The World Is Watching?

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead counsels that the world is watching the results of the American elections:

The world’s love-hate relationship with the U.S. is about more than military might and policy ideas. For all the talk about decline and the supposed collapse of American soft power, the U.S. remains the unrivaled diva on the global stage—the most arresting figure, if not always the most sympathetic one, whose antics keep all transfixed.

America is the world’s biggest billboard. Nothing that happens here stays here; everything spreads. If Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality spring up in Minnesota, protesters in Lagos, Nigeria, take note. If U.S. rioters start demolishing Confederate memorials, statues of slave traders go into the river in Britain. And if Americans elect a nationalist populist to the presidency, his rhetoric and his ideas will be repeated and sometimes distorted out to the farthest ends of the earth. For good or for bad, the U.S. matters.

America is an experiment in self-governance. The U.S. is a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln put it. No aristocracy, no cultural or technocratic elite, no religious hierarchy ever quite manages to govern Americans. (Though many have tried, and some are still trying.) And no smooth-tongued demagogue has ever persuaded us to dismantle the constitutional fences that protect our inherited institutions.

Some well-meaning Americans think that our many flaws undermine the power of our example to the world. That is not the whole story. For admirers of liberty around the world, the example of our democracy is all the more compelling because the faults of U.S. society are out in plain view. The history of American democracy is not a story of sages and philosopher kings. The U.S. story is rich with examples of racism, political corruption, hypocrisy and crass materialism. America has left undone things it ought to have done and done things it ought not to have done. Its critics have never lacked for material.

U.S. history is not a tale of preternaturally virtuous people overcoming temptations that lesser nations cannot resist. If it were, the American example would not be contagious. But if boobs like us can make democracy work, then there is a chance for people to make it work anywhere.

That’s hopeful in its way. From where I sit in Chicago, Illinois what we have is government of the people, by the public employees, for the public employees and this election is about cementing that hold even tighter.

Sadly, if the world is, indeed, watching us it is watching us through a keyhole and the keyhole is owned by a narrow segment of the society—journalists, television and movie writers and producers, college professors, and politicians aligned with the above—who themselves don’t know a lot about the United States. My experience is that progressives do love America but their love is of a peculiar kind. They love it for what it might become rather than for what it is or has been which in fact they may hate. Try that out on your spouse, your family, your friends, and your employer and I believe you’ll see the contours of my concern.

That, I should mention, is my concern about the eventuality of Kamala Harris becoming president. Neither of her parents are Americans, she largely grew up in Canada, and she has spent her adult life in the hothouse environment of Northern California. I doubt she’s ever visited Bakersfield let alone Lubbock. I don’t think she knows anything about the United States other than the views of those in her echo chamber.