The End of The Anglo-American Order

11/30/2016
The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times
http://nyti.ms/2gDAv47
The End of the Anglo-American Order

For decades, the United States and Britains vision of democracy and
freedom defined the postwar world. What will happen in an age of
Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?
By IAN BURUMA NOV. 29, 2016
One of the strangest episodes in Donald Trumps very weird campaign was the
appearance of an Englishman looking rather pleased with himself at a rally on
Aug. 24 in Jackson, Miss. The Englishman was Nigel Farage, introduced by
Trump as the Man Behind Brexit. Most people in the crowd probably didnt
have a clue who Farage the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party
actually was. Yet there he stood, grinning and hollering about our
independence day and the real people, the decent people, the ordinary
people who took on the banks, the liberal media and the political establishment.
Trump pulled his face into a crocodile smile, clapped his hands and promised,
Brexit plus plus plus!
Brexit itself the decision to withdraw Britain from the European Union,
notwithstanding the almost universal opposition from British banking, business,
political and intellectual elites was not the main point here. In his rasping
delivery, Trump roared about Farages great victory, despite horrible namecalling, despite all obstacles. Quite what name-calling he had in mind was fuzzy,
but the message was clear. His own victory would be like that of the Brexiteers,
only more so. He even called himself Mr. Brexit.
Many friends and experts I spoke to in Britain resisted the comparison
between Trumpism and Brexit. In London, the distinguished conservative
historian Noel Malcolm told me that his heart sank when I compared the two.
Brexit, he said, was all about sovereignty. British democracy, in his view, would
be undermined if the British had to abide by laws passed by foreigners they didnt
vote for. (He was referring to the European Union.) The Brexit vote, he
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maintained, had little to do with globalization or immigration or working-class

