Excellent essay for the morning coffee. I've come to look forward to the morning substack essay with coffee the way I used to enjoy the morning newspapers with coffee in more civilized times.
The evolution of British identity is something I've become very aware of in my own life, despite not being British. The American perception of the British was traditionally one dominated by a certain type of Britishness - the upper class, stiff upper lip, well educated, well-mannered, mildly conservative and simultaneously mildly liberal Englishman, for, after all, this was the class that dominated British politics and culture and for most of the world, the British they encountered outside Britain, for the poor rarely ever travelled. This was the consensus for the British identity during the empire, and naturally, it lingered for some time afterwards. And a great number of Americans, particularly the Protestant establishment, did highly respect it, seeing a shared common heritage in political values and classic liberalism and cultural traditions.
Certainly, not all Americans responded well to the concept of the British. Irish Americans were zealously anti-British, and the rural white populations (usually Scots-Irish) were forever jeering that they'd defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, and the American lower middle class often only saw Britain as a land of class and snobbery. So one can see the twin side of the well-mannered upper class/upper middle class British man or woman would be snobby, intolerant, bigoted, obsessed with class and manners, all distinctly against the egalitarian spirit of America.
Nonetheless, regardless of which side of the coin you preferred, the perception of who the British were had a pattern to it. And it was bourn out by the leagues of British literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that flooded American libraries, and British speakers and visitors. My mother, growing up in the 1950s, commented that based on British children's books and later, the mystery novels, she was left with the vague impression all children in Britain went to boarding schools and had nannies, to the point that on a family trip to England in the early 1960s she was startled to encounter clearly working class people and accents and behaviors - some of which too closely mirrored certain parts of her hometown city that we'd impolitely call white trash. And flash forward to 2022? The public perception of the British outside Britain is probably more defined by loutish behavior and excessive drinking and vulgarity.
Anecdote aside, the evolution of the British identity in the last 40 years has been remarkable. In reading various British presses one is aware that the idea of the British spirit or British values still holds some weight, or at least obsession among the talking heads, but one also gets the impression it is only growing weaker and weaker. It's now evolved to being little more than a vaguely liberal concept that has to be weak enough for anyone to adopt, regardless of whether they are British or not. Someone from a very different part of the world can migrate to Britain and within a few years demand to be called British, without having to share in any of the old responsibilities usually associated with citizenship and culture and heritage, something that would have been immediately understood by the Britain of up till the 1990s, regardless of where in Britain you came from. So Britishness become a brand, hence the Singaporean with the Keep Calm and Carry on mugs and a Mini and an obsession with London. But as a brand, it has no depth to it, and that is the challenge for the future.
I'm also seeing a similar problem emerge in the United States. The loss of a cohesive American identity has only worsened, and it's happened very rapidly. 20 years ago, both the don't tread on me Texan cowboy and the prissy New England progressive dedicated to good causes would be both part of the great American family, still sharing common values despite differences in politics. Today, they are increasingly not of the same family. A substantial portion of the country, especially the progressive left, no longer has any meaningful attachment to the old American creed of free speech, free rights, meritocracy, egalitarianism, and now often see these principles as oppressive! I left the US in 2008 for a long expat stint abroad and at the time I knew exactly what it meant to be an American, warts and all. Today? I no longer know.
I could expand at length about Britain's endless decline. Has any country fallen so far, not in terms of power or strength but in dignity? I don't know. I'd be interested to know what you noticed what was different in America between leaving and coming back
I spent some time thinking about your question, mainly how to reduce what’d be a PhD dissertation to a readable response. An excellent overview is Coming Apart by Charles Murray, published in 2010 and which describes in statistical detail the fracturing of American society post 1960: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X (Murray is the author of the infamous Bell Curve and also a staunch old fashioned liberal not afraid of uncomfortable statistics).
Still, what changed between 2008 and 2019?
Let me start from a initially different place to give a bit of a context. I don’t buy into the handwringing over fears of demographic changes because America has always been an immigrant heritage society – something that may actually save it in the long run. 100 years ago it was the Protestants who feared the large scale immigration of Catholic Italians and Irish into the US and afraid it’d change the nature of America. People are always fearful of change -understandably.
