Nothing in what I’m about to say should be taken as a personal insult to any American citizen or anyone living in the States. I should also point out that normality is an illusion and not worth considering as a concept. It’s a bit like the idea of something being “natural” or “unnatural”: pretty much meaningless and only superficially significant. If you examine the concept of normality too closely, it tends to fall apart, so it depends on ignorance and unwillingness to enquire more closely. However, that very failure to examine something through lack of knowledge can also be useful in that you don’t get bogged down by facts and you can sketch something which seems realistic on the face of it to other people who don’t know much about the topic either. That’s kind of what I’m aiming at here.
There is of course a concept out there of “American Exceptionalism” and another one called “Manifest Destiny”, both of which are probably significant in forging national identity. And the US is indeed exceptional, being the world’s most powerful and wealthiest nation, and also one of the largest and most heavily populated. That isn’t what American exceptionalism means though. The idea of a normal America is, in a sense, the opposite of American exceptionalism. The question I’m asking here is what the US would be like if it wasn’t exceptional? By that, though, I’m not particularly thinking of wealth, power, population and size, although all of those may be connected to that idea. Therefore I’ll outline those two ideas first.
American exceptionalism is the idea that there is a qualitative difference and uniqueness about the USA which doesn’t apply to other countries, and sets it up as an outlier in some way. I am personally a little dubious about this regardless of whether it’s positive or negative to think this because I think of the country as a “melting pot”, that is, an amalgam of all the ethnicities and national identities making it up, who were either there before Europeans reached it, were brought with willing settlers or came unwillingly as slaves or indentured labour, and of course immigrants in more recent times. This mixture in itself could make the US exceptional because it could become more representative of the human race than other nations, but in fact the dominant image as presented to the world is of course Northwestern European. And I am myself Northwestern European, something I identify with more strongly than any national identity, so I will tend to be oblivious of the implications of that identity more than most other people might. It does seem, though, that the cultural and ethnic mixture is not generally what American exceptionalism is.
Ways in which America might be seen as exceptional have included its Puritan roots, the complete absence of feudalism from its history, freedom of religion and republicanism with a decidedly small R. England, of course, has a state religion, as had many other countries at the time, and there were also religious connectons with many social struggles in Europe centred around the authority and therefore potential sovereignty of the Roman Catholic Church, such that the alternatives seemed to be either to allow an extranational authority to have some control over a government or to have the government or head of state be also the head of the Church. The US has neither of these, and this is a very good thing. Westminster has bishops in the House of Lords and the Queen as head of the Church. The US is also a republic, and I would also say that it’s also somewhat democratic as simply being a republic because you’ve got a dictator in charge is rather pointless, at least in peacetime. Nowadays this is a pretty common situation but this was not so in 1776 and the allegiance with France makes a lot of sense here. As far as I can remember, the only other republic in Europe at the time was the microstate of San Marino, which even now only has a population of around thirty thousand. I would prefer the US to be less exceptional in this regard because I am mildly republican, mainly because I think there are much bigger issues, primarily that the UK is not communist, and I can’t see the point of having an apparently democratic republic which is still rampantly capitalist. I have a hunch that Puritanism ultimately led to the Labour Party in this country, so it’s interesting that it took such a different course in North America. The Puritans were in a sense trying to build Jerusalem in a promised land.
This brings me to the Mormons and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. To a European, or this European, the Church of the Latter Day Saints seems kind of irrelevant in a way. My understanding of Christianity, and as I’ve said before I no longer regard myself as a faithful Christian substantially because of the behaviour of certain churches in the States, is that Christ came once for the whole world, that those who couldn’t’ve heard the Good News would be judged as if they had and that there was no need for a further manifestation. It’s also abundantly clear that Native Americans are most closely genetically aligned with East Asians in the Old World and therefore not descended from the Jews. However, to someone in North America I can understand that the sense of something happening “over there” rather than on their own continent could be very strong, and here in Britain we’ve had the British Israelites, who were Gentiles who believed the English were descended from the Jews and were therefore God’s chosen people, so it even happens here.
That very White lady is carrying a book. As far as I know, the idea of Manifest Destiny is dead today, but I’m probably wrong. The idea here is that the West of the North American continent was destined to be made in the image of the East and that US institutions and people (presumably meaning Whites of European descent) were especially virtuous. I’ve heard that the Mormons believe the Constitution of the United States is divinely inspired, and this seems very much to go along with this idea. An important part of it is that there seems to be an idea of divine right and God aiding the American settlers in this aim, which is irresistible because God is on their side. I would be interested to know where Black people and Native Americans fit into this idea. I can at best only imagine paternalism. Of course I could spend time looking into this but I’m trying to use broad strokes here and use my ignorance to produce something more assertive than it might otherwise be. This will probably lead to me doing something crass and naïve, but the alternative is obfuscatory waffle and I’m not doing that here. And like American exceptionalism, I don’t feel entirely negative about the idea of Manifest Destiny (aren’t there a lot of capital letters in this post?), because if it means the spread of republican democracy that would seem to be a good thing, provided it was proper democracy as opposed to the likes of the Trail of Tears, nuclear testing on Western Shoshone land, Black slavery and indentured servitude of White people being tolerated and whole swathes of people being conveniently written out of the rights the US government is supposed to have given them.
In a sense, the idea of a “normal” America could still include exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, but in a very different form. The question I’ve set myself works like this: what would the United States be like if their distinctive character were more in line with other countries? Is there a straight line of progress from which the US have deviated and many other countries haven’t?
Canada springs to mind as an example of a nation which has pursued a different historical path but still shares features with the US. However, as a country Canada is itself quite atypical. Most Canadians live within a couple of hundred kilometres of the Forty-Ninth Parallel and Canada is of course a monarchy. It’s also barely cohesive according to some Canadians I know (again I’m being wilfully ignorant here). It’s fairly atypical nowadays for a developed country to be even a constitutional monarchy.
In South America, some countries have a large enough Native American population relative to their Europeans for it to be acknowledged officially as an influence on their culture and national life. I’ve already mentioned Bolivia on here in that respect. By contrast, US culture seems to be much more dominated by Whiteness, and I wonder why this is. I don’t think it’s entirely unfair because I suspect the population of Native Americans, even at the start of European colonisation, was smaller than it was in Central and Southern America. It obviously didn’t help that they were deliberately and accidentally infected with European diseases and massacred by the Europeans, but this wasn’t a uniquely North American thing. The thirteen most common Native American languages are Central or Southern American, or Mexican, and unlike the situation in Bolivia, Perú or Paraguay, the situation for the US as a whole is not of a single or a couple of widely spoken non-Indo-European languages. Nonetheless, the US is a federal state, so it could in theory have official second languages. Navajo is only the thirty-third most spoken language in the country. And it’s at this point that it becomes particularly clear, if it wasn’t before, that one reason the US is not “normal” is its history. Navajo is still spoken by more people than Gàidhlig is in Britain, even proportionately, and yet Gàidhlig is one of our official languages.
The second language over most of the US, perhaps surprisingly even including Alaska, is Spanish. The exceptions to this are the states of Hawaiʻi, where it’s Tagalog, the Dakotas, where it’s German, and Louisiana, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, where it’s French. The unexpected one there is Tagalog in Hawaiʻi, because why isn’t it Hawaiian? It also surprises me that Tlingit or Inuktