Why Do We Brits Care About the US Election?
[warning: written without an editor, excuse any typos]
At time of writing, the votes have been cast and the American people have spoken, but we don’t know what all of them have said yet.
Rarely do foreign elections capture the imagination the way the USA democratic circus does. Eternal campaigning, unlimited spending on advertising, wall to wall coverage with a myriad of bipolar strorylines and of course larger than life characters.
This cycle, the eternal burning dumpster fire that is Donald Trump is seeking re-election following a tumultuous and universally exhausting first term. At this point I am sure you haven’t been living under a rock and have been aware of the revolving door or maddening behaviour.
My question is why, in countries like the UK and others, do we care so much about the outcome of this election?
Outside of the technical reasons resigned to the white papers of foreign policy, diplomacy and trade, I had some alternative ideas as to why it’s all so compelling. None of them, I believe, involve Nigel Farage dragging Britain’s reputation further through the mud by making himself the defacto face of Brexit for Trump’s campaign
The False Equivalency.
It’s no secret the current British government, lead by Boris Johnson (Dom Cummings depending who you ask) have massively dropped the ball on their CoVid-19 response.
However, compared to the American response under Trump, we come off incredibly favourable.
The problem being, because America is one of the countries we see as most comparable to ourselves in terms of economic and artistic regality, shared language and transatlantic kinship, we find ourselves comparing our response favourably to the American debacle — which is obviously insane and far from comforting for all those adversely affected in the UK.
This is not unique to the pandemic, the standards we hold to policing, food standards, predatory debt, healthcare and so on, is always judged against the Americans.
Underfunded NHS; “be thankful it won’t bankrupt you”.
Institutional racism in the Police; “Well at least we’re not shooting people”.
Boris Johnson being a general deplorable; “but have you heard what Trump said about Mexicans?”
These are just three examples of where we could be lowering our own standards because an otherwise poor performance looks favourable to a disaster. The desire to strive for standards befitting a sovereign economic power like the UK shouldn’t be dampened because America is a larger shinier turd right now.
The Imitation Game
The age old cliché “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold”. The saying rings true for many exports other than economic crises. The arts, media, industry, activism and politics are influenced by our more flashy comrades.
Within politics, we’ve seen how the modus American has influenced campaigns, with more rallies being held, how their shifts in ideology has gained traction with similar demographics: millennial and GenZ coffee shop socialists and social justice warriors worshipping the cult of personalities in Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, or more whiter demographics leaning further right and nationalistic while being lead by blonde populists spouting mistruths and jingoism for fun.
What we need to see is that a country like America can reject a regressive ideology, criminal activities and blatant chumocracy for a more centrist approach, then we could very well follow suit. A small part of the country are still in denial about the absent virtues of a Jeremy Corbin leadership, while others who held their nose when voting Tory this cycle have been put off by their string of failures and uninspiring “Brexit loyalty is my qualification” cabinet. A Joe Biden victory would be an affirmation back towards this kind of moderate/ centrist resurgence.
We have also seen, thanks to Dom from Barnard Castle, that chaos is acceptable for a government as the news cycles move to keep up so nothing sticks. The same way America uses false patriotism to allude to any sort of criticism, we have seen a rise of that through this Tory government as well as approach to rules and laws being only suggestions, unless you’re not one of the ruling class. What passes for acceptable there, they will chance here.
Our media has also shifted to accommodate more American style programming. I am not including the newspaper/tabloid media in the UK in this, as they have always been, and continue to be skewed to whatever group think they wish to push on to their readership.
While strict impartiality laws prohibit our 24hour news networks from telling us how we should interpret the news like in America, there has been a rise of content that copied the model of news related outrage and virtue signalling. Shows like The Debate on Sky News give way to ‘should have kept that thought to themself’ leaders like Nick Ferarri and Carole Malone, validating some truly absurd hot takes on a news network platform, while Piers Morgan is leading the morning charge with Good Morning Britain which has become effectively the Daily Mail of TV, by straddling the fine line of being an entertainment show that talks about the news rather than being the news. Both of these are examples of where recreational anger and vapid populism comes to prance around and polarise a rapidly polarising populous.
While we aren’t quite yet at the stage of having opinion hosts of the level of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity of insane, it’s not unreasonable to think there’s a loophole somewhere that could let that happen.
Additionally the rise of rogue ‘News’ outlets like the Daily Caller, OAN and many more have led to the spawning of similar garage band type outlets such as Novara Media and Guido Fawkes/OrderOrder. The thought of seeing ‘journalists’ like Tom Harwood or Ash Sarkar influencing the interpretation of the news to a captive audience without regulation is a great source of nausea.
Similarly, a rejection or commercial failure of these American counterparts will slowly put the breaks on the viability of such a hegemony. I wouldn’t hold out as Andrew Neil is looking to launch his own news network, with some conservative leaning finance, under the guise of journalism; promises to serve the “vast number of British people who feel underserved and unheard” by existing television news channels, explicitly pitching itself into the middle of the culture war. So not the news as it is, but rather a version of the news as you’d rather hear it.
That Fair is Fair
In my opinion, I think we follow this election so closely, because we need to know the world makes sense. We need to know that left does not mean right and what is in front of our eyes is being seen by everyone else. Trump is kind of an arse, and he’s done a lot of terrible things. He also has escaped any sort of recompense and is seemingly above any law, as are his cronies. We need to see that this behaviour is not ok and that people are held to account for their behaviour, otherwise the social contract we all abide to falls to pieces and the already tenuous idea of meritocracy and social mobility becomes an ironic abstract of nihilism.
Call it karma, call it belief in the system, we just need to see that you can’t keep failing upwards, enriching your mates and you can’t keep distorting reality without some sort of reality check. Because maybe, just maybe, we hope fair will be fair here at home.