But America was founded by immigrants, it’s the national story, and provides a common shared heritage whether your family (like mine) arrived on these shores in the 1700s, or yesterday. Abraham Lincoln, in his political speeches of the late 1850s, succinctly pointed out America now had large populations of people who couldn’t claim descendance from the founders of 1776, but that was besides the point. What mattered was that the Founders created a new American state based on the creed of liberty and equality and freedom and where people from all over the world could come to and throw off the shackles of oppressive dogmatic faith, aristocratic rule, suppression of natural rights, and embrace all the great enlightenment principles of freedom, equality, liberty, and the assorted natural rights of speech and press and so forth. That was the American creed, based on all men are created equal.
And it was spectacularly successful. It allowed disparate cultural groups to blend together into a single country, whether the old Anglo-Saxons settlers, the various regional identities, the subsequent waves of Germans and the later Italians, Poles, Jews, and starting in the 1960s onward, large numbers of non-white, non-Christian immigration from disparate countries. People could maintain their own historical cultures and traditions and coexist – as long as there was mutual respect from everyone for the creed.
Although the rise of the critical progressive left was already underway as early as the 1990s, and I encountered strains of it at the Ivy League college I went to in the early 2000s, the institutional structure of America, both the government and universities and corporations and cultural institutions, and the mainstream media, remained fully committed to the American creed. Flaws in the historical past was because people had failed to live up to the promise of the sacrosanct creed, and the history of America was getting closer to the full promise of the creed. On racial grounds, the goal was to move towards a race-blind society, and we did seem to be making great progress in that direction. Regardless of any imperfection, everyone still shared a common belief in the natural superiority of the creed as just.
That was the America I left in 2008. When I returned in 2019, it was to suddenly discover a country that no longer so wholesomely believed in the creed. The progressive left, and increasingly more and more of the regular left, now saw the creed as systematically racist and oppressive (still trying to understand why). With the creed steadily delegitimized by the very institutions that once upheld it, there’s an accompanying collapse in meaningful belief in the shared common heritage based on the creed. The left and the mainstream media they control is openly disdainful of it and barely acknowledges it beyond as a force of oppression rather than good. The progressive left is devoted to a different goal that has little to do with traditional liberalism. Many schoolkids are no longer educated in the virtues of liberty and freedom, and many of the woke left now see such concepts with suspicion (which was made readily obvious in the great political wars over the COVID response, and, of course, the current tensions of free speech/disinformation, something that would have been unfathomable 10 years ago because there was simply no questioning free speech).
The conservative half of America is abundantly aware that the left clearly no longer sees the same country they do nor respect the same sacrosanct creed that was once universal. It’s no surprise that the conservative half has utterly lost any confidence or trust in the institutions, media, and even the government itself when the civil service is in the thralls of wokery.
And thus is the situation. The story of America is different from Britain despite some shared common heritage and common universal principles. What America still has, to its advantage, is the immigrant heritage actually may be the factor keeping the creed alive, despite what some of the far-right fears. Some of the strongest champions of the traditional creed are immigrants, it’s what they see in the US versus the places they left. And immigration is a heritage that allows all new immigrants to see themselves part of America’s history and culture from the day they arrive in the country, because they see that experience repeated across the generations by previous waves of immigrants.
The previous paragraph also shows how the immigrant story in Europe faces a different challenge. I do wonder if immigrants come to form a substantial minority in a country where they have no shared history and cannot look at the institutions and history and even the physical fabric with a cultural familiarity, how that affects the long term cohesiveness of that society. But that’s a different post!
I feel like I should read more about Canada in the 60s - it seemed to have the most extreme 60s of all. Going from Juno Beach to, well, Trudeau is a huge transformation.
Excellent essay for the morning coffee. I've come to look forward to the morning substack essay with coffee the way I used to enjoy the morning newspapers with coffee in more civilized times.
