The United States is changing, perhaps for the better, though not in politics. And they are less and less “European”, argues the American journalist and author – and European part-time guest – George Blecher.
Published on 27 October 2024 at 15:57
During the entire 90 minute debate between US Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I only heard the words “Europe” and “Ukraine” mentioned four times.
Trump repeated his boast about forcing European nations to pay their “fair share” to NATO; Harris repeated the time-worn Democratic Party pledge that America will stand by its allies “as it always should, as a leader upholding international values and norms.”
That was all. Aside from Trump describing Viktor Orbán as a “tough person… smart” and the candidates jousting over who could stand up to Putin, there was no mention of Russia’s threat to Europe, or of global warming – a topic that the EU seems to regard with far more gravitas than the Biden White House, and certainly more than Trump.
The fact is that over the past 50 years – and more recently due to large waves of immigration – the US populace has grown less European, and considerably less interested in Europe.
Demographically, the population has changed radically over the past half-century. While first-generation immigrants to the US accounted for 6% of the population fifty years ago, now they total over 14%.
According to a 2017 study “Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse” and “the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades. By 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority”.
In 2008 the US Census Bureau predicted that by 2043 “white” Americans would no longer predominate. The prediction was so alarming in some quarters that since then, the very definition of “white” has become hopelessly muddled. But experts seem to agree that by mid-21st century, using whatever metrics one chooses, the US will not be a country where non-Hispanic white people will be the majority.
For Americans old enough to remember how much we used to idolize London and Paris and Rome as bastions of culture – yet were cheap enough destinations to allow us to spend months not only in churches and museums but in pubs and cafes – this shift is unexpected and a bit unnerving. To my generation, Europe was the home of our ancestors, cultural history, republican principles and our dreams of a sophistication we could only aspire to. Not any longer.
The shift away from Europe has been as profound culturally and politically as demographically. Hispanic and East Asian cultures dominate (or at least exert an increasing influence on) everything American from cuisine to fashion to music. The study of our own history has shifted from European-inspired institutions to the oppression of non-European minorities. Think of Bill Clinton’s closeness to Tony Blair, Obama’s bromance with Macron, Bernie Sanders’ praise of Denmark as an exemplary Social Democratic state: all belong to a hazier and more Eurocentric past.
Due to immigration and increased awareness of oppressed minorities, a younger generation is largely free of the prejudices that have always been festering behind the patina of American optimism
Trump’s interest in Europe seems to be that of a landlord hounding an errant renter; Harris, who spent virtually her whole political career as far away from Europe as an American can get, took her first diplomatic trip there only three years ago, where she didn’t have much more to offer than polite smiles.
It may be my limited experience, but I sense a loosening of connection between Europe and the US from the other direction as well. Last fall when I taught a short course in contemporary American politics to students at BISLA (Bratislava International School for Liberal Arts), an English-speaking BA program in Slovakia, not one of my students expressed an interest in doing graduate work in the US. Reason No. 1: “We don’t want to get shot.” Reason No. 2: “It’s incredibly expensive.” Reason No. 3: “Even with Brexit, we can attend English-speaking graduate programs in the EU that are completely free.”
Though Europeans haven’t completely lost the habit of studying everything American from stand-up comedy to trade relations with China, it feels like there’s a general souring on the part of many Europeans toward the US, a feeling that its best days are over, and that – most painfully for American Europhiles like me – the US is no longer held up as the ideal of a democratic state.
Ties between the US and Europe remain deep
Where does the US-Europe relationship go from here? Hard to say, partly because in recent years the US has had an erratic “foreign policy” that ranged from Bush’s foolhardy war in Iraq to Obama’s conservatism in Syria to Trump’s disdain for NATO and resignation from the Paris Climate Accords. Because power has become more and more concentrated in the American Executive, this unpredictability is likely to continue.
In spite of all this, ties between the US and Europe remain deep. If the US is a bruised democracy, so are some European nations, and yet a shared democratic ideal persists. Militarily and economically, we’re bound together: however foot-dragging the Biden administration has been in arming Ukraine, the commitment, at least to the present moment, seems firm.
But I think European America-watchers might consider reevaluating a wide-eyed incredulity they seem to cherish, and start looking at how dated their assumptions about the US may be.
How is it possible, some European friends ask me, that your country might actually elect Donald Trump for a second term? How is it possible that US states ban abortions yet allow citizens to carry assault rifles? Bewildering or not, these and many other hard truths are, to quote Mr. Trump’s running-mate, “bleak fact[s] of life”– or at least bleak facts of life in America in 2024. The sooner one accepts them as “facts,” not just nightmarish fantasies, the sooner one can start figuring out how they came about and how to deal with them.
I don’t think all the recent changes in the US are negative. For one thing, the “melting-pot” image of the US has never been accurate. More likely, since its beginnings the nation has been a conglomeration of religious, ethnic and racial groups that barely tolerated one another. This seems to be changing.
Due to immigration and increased awareness of oppressed minorities, a younger generation is largely free of the prejudices that have always been festering behind the patina of American optimism. All polls suggest that young Americans are far more accepting of racial and sexual/gender variety than their elders. In one or two generations, Americans may not only look different but think quite differently, at least in terms of social interaction: capitalism in the US may not be waning, but tribalism is, and in that way if no other, the US might have something positive to offer the future.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: global warming. However fragmented the planet feels at the moment – and however much the internet has created as much insularity as universality – that one issue is above and beyond national borders. It may well become the great unifier of the future, erasing greed, wars, political differences in the face of planetary extinction. Or it may not, and then JD Vance’s bitter cynicism – his acceptance of the “bleak facts of life” – will really have won the day.
This article is published within the Come Together collaborative project.
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