2 weeks Ago By Aimee Meade
When I first moved from the Midwest to the UK 12 years ago, having visited once and not knowing anyone in the country, I was surprised that almost every Brit I met would immediately voice to me their strong views about Americans and their politics . That view was almost always the same: Americans were morons who elected morons who enacted moronic, self-harming policies. This belief was something I more or less played along with at first, adopting a pick-me attitude which suggested, having left and moved somewhere I then believed to be more progressive, I was somehow exonerated from this reputation.
It felt like an echo of why I had decided to leave in the first place. Quickly though, this schtick from Brits grew tiresome as the foundations of their beliefs were revealed to be total conjecture – not rooted in any real engagement with the United States, but entirely gleaned from surface brushes with American culture. Few knew many (or any) Americans personally – fewer had been to the United States beyond a coastal city break or a trip to Disney World.
It emerged that their political arguments were based on, at best, episodes of The West Wing and were otherwise derived from skim-reading Wikipedia pages and, above all else, mindlessly parroting this view of Americans from other Brits around them. At no point is this phenomenon starker than during a US general election . Every four years, Americans in the UK are treated to misinformed Brits speaking with false authority about a place they don’t understand and have not meaningfully engaged with – one that, despite their vehement criticisms and implicit superiority over, they are completely obsessed by.
We get to hear from the UK public that Americans are 300 million idiots, electorally shooting themselves in the foot on things like healthcare, abortion and guns all the while Britain crumbles around them (something which is of course blamed on others and, unlike Americans, should garner Brits unending sympathy). Some Americans are treated to something greater: Brits who believe they are experts on swing states and electoral strategy , even telling me, an Ohioan, why my vote does or doesn’t matter. Brits’ moral superiority mixed with their ultimately fan-ish treatment of American politics blends a unique cocktail of almost always getting things wrong.
On the whole – with exceptions so slim it’s barely worth mentioning – Brits misunderstand the American electoral system and even how American society works. American political leanings are argued as falling cleanly along racial and geographic lines – a specious claim which has rarely been true. This delusional confidence about American electoral politics is only exacerbated by a UK commentariat who, on the whole, suffer from the same problem.
I’ve seen broadcasters and columnists explain what’s happening in often dated terms, getting ever-shifting swing states wrong or professing “the mood in America” having vox-popped three or four people at a political convention. Read Next Suffering from US election dread? Try my coping strategy Their self-appointed and self-perpetuated expertise constantly has them missing out on what many Americans actually believe and campaign for – and where power is centralised in the US. The United States is a complex social and cultural construct – far more complicated and diverse than the UK.
Most Americans are well aware of the political structures that hold them back, such as the nonsensical continuation of the electoral college or the lopsided concentration of congressional power, and have pushed against them for decades. If it was as easy as Brits purport to get rid of the presidential system, undo processes of constitutional change or even to limit the rise of populist figures like Donald Trump , it would have happened. A lack of results does not equal a lack of effort made by Americans and this suggestion paints over large portions of historical struggle and tars swathes of the country with an unfair brush.
This argument is also generous to Brits, who are likely not criticising American political outcomes because of an intimate understanding of its electoral workings, but come to these conclusions after watching a clip online of someone from Alabama saying they don’t know if they’re going to vote and laughing at how dumb all Americans must be. This often classist attitude leads to cocky assumptions about all Americans that project a small demographic as the whole picture. But more than anything – whether it’s about fairness, ahistoricism or even basic stereotyping – most arguments from Brits are simply naive.
Like a child insisting on the reality of Santa Claus or a teenager who thinks they’re the first person to have ever discovered atheism, Brits make pseudo-intellectual pronouncements that are typically stupider than their false perception of Americans, which have no impact beyond proving how little they know about a subject that has captured their dedicated fascination. The irony of these deeply felt opinions based on occasionally reading The New York Times and visiting Orlando twice is not lost on the Americans exposed to these confidently stated but fundamentally misguided beliefs. The reality of American society today is something deeply mixed where , like every other place in the world, there are many people making ill-informed electoral decisions while many others advocate for what is right and what will benefit the most vulnerable (this latter group, it’s worth emphasising, are not all voting for Kamala Harris ).
Unless their attitude changes, Brits will continue to fail to understand what is happening in a place they spend large portions of their lives infatuated with. Their smugness and superiority won’t improve American elections or even American culture, but it will guarantee Brits remain in the dark. Sarah Manavis is an American writer covering technology, culture, and society.
