When Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, he knew that a sceptical reader might wonder why he had spent hundreds of pages reciting for German readers a contentious account of British economic history. De te fabula narratur-this is your story-was his reply. "The developed country shows to the less developed the image of its future." This is an apt moment to wonder whether a modern Marx would want to tell the British, not that they show the future to Germany, but that the US displays their future to them. To put it more bluntly: is what Americans are getting from Bill Clinton what the British will get from Tony Blair? Is the US inner city the future of Glasgow or Liverpool? Are the housing estates of Sheffield and Leeds the Cabrini Greens of our future?
Less excitedly, one might wonder whether the US economy, with its increasing inequality of rewards, and its inability to find work for the least skilled, is the future of the British economy, too. And whether the US higher education system, with some 3,500 colleges and universities, and 14m students operating at all levels of competence, is a glimpse of the future for British higher education.
Perhaps less plausibly, one might wonder whether the punitive enthusiasms of Michael Howard are a foretaste of a Britain that has followed the state of California by spending more on prison building than higher education, and has cut welfare payments in order to spend $40,000 a year to keep in jail the angry young men that neglected children turn into. And since in the US, the new culture of punishment goes along with the rise of the religious right, and a constant hubbub of demands that public schools should resound with prayer when they are not echoing with the sound of corporal punishment, one might wonder whether the current wave of moral zeal among British politicians is not the first stirrings of what in the US is a full tide.
The obvious answer to such questions is "heaven knows." For the most surprising feature of the recent election season, and for the two years before, has been the unpredictability of events. The most sensible reaction to the politics of the past six months has come from Newt Gingrich. "I just don't know what's going on," he has been saying whenever asked for an opinion. The Speaker who thought in November 1994 that he had been elected to implement a "revolution" discovered that Americans are pious towards the revolution that emancipated their country from its British rulers, but otherwise loathe the very thought of revolution. The electorate that, he thought, had elected him to take the most intransigent possible line on the federal government's chronic budget deficit blamed him in particular and the Republican party in general for the government shutdowns that prevented tourists from visiting the Grand Canyon and much else besides. The more Gingrich thrashed about, trying to remind them that they had voted him into power so that he could launch bold new ventures in curbing environmental regulation and keeping out illegal immigrants, the less they liked him. Just before the election Gingrich was talking about retiring from politics, and confessed complete bewilderment with the public mood.
Poor Bob Dole was in an even worse plight. Having started off ostentatiously refusing to denounce Clinton's failings of character-his inept financial transactions and his inability to keep his hands off women to whom he is not married-Dole found that he was 15 points behind Clinton in every poll and slipping. So he launched the sort of mean-spirited attacks that had cost him the Republican nomination in 1988, and found that the country was not interested. Just before the election, he started attacking the media and then the voters for their refusal to acknowledge the president's unfitness to govern.
That the American mind is inscrutable is clear. Clinton should have coasted to an easy election victory just because the economy had done so well during the four years of his first term. But the public was only reluctantly ready to admit to being better off. The unemployment rate had come down from 7 per cent to 5.2 per cent during Clinton's term in office; inflation had remained steady at around 2 per cent. Yet just as in Britain, the "feel good factor" was notably absent.
When the electorate swept Gingrich into power, the president had already done more to reduce the deficit than anyone other than the unfortunate President Bush in 1990. Clinton promised in 1992 to reduce the deficit by 50 per cent in the first four years, and it has gone down by 60 per cent; he promised to create 8m new jobs and 10m have actually been created. (I use the passive form deliberately; the boom that has pushed him back into office started under Bush, and the tax revenues of a growing economy have done a lot more to reduce the deficit than any self-restraint on the administration's part.)
One clue to the surprising absence of the feel good factor was provided a couple of weeks before the election by the Washington Post. When asked in a survey to guess the rate of inflation, almost nobody suggested a figure below 5 per cent, and most offered 10 per cent and above. The unemployment rate they thought must be about 25 per cent. When prodded gently about their reasons for believing this, they responded that some item of food or other was 40 per cent dearer than a year ago, or that they knew several people looking for work and not finding it. For all Dole's raging that the electorate ought not to believe what they read in the liberal media, the evidence is that most of the public reads next to nothing and knows next to nothing about the issues on which politicians trade.
