that Buffalo Bill style blurring of the differences between truth and fiction. As Andersen puts it: “Mix the protestant impulse to find meaning and purpose in everything, with the Enlightenment’s empiricism and you get our American mania for ‘connecting all the dots’, irrationality in rationalist drag.”

Irrationality in rationalist drag. That’s it. That’s America. Dotty religion, pseudoscience, tatty fakery — all living alongside, or mixed up within, a nation that thinks its business is business, thinks it is serious and sober and searching for truth.

More from this author

Does TV really rule America?

By Justin Webb

Will they ever snap out of it? Will the fever pass? Probably not. And frankly it looks as if it could get a lot worse before it gets better in the era of Trump. America is on a bender, a Buffalo Bill re-enactment moment. Andersen points out a striking fact towards the end of Fantasyland: in 2008, three quarters of the Republican candidates for president said they believed in evolution. By 2012, the figure had dropped to a third. In 2016 it was down to one candidate: Jeb Bush, who said it was his truth, but did not need to be taught in schools.

You could cry at such nonsense. Or shrug your shoulders and turn away. Or keep loving America — enjoy the circus — and hope for the best. As the father of an American citizen and a frequent visitor to the land of the too-free-with-the-facts, I am taking the latter option. But I admit to being worried. Andersen, being American, ends his book with a little homily about how decent folks can rescue the situation. It is the least convincing part. I am not so sure they can.