Less noticed changes in the United States

Linda Colley, Guardian News Service, London

Coming back to the United States after five years in London, I am struck by how much has changed since I last worked here. I am struck, too, by how much about America -- including a great deal that is good -- barely gets reported in Britain.

To begin with, it seems a markedly more cosmopolitan place. The plurality of television channels means that the world is now beamed into ordinary American households to an unprecedented degree. Of course, Fox News allows Murdoch to extend his influence over what people see and think. And, of course, wealthy lobbies take their cut. You can tune in every week, for instance, to a show devoted to raising money for shipping Russian Jews to Israel.

This is less humanitarianism pure and simple than the activism of America's religious right. The idea is that deserving individuals from the former communist evil empire will serve to boost Israel's Jewish population, thereby keeping the Palestinians firmly in their place and enhancing the ties between Christian and Jewish fundamentalists that the likes of the evangelist Jerry Falwell now consider indispensable.

Yet these kind of programs are only one part of the story. More significant is that there is an astonishing plurality of voices. Viewers where I am living now, in New Jersey, can watch BBC World News three times a day; they can also watch news broadcasts by German, Spanish and Irish stations. Moreover, the televisions that are sold in their millions in American supermarkets now feature these foreign channels as part of their built-in package. You don't have to pay extra for cable TV in order to access them.

This is radically different from how it was in the States even in the 1990s. Then, in order to get a different take on global events, I had to lean over my radio trying to make sense of the BBC's World Service in between the static. Now, the world is on the TV screen; just as the world's press is on the computer screen. The importance of all this for the growing debate in America on the Iraq war and Bush's presidency cannot be underestimated.

The extent of this debate was the second striking thing. This was exemplified by an event at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. A New York lawyer called Larry Kramer talked about what he saw as the supreme court's current and excessive role in America's political system. A ritualized academic event developed into a much wider discussion of the health (and otherwise) of democracy in the U.S. that went on all evening.

Nor should one dismiss this as just the chattering classes at work in one of America's most liberal universities. The local newspapers here are full of letters from blue-collar workers complaining about the economy, and from elderly residents attacking the war (Bush's ratings with the over-65s are dropping fast at present). On TV, and in the mainstream broadsheets, too, there are arguments virtually every day not just for and against the war, but about what it says about America's politics, identity and global status.

For a foreigner, there are both attractive and unattractive aspects to this non-stop analysis. Many of the debates are characterized by what a Canadian writing in the New York Times recently styled blatant Americanism. The message that the U.S. is not only the most powerful state in today's world, but also the best governed and most benign power in all of recorded history comes over loud, clear and often. But while this can grate, such patriotic self-congratulation has its up side.

Most people here still believe that things can get better -- and that things should get better. These great expectations on the part of the people below mean that American politicians who don't deliver or who appear to be doing wrong can get a very rough ride. If Iraq continues to be controversial, and if the Democrats find a leader with an ounce of charisma, the next presidential election is wide open.

The final thing that impressed me seems parochial compared to all this, yet it really is all of a piece. Princeton University is triumphantly a gynocracy. Its president is a woman, as is its provost, as is its librarian, as is the head of the Woodrow Wilson School, probably the world's richest academic institution. Such female prominence has now become the norm in America's ivy league. Half of these institutions now have women provosts.

The contrast with British academe is striking. Britain's universities rely on female as well as male taxpayers, yet the vast majority are still run by men. Ivy league universities are privately funded, yet give increasing prominence to women. Even the most conspicuous British exception only goes to prove this rule. Cambridge University's new vice-chancellor is a woman -- but she had to be recruited from America.

So for professional women, the U.S. still in the main offers better prospects than Britain or the rest of Europe does. This is as true of industry or investment banking, say, as it is of academe.

But what about America's gross economic inequalities? What about its acute racial problems? Its rulers' apparent unconcern for the world's climate? Its superabundance of weapons of mass destruction? I wouldn't deny any of this. If I dwell on its openness to global news, on the vitality of its political debate, and on its superior opportunities for women, this is not out of blind Americophilia, but rather because these things receive insufficient attention in Europe.

The U.S. tends to figure in European commentary more as an emblem than as it actually is (and vice versa of course). For many on the right, America is to be routinely celebrated because it stands for free enterprise and global power; for many on the left, America merits perpetual suspicion and censure for the self-same reasons.

Yet these reactions are wrong. Both the knee-jerk approval of the right and the instinctive disapproval of the left miss out on a vitally important historical fact. From the American revolution right up to World War II, the U.S. was more likely to provoke suspicion among members of the British establishment than deferential approval.

It was seen -- with good cause -- not just as a potential rival for empire, but also as dangerously egalitarian, worryingly innovatory, and excessively democratic. Now that it rules the world, these radical and reformist aspects of America can easily get forgotten.

At the end of the year, George W. Bush will be visiting London. Crowds of anti-war demonstrators will almost certainly excoriate him and -- in some cases -- his country. Tony Blair will, just as predictably, label these critics anti-American. Yet, in both cases, a more discriminating and more accurate appraisal of America would be no bad thing.

Future British prime ministers may well find it better for their health and for their majorities to distinguish between pro- Americanism on the one hand and being necessarily supportive of American foreign policy adventures on the other.

But, by the same token, those who are alienated by the latter could usefully remember that America's revolution is still going on. And that some of it is worth Europe's close attention and emulation.