people feeling left behind by the elites. It was primarily a matter of democratic
principle.
Malcolm seemed to think that Brexit voters, including former industrial
workers in Britains rust-belt cities, were moved by the same high-minded
principles that had made him a convinced Brexiteer. I had my doubts.
Resentment about Polish, Romanian and other European Union citizens coming
to Britain to work harder for less money played an important part. As did the
desire to poke the eye of an unpopular elite, held responsible for the economic
stagnation in busted industrial cities. And the simple dislike of foreigners in
Britain should never be underestimated.
In the United States, too, I found resistance to the idea that Brexit was a
harbinger of a Trump victory. I was assured over and over by liberal friends that
Trump would never be president. American voters were too sensible to fall for his
hateful demagogy. Trump, I was told, was a product of peculiarly American
strains of populism that flare up periodically, like the anti-immigrant nativism in
the 1920s or Huey P. Long in 1930s Louisiana, but would never reach as far as the
White House. Traditional American populism of this kind, directed at the rich,
bankers, immigrants or big business, could, in any case, not be usefully compared
with English hostility to the European Union, because there was no supranational
political union the United States belonged to.
And yet Trump and Farage quickly recognized what they shared. In Scotland,
where Trump happened to be reopening a golf resort the day after the Brexit vote,
he pointed out the parallels. Brexit, Trump said to the Scots who voted
overwhelmingly against it, was a great thing: The British had taken back their
country. Phrases like sovereignty, control and greatness fired up the
crowds in both Trumps and Farages campaigns. You might think they meant
something different by those words. Farage and his allies, many of them English
nationalists, wanted to wrest national sovereignty from the European Union. But
from whom or what does Trump want to take his country back? Trump has
gestured at the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization
as noxious elements run by international elites to the detriment of the American
working man. But I cant imagine that these institutions fill most of his followers
with rage.
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In fact, most international institutions, including the I.M.F. and NATO, were
set up under American auspices, to promote the interests of the United States and
its allies. European unification, and the resulting European Union, too, have not
only been approved of but also vociferously encouraged by American presidents
before Trump. But his America First sentiments for that is what they are at this
point, more than a policy are hostile to these organizations. And so, by and
large, are the likes of Nigel Farage.
So Farage and Trump were speaking about the same thing. But they have
more in common than distaste for international or supranational institutions.
When Farage, in his speech in Jackson, fulminated against the banks, the liberal
media and the political establishment, he was not talking about foreign bodies
but about the aliens in our midst, as it were, our own elites who are, by
implication, not real, ordinary or decent. And not only Farage. The British
prime minister, Theresa May, not a Brexiteer before the referendum, called
members of international-minded elites citizens of nowhere. When three High
Court judges in Britain ruled that Parliament, and not just the prime ministers
cabinet, should decide when to trigger the legal mechanism for Brexit, they were
denounced in a major British tabloid newspaper as enemies of the people.
Trump deliberately tapped into the same animus against citizens who are not
real people. He made offensive remarks about Muslims, immigrants, refugees
and Mexicans. But the deepest hostility was directed against those elitist traitors
within America who supposedly coddle minorities and despise the real people.
The last ad of the Trump campaign attacked what Joseph Stalin used to call
rootless cosmopolitans in a particularly insidious manner. Incendiary
references to a global power structure that was robbing honest working people
of their wealth were illustrated by pictures of George Soros, Janet Yellen and
Lloyd Blankfein. Perhaps not every Trump supporter realized that all three are
Jewish. But those who did cannot have missed the implications.
When Trump and Farage stood on that stage together in Mississippi, they
spoke as though they were patriots reclaiming their great countries from foreign
interests. No doubt they regard Britain and the United States as exceptional
nations. But their success is dismaying precisely because it goes against a
particular idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism. Not the traditional self-image
of certain American and British jingoists who like to think of the United States as
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the City on the Hill or Britain as the sceptered isle splendidly aloof from the
wicked Continent, but another kind of Anglo-American exception: the one shaped
by World War II. The defeat of Germany and Japan resulted in a grand alliance,
led by the United States, in the West and Asia. Pax Americana, along with a
unified Europe, would keep the democratic world safe. If Trump and Farage get
their way, much of that dream will be in tatters.
Intheyears when most of Europe was overrun by the Nazis or fascist
dictatorships, the Anglo-American allies were the last hope of freedom,
democracy and internationalism. I grew up in the world they shaped. My native
country, the Netherlands, was freed in 1945, six years before I was born, by
British and North American troops (with the help of some very brave Poles).
Those of us with no direct memories of this had still seen movies like The
Longest Day, about the Normandy landings. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and
Kenneth More and his bulldog were our liberating heroes.
This was, of course, a childish conceit. For one thing, it left out the Soviet
Red Army, which liberated my father, who was forced to work in a factory in
Berlin along with other young men who, under German occupation, refused to
sign a loyalty oath to the Nazis. But the victorious Anglo-Saxon nations, especially
the United States, largely shaped the postwar Western world we lived in. The
words of the Atlantic Charter, drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941,
resonated deeply throughout a war-torn Europe: Trade barriers would be
lowered, peoples would be free, social welfare would advance and global
cooperation would ensue. Churchill called the charter not a law, but a star.
Pax Americana, in which Britain played the role of special junior partner,
whose specialness was perhaps more keenly felt in London than in Washington,
