The bright side of a transatlantic rift

{"text":[[{"start":7.66,"text":"In the US, in common speech, the word “Asian” has tended to mean East or Southeast Asian. "},{"start":13.314,"text":"In the UK, the same word more often refers to the Indian subcontinent. "},{"start":17.682000000000002,"text":"Look, I don’t decide these things. "},{"start":19.974,"text":"It has to do with historic patterns of migration: who went where. "},{"start":23.692,"text":"It is also liable to change. "},{"start":25.622,"text":"But it shows that America’s exposure to the world’s largest continent is nothing like Britain’s. "}],[{"start":30.85,"text":"That is the least of the differences. "},{"start":33.042,"text":"The forebears of a Black Briton probably arrived in the country after 1945, willingly. "},{"start":38.472,"text":"Those of a Black American might have come centuries ago, forcibly. "},{"start":42.439,"text":"In America, the settlers’ treatment of people who were already there is recent enough to be a raw topic. "},{"start":47.769000000000005,"text":"As harsh as the Emperor Claudius no doubt was, the displacement of “native” Britons has lost some of its salience over the intervening millennia. "}],[{"start":55.84,"text":"“Woke”, if that means a focus on group identities, has turned out to be a bad fit in the US. "},{"start":61.357000000000006,"text":"But at least it was dreamt up with the US in mind. "},{"start":64.087,"text":"What possessed people in Britain to think it made sense in their different (which isn’t to say better) context? "},{"start":69.642,"text":"Or in Europe’s? "},{"start":70.834,"text":"I’d toast the apparent demise of this dogma but even the crusade against it in Britain has a US flavour — faintly religious, very online — which will unnerve the public in no time. "}],[{"start":81.38,"text":"There is but one consolation in what Donald Trump has done of late. "},{"start":85.172,"text":"Strategically, the transatlantic rift is a disaster. "},{"start":88.539,"text":"Culturally, it might not be the worst thing if America and Europe have a bit less to do with each other. "},{"start":93.68199999999999,"text":"Their educated elites in particular should start seeing other people. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

Looking back, the relationship was at its healthiest in the cold war, when the political enmeshment was almost airtight but there was much less pretence of sameness

"}],[{"start":98.14,"text":"The undue obsession isn’t all one way. "},{"start":100.882,"text":"How did JD Vance become so exercised about free speech in Britain that he raised it in a televised Oval Office setting? "},{"start":107.237,"text":"If we fall short of First Amendment standards, that is because we don’t have a First Amendment, because we are a different country. "},{"start":113.429,"text":"As with Elon Musk’s dabblings in Germany, the conceit here — born of the internet, I think — is that the north Atlantic is a common cultural space. "}],[{"start":122.48,"text":"Still, the fault lies mostly with Europe. "},{"start":125.584,"text":"The US is not “culturally imperialist”. "},{"start":128.189,"text":"It has CNN but no public mission to shape world news, at least not one to match the BBC, France 24, Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera. "},{"start":136.669,"text":"It has no Melville Institute to go against those named after Goethe and Cervantes. "},{"start":140.924,"text":"Its grip on film, academia and postwar painting was never a conscious, top-down project, even if the CIA was more of a cultural actor in the cold war than was known at the time. "}],[{"start":151.79,"text":"No, it is a European choice to live vicariously through America. "},{"start":156.16899999999998,"text":"Not just a British one, unless I am misremembering those George Floyd protests in France.) I myself am always setting the continent’s feeble economic growth rate against America’s, as though it were the natural comparator. "},{"start":167.237,"text":"Given their respective ages and histories, is it? "},{"start":170.10399999999998,"text":"Even if Europe is the Norma Desmond of continents, drunk on the past, how could it not be? "}],[{"start":176.16,"text":"Looking back, the relationship was at its healthiest in the cold war, when the political enmeshment was almost airtight but there was much less pretence of cultural sameness. "},{"start":185.014,"text":"A staple of 20th-century Toryism was mild distaste for the US, which often informed a corresponding fancy for the European project. "},{"start":192.694,"text":"Jeremy Clarkson, a subtler conservative than his schtick implies, is an echo of that world.) This sentiment crossed over at times into witless anti-Americanism. "},{"start":201.462,"text":"But it helped to inoculate the continent against laughably out-of-context ideas and practices. "},{"start":206.429,"text":"As a child in the height of the Atlantic bond, I never heard “upspeak”, that tic by which grown men and women in modern Britain adopt the vocal cadence of 13-year-olds in Pasadena. "},{"start":215.634,"text":"What we have lived through is the inverse of the cold war: political estrangement alongside deepening cultural mimicry. "}],[{"start":222.51,"text":"Perhaps the Trump shock will bring a cooling off on all fronts. "},{"start":225.914,"text":"Last weekend, in a startling speech as Canada’s Liberal leader, Mark Carney cast the US as Other, in its approach to language and the absorption of immigrants and other cultural fundamentals. "},{"start":235.757,"text":"Whether to regret his belligerence, or wish our prime minister would say the same, it is hard in these times to know. "}],[{"start":241.68,"text":""}]],"url":"https://d33mkcasurz97s.cloudfront.net/album/197259-1742103289.mp3"}