Comment
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
America has made the world too American
Donald Trump is not, as some embarrassed Americans would have it, “un-American”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. He’s the “most American president ever”. Republicans and Democrats – whatever their practical disagreements – are all drawn from a philosophical tradition rooted in love of individual freedom and the unleashing of personal passions. And this distinctly American form of liberalism has been remarkably infectious. In his Lament for a Nation, Canadian philosopher George Grant describes how, in the 1950s, Canada elected a prime minister who refused to house US nuclear weapons on the basis that if Canada became a missile base, all pretence of independence would be off. The elite turned on him, and he was booted out of office. Canada had become so “integrated into the American Way” that it had lost the imagination to stand alone. Today, Europe is the same.
Take Ireland, a model of globalist acquiescence at the cost of sovereignty. It has embraced free markets (low corporation tax) and free movement (mass migration) and now it’s unaffordable for many locals and embroiled in a violent identity crisis. These US-style policies were justified by elites as essential to modern nation-building – “we need money, we need workers”. But, as Grant observed in the 1960s, when the modern state develops by opening its arms to global capitalism, global capitalism flattens and destroys the “indigenous differences” that make nations worth having to begin with. In other words, America has made us all rich, but it has also made us duplicates of the US. It’s obvious in how we talk (“badly”) and emote (“too often”) and in our embarrassing habit of responding to American political events as though they were our own. Many Britons simply “don’t feel like themselves any more”. This is why Trump must be resisted. “It is a question of dignity.”
🇨🇦🇺🇸 The “Old Canada” was different, Grant argued, because it combined the “Tory paternalism of England” with the ethics of French Catholicism, which said “virtue must be prior to freedom”. Today, these are gone, and Grant concluded that their demise was unavoidable because no nation can resist the power of America or the temptation of individualism.
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Heroes and villains
Claudia Winkleman and The Traitors castle
Hero
Adam Ramsay, who has written a piece for the leftie website Novara Media fearlessly lambasting The Traitors for filming in a Scottish castle “built with stolen imperial wealth”. Ramsay later admitted on X that, “as various people have pointed out, I grew up in a large, castle-like house, on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, which has been in my family for many centuries”.
Hero
Jeffrey Archer, who has announced that his next book will be his last because it’s so brilliant he’ll never write anything better. The reliably immodest author, whose novels have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide, says on finishing his first draft of Adam and Eve he realised that, at 85, he could “never hope to equal it”.
What you’ve missed this week
The rest of this issue is for paying subscribers only. If you can afford it, can we persuade you to join them? Today, they’re enjoying a bumper crop of Heroes and Villains; a fabulous obituary of fashion designer Valentino, whose six pugs were ferried around in their own people carrier; and what the hilariously cutting Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has to say about Prince Philip, Winston Churchill and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s newspaper editor dad.
And that’s just today. Earlier in the week they read pieces on:
💀 China’s “Are You Dead Yet?” app
🐔 A glorious description of Robert Jenrick
🐮 Veronika the extremely clever cow
😬 UKIP’s controversial new logo
🙅 Why some Gen Zs are “seeking rejection”
🤣 A sozzled Rod Stewart doing the Scottish Cup draw
📺 TV’s “slide into stupidity”
🤯 The Democrats urging Kamala Harris to run again in 2028
🐧 A lethally addictive online game
👏 The one country where young people are still shagging
So go on, treat yourself and sign up. It’s just £40 for the whole first year, which works out at only 80p a week – an extraordinarily low price for such a lot of fun.
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