John Major Is No George Bush

The British are having an election today, but given the way American journalists and pundits covered the campaign, it might as well have been an American election they were talking about. All we heard was how much the British, in their political style, are just like us.

Prime Minister John Major was routinely compared to George Bush on the eve of his repudiation by the American electorate in 1992. The hapless Conservative was portrayed as pallid, decent and maladroit, and no match for his charismatic challenger, Labor’s Tony Blair (in the role of Bill Clinton), who would win with the help of “American” political tools, such as polling and focus groups.

American reporters are by no means alone in emphasizing how closely British (and European) political campaigns now resemble elections in the United States. Nor are these perceptions new on either side of the Atlantic. Ever since the ascension of John F. Kennedy, European intellectuals have complained about the loss of content in their own politics in favor of sound bites, photo-ops and the marketing of personality.

The problem with these perceptions, whether advanced by European or American commentators, is that they reinforce the even more prevalent cliches about the globalization of American culture. Tony Blair becomes the political equivalent of Mickey Mouse; the British election is yet another lamentable example of how the world is enthralled and enslaved by McDonald’s and MTV.

In fact, the “Americanization” of British politics, and of the cultures of the rest of the world, is a myth. A powerful myth, often useful to foreigners seeking explanations for changes in their own societies that they don’t like, but a myth nonetheless.

The differences between the United States and other countries are striking precisely in the realm of politics and governance. People abroad still disagree with Americans about the responsibility of the state to guarantee its citizens economic security. The British, despite their ambivalence about identifying with Europe, still share with their cousins on the Continent a longing for the political, social and economic tranquillity that the welfare state provides. They remain willing, despite the preachings of Margaret Thatcher and her disciples, to pay higher income and sales taxes than Americans would ever put up with. In return for their money, they are still eager (as are the French and the Germans) to preserve what they’ve received from the government: free education and medical care, subsidized nursing homes and child care facilities, generous pensions and unemployment compensation, superb mass transit and national railroad systems.

Thatcher’s protege, Major, was expected to lose not because he was out-dazzled by a telegenic upstart but because the questions facing the voters were uniquely British: How much more can the postwar welfare state be dismantled without endangering not only the safety net for the poor but even the Thatcherite vision of social ascent; and how intimately can Britain become a part of Europe without losing its national identity?

The American-centered interpretation raises an even more serious issue for us. Our tendency to Americanize the news from abroad not only blinds us to what is going on over there; it makes it harder for us to understand what is happening here. Since we believe that the American way of life is vastly preferable to everyone else’s, we measure the progress of other societies by how faithfully they copy our values and behavior. As a result, we become oblivious to our own cultural idiosyncrasies, and we begin to discount the special qualities of our own institutions and political practices.

Yet were we to focus on the distinctiveness of the British election, we would realize that words like “Americanization” or “globalization” tell us remarkably little about what either we or the rest of the world is like at the end of the 20th century. So obsessed have we become with the global reach of the American economy and American culture that we’ve ignored or minimized the visible survival of national cultures and political traditions including our own. Worst of all, the notion that foreigners can be understood, or judged, by how well or how poorly they emulate us makes it impossible to comprehend them, or ourselves.