What broad changes are going on beneath the confused surface? The first thing to note is that the American public is not getting any more "liberal" as some of the single issue propositions voted for on 5th November show, most notably support for ending affirmative action in California. That is true, both in the British sense of that term-which is to say they are not getting any more tolerant, any happier about sexual deviance, any less attached to assorted forms of religious fundamentalism; and in the American sense-which is to say that they do not trust central government any more than they did when the Clinton healthcare plan was defeated in 1994, they are no more willing to spend time and money sorting out the rest of the world than they were before 1941 and the second world war made isolationism impossible, and they are not distressed by the growing inequality of US society.
It remains true, despite the influx of Asian and Hispanic migrants over the past 30 years, that the US is a highly individualist society. Prisoners in jail differ not at all from their contemporaries in the outside world in their views about crime and punishment. They take a hard line against criminality and do not think it unjust to throw criminals in jail or execute them. American society is more obviously a "blame culture" than a victim culture. But it is more strikingly a culture devoted to the moral requirement that we must stand on our own two feet, and the rather dubious sociological belief that people who do stand on their own two feet will flourish. That attitude explains why a Democratic president was able with so little opposition to sign a welfare reform bill that will do next to nothing to get people into work, but will do a lot to make 1m children even hungrier, less intelligent and more anti-social than they might otherwise have been.
Given that every survey of the moral allegiances of the western world places the British and the Americans together at one end of the scale that runs from "individualism to collectivism," and therefore at the opposite end from the Japanese and most Europeans, one is bound to wonder whether the British are headed down the same track. I suspect that we are. Do not be misled by the "communitarianism" of Blair and Clinton. The kind of individualism that the British public subscribes to in bursts (and which Americans subscribe to more continuously) is entirely consistent with what usually passes for communitarianism. The most important feature of the community is that it is a moral entity that polices the character, allegiances, and aspirations of each of its members. Hence the passion for "Victorian values," on both sides of the Atlantic. The community's relationship to its members is not one of good-natured, uninterfering affection, but a combination of stern parent, vicar, and policeman.
But why are both the US and Britain so bad at sustaining this, or any other, sort of community where it is most needed? It is clear that Britain will not see inner city housing estates turning into miniature versions of Chicago's Cabrini Green ghetto, if only because that takes three ingredients Britain does not have-easy access to handguns by teenagers who have no inhibitions about using them, a drug market that offers terrific temptations to young men whose prospects of alternative employment are grim, and the historical legacy of moral disorganisation within and white racism without that black Americans have to fight throughout their lives. But Britain is more than likely to see a mild version of the same thing.
That nasty, and none too intelligent volume, The Bell Curve, pointed to some of the reasons why, although most of them were spelled out much less obnoxiously in Michael Young's Rise of the Meritocracy 40 years ago. A meritocratic society allows the bright and ambitious to rise to the top; once there, they marry people like themselves, and bring up their children to do likewise. A society in which human brawn is increasingly unimportant and skills of a rather calculating kind are ever more important reinforces the process. People who can do non-routine intellectual tasks will flourish, while people whose skills are essentially based on carrying out other people's orders will do as badly as the merely brawny. Since much of the non-routine business will need lots of communication skills, too, women are likely to do better than men in the new world.
The result will be an extension of what is already happening; inner city boys in Britain will do worse in school than the girls, will go on to higher education in smaller numbers, and be less likely to return to education later in life. They will be less attractive partners for long term relationships and marriage, and that will do nothing to increase their happiness or their capacity to hold down jobs, and so gloomily on. You can talk up God, family and community as much as you like-and it seems that both Clinton and Blair like to a lot-but unless the cycle of economic, cultural and therefore educational and psychological decay is broken, you cannot hope to put the Victorian virtuous cycle in place.
