American and British Political Discourse: A Note

Over the years I have had many an occasion to consider the differences in the political discourses of the U.S. and Britain. One of the most significant has been the greater attentiveness of British news-watchers to the economic and socioeconomic than their American counterparts--on average more interested, better-informed, more willing and able to discuss them substantively.

The difference exists in spite of a great many similarities. Britain, too, has its "centrism," which in a prior day undertook reform, but from an essentially conservative position with essentially conservative ends--fearful and resentful of the left while conciliatory to the right, culminating in a rightward shift over time and the withering of discussion, debate, electoral options regarding these matters (witness the trajectory of the Labour Party). Britain, too, has its "culture wars," with both sides in them quite deliberately deploying the politics of identity to divert the public from more material issues. Britain, too, has its "pundits" telling the public social class and class differences are nonexistent or irrelevant or minor, that any such thing as an Establishment is a leftist fantasy, that "neoliberalism" too is "not a thing." All of this reflects the reality that in Britain, too, the media ill serves the public where these matters are concerned (and just about every other, too).

Of course, one may also argue that if all this is the case in Britain it is less thoroughly so than in the U.S., that centrism has not had such a tight grip on the more leftward of its parties (whom would one call the American Aneurin Bevan?), that in Britain the culture wars have not quite gone so far in blocking other issues out of the public consciousness, that much that is conventional wisdom in America is not quite that in Britain, in part because for all its failings the country's media does offer somewhat more leeway for the sorts of marginalized views and voices attentive to such things. Still, as the trajectory of British discourse and policy in recent years makes clear (and as I imagine British leftists in particular would hasten to point out) one should not make too much of these qualifications. Rather three things seem to me to have made the difference:

1. Britain's governance and public policy formation in these areas has so often been so much more centralized than in the U.S.. This makes many an issue decided at the local or state level in the U.S. (local tax rates, much to do with education and health services, etc.), which people in various parts of the country decide in different ways, from different starting points and with different emotional charges, more completely a matter of national policy in Britain (with Thatcherism, in fact, strongly identified with centralization for the sake of implementing its program more fully). The result is that they are an object of national rather than local debate, with all the additional attention this brings them.

2. Britain's policy in the relevant areas has shifted much further left and much further right than it did in the U.S. over the course of the years. This is not to deny that in British life the "center" of the political spectrum may even now be regarded as lying leftward of the American center. However, the public sector, the welfare state, organized labor, were all built up to far greater heights in Britain than was ever seriously considered in the U.S.. And whatever their limitations have been in practice (and these should not be overlooked), Britain had free college and free-at-point-of-service health care, and the U.S. never came close to anything like that. Meanwhile, circa 1980 three of every five British workers was a member of a labor union, as compared with just one in five American workers, while British unions were unencumbered by anything remotely like Taft-Hartley and the top-heaviness of American unions with bureaucracy, and vastly more politically conscious and militant. Naturally the dismantling of all that, if still leaving Britain with more apparatus of this kind than the U.S. ever had, entailed a far bigger and more wrenching shift in economic and social life than what the U.S. has seen in the same period, with that much more controversy, reflected in the reality that, while Ronald Reagan has been a divisive figure in American history, in the American mainstream one simply does not see the expression of the kind of bitterness toward him that one sees in regard to Thatcher in Britain. All of this, again, makes it harder to slight the topic.

3. In Britain the reality of social class has simply been too ostentatious for too long to ignore. Where in the U.S. the national mythology is overwhelmingly devoted to the idea of the self-made individual (to the point that children of extreme socioeconomic privilege constantly pass themselves off as such, with a lickspittle press always enabling them) a monarchy remains the center of British public life, while the legislature's upper house remains a House of Lords, and even for the native-born, old-stock Briton accent is scarcely less a marker of class origin than it was when George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion. Even the difference in the usage of the term "middle class" appears telling. The attempts by British leaders to make the kind of vague use of the term that Americans do, to portray their nation as, rich and poor alike, somehow a middle class nation, seem to have had rather less success than across the Pond. Rather in British usage the word seems to still have a more exclusive (and meaningful) usage, with middle classness having a higher floor--and in the view of most a distinct ceiling too, many scoffing at David Cameron's calling himself "middle class."

Together these three factors--that centralization of political life, the extremity of the distance policy moved along the political spectrum across the past century, and the greater difficulty of dismissing the role of class--make it far, far harder to avoid acknowledging the herd of thoroughly material elephants in the room that make so much difference in the large and the small of individual lives.