American impressions: the national future
Reflections on my time as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon University, North Carolina.
1. Elon University · 2. Flora and fauna · 3. Teaching technology ethics · 4. The sport · 5. Being a Fulbrighter · 6. Life in the North Carolina Piedmont · 7. The national future.
I try to arrive in the US as non-judgemental as possible, determined to reappraise America from first principles. Unrealistic perhaps, but it felt like the only honest way to approach my role.
I return home afraid for – and of – the future of America.
Exceptionalism still courses through American veins. Citizens still see the US as the best country in the world and presume others agree. Locals are shocked to hear my wife elected not to accompany me – who turns down America? – and assume I’d stay if I could. When I explain the temporary nature of my visa, several people lament that the US won’t kick out all these illegals but won’t let someone like me (a definition I don’t press) stay permanently. Were I to confess I don’t want to stay, it might be the first time some Americans hear it.
A common cultural theme: Americans are primed for the hardness of the world. You see this most clearly in TV commercials, particularly those aimed at men. In these ads toughness is framed as geographical, geological. Hard roads and baking sun require supersized solutions, unrelenting toil, a survivor mindset. Maybe there’s a little in that, but I feel the nation’s toughness is mostly of its own design. America makes its world hard in ways other nations do not.
I find violence to be imprinted at a near-cellular level in the American psyche. (Jonathan Stein has written admirably about this.) Masculine aggression is canonised and celebrated, a virtue flowing from the country’s expansive history. Justifications I hear for pointing a loaded gun at another person include 1. stepping onto my property at night and 2. touching my vehicle. The only role for nurture and compassion is as defence mechanisms, instrumental goods for furthering the true American virtue: individual or in-group sovereignty. Taking care of each other is transmuted into protecting your family from threats.
I once heard it said that America is a good idea but shame about the execution. I’m not sure the idea is good today. A nation fixated on individual liberty feels mismatched to the twenty-first century: ideologically dated, if not outright juvenile. The challenges we face in the coming decades are deeply interwoven and collective. Your fate will be my fate. So I’m particularly shocked by America’s total inaction on climate. There’s endless, needless polystyrene and plastic. The vehicles are obscene and, alongside jets, remain the dominant means of transport. Conspiracist outlooks on climate are routine. So when I overhear Floridian retirees complain about their spiralling home insurance, I want to tell them: buckle up. Things are set to get much worse. Unless you find a way to work together, sacrificing some of your personal wellbeing – and yes, even some of your more incidental freedoms – for the good of all, your state, your home, and your way of life have precarious futures.
More than anything, I want to tell America about decline. After all, what else has more clearly defined the last British century? Britain has mostly sublimated this decline into nostalgia: poisonous enough, but with the spikes on the inside. But I fear for America. The MAGA extremes make it clear many millions of Americans are eager to embrace full-on fundamentalist nationalism, a stance that will not tolerate also-ran status. The people who stand to lose most from this shift will of course be those who are already most downtrodden in society, while America’s recently capricious foreign policy suggests for many years we’ll be one flashpoint away from global disaster.
But America won’t listen to someone like me. Exceptionalism, remember. With sadness for the aspects of America I hold dear, I know the country will make its own mistakes. Its contemporary politics are postured as an emergency of liberty: unless we act immediately, they will take everything from us. But the adrenaline rush of fight or flight can’t last forever. The spring is wound too tight. Some kind of lashing out feels almost inevitable; I don’t know whether it will be internal or external, but I dread it either way.
A condition of my grant is that I fill in an extensive survey on how the Fulbright programme has changed my opinion of America. My cursor hovers over the scale, torn between No Change and Slightly Declined. In the end I chicken out, not wishing to appear ungrateful: No Change. No change. But the change is coming.
