As i sit down to write these words the military response to the terrorist attack on the US is only a few days old, but one thing is clear. The fears of the British left that a vengeful America would carpet-bomb Afghan cities without regard to civilians has proved wrong. Far from waging a Huntingtonian battle of civilisations, the US government has bent over backwards to embrace Islam in a way it has never done before. How is it that the fears of the British left and the reality of the US response are at such odds?
The reason the US has not, and will not, wage the attack many on the left feared is that the idea was a concoction of columnists' fevered misunderstanding of America. No one in a responsible position in the US government ever proposed Dresden-style bombing of Afghanistan or "making an example" by causing such a massive number of deaths that no country would think of harbouring terrorists in the future.
It is true that there have been radio talk show hosts and a few right-wing columnists who proposed bombing Afghanistan into the dust, but this said nothing significant about America's military response. Yet the day after the attack, the usually respectable Polly Toynbee let loose the unhinged observation that the US is "fatally burdened by a primitive and unsophisticated political culture. Its warped political institutions, its leaders' debilitated and febrile dependence on hour-by-hour opinion polling, its constitutionally split powers, reliance on big business and its perpetual cycle of elections all add up to a politics unfit to bear this responsibility." To take one example from this list, I thought that 18 years of Thatcherism had given the British left an appreciation for the value of "constitutionally split powers." But what is especially peculiar here is Toynbee's lack of understanding of the relationship between the "warped political institutions" she decries and what she calls America's "primitive and unsophisticated political culture."
It is a peculiar feature of American culture that we have legitimated "popular speech," the idea that political discourse should not be limited to those of high education or elevated standing. This drives the British left mad. Before the US government can send men into battle, the people need to be persuaded that our cause is just and that means speaking to them in their own language. This is not the language of Guardian columnists, and it tends to reinforce the impression that US policy-makers are "cowboys" who cannot be trusted with power and need to be restrained by wise, rational, well-bred Europeans. But the need to speak in a democratic language is a sign of our reluctance to fight, of the efforts our officials must go to in persuading Americans to accept the spilling of our fellow citizens' blood.
We have also accepted the idea that the "people" should be involved in governing not just at particular times (elections), but throughout the process of decision and even implementation. A remarkable amount of the deliberation that does occur in our system happens in public view, as opposed to being thrashed out in back rooms or ministerial offices. In a culture as democratic as ours, the processes of government have a tendency to look messy and irresponsible. Britain and most other advanced democracies have made a different choice about how to organise democracy, by placing greater faith in a governing and editorialising elite, which makes its processes appear much more high-toned. This also, not accidentally, creates less distance between European intellectuals and their governments, and a great deal of intellectual condescension toward ours.
Our choice often spooks our less democratic allies, who can mistakenly take the presence of certain views in our political discourse as evidence that they are being taken seriously. Some of the extreme responses expressed after the attack were merely the venting of popular rage. Thankfully, we have a vigorous system of representative government, that, in James Madison's words, "refines and enlarges the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their countrymen..." Our separation of powers introduces a further filter between popular outrage and public action, limiting the ability of any participant to directly act on popular prejudice. The moderating of the administration's domestic anti-terrorism proposals is a good example of this quality of our "warped political institutions."
So the US system is characterised by a vigorously democratic culture with numerous filters at the institutional level. This would be dangerous in parliamentary systems where there is little standing in the way of governing majorities' ability to effect their will. It is for this reason that such systems require a more elite-dominated political culture, since the filtering of popular passions must occur through extra-institutional means. For historical reasons, this arrangement may be appropriate for European nations such as Britain, but there is no reason to consider it a universally desirable model.
The attractions of our system come not from the aesthetic qualities of its processes, but from its outcomes. And the fact that it works even with a middling character such as our chief executive underlines the point. European observers should pause before condescending, and try to understand the workings of US democracy. n
