Fear and loathing are demolishing the foundations of American power
How much longer can we count on the US to lead the free world when it is so consumed by self-doubt?
As the geopolitical skies darken, America remains the leading light in the fight for freedom. Washington has taken a huge gamble, defying Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats to supply Kyiv with weapons in its battle against Russian imperialism. Amid Ukraine’s apparent big victory in Kharkiv, this high-stakes strategy seems to be paying off. Even as it seethes over Europe’s stingy attitude to security spending, the US continues to carry the weight of the Nato alliance on its shoulders. Countries like Sweden and Finland are thus scrambling for cover in what remains essentially a Us-bankrolled alliance.
America’s cultural commitment to freedom is also fiercer than anywhere else in the West. Touring the deep South over recent weeks, I have become more convinced of this more than ever. From the anti-racism activists who preach the power of black entrepreneurship to the gun club members of rural Mississippi who quote John Stuart Mill at the drop of a hat, the country pulsates with a visceral love of liberty, and a raw faith in individual flourishing.
But for how much longer will that remain true? The ailing Joe Biden seems to be the embodiment of American confusion and decline. Meanwhile, the Right is becoming debilitated by a new kind of conspiratorial cynicism. At a Trump rally I attended in Austin over the weekend, there was rapturous applause when Donald Trump Jr excoriated the White House for spending billions to help “kleptocratic” Ukraine.
The scariest thing of all, however, is the intellectual battle raging in America over the very meaning of freedom itself. To call this a culture war doesn’t do justice to the depth of the country’s philosophical rift. The US was founded on a classical definition of liberty, which emphasises God-given rights enshrined in the constitution, entrepreneurship and minimal government interference. The American story of freedom has bristled with rugged individualism ever since settlers ventured out to the wilderness of the Western frontier. We should not pretend that this story was flawless from its inception. The price of the US’S foundation was mass oppression – from the enslavement of blacks to the extermination of Native Americans. Still, the original US conception of liberty, and the confidence most Americans have had in those values, has arguably made the country the superpower that it is today.
The Left is now seeking to fundamentally challenge all of this. Some of their interventions are to be welcomed – such as the advancement of basic LGBT rights in line with the constitution. But, more broadly, radicals are seeking to replace the old idea of liberty with an entirely new definition. In Mississippi, I asked a sociologist for the meaning of freedom. He informed me matter-of-factly: “Liberation from the structures of white supremacy.” In Tennessee, I asked a pastor whether the woke mindset might harm America’s social fabric as well as individual self-esteem. He replied gently that such willful ignorance was the “shriek of the Devil”, and referred me to Mark 5:9 in which Jesus encounters a man possessed by so many evil spirits that he does not know his own name. The pastor’s spiritual resolve reminded me of today’s secular activists who see a world divided into enlightened liberals and heathen racists.
One also detects in America an important shift from a “negative” idea of liberty, which emphasises individual freedom from outside interference, to a more “positive” conception which aims for a higher state of collective enlightenment. Many activists are convinced that this lofty goal can only be achieved through an expanded welfare system devoted to “equity”. A minority even think free speech can be legitimately censored in the name of “true” righteous freedom.
I have come to understand much better why so many in America have come to think in this way. The legacy of slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow laws, as well as contemporary racism, have instilled in many decent Americans an admirable desire to right past wrongs and a genuine terror of what society can become without a strictly enforced moral code.
Still, there is serious danger that these trends are taken too far. By conceiving of freedom not as a natural birth-right but as a socio-economic outcome to be engineered by a benevolent state, Leftists risk corroding the can-do attitude that has propelled America’s success. They are also handing unprecedented power to bureaucratic elites. Meanwhile, their clamour to clamp down on Right-wing hate speech is ushering in terrifying levels of state surveillance and control. Take the FBI’S routine surveillance of citizens on online platforms, as it splurges on social media monitoring technology that civil liberties groups say raises deep concerns.
Frighteningly, there is no effective centre-right counter-narrative to all of this. Bereft of new ideas, the American Right is becoming as bad as the other side. It is sliding into a siege mentality, embracing narratives of control – whether over the Mexican border, American history or what children are taught about racism in school. Republican politicians seem to have little to say about how to safeguard liberties that conservatives actually do care about, from freedom of speech and freedom from oppressive taxes to the consequences of bloated bureaucratic power.
The question is whether the West will always be able to depend on an America at war over its very foundations. Should the Left-wing ideology prevail, the story of individual liberty that is so integral to the country’s identity could crumble, leaving America lost and consumed with self-loathing. On the other hand, if conservatives continue to batten down the hatches, America will likely become ever-more anxious and isolationist.
Over coffee, a Chinese-american international relations expert put it to me like this: “In China everything revolves around the economy, but in America everything revolves around politics.” This is a useful way to think of the unfolding battle of civilisations. As seismic as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, the two big questions of geopolitics are whether the Chinese Communist Party can sustain China’s growth, and whether America can stop ripping itself apart long enough to formulate a coherent strategic response to Beijing’s rise. On the latter count, it is difficult to be optimistic.
Many decent Americans have a genuine terror of what society can become without a strictly enforced moral code