If we shall stagger into a diluted version of US social ills, we shall also stagger gently into one of the US responses. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about coming back to Britain after nine years in the US is to find that Britain has gone so fast down the track of instituting a US mass higher education system and so slowly down any rational route to financing it. It is obvious that a system of public financing that worked well when only 6 to 10 per cent of the age group went to university, and when universities were 50 per cent cheaper-even allowing for inflation-will not work when 35 per cent of the age group goes to college. Any system of financing amounts to a "spend now pay later" mechanism so far as students are concerned; generous grants should be paid for by higher taxation, which falls disproportionately on those who reap the benefit of a decent education. How much you pay should depend on what the pay-off is likely to be-in which case Oxford and Cambridge ought to cost a lot more than Luton and Bournemouth, just as Harvard and Princeton (and state universities such as Michigan and UC Berkeley) cost a great deal more than York College in the city university system of New York.
In much the same way, it makes sense to allow the leading dozen British universities to gradually privatise themselves. The greatest beneficiaries would be bright but hard-up students. Princeton, for instance, takes students without asking what they can afford, and then gives about ?25m a year in scholarships, work opportunities and to a lesser extent loans to students whose parents cannot afford the ?20,000 a year it costs to send a student there. That ?25m is spread over a student body barely a third the size of Oxford, Cambridge, or Manchester, and it exists because the alumni see the point of giving something back to the institution that has done so much for them. If Britain is to have a university system that is not an embarrassment in the next century, that is the route we have to go down.
That may strike a gloomy note, but it ought not to do so, entirely. The best of US education is wonderful, and much of the rest is not at all bad. A decentralised, inegalitarian system is bound to produce some lousy schools and colleges, just as it will produce lots of lousy hospitals and prisons. Anyone looking for reasons to feel miserable when looking across the Atlantic would find many more in the penal system than in higher education. The penal system really does show what would happen if Michael Howard were given a free hand-in 15 years the prison population in the US has tripled, and the crime rate has budged only as much as demographic changes on the one hand, and more intelligent policing on the other, have pushed it. The murder rate in New York did drop by a third in two years, but that was because the police were remorseless in getting guns out of teenage hands. And it is hard to escape the thought that decriminalising cannabis would do more to free prison space for the really dangerous than any other policy.
The mood of those who want to throw still more criminals in jail has swung away from wanting to deter the non-offenders by providing them with unpleasant examples to reflect on towards "incapacitation." If burglars, drug pedlars and perpetrators of violent assaults are in jail during their most dangerous years-14 to 30 or thereabouts-at least they cannot be on the streets doing more damage.
Still, the British crime scene can never get quite like the American scene, if only because the great American divides of race and recent migration have so few counterparts in Britain. But there is something else that continues to divide us. Although the British are not an entirely godless people-80 per cent profess belief in some sort of deity-they do not drag their religious enthusiasms into the political arena. It makes British arguments over abortion quite different from the violent quarrels that dominate the American political scene. It also means that restoring capital punishment in Britain would be even harder than abolishing it in the southern US; nobody in Britain would think that announcing that Deuteronomy was insistent on the need to put murderers to death had any bearing on the matter at all, while large parts of the US deal in just that currency.
It is religiosity that perhaps accounts more than anything for the curious sensation that living in the US always induced in me. On the one hand, much of what happens there will plainly happen here with a timelag of five to ten years. (The economic rise of women in Britain, which follows the American pattern, is one example.) Clothes, music, films are part of a common culture in which the US generally takes the lead and Britain follows-give or take Persuasion, AbFab and Inspector Morse, which seem to belong with Aquascutum and Cooper's Oxford Marmalade in the American imagination. On the other hand, it is plainly an entirely different civilisation, much more alien to a British visitor than anywhere in northern and western Europe nowadays has become.
It is a curious fact that the country which has no established church, which is also the country which has taken in innumerable Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and animists, subscribes so unanimously to the view that it is "one nation under God." Whose God, it is impolite to ask; how many there are of him, her, it or they, nobody wants to know. The point of the public faith is to boost public spirit. Adverts pasted on the side of the New York buses used to exhort passengers in truly ecumenical fashion, to "worship this weekend," and the habit persists. I think, indeed I very much hope, that British politicians will always look mildly ridiculous doing what American politicians take for granted, and so long as they do, the Americanisation of Britain will remain incomplete.
