That a competent generation of English footballers was “golden”. That a CD album by Linkin Park or Green Day should retail for upwards of $20. That, with sage government, the vicissitudes of the business cycle were as eradicable as rubella.
There was so much hubris around in the early years of the millennium that it feels boorish to single out one instance of it for retroactive scrutiny. It is just that, while the others went up in the subsequent bonfire of vanities, this one got singed at the edges before tumbling out more or less whole. It lives on in such books as The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray. It is there in the Anglo-American right’s view of Emmanuel Macron, that scourge of free trade, radical Islam and the cultural left, as some kind of effete globalist.
I am talking about the idea that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”. The writer Robert Kagan was referring to their respective propensities to use armed force abroad. To that extent, as the Iraq war showed, he was broadly right. But his framing device took on broader meaning. Europe was: unmoored; wishy-washy; lost in a post-Christian haze of relativism and self-doubt. The US was: proudly western; stouter in defence of its values; modern, not postmodern. Something called “moral clarity” was often ascribed to the New but not the Old world. It is hard to explain to those under 30 how ingrained these perceptions were.
It is hard because they have lived through the total inversion of them. Where would you expect to find a freer spirit of rational inquiry now, a German campus or an American one? Where would you back Enlightenment individualism to hold out against the march of group rights, France or the US? Which country is likelier to tell its radicalised young that, actually, no, we’re not going to overturn our whole understanding of national history, but thanks: Italy or the US? If you have frequent occasion to cross the Atlantic, on which side do you more often find yourself walking on eggshells? In short, which place is committed to the point of chauvinism to its culture, and which is more prone to a certain cringe?
Push this argument too far and it will age as badly as the one from 20 years ago that it is designed to expose. Europe is not immune to le wokisme (there are some who would stop the French language’s use of that gendered definite article, for instance). Some of the source philosophy is French. The US might just be 10 or so years further along the bumpy road to a common woke destiny.
But even that would have confounded the public intellectuals circa 2003. For them, Europe was at the vanguard of decadence and nihilism. America was, if not the keeper of the western flame, then far slower to lose faith in it. Why did they get it so wrong?
The largest error was to define the cultural threat as Muslim immigration and not domestic rot. It was never spiteful to wonder how arrivals from the Maghreb or the Middle East might tilt the balance of, say, German or Swedish life. Harder to foresee was that seventh-generation Americans, passing through universities that handily pre-date the republic, would overturn classical liberal norms in US newsrooms, publishing houses, corporate C-suites and other weather-making workplaces. “You do it to yourself,” sang Radiohead, “and that’s what really hurts.”
How rudely the US and Europe have defied their turn-of-the-millennium stereotypes. If there is a lesson here, it is for the one country that might plausibly choose which of the two to orientate itself towards. Brexit, which increasingly demands to be set to the Benny Hill theme, always appealed to the kind of person who frets about the cultural left. It is a respectable thing to worry about. The mystery is how on earth it squares with devout Atlanticism. If wokery is such a menace, then turning away from an often unreconstructed Europe seems perverse. Embracing a US where so much of the western inheritance is “problematised” is even weirder. The economic case for buyer’s remorse over Brexit is sufficiently well-documented. The cultural one might turn out to be yet more haunting.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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