was based on a liberal consensus. Not only NATO, set up to protect Western
democracies, chiefly against the Soviet threat, but also the ideal of European
unification were born from the ashes of 1945. Many Europeans, liberals as well as
conservatives, believed that only a united Europe would stop them from tearing
their continent apart again. Even Winston Churchill, whose heart was more
invested in Commonwealth and Empire, was in favor of it.
The Cold War made the exceptional role of the victorious allies even more
vital. The West, its freedoms protected by the United States, needed a plausible
counternarrative to Soviet ideology. This included a promise of greater social and
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economic equality. Of course, neither the United States, with its long history of
racial prejudice and occasional fits of political hysteria, like McCarthyism, nor
Britain, with its tenacious class system, ever quite lived up to the shining ideals
they presented to the postwar world. Nonetheless, the image of exceptional
Anglo-American liberty held up, not only in countries that had been occupied
during the war but in the defeated nations, Germany (at least in the western half)
and Japan, as well.
Americas prestige was greatly bolstered not just by the soldiers who helped
liberate Europe but also by the men and women back home who fought to make
their society more equal and their democracy more inclusive. By struggling
against the injustices in their own country, figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. or the Freedom Riders or indeed President Obama kept the hope of
American exceptionalism alive. As did the youth culture of the 1960s. When
Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright and later president, hailed Frank
Zappa, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones as his political heroes, he was not being
frivolous. Under communist oppression, the pop music of America and Britain
represented freedom. Europeans born not long after World War II often
professed to hate the United States, or at least its politics and wars, but the
expressions of their hostility were almost entirely borrowed from America itself.
Bob Dylan received this years Nobel Prize for literature, not least because the
Swedish jury of baby boomers grew up with his words of protest.
The ideal of exceptional Anglo-Saxon liberties obviously goes back much
further than the aftermath of Hitlers defeat, let alone Bob Dylan and the Stones.
Alexis de Tocquevilles admiring account of American democracy in the 1830s is
well known. Much less famous are his writings on Britain in the same period.
Born soon after the French Revolution, Tocqueville was haunted by the question
of why Britain, with its mighty aristocracy, was spared such an upheaval. Why did
the British people not rebel? His answer was that the social system in Britain was
just open enough to allow a person to hope that with hard work, ingenuity and
luck, he could rise in society. The British version of the American dream: The
Great Gatsby may be the great American novel, but Gatsby could have existed in
Britain too.
In practice, there were probably not all that many rags-to-riches stories in
19th-century Britain. But the fact that Benjamin Disraeli, the son of Sephardic
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Jews, could become prime minister, and an earl, no less, provided the basis for
many generations in Europe to believe in Britain as an exceptional country. Jews
from Russia or Lithuania, or from Germany, like my own great-grandparents,
flocked to Britain as immigrants in the hope that they, too, could become English
gentlemen.
Anglophilia, like the American dream, may have been based on myths, but
myths can be potent and long-lasting. The notion that sufficient effort and talent
can beat the odds has been especially important in Britain and the United States.
Anglo-American capitalism can be harsh in many ways, but because free markets
are receptive to new talent and cheap labor, they have spawned the kind of
societies, pragmatic and relatively open, where immigrants can thrive, the very
kind that rulers of more closed, communitarian, autocratic societies tend to
despise.
Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany until 1918, when his country was defeated in
the First World War, which he had done his best to unleash, was such a figure.
Half English himself, he called England a nation of shopkeepers and described it
as Juda-England, a country corrupted by sinister alien elites, where money
counted more than the virtues of blood and soil. In later decades, this kind of
anti-Semitic rhetoric was more often aimed at the United States. The Nazis were
convinced that Jewish capitalists ruled America, not just in Hollywood but in
Washington and, naturally, New York. This notion is still commonly held, though
less in Europe than in the Middle East and some parts of Asia. But talk about
citizens of nowhere, sinister cosmopolitan elites and conspiratorial bankers fits
precisely in the same tradition. A terrifying irony of contemporary AngloAmerican populism is the common use of phrases that were traditionally used by
enemies of the English-speaking countries.
Yet even those who dont go along with the kaisers loathsome words
recognize that liberal economics, as practiced since the middle of the 19th century
in Britain and the United States, has a darker side. It does not allow for much
redistribution of wealth or protection of the most vulnerable citizens. There have
been exceptions: Roosevelts New Deal, for instance, or Britains postwar Labor
government under Clement Attlee, which created free national health care, built
better public housing, improved education and guaranteed other blessings of the
welfare state. British working-class men who risked their lives for their country
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during the war expected no less. On the whole, however, Britain and the United
States have, compared with many Western countries, generally set greater store
on individual economic freedom than on the ideal of egalitarianism. And nothing
creates such swift and radical social change as unfettered free enterprise.
The Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s deregulating financial
services, closing down coal mines and manufacturing plants and hacking away at
the benefits of the New Deal and the British welfare state was regarded by
many conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a triumph for AngloAmerican exceptionalism, a great coup for freedom. Europeans outside Britain
were more skeptical. They tended to see Thatcherism and Reaganomics as
ruthless forms of economic liberalism, making some people vastly richer but
leaving many more out in the cold. Nonetheless, in order to compete, many
governments began to emulate the same economic system.
That this happened at the end of the Cold War was no coincidence. The
