America, It`s Mind and Policies

let`s start with philosophy or say Philosopher Isaiah Berlin once remarked that the United States was “aesthetically inferior but morally superior” to Europe. On the aesthetics, there’s not much doubt. Savoir vivre is a French expression that English finds it needs. Style is many things but one reason Italy elevates it is because it is a fine disguise for lost power. When you’re running the world you don’t have much time for Windsor knots.The aesthetics of European cities offer the consolation of the past’s grandeur but seldom the adrenaline of future possibility. It’s wonderful to be lost in Bruges or Amsterdam, Venice or Vienna. The palaces bear no relation to current obligations. They have become outsized repositories of beauty.

Sleepwalk through them and feel content. The only problem is awakening. One of the things you awaken to is that it’s now almost a century since Europe ripped itself to shreds at Verdun. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently calculated in the New York Review of Books that British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, given respective populations, were the equivalent of “280,000 GI’s killed between dawn and dusk”.The Great War had its mid-century European sequel. And so power passed to America. It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.
He found it “morally superior” to Europe. I think he meant above all the can-do vigour of a young nation still able to dream big and gather its collective resources to realise great projects. Not for America the moral relativism of tired European powers that, ambition exhausted or crushed, settled for comfort and compromise.

I was talking about puritanism the other day with an American friend who observed: “Don’t knock it — that’s what got us this country in the first place!” There’s something to that: America has been inseparable from a city-on-the-hill idealism but also from a strong work ethic. When I became an American citizen and had to do an English test the second sentence of my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day”.But of course you can’t work if you don’t have a job and today that’s the situation of 9.1 per cent of Americans and 24 per cent of American youth. These are shocking numbers that aren’t temporary blips. They reflect shifts in the global economy. Every year developing economies are producing tens of millions of middle-class people who can do American jobs. What’s most worrying is that the American response to this crisis seems to be one of a country in the middle age, a nation that has lost its can-do moral edge, the ability to come together and overcome. In this critical regard US President Barack Obama has failed to deliver.