Why are we having an American-style election?

Stranded 4,000 miles from home because of the volcano, I’m struggling with a Chicago perspective on the British election. Viewed from here, of course, Britain hardly exists. Even open-minded types with an informed interest in current affairs tend to be a bit vague about any changes in British politics since the time of George III, Whigs and Tories and the American revolution. The only item from Britain that’s broken into US news is the TV debate between the three party leaders: not for what was said or how it went, but as a sign that Britain is becoming a bit more normal, or at least more American.

But there’s another trend in British political culture that may be a more significant sign of Americanisation: the rise of the narcissistic idea that if you want to talk about politics, you need only talk about yourself. A public discourse that used to be capable of debating rival analyses, identifying grounds for hope and fear, and working out priorities and policy options is increasingly being taken over by histrionic displays of outraged good conscience.

Political narcissism has a long tradition in US politics, especially amongst the dyed-in-the-wool, salt-of-the-earth, saintly old leftists, most of them now in their seventies, who define themselves as "veterans" of the civil rights, student and anti-war movements.



Take the activist John Gerassi, the "unrepentant radical educator" who still identifies with "the movement" and lives off the social capital that accrued to him when he was dismissed from California State University. In the 1960s he contrasted the police-ridden US with the "total lack of police" in Cuba. At the same time, his fellow activist activist Jerry Rubin was busy denouncing American universities as lie-factories and calling for them to be "abandoned or closed down." (See this New York Review of Books article or http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/monchinski.html)

Not that this kind of narcissism is confined to the revolutionary left. The other day I took a money-saving pedestrian tour of public art in downtown Chicago: an impressive collection that began when Picasso donated a 50-foot steel sculpture in 1967. But on this occasion the Picasso found itself presiding over a tea-party rally. Some 200 harmless-looking ordinary Americans, of all ages and races, and, to judge by their banners ("Taxation is robbery" etc) perfectly literate, all thrilling to the anti-government message ("What is gun control? … it’s control, and we don’t want it in the land of the free.")

The old-left vets like to treat these conservative revolutionaries ("tea-baggers" as they call them) as harbingers of a new fascism, and I suppose they may be right. But the elephant in the room is the fact that their desultory doctrines—about the universities as agents of state indoctrination and the police as enemies of freedom—are indistinguishable from the boasts of the old-left vets. And neither group is willing to accept that politics might be about anything but themselves: they can’t step outside the private garden where they lovingly cultivate their indignation. It may strike you as very American, but—to judge by public reaction to the British election—it’s not exclusively so any more.