The evolution of British identity is something I've become very aware of in my own life, despite not being British. The American perception of the British was traditionally one dominated by a certain type of Britishness - the upper class, stiff upper lip, well educated, well-mannered, mildly conservative and simultaneously mildly liberal Englishman, for, after all, this was the class that dominated British politics and culture and for most of the world, the British they encountered outside Britain, for the poor rarely ever travelled. This was the consensus for the British identity during the empire, and naturally, it lingered for some time afterwards. And a great number of Americans, particularly the Protestant establishment, did highly respect it, seeing a shared common heritage in political values and classic liberalism and cultural traditions.
Certainly, not all Americans responded well to the concept of the British. Irish Americans were zealously anti-British, and the rural white populations (usually Scots-Irish) were forever jeering that they'd defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, and the American lower middle class often only saw Britain as a land of class and snobbery. So one can see the twin side of the well-mannered upper class/upper middle class British man or woman would be snobby, intolerant, bigoted, obsessed with class and manners, all distinctly against the egalitarian spirit of America.
Nonetheless, regardless of which side of the coin you preferred, the perception of who the British were had a pattern to it. And it was bourn out by the leagues of British literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that flooded American libraries, and British speakers and visitors. My mother, growing up in the 1950s, commented that based on British children's books and later, the mystery novels, she was left with the vague impression all children in Britain went to boarding schools and had nannies, to the point that on a family trip to England in the early 1960s she was startled to encounter clearly working class people and accents and behaviors - some of which too closely mirrored certain parts of her hometown city that we'd impolitely call white trash. And flash forward to 2022? The public perception of the British outside Britain is probably more defined by loutish behavior and excessive drinking and vulgarity.
Anecdote aside, the evolution of the British identity in the last 40 years has been remarkable. In reading various British presses one is aware that the idea of the British spirit or British values still holds some weight, or at least obsession among the talking heads, but one also gets the impression it is only growing weaker and weaker. It's now evolved to being little more than a vaguely liberal concept that has to be weak enough for anyone to adopt, regardless of whether they are British or not. Someone from a very different part of the world can migrate to Britain and within a few years demand to be called British, without having to share in any of the old responsibilities usually associated with citizenship and culture and heritage, something that would have been immediately understood by the Britain of up till the 1990s, regardless of where in Britain you came from. So Britishness become a brand, hence the Singaporean with the Keep Calm and Carry on mugs and a Mini and an obsession with London. But as a brand, it has no depth to it, and that is the challenge for the future.
I'm also seeing a similar problem emerge in the United States. The loss of a cohesive American identity has only worsened, and it's happened very rapidly. 20 years ago, both the don't tread on me Texan cowboy and the prissy New England progressive dedicated to good causes would be both part of the great American family, still sharing common values despite differences in politics. Today, they are increasingly not of the same family. A substantial portion of the country, especially the progressive left, no longer has any meaningful attachment to the old American creed of free speech, free rights, meritocracy, egalitarianism, and now often see these principles as oppressive! I left the US in 2008 for a long expat stint abroad and at the time I knew exactly what it meant to be an American, warts and all. Today? I no longer know.
I could expand at length about Britain's endless decline. Has any country fallen so far, not in terms of power or strength but in dignity? I don't know. I'd be interested to know what you noticed what was different in America between leaving and coming back
I spent some time thinking about your question, mainly how to reduce what’d be a PhD dissertation to a readable response. An excellent overview is Coming Apart by Charles Murray, published in 2010 and which describes in statistical detail the fracturing of American society post 1960: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X (Murray is the author of the infamous Bell Curve and also a staunch old fashioned liberal not afraid of uncomfortable statistics).
Still, what changed between 2008 and 2019?
Let me start from a initially different place to give a bit of a context. I don’t buy into the handwringing over fears of demographic changes because America has always been an immigrant heritage society – something that may actually save it in the long run. 100 years ago it was the Protestants who feared the large scale immigration of Catholic Italians and Irish into the US and afraid it’d change the nature of America. People are always fearful of change -understandably.
