Time for US to see reality

I lived on and off in the United States for three years in the late 1990s. In all that time, I don't remember a single conversation about politics that I didn't initiate.

People would talk if prompted, especially about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but their views, even on that fiercely divisive crisis, didn't spring to their lips unbidden.

I was struck therefore, during a brief visit to the US last week, by an obvious change. At least four times - in a diner, in a taxi, on a train, at an airport - Americans who didn't know me from Adam launched into unprovoked discussions of the election. There is surely some glimmer of hope in the odd fact that George W. Bush and his cronies, who care so little for it, might just have saved American democracy.

At one level, the passion that will animate today's election is rather strange. Bush and Kerry are both scions of the east coast establishment. Both get most of their money from big business. Both present themselves as deeply religious Christians. Both claim the high ground of militarist patriotism. (Remember Kerry cringe-makingly "reporting for duty"? ) Both take for granted America's right to lead the world. Both, initially at least, thought the invasion of Iraq was okay. The differences between them are real, but they hardly explain the abyss of visceral emotion that separates Bush and Kerry voters who otherwise agree on so much.

It seems to me that the profound conflict we are witnessing is generated by something more than a set of disagreements about public policy. The virtual civil war is driven, rather, by opposite reactions to the same phenomenon: the decline of America's belief in its own superiority. For most of its modern history, America has been, not just a place, but an ideal. It has been held together by the notion that it is, in a sense, a sacred place. It is a secular heaven-on-earth, a New Jerusalem with cars and fridges and flat-screen TVs. It is the best thing that has ever happened in human history, a state of grace to which all humanity aspires and which it will, at some happy time, attain.

This notion is now unsustainable. The American historian, Tony Judt, gives an excellent summary of its collapse in the current New York Review of Books: "With our growing income inequities and child poverty; our under-performing schools and disgracefully inadequate health service; our mendacious politicians and crude, partisan, media; our suspect voting machines and our gerrymandered congressional districts; our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws - our own and other people's: we should not be surprised that America has ceased to be an example to the world. The real tragedy is that we are no longer an example to ourselves."

The great divide in America now is between two different ways of reacting to the collapse of belief in the nation as the best of all possible worlds. One reaction is to replace that secular faith with a religious one. It is not accidental that there has been a huge turn towards fundamentalist religion in the US over the last two decades or that George W. Bush has gone further than any previous president in using the language of born-again Christianity as a substitute for political argument. He and the zealots around him have created a powerful system of denial in which an apocalyptic clash between Good and Evil has replaced rational politics. The great utility of this faith-based politics is that it is utterly impervious to evidence and events: a large majority of likely Bush voters still believe, for example, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was in cahoots with al-Qaeda.

The other reaction is to acknowledge the problem and suggest, however tentatively, ways of dealing with it. Kerry and his supporters still cling to the notion that America is capable of infinite greatness, but they at least know that the ideal is mocked by current realities. They know that the disaster in Iraq has demonstrated the limited utility of US military power; that the American dream is long over for the millions of families who work their guts out for appalling wages and can't afford to get sick because they have no health insurance; that America's consumer culture is now dependent on foreign debt and foreign investment.

They know that the greatest achievement of their mighty economy - its plethora of world-class transnational corporations - has ended up exporting their jobs. They may feel unable to acknowledge the depth of these problems or to spell out the tough choices that will have to be made. But they at least recognise that the pretence that all of these complexities can be subsumed into an epic conflict of Good and Evil will only make things worse.

Between these two responses, there is almost no middle ground. The two sides, sometimes literally, don't talk the same language. But at least they're talking about something real. Bush, in his own way, has exposed the delusions of America's self-image far better than any left-wing critic ever could. We can only hope that enough Americans have heard what he has inadvertently told them to kick him out and start the process of getting a grip on reality.