'Many people can remember that there used to be a redistribution of income, funded by taxation. What happened to that?' Photo: Book cover of When America Stopped Being Great: A history of the present by Nick Bryant
When America Stopped Being Great: A history of the present by Nick Bryant
Author: Nick Bryant. Review by Reg Naulty
The governance of a society has big implications for the lives of the people living in it. Hence Plato’s Republic, which was meant to ensure that rulers knew what goodness is, and how to give it expression in a state they governed. Ideally, they would create a society in which it was easy to be good.
Nick Bryant felt that the US was such a place – not in a puritanical way, but in a congenial way – when he first arrived from England in 1984. He still loves the US, but is disappointed. This book is a record of what went wrong.
Quite a lot of that happened in The White House itself. There was the sex life of John Kennedy, the intellectual incuriosity of Ronald Reagan, the lying of Bill Clinton, the paranoia of Richard Nixon, and the incompetence of George W Bush. They all diminished the reputation of the presidency in the public mind.
There were, of course, more serious things happening outside The White House – the unemployment in the Rust Belt, for example. Out of work people in Detroit and Pennsylvania could have been forgiven for thinking that no one in Washington was worried about them. When Bryant was near Pittsburgh, he noticed the number of ex-steelworkers driving taxis. They were concerned about the experiments with driverless cars. It may well be that the relentless onset of artificial intelligence makes a universal wage inescapable.
Then there is the gap between the rich and poor, now well publicised. Many people can remember that there used to be a redistribution of income, funded by taxation. What happened to that?
Bryant argues persuasively that Congress is becoming dysfunctional. He cites the persistent obstruction by Republicans of Presidents Clinton and Obama. The high-mindedness of the US is gone. One wonders whether that is why the current presidential candidates are so old. Younger people no longer think that a constructive career is possible in politics.
Bryant mentions other damaging influences – the trivialising of public life due to the internet, and the sensationalist media. But it is impossible to be pessimistic about the US. There is so much good will. Bryant does not identify its religious life as an asset but, stretching well beyond the religious right as it does, it is a powerful source for good. No country is more likely to produce charismatic leaders of the type lauded by Matthew Arnold in ‘Rugby Chapel’:
Then in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardour divine…
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.
