Reporting on the American elections today is a matter less of political analysis than it is sociological reflection on the phenomenon of political partisanship. Like much of the Western world, American politics is no longer “normal”. Rather than debates, however harsh and divisive, over divergent policy directions, we get fundamental clashes of identity mediated via post-modern rows over the nature of reality itself. 

What makes the current polarisation so strange is that it is occurring precisely at a time when America’s most serious real-term divisions have declined. By any measure, problems of racial violence, discrimination and segregation are far less severe than in the past century. The episodes of extreme violence that characterised the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, and the conflicts over civil rights, have not, despite the disorder that accompanied the BLM movement, seriously returned. Even aspects of policy, such as immigration and conflicts over DEI, which can be cast as racial divisions, see robustly multi-racial coalitions on both sides of the issue. “Whiteness” itself, whether implicitly upheld by America First politics, or denounced as the original sin of the USA by the progressive left, is a thoroughly post-racial category that can encompass persons of any background. 

America is facing bitter and intractable divisions between groups over seemingly superficial differences of language and identity. More fundamental divides, such as the widening economic rift between the poor and the wealthy, are far less salient today than they were at the 20th century peak of equality during the “Great Compression” of 1937-67. 

The full weirdness of the culture war is more visible in America than anywhere else. For a Brit landing on these shores, a number of things are strikingly apparent right away. The proliferation of partisan signage, from bumper stickers to lawn signs, seems universal. Political messaging is broadcast, and isn’t just restricted to innocuous Harris or Trump signs. There are declarations of support for Israel or Palestine, BLM signs and any number of other contentious causes. Even apartment buildings have signs plastered over doors. 

I witnessed the casual politicisation of apolitical spaces. Cafes, bookshops and restaurants fly progress pride flags. Cheerful little signs proclaim a shop’s commitment to a progressive worldview, like one invitation to leave a tip entitled “if you’re scared of change, leave it here!” 

In Philadelphia, at the heart of America’s electoral battleground it was especially inescapable. Whilst a Trump ad scrolled overhead in giant digital letters, a crowd of young activists in jeans jumped up and down waving Harris signs at the intersection as cars honked in support. Elsewhere, pink high-vis jacket-wearing volunteers, with equally fluorescent hair, sternly handed out leaflets about the importance of “reproductive freedom”. Later on, traffic was stopped as women marched down the street chanting and waving signs. This time, it was nothing to do with the election, but a protest over the violence that nurses regularly face doing their jobs. Here was a glimpse of the pain just beneath the surface of all the noise; public servants paying the price for crime and social decay.

… as an outsider, it’s hard to avoid the feeling … that there is something structurally wrong with America

Of course it doesn’t take much perceptiveness to notice America’s social problems. They’re right there screaming in your face, often literally. Even as someone used to London’s substantial problems of poverty and homelessness, I was taken aback by how much worse it seems in the States. If Britain were a US state, it would be, in GDP per head terms, the very poorest. But it often doesn’t feel that way. It’s easy to admire American wealth and dynamism from a distance, and there was no shortage of that in evidence. But close up, it’s impossible to ignore the withered faces, missing limbs, the bodies I saw sprawled out on everything from subway seats to a bench in a museum. The habit of blindness to human suffering is swiftly learned. 

A growing cost of living and rising inflation is, with at best partial justice, frequently blamed on Joe Biden. But as an outsider, it’s hard to avoid the feeling, increasingly true of Britain as well, that there is something structurally wrong with America. Speculative money is flooding housing markets, and the physical and social decay of cities has increased in direct proportion to the explosion of their fiscal value. At certain points in American history, the scale and power of money has seemed to be a rising tide sure to float all boats, but without fail the tide swamps the smaller vessels in the end. The digitisation of American capitalism has generated unimaginable wealth, and produced unprecedented consumer convenience, but it has done so whilst generating far fewer jobs than previous industries. Labour and capital, as it is England’s even more service-dominated economy, is badly distributed and organised, accumulating and bloating. America, and much of the Western world with it, is poisoned by money, clotting cancerously in its “global” cities, retreating from its extremities as economic hyperthermia sets in. 

The sense that there is often “too much” in America, from too-large cars to too-vast meals, is more than a puritanical sneer from a fading Europe. American energy is electrifying, but so much of it is wasted on individual appetite rather than collective endeavour. Stepping out of America’s great railway stations gives you a sense of what America really is — a great civilisation, as Ross Douthat says, experiencing decline and decadence. Philadelphia’s 30th street station is a vast Art Deco temple, the relic of an age of American mass transit. Great golden lamps hang in this cathedral of transportation, and a war memorial, dedicated to American railway workers who died in WW2, depicts an extraordinarily vertical St Michael the archangel lifting a serviceman, valkyrie-like, out of the flames of war. You only have to see American movies of the 40s and 50s to get a sense of the grandeur and coherence of American urbanism. Today, there is vastly more money, but little evidence of the ability to cooperate and coordinate labour at the level of the civic or national community when the goal is the common good rather than material self interest. 

None of this, let it be said, is to assert the superiority of my own homeland. The same problems are everywhere in the West to varying degrees and in different realms of endeavour. But America, as the preeminent and paramount power of our age, is in the driving seat. Either it will lead us out of the pit we are all tumbling into, or some fantastic act of resistance and renewal will have to be mounted from elsewhere. 

Certainly, nobody can seriously believe either Trump or Harris are going to turn things around. But what either of their victories threaten, with a sense of leaden inevitability many Americans are quietly or loudly dreading, is a fresh and brutal fracturing of America’s already divided culture. It is hard to imagine Trump acquiescing to a defeat, but nor is there much hope that liberal America will accept his victory, which much of the left regard as an existential threat to democracy and the American constitution. The knife edge closeness of the election only compounds the problem. 

It’s hard to imagine what will be more toxic. A defeated Trump will pump poison into the paranoid minds of his most ardent supporters, but the last time he took the Presidency, it unleashed a progressive tidal wave of outrage that deranged nearly every liberal institution in America. Either way, lunatic energy will blaze through the public realm, ending up who knows where.  

Whether we want to or not, we’re all in some sense living in America

But where do these bitter divisions, and secular decline in social organisation come from? America, as I noted at the beginning, has faced seemingly far greater divides (not to mention a horrific civil war) with less degeneration in its public powers and reason. In looking for explanations it is a mistake to reduce matters to either material or abstract causes. Instead, historical change can be seen as part of a complex interplay between institutional evolution, individual actors, the play of language and ideas, shifting social habits and material forces, all of which are bound by two way flows of influence, continually shaping and being shaped by the other.

Despite this complexity, we can trace certain tendencies and directions of travel, as particular patterns take on a self-reinforcing character, becoming dominant themes, with increasingly clear sorts of outcome over time. The pattern of American individualism, consumerism and conformity is not only blatantly apparent, it has been universalised and globalised. Whether we want to or not, we’re all in some sense living in America.  

As Mark Lilla has argued, American identity has its origins in an original moment of affective unity, dating from the time of colonisation, when unprecedented material equality and the experience of shared struggle and challenges created an egalitarian, relatively classless culture. The persistence of racial divisions in America stems from the original sin and psychic wound of black enslavement. The added emotional agonies of the legacy of slavery in America, far more apparent than in many other countries, including in Latin America, where slavery sometimes persisted far later, is a reflection of the accumulated bitterness of a group forced to be spectators to the rise of a utopian republic built on the back of their labours. 

If a sense of psychic unity and emotional sympathy is seen as the basis of democratic nationhood, rather than formal equality alone, then the breakdown of American political life on the basis of rival identity groups’ (whether racial, sexual, religious or gender-based) demands for dignity becomes a far more coherent prospect. Even if formal discrimination and segregation has dwindled away, the presence of a group with a history of exclusion and a reality of huge economic and social suffering presents a terrible challenge to the American republic, a challenge compounded by those same economic and social problems persisting across racial and regional divides. The fact that family breakdown, drug addiction and worklessness afflict both urban and rural, black and white communities has, tragically, created mutual contempt as often as it has sympathy and solidarity. 

America’s governing classes want to relieve these problems, but their emotional psychology as a group prevents them organising politically to address them. On the one hand, a habit of superiority produced by the educational system, and their own power and prosperity, inclines them to pity rather than sympathy, often rendering attempts at help as operations of coercion and control. More problematically still, individualist ideas limit and bound their imagination.

Individualism is a problem, however, for every level and part of society. The most dangerous and under-realised element of this is that because all exercises of authority are seen as intrusions, those who must, inescapably, wield authority, become authoritarians in doing so. Progressives and traditionalists alike battle for the commanding heights of power in order to socially coerce their opponents.

Many Americans, especially older ones, are intuitive libertarians, and revile from such uses of authority. This is admirable in many senses, and there is no shortage of basic decency or a desire for community amongst Americans. But these instincts are hopelessly frustrated. Holding Americans apart are not only the power ideas and sentiments we have touched upon, but just as much a pattern of material organisation that drives and is driven in turn by these mental and social concepts. The famous explosion of American cities into suburban sprawl, the vast kingdom of the car, is only the most visible aspect of this pattern. It is one of technological substitution and automation of human relations. It is visible in everything from the economy of apps, to the generation of credit scores, to the neglect of beauty and high culture. Everywhere an economistic, numerical and administrative logic reigns, and excludes all other modes of thinking at the level of collective organisation.

All of these tendencies militate towards individualistic habits of thought and conduct. The once essential local bonds of American life, in the form of clubs, associations and congregations — the civil society so admired by Tocqueville — are, as Robert Putnam observed in Bowling Alone, falling apart. Even where they persist, they are tied far more closely to individual identity and consumer preference than before, and far less to meaningful relationships. In the final bitter irony, individualism traps people within their inherited characteristics, and excludes them from meaningful rebirth in communities of choice and adoption. 

The great tragedy of America is that it contains such an outsize proportion of human genius and goodwill, trapped within a system that increasingly gives these sentiments no public outlet. Most Americans, far more than cynical Brits, want to do good, and want their country to do good. My experience of Americans has been of people possessing great kindness and curiosity about the lives of others. A fundamentally energetic, idealistic and creative country is unable to express these qualities in its national politics, or to project them effectively abroad. 

As America goes to the polls, whatever the result, I fear we will see further agonies for this great nation, but I hope, for all our sakes, that it will break free of the systems that are ruining it.