But America was founded by immigrants, it’s the national story, and provides a common shared heritage whether your family (like mine) arrived on these shores in the 1700s, or yesterday. Abraham Lincoln, in his political speeches of the late 1850s, succinctly pointed out America now had large populations of people who couldn’t claim descendance from the founders of 1776, but that was besides the point. What mattered was that the Founders created a new American state based on the creed of liberty and equality and freedom and where people from all over the world could come to and throw off the shackles of oppressive dogmatic faith, aristocratic rule, suppression of natural rights, and embrace all the great enlightenment principles of freedom, equality, liberty, and the assorted natural rights of speech and press and so forth. That was the American creed, based on all men are created equal.
And it was spectacularly successful. It allowed disparate cultural groups to blend together into a single country, whether the old Anglo-Saxons settlers, the various regional identities, the subsequent waves of Germans and the later Italians, Poles, Jews, and starting in the 1960s onward, large numbers of non-white, non-Christian immigration from disparate countries. People could maintain their own historical cultures and traditions and coexist – as long as there was mutual respect from everyone for the creed.
Although the rise of the critical progressive left was already underway as early as the 1990s, and I encountered strains of it at the Ivy League college I went to in the early 2000s, the institutional structure of America, both the government and universities and corporations and cultural institutions, and the mainstream media, remained fully committed to the American creed. Flaws in the historical past was because people had failed to live up to the promise of the sacrosanct creed, and the history of America was getting closer to the full promise of the creed. On racial grounds, the goal was to move towards a race-blind society, and we did seem to be making great progress in that direction. Regardless of any imperfection, everyone still shared a common belief in the natural superiority of the creed as just.
That was the America I left in 2008. When I returned in 2019, it was to suddenly discover a country that no longer so wholesomely believed in the creed. The progressive left, and increasingly more and more of the regular left, now saw the creed as systematically racist and oppressive (still trying to understand why). With the creed steadily delegitimized by the very institutions that once upheld it, there’s an accompanying collapse in meaningful belief in the shared common heritage based on the creed. The left and the mainstream media they control is openly disdainful of it and barely acknowledges it beyond as a force of oppression rather than good. The progressive left is devoted to a different goal that has little to do with traditional liberalism. Many schoolkids are no longer educated in the virtues of liberty and freedom, and many of the woke left now see such concepts with suspicion (which was made readily obvious in the great political wars over the COVID response, and, of course, the current tensions of free speech/disinformation, something that would have been unfathomable 10 years ago because there was simply no questioning free speech).
The conservative half of America is abundantly aware that the left clearly no longer sees the same country they do nor respect the same sacrosanct creed that was once universal. It’s no surprise that the conservative half has utterly lost any confidence or trust in the institutions, media, and even the government itself when the civil service is in the thralls of wokery.
And thus is the situation. The story of America is different from Britain despite some shared common heritage and common universal principles. What America still has, to its advantage, is the immigrant heritage actually may be the factor keeping the creed alive, despite what some of the far-right fears. Some of the strongest champions of the traditional creed are immigrants, it’s what they see in the US versus the places they left. And immigration is a heritage that allows all new immigrants to see themselves part of America’s history and culture from the day they arrive in the country, because they see that experience repeated across the generations by previous waves of immigrants.
The previous paragraph also shows how the immigrant story in Europe faces a different challenge. I do wonder if immigrants come to form a substantial minority in a country where they have no shared history and cannot look at the institutions and history and even the physical fabric with a cultural familiarity, how that affects the long term cohesiveness of that society. But that’s a different post!
Fascinating and foreign!
You couldn't have squeezed in a mention of The Liver Birds? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063924/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
I still cherish the memory of Beryl drying her knickers with a toasting fork in front of the electric fire.
Boss tha’
haha
I feel like I should read more about Canada in the 60s - it seemed to have the most extreme 60s of all. Going from Juno Beach to, well, Trudeau is a huge transformation.
thank you
And this is what it is now! https://twitter.com/Harry__Faulkner/status/1526587294366552067