As I’ve alluded to before, we on this side of the Atlantic often struggle to understand Americans. It can seem strange — we’re saturated with US culture, its fast food, music, and movies — but there’s a hidden inner life to America that Europeans often fail to penetrate. Having partly grown up in America, I remember just how different, and varied, the reality of US culture is behind the veil of ersatz Hollywood Americana. We Brits in particular are often the most guilty, because of the illusory closeness of language, in imagining Americans are just slightly confused Englishmen who have yet to discover the NHS. 

Until recently, our view of America was filtered through its liberal cultural and intellectual elites

What we forget is that whilst every European country (including, de facto, the UK) has a 20th century constitution, and a social democratic consensus, America still has a fundamentally 18th century constitution. America is a country of similar geographical and demographic scale to the EU, and possesses huge internal variation and complexity, a situation encouraged by its federal structure. In the States, democracy is more untamed, and liberty harder edged. Europeans, making brief forays into New York, and absorbing certain filtered elements of its culture, can maintain the illusion that America is but an estranged (and somewhat backwards) cousin. But sometimes, that illusion breaks down, and rather harshly. Obama sustained this fond fantasy (and was consequently beloved of the European establishment), but Trump decisively shattered it. 

The past few weeks have brought this fracture back to the surface, and in an interesting way. Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire who has taken over Twitter, has been causing outrage across Britain and Europe, as he lobs rhetorical hand grenades into the troubled waters of English rioting and social disorder. British politicians have called for the social media giant to be regulated, and Elon specifically to face the force of the law. EU commissioner Thierry Breton sent Musk a public letter calling on him to restrict “harmful content” on Twitter, or face “legal sanctions”. 

Twitter, especially on Musk’s watch, has had a remarkable effect on European perceptions of the States. Until recently, our view of America was filtered through its liberal cultural and intellectual elites, causing regular bemusement at the conservative leaders who regularly seized the helm of the country, and their radically different affect and worldview. Twitter has changed all that. For the first time, European individuals and journalists are encountering America’s “internal” discourse in a direct and relatively unmediated way, to such an extent that the language and thinking of both our left and right has become subtly and sometimes overtly “Americanised”. 

This has produced shock and hysteria, in part because our own thinking is in a state of drift and incoherence. On the one hand we rely on an unquestioned series of conventions and assumptions, that we describe as “moderate”, or “centrist”, and react with horror at anything that offends these as being an “extreme” mode of politics. On the other hand, we have abandoned independent thought, so that we are unable to analyse this difference, even in critical terms, leaving us with uncomprehending mockery, denial and dismissal in the face of the “other”. 

What is it that we in Britain don’t “get” about Elon? He is of course an abrasive, egotistical and eccentric character, who is sometimes casual with the truth, and arbitrary in the running of Twitter, which he treats as a personal pulpit. These evident individual failings act to obscure the culture and thinking which produces him, and his attitudes, and why he, and flamboyant figures like him, have such enduring appeal within America. First of all, lest we forget, Musk was once a popular figure in the European imagination. Before we got too close a look at him, we were in awe of this business maverick who was reviving the dream of space travel, largely abandoned by the state, via the power of the private sector, and unleashing fleets of electric cars onto US roads. But Musk hasn’t changed, and America hasn’t changed either. The factors that produce the things we like — technological optimism, a cheerful, confident, entrepreneurial national character, a sense of glamour and ambition — all stem from factors that, in practice, Europeans shrink from. 

Elon’s gleeful attitude in the face of the prim moderators of speech is born of America’s vastly more robust definition of free speech — a definition once beloved, but now reviled by our progressive left. Likewise, American democracy is a great deal more direct than it is allowed to be in most of Europe. Though much of the Continent prides itself on a system of proportional representation that is, seemingly, more democratic, its actual result is a series of coalitions, and real power is often vested in the administrative state, or increasingly, the growing EU bureaucracy. Meanwhile, in America, many positions that would be filled by civil servants in Europe are directly elected, or politically appointed. America’s system of “checks and balances” may see many democratic energies defused at a national level, but they are always present, especially at the local and state levels, where there is huge scope to assert regional and civic culture in policy and law. Town hall democracy was born in America, and has never stopped since. 

Europe could learn and relearn a great deal from America’s religiosity, sincerity, confidence and small town democracy

Likewise, the sheer scale of money and lobbying that verges on corruption that exists in American democracy speaks to a highly flawed system, but it also reflects vast political and popular energies that simply don’t exist in a European continent that has sunk into a complacent dotage. US democracy is a thrilling game played for the highest stakes, and unsurprisingly it often draws the fascination of our journalists far more than our own staid politics. 

In a telling exchange, liberal US commentator Noah Smith clashed with British liberal commentator David Aaronovitch. Smith wondered, idly, what was going wrong with the rest of the English speaking world: 

Between Britain throwing people in prison for tweets, Canada recommending suicide for the disabled, and Australia…well, being Australia, I’d say the Anglosphere is looking decidedly wacky these days.

Aaronovitch, shocked at encountering American attitudes to free speech (attitudes that much of the British left shared 20-30 years ago), responded, scoldingly: “By FAR the wackiest part of the Anglosphere is Muskian America, Noah”. Smith, who, reflects the fervent patriotism typical of the American centre left, and quite alien to British equivalents, expressed unalloyed contempt in response:

America hasn’t had anti-immigrant riots in over a century, you had them last week. You can’t build any housing, you have no industry to speak of, and you elected a prime minister who lasted less time than a head of lettuce. You wrecked your economy by making it totally dependent on finance and then you wrecked it again by leaving the EU. You have a huge antisemitism problem, and you almost elected Jeremy Corbyn. Your GDP per hour has barely increased since 2006. Your NHS is falling apart. 

Need I go on?

This, not sub-Churchillian special relationship pablum, is the real attitude of many Americans, including on the left, to the UK. They think us contemptibly craven as individuals, willing to roll over for the government, and as drastically mismanaging immigration, politically sclerotic, and economically stagnant at an institutional level. 

Figures like Musk and Trump appear ridiculous and absurd to European eyes, as well as frighteningly reckless. But they reflect an American spirit that is militantly democratic and liberal in a way Europe is not, and a kind of political vitality that we lack. That is not to say we should approve of or agree with American culture — indeed, its worst aspects: individualism, consumerism, hysteria — now infect and degrade our civilisation at every level. We fail to effectively resist however, in as much as we fail to properly understand. Some of the strongest correctives to America’s excesses, like a learned immunity to a virus, exist within the US body politic itself. Europe could learn and relearn a great deal from America’s religiosity, sincerity, confidence and small town democracy. 

Europe has become senile, whilst America is recklessly adolescent. We must instead seek to reconcile age and wisdom, new world and old world, and rediscover a shared, Western, Christian civilisational project. Thoughtless posturing and mutual mockery must, somehow, give way to a genuine dialogue.