collapse of Soviet communism was celebrated, rightly, as the final liberation of
Europe. Countries, left behind on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain after World
War II, were free at last. The first President Bush spoke about the new world
order, led by the only superpower left standing. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution
appeared to have triumphed.
But the end of communism in the West also had other, less desirable
consequences. The horrors of the Soviet empire tainted other forms of leftism,
including social democratic ideals, which in fact had been anti-communist. Even
as the end of history was declared and the Anglo-American liberal democratic
model was expected to be unrivaled forever, many began to believe that all forms
of collectivist idealism led straight to the gulag. Thatcher once declared that there
was no such thing as society, just individuals and families. People had to be
forced to take care of themselves.
Radical economic liberalism did more to destroy traditional communities
than any social-democratic governments ever did. Thatchers most implacable
enemies were the miners and industrial workers. The neoliberal rhetoric was all
about prosperity trickling down from above. But it never quite worked out that
way. Those workers and their children, now languishing in impoverished rustbelt cities, received another blow in the banking crisis of 2008. Major postwar
institutions, like the I.M.F., which the United States set up in 1945 to secure a
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more stable world, no longer functioned properly. The I.M.F. did not even see the
crisis coming. Large numbers of people, who never recovered from the crash,
decided to rebel and voted for Brexit and for Trump.
NeitherBrexitnor Trump are likely to bring great benefits to these voters.
But at least for a while, they can dream of taking their countries back to an
imaginary, purer, more wholesome past. This reaction is not only sweeping across
the United States and Britain. The same thing is happening in other countries,
including some with long liberal democratic traditions, like the Netherlands.
Twenty years ago, Amsterdam was seen as the capital of everything wild and
progressive, the kind of place were cops openly smoke pot (another myth, but a
telling one). The Dutch thought of themselves as the world champions of racial
and religious tolerance. Of all European countries, the Netherlands was the most
firmly embedded in the Anglosphere. Now the most popular political party,
according to the latest polls, is led practically as a one-man operation by Geert
Wilders, an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union firebrand who
hailed Trumps victory as the coming of a patriotic spring.
In France, Marine Le Pen, who shares Wilderss enthusiasm for Trump,
might be the next president. Poland and Hungary are already ruled by populist
autocrats who reject the kind of liberalism that Eastern European dissidents once
struggled so hard to achieve. Norbert Hofer, a man of the far right, could become
the next president of Austria.
Does this mean that Britain and the United States are no longer exceptional?
Perhaps. But I think it is also true to say that the very idea of Anglo-American
exceptionalism has made populism in those countries more potent. The selfflattering notion that the Western victors in World War II are special, braver and
freer than any other people, that the United States is the greatest nation in the
history of man, that Great Britain the country that stood alone against Hitler
is superior to any European let alone non-European country has not only led to
some ill-conceived wars but also helped to paper over the inequalities built into
Anglo-American capitalism. The notion of natural superiority, of the sheer luck of
being born an American or a Briton, gave a sense of entitlement to people who, in
terms of education or prosperity, were stuck in the lower ranks of society.
This worked quite well until the last decades of the last century. Not only
were the fortunes of working- or lower-middle-class people in Britain beginning
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to dwindle compared with those of the rich, who were steadily getting richer, but
it gradually became clear even to the most insular Britons that they were doing
much worse than the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Dutch, worse even
than the French, Britains oldest rivals. One way of venting their rage was to fight
in soccer stadiums, taunting German fans by mimicking British bombers and
bellowing slogans about winning the war.
The so-called football hooligans remained an embarrassing minority, but
there were other ways to express the same feelings. The European Union, for
which most British people had never felt a great love, actually made many parts of
Britain more prosperous. The blight of the old industrial cities and mining towns
was not a result of European Union policies. But it was easy for Euro-skeptics to
deflect popular attention from domestic problems by blaming foreigners who
were supposedly running the show in Brussels. Europhobes liked to claim that
this was not why we fought the war. The specter of not just Hitler but also
Napoleon was sometimes evoked. Spitfires and talk of Britains finest hour made
a rhetorical comeback in the UKIP campaign to leave Europe. Some pro-Brexit
politicians even praised the greatness of the British Empire. Taking back
control by leaving the European Union is not going to make most people in
Britain more prosperous. The contrary is more likely to be true. But it takes the
sting out of relative failure. It feeds the desire to feel exceptional, entitled, in
short, to be great again.
Something similar has happened in the United States. Not only were even the
least privileged Americans told that they lived in Gods own country, but white
Americans, however impoverished and undereducated, had the comforting sense
that there was always a group beneath them, who did not share their entitlement,
or claim to greatness, a class of people with a darker skin. With a Harvardeducated black president, this fiction became increasingly difficult to sustain.
Trump and the leaders of Brexit had a fine instinct for these popular feelings.
In a way, Trump is a Gatsby gone sour. He played on the wounded pride of large
communities and inflamed the passions of people who fear the changes that make
them feel abandoned. In the United States, this brought out old strains of
nativism. In Britain, English nationalism is the main force behind Brexit. But in
both cases, taking back our country means a retreat from the world that the
Anglo-Americans envisaged after 1945. English nationalists have opted for a
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modern version of Splendid Isolation (paradoxically, a term coined to describe

