For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic have me thinking about the differing social models in the two countries, and I am just going to collate some of my impressions here. I will be appealing to various facts and figures but also just my own impressionistic sense of things. The big picture view is that I think that in some ways the USA is in a worse state than the UK, but I would be more optimistic about the USA's future despite that.
So the major difference that has basically defined my whole experience of adult life is that since 2008 the British economy has more or less been stagnating when not actually declining.
It's not that there's been no growth, it's just been on the whole pretty slow. This is unlike the USA, which has actually experienced periods of sustained economic growth in that time:
And, like, you can feel this difference from within the countries. Among many people my age and younger people think of our governments in the UK as just relentlessly dour and miserable, a social contract entirely consisting of working just to keep afloat and where any suggestion that things might be better is scoffed at as naive if not dangerous. (What maybe marks people around my age out here, by the way, is being just old enough to have witnessed the pre-crash times while socially and politically conscious, but not old enough to have actually experienced it as a full participating member of the economy.) I strongly did not and do not get that impression in the USA - while there is plenty of bad stuff going on there, and plenty of dissatisfaction with the economic order in particular, I do not get the impression of a society where people simply do not believe things can or will get better. The complaints are about corruption, unfairness, and inequity; not as much about hopelessness, stagnation, lack of political imagination.
That said, this does not immediately and straightforwardly entail things are just all round better off in the USA. For one thing, while both countries have pretty high levels of wealth inequality, the USA is even more unequal than the UK. And per this tweet from a journalist who did some of the datavis here: "living in the US is obviously more expensive. Adjusting for prices, the gap falls to £41k vs £57k. We could go further: in 2022 US workers did 18% more hours a year than British workers. If US workers got the same hourly rate but did UK hours, they’d be on about £48k."
So while people in the USA are richer, they are working longer hours and generally paying a higher price for their stuff. What is more, when you look at how people are actually using their extra income, a lot of that is going on housing and healthcare;
And, as we shall see, it's not obvious people in the USA are actually getting better healthcare out of this. That said, just informally, it does seem to me that US abodes are actually generally nicer and larger than what you would see from people working jobs about equivalent in terms of social standing in the UK. And this seems to be backed up by what stats I can find. You spend a lot of time in your house! It being more spacious and having nicer stuff therein is not a small deal.
On net, while it's not as much of a gap in standards of living as just looking at the GDP gap would make things appear initially, I think that in addition to the larger houses the difference in economic performance is felt on some emotional level. All this does make a difference to the "vibe" in the respective countries.
There are, however, some ways where the UK is frankly much better. As this thread makes clear, your life expectancy is just longer in the UK, pretty much wherever you are on the income distribution.
Burn-Murdoch is able to make the point dramatically when he
notes "the average American now has the same healthy life expectancy (years lived in good health) as someone in Blackpool, the town with England’s lowest life expectancy". While I do in fact think a lot of that is to do with our having a better healthcare system, there are also lifestyle differences and an incredibly high level of
ambient violence in the USA compared to the UK.
And, again, I think this is another thing difference you can feel just by going about your life in the two countries. People are dissatisfied about healthcare in both, but in the UK the overwhelming national mood is one of basically believing in the system we have and wanting it run better, whereas in the USA there is a large swathe of public opinion more deeply dissatisfied. Fear of violent crime is of course a constant everywhere, but again the highly dramatic incidents of mass murder in the USA, far far rarer in the UK, have brought to general awareness some difference in cultures here and resulted in somewhat macabre and unpleasant memes being common currency (
e.g. etc).
That makes comparisons a bit difficult. People in the UK are poorer than the USA, but have more free time and live longer. You might wonder - how much money would I spend to have more time to spend with my friends and family, both just in terms of literal years alive and also in terms of time to do as one wills? The answer will presumably vary from person to person, but for many of us it is going to be quite a large sum, and whatever differences exist between the UK and the USA have to take that into account. There is, to be clear, presumably
no reason you could not try to combine the best of both social models - but in any case this is the choice one presently makes between the two.
The popular culture between the two countries is remarkably similar, and here because of the overwhelming dominance of American entertainment and consumer culture. Much of what is distinctive about UK culture has been steamrolled throughout the late 20th and early 21st by US led global capitalism; which, of course, we Brits are liable to feel somewhat aggrieved by. But the American version of doing this to us was far more peaceable than how the Brits steamrolled local cultures with gunships back in the day, so in the grand historical scheme of things we've perhaps the least right in the world to complaint. Not that idiosyncratic British culture is entirely gone by any means (I always particularly enjoy the stories of towns expressing their frustrations by
burning effigies of whatever has recently annoyed them on Bonfire night), and the taste in sports remains genuinely distinct. But on the whole I think you will not feel a huge difference in pop culture between the two - and this is because the USA is still creating the most interesting things, and the UK largely just responding to that.
On the subtler aspects of culture - there are some differences. In my experience I found Americans generally far more uptight than Brits, though in general I think this might be difference between America and much of the old world (not all: Germany and Japan both do seem a bit more formal than the US in my experience). And here there is a huge cultural mismatch between Americans self-conception and their behaviour - where I think they often self-conceive of their country as a bit more loose and informal, reflecting more egalitarian norms or the like. And it is more egalitarian in some important respects!
For instance, ignore what Europeans will tell you - America is far less racist than the old-world in every day interactions; its just less dramatic in its implications cos of generally lower inequality and less violence. And yet, American cities are segregated in a way that in the UK, outside of Belfast for obvious reasons, would feel shocking. This is something I felt on a personal level, actually being subject to some very minor harassment when I lived in an Italian-American neighbourhood, but facing no problems at all when I moved into a black neighbourhood. And the stats bear this out:
So we end up in this strange situation where American culture is more egalitarian but also more segregated - people acknowledge they should be equals but do not have regular experience of casual friendly intercourse. This has led, I believe, to American egalitarian culture largely developing via people being very sensitive to sins against presumption of equal standing and suggestions of status differences. So to protect against violations of these sensibilities a generally more uptight and rule-bound culture has developed, which spills over into just generally being more serious and on the look out for rule breakers. You can't trust that people are civic friends, but you feel strongly they ought to be civic equals, so you have to be on the look out for their rule compliance. Memes have also noticed this (
e.g.) and the more easy-going attitude to interpersonal interactions was one of the things I missed most about the UK while living in the US - I think, in fact, it was part of why I ended up forming such a fondness for
Charles Mills as a mentor, since he was also just generally a more unserious person. Dour Protestant moralism, even where it is not actually accompanied by credal adherence to any Protestant sect, is very much the order of the day in much of the USA.
(Also: impromptu public or communal singing is just a thing Americans do less than Brits. Their sporting culture features it far less, and it is also not something that happens spontaneously when people go to the pub or bar together. I feel like
this scene would be incomprehensible to the American mind.)
All this is, I think, the background to the somewhat unpleasant political situations in both countries right now. The US is a
global outlier in the degree to which its politics is affectively polarised - meaning people on different political sides both disagree sharply and also hate each other for it, roughly. (This is a cultural difference I also felt but I do not trust my experience - my most extensive time in the US was while as a grad student in a humanities programme. This made my experience of this exact phenomenon much more extreme, I think, than the typical Americans' would be.) But even if we're not quite at each other's throats in the same way, we do also have a rising
ethnonationalist right just constantly absolutely furious, prone to believing conspiratorial nonsense, and filled with dreams of purgative violence that would somehow make all the unhappiness go away. In the USA those people actually have power, whereas in the UK the centre right discredited themselves and now it's the centre left's turn, so one feels that after Starmer comes Farage. I hope not, we'll see how it goes. I just want to note that the USA's political present would seem, at the moment, to foreshadow the UK's near future.
My personal explanation for this is that the electorate in rich western democracies right now really really hated post-pandemic inflation and did the typical thermostatic public opinion thing where they just blamed whoever was in power for that. This swept Labour to power in the UK and the Republicans to power in the USA. So far so normal, but, somewhat unusually, this all came after a very high stress and unusual event - pandemic and the lockdown - had generated a whole bunch of people who'd spent a bunch of time online getting radicalised by Influencers from the already-on-the-upswing far right.
And the story these Influencers told was that this isn't just that prices went up and that was annoying - oh no. This was <basically identikit fascist story about Betrayal by disloyal elites who have forgot the True Volk and who must be dislodged by a Strong Leader who will Reaffirm Our Greatness etc etc>. So now a solid core of aforementioned electorates are just completely poisoned on normal political mechanisms being anything like adequate to address their fundamentally vague lingering sense of dissatisfaction. And they will remain as such, since the basically identikit fascist narrative is designed to be unresolvable and promote distrust of anyone telling you otherwise. So this sizeable chunk of voters are more or less locked into the negative phase of thermostatic reaction, and liable to keep simply demanding ever more radical action in the mistaken belief that if only the traitors were purged they'd feel better again.
All of this made worse by another political commonality between the UK and the USA. A lot of the sensible moderate centrist crowd are, in some deep way, in agreement with the far right. Not actually about the values - but about something more nebulous, something like authenticity or right to govern. All that stuff about a True Volk and out-of-touch-elites; I think a lot of the centrist crowd actually believe of themselves that they are elites, who are out of touch, who are somehow less Real than others. And the huge inequality in both countries contributes to that, as well as background racial ideologies! When the far right conjure up a somewhat fantastical image of a True Working Brit/American it is inevitably an incredibly reactionary white guy who loves cops, hates immigrants and trans people, and really resonates with a stereotypical image of the national culture. (Witness the role of "Joe the Plumber" in the Obama-McCain election, or "Workington Man" in the UK 2019 election.) And I think because of genuine economic inequality in both countries, exacerbated by affective polarisation in the US and the
incredibly narrow the class-base of UK journalism over here, our commentariat are just unable to call shenanigans on this image. (I would also like to mention here that the
UK wealth elite are concentrated in London, which further exacerbates this, and are if anything a bit to the right of the population ideologically.) All this means our Sensible Centrist friends are easily emotionally pressured into conceding ground to the far right.
Features of the UK situation will mitigate this when it comes for us: there is generally less violence here so a smaller base frothing at the mouth to see it deployed. But features of the UK will also make it worse: a political culture locked in to discouraging any sense that anything will ever change for the better is extremely poorly positioned to respond or adapt to people demanding change-in-a-nebulous-sense. Even the informality I prefer in UK culture - relying on informal norms of civic friendship is all very well and good while they are respected, then disastrous when they are not and you will miss the formality. (This may well have political analogues: parliamentary sovereignty relying on informal precedents preventing it becoming tyrannical will fare poorly compared to the US constitutional system if under direct authoritarian assault, and the US system has not been holding up too well. Then again, lacking an obvious post to get taken up by strongman in the way a Presidency creates will be to our advantage.) So my guess is -- when the populist right get their way here not all of the results will be as dramatically bad as they have been in the US. Threats to invade our neighbours and
murderous farm-raids will, I think, be less a part of the deal. But a generalised air of cruelty will still pervade, and in the UK is far more likely to be locked in as an unchangeable feature of our politics going forward.
(All of this is assuming Reform do not actually decide to blow up the Good Friday agreement. If they do that we will get all the bad stuff I said plus ultra-violence that may end up being far worse than what was witnessed in the USA.)
The international Low Trust Cohort marches on never satisfied, wrecking everything they touch. But in
the USA I think they may be able to change and adapt to it, because what
all these differences amount to is a more dynamic culture. The UK will mitigate the worst of it to a greater extent than the USA, but is more likely to lock-in whatever damage is done.
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