The cosmopolitan ecologist

This list goes out to all my friends and colleagues in Europe. I may share many progressive viewpoints with them, but I get occasionally frustrated by how they talk about the United States and its politics. The scope of the problem became more apparent after the chilly reception that Bernard Henri-Levy’s new book received in the United State, even among folks who are its natural ideological allies (see Garrison Keiler’s excellent review of the book for more). Here then are 10 facts European progressives should keep in mind when writing if they want Americans to be at all receptive to their argument:

1. America is a big country, which if overlaid on Europe would stretch from Lisbon to Baghdad. I say this not to be chauvinistic (although there are plenty of Americans who would be), but just to point out that there’s an enormous amount of terrain for a visitor like Mr. Henry-Levi to cover, ranging from swampy lowlands to vast deserts to tall sierras.
2. America is very diverse ethnically, with arguably more ethnic variation than Europe. Certainly, the percentage of Americans who are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants (10.4%) is far higher here than in the EU. These waves of immigrants have come in complex, spatially heterogeneous patterns, creating odd political outliers like the vehemently anti-Castro Cubans of Miami.
3. While perhaps not as culturally differentiated as Europe, where one switches languages every couple hundred miles, there is significant cultural variation in the US. The Southeastern States, with their legacy of slavery, are very different in culture and norms than the industrial Northeast. In the Western US it gets even more complicated: you have Nevada, where prostitution and gambling and just about everything else is legal, right next to conservative Mormon Utah! Most importantly, the United States has a pronounced cultural split between its urban and rural cultures. In many senses, these two groups are now fighting for power.
4. It is rather pointless to talk about “American culture” or “American politics” as a single unitary entity, any more than one can talk about a “European culture” without sounding a bit naïve to a European about the complexity and diversity of that continent.
5. There are of course some unifying traits for Americans, but they are rather few and far between, truthfully. Moreover, they tend to be of an almost philosophic nature, concerning our general temperament, rather than specific things like baseball or peanut butter (both of which substantial minorities of Americans hate). Alexis de Tocqueville does as good a job as anybody in sketching these things out, and I personally feel like no one’s really improved on his work.
6. Even the few unifying traits that exist have significant subpopulations in the US that counteract the general rule. Like all generalizations I as an American could make about Europeans, they would become harmful if they’re used to prejudge.
7. Politics in America is not some simple function of a unitary “American” character. In fact the federal system of state autonomy makes each state its own political world, to a degree many foreigners from countries with centralized governments often don’t understand.
8. Political parties in the US serve as broad coalitions, rather than as the strident unified political parties one sees in parliamentary systems. For constitutional and historical reasons (that I often bemoan) Americans are stuck with this system, which transfers all the public compromises among parties in a parliamentary system when they form a governing coalition into the back room, behind the scenes. Therefore, statements about the view of “the Republicans” strike most Americans as facile- it’s not even really worth talking politics about them until you recognize at least their 3 or 4 major constituents.
9. The current religious right-wing ascendancy at the Federal level really the political victory of a relatively small percentage of people who have control of one of our two parties, and so far haven’t shattered the rest of the party’s coalition. It doesn’t reflect anything near the majority of its own party.
10. All the electoral rules at a Federal level in the US have a consistent and intentional bias toward rural areas and away from urban areas, and toward “battleground states” (where neither party is dominant) and away from certain states (like California). This tends to make the Federal government in the US lag substantially behind urban areas in adopting progressive, cosmopolitan ideas. Don’t read too much into American culture by the politics in Washington.