British foreign policy under Benjamin Disraeli). Trump wants to put America
First.
BrexitBritainand Trumps America are linked in their desire to pull down
the pillars of Pax Americana and European unification. In a perverse way, this
may herald a revival of a special relationship between Britain and the United
States, a case of history repeating itself not exactly as farce but as tragi-farce.
Trump told Theresa May that he would like to have the same relationship with
her that Ronald Reagan had with Margaret Thatcher. But the first British
politician to arrive at Trump Tower to congratulate the president-elect was not
the prime minister or even the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, but Nigel Farage.
Trump and Farage, beaming like schoolboys in front of Trumps gilded
elevator, gloated over their victories by repeating the same word that once made
their respective countries exceptional: freedom. In the privacy of Trumps
home, Farage suggested that the new president should move Winston Churchills
bust back into the Oval Office. Trump thought this a splendid idea.
A month before Trumps election and three months after the Brexit vote, I
visited the great military historian Sir Michael Howard at his home in rural
England. As a young man, Howard fought the Germans as an officer in the British
Army. He landed in Italy in 1943 and took part in the decisive battle of Salerno,
for which he was awarded the Military Cross. John Wayne and Kenneth More
were a fantasy. Sir Michael was the real thing. He is 95 years old.
After lunch at a local pub, just a few miles from where my grandparents used
to live, we talked about Brexit, the war, American politics, Europe and our
families. The setting could not have been more English, with the pale autumn sun
setting over the rolling hills of Berkshire. Like my great-grandparents, Sir
Michaels maternal grandparents were German Jews who moved to England,
where they did very well. Like mine, his family of immigrants became utterly
British. In addition to being Regius professor of history at Oxford University,
Howard taught at Yale. He knows America well and has no illusions about the
special relationship, which he believes was invented by Churchill and was
always much overblown.
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Sitting in his drawing room, with books piled up around us, many of them
about World War II, I wanted to hear his thoughts on Brexit. He replied in a tone
of resigned melancholy more than outrage. Brexit, he said, is accelerating the
disintegration of the Western world. Contemplating that world, so carefully
constructed after the war he fought in, he said: Perhaps it was just a bubble in an
ocean. I asked him about the special Anglo-American relationship. Ah, the
special relationship, he said. It was a necessary myth, a bit like Christianity.
But now where do we go?
Where indeed? The last hope of the West might be Germany, the country
that Michael Howard fought against and that I hated as a child. Angela Merkels
message to Trump on the day after his victory was a perfect expression of
Western values that are still worth defending. She would welcome a close
cooperation with the United States, she said, but only on the basis of democracy,
freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin,
skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. Merkel spoke as
the true heiress of the Atlantic Charter.
Germany, too, once thought it was the exceptional nation. This ended in a
worldwide catastrophe. The Germans learned their lesson. They no longer wanted
to be exceptional in any way, which is why they were so keen to be embedded in a
unified Europe. The last thing Germans wanted was to lead other countries,
especially in any military sense. This is the way Germanys neighbors wished it as
well. Pax Americana seemed vastly preferable to a revival of German
exceptionalism. I still think so. But looking once more at that photograph of the
Donald and Farage, baring their teeth in glee, thumbs held high, with the gold
from the elevator door glinting in their hair, I wonder whether Germany might
not be compelled to question a lesson it learned a little too well.
Ian Buruma is a professor at Bard College. His most recent book, Their Promised
Land, will come out in paperback in January.
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11/30/2016

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

maintained, had little to do with globalization or immigration or working-class

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

modern version of Splendid Isolation (paradoxically, a term coined to describe

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

The End of the Anglo-American Order - The New York Times

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