Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Although her tenure is barely more than a month old, I can already tell what is going to annoy me most about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership of the Conservative party. It is the dismissal of her political interventions with the phrase “America-brained”.
A speech that she made last week (in Washington, naturally) was widely criticised for its focus on American topics, for its American audience, its use of American English and its supposed disconnection from the concerns of the British voting public.
The argument is that the leader of the opposition is too preoccupied with American politics, and that her dividing lines might have resonance there but not in the UK.
To be clear, I carry no brief for Badenoch. Thus far, she has done nothing to suggest that she is anything other than a typical first-term opposition leader making the mistakes that a typical first-term opposition leader often makes.
Nevertheless, I think there is something corrosive about this tendency to check ideas for their passport and to substitute that for rigorous analysis.
While Badenoch’s diagnosis of how and why the Conservatives lost July’s general election — the usual “we lost because we weren’t sufficiently true to our values” boilerplate that defeated parties reach for — has several flaws, it remains true to say that the US has enjoyed far greater growth and prosperity than Europe since the financial crisis. So there is clearly something worth looking at and learning from here.
The massive improvements in state schools in England, which mean that English schools now outperform most education systems in the west in mathematics and literacy, came in part from studying the success of charter schools and the Teach For America programme. These influenced the establishment of academy schools and Teach First. If that kind of success is “America-brained”, we need more of it.
Nor is this reflex dismissal limited to the UK. In France, the term often used is “Anglo-Saxon”, but the intent is the same: to declare an idea out of bounds based on its supposed country of origin. I use the word “supposed” quite deliberately — many of the sillier ideas about race and racism that have gained runaway success in the US, such as the habit of referring to ethnic minorities as a “global majority”, are in fact British in origin.
France and the UK have provided two natural experiments in how to manage ethnic and cultural diversity in former imperial powers, with Britain’s approach achieving far better results. But neither “model” is entirely French or British in its intellectual origins and advocates for either approach can be found in both countries.
There are a handful of ideas and public policy proposals that can genuinely be said to be of use only in particular countries, usually because of some specific national advantage or a distinctive source of national shame that the policy exploits or seeks to rectify. But for the most part, good ideas know no borders.
To maintain otherwise is damaging in two ways. First, it encourages a cheaply rhetorical way of dismissing ideas without doing due diligence. Giving a bad idea a thorough kicking can actually spark some better ones, or else encourage some empathy for those you disagree with by learning a bit about their intellectual history.
Second, this bad habit impedes the exchange of good ideas. Countries that want to succeed should learn from Japan about how to run railways, the US on how to nurture start-ups and the UK about how to integrate immigrants.
Where there is a problem with “America-brained” thinkers is when their influences are limited to only one country in a diverse world. For any nation, there are huge amounts to learn from best practice elsewhere.
But the tendency to dismiss learning from America as inherently flawed can be particularly damaging.
Donald Trump’s second presidency will give people outside the US, particularly in Europe, plenty of reasons to sneer reflexively at “American ideas”. But whatever may happen to the US in the future, it cannot be denied that the century of American dominance has produced and strengthened a vast quantity of good ideas that are worth taking seriously elsewhere.
The leader of any shattered political party, particularly in a low-growth country like Britain, should not so glibly be dismissed as “America-brained” for looking at the US and trying to learn from it.
Source link
