Above: The Guardian’s Mid-Term election coverage.
Last week, in case you hadn’t noticed, there were elections in America. But of course you noticed. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg could have co-hosted a mud-wrestling and Koran burning sex party on the floor of the Commons and the story would have been buried under the latest exit polls from Wisconsin.
There is something sad about how slavishly obsessed we have become with American politics. On the night of the election The Guardian website replaced its front page with an enormous blue white and grey map of America that automatically updated every few seconds, broken down by state and congressional district. The Times, the BBC and The Independent were all equally obsessed. Guardian Columnist Gary Younge has spent the last month driving from Denver to Los Vegas interviewing gun toting pensioners and Obama-hating hipsters. Meanwhile Ed Pilkington snuck on board on the tea-party express bus to interview a disabled Iraq war veteran who, for some god-only-knows reason, had decided to spend his life campaigning against moderate healthcare reform and someone at the BBC blogged at length about the effect of a viral campaign video in North Carolina’s second district. The nadir came a few weeks ago when a Guardian blogger, watching a local news channel, posted a breathless minute-by-minute live blog covering the debate between the two senate candidates from Delaware. For about an hour this was the leading article on The Guardian’s website. Just imagine for a moment what this would look like if the situation were reversed. It would be the equivalent of a senior New York Times staff writer sitting in a dank half-empty hall in Stapleford watching Nick Palmer, the obscure Labour backbencher from Broxtowe, debate with his Tory opponent about the punctuality of Nottinghamshire council’s waste and recycling collection.
We have arrived at a point where the British political classes are probably unable to name the leaders of Spain, China or Brazil, but are having heated debates about whether newly elected Florida governor Mark Rubio might run for president in 2016, or whether the proposition to legalize the personal growth of pot in California boosted democratic turnout in the state. The West Wing, Primary Colors, 24 and Obama have dramatized American politics and exported its tropes to the rest of the world. Politics in the US has become the paradigm for politics everywhere else. We now talk of “tough races”, “swing constituencies” and “negative campaigning.” The horse-race drama of photo-finish presidential races have become the greatest show on earth, and are now perhaps more likely than any UK election to compel British people of all ages to stay up watching News24 and eating popcorn.
This was brought horribly home by a recent article in Slate by Anne Applebaum comparing British and French political responses to recession public spending cuts. She pointed out that while the French were on strike, the British were showing a “characteristic… stiff upper lip”. “In an age of supposed globalization,” she wrote, “when we are all allegedly becoming more alike—listening to the same American music, buying the same Chinese products—it is astonishing how absolutely British the British remain.” This is a very odd statement indeed. Considering that In the 1970s so many British miners went on strike that electricity had to be rationed to three days a week. Considering that in the same decade, during the ‘winter of discontent’, even gravediggers were on strike. Considering that during the 1980s, the last period of Conservative public spending cuts, Britain was essentially plunged into Civil War - fighting a pitched battle with striking coal miners that lasted for years. Considering that in the 1990s there were riots against the introduction of a poll tax. Considering that in 2003 more than a million people marched against the Iraq War. Considering that a massive student demonstration against the cuts is set to take place next week and that BBC journalists are on strike. Many Western European countries, including Britain and France, have had issues with militant unionism and street protests that far outstrip anything seen in the United States since the end of the Civil Rights movement. But of course she hasn’t considered this. Her research could be based almost entirely on John Cleese’s character in the recet James Bond movies. Luckily for her few of her readers will know any better. While every time Obama sneezes the Guardian runs an editorial, most Americans have no idea who the Prime Minister of the UK is. Reading these articles I sometimes feel a pang of shame, as if I had commented in detail on a high school crush’s novelty key ring only to discover that she doesn’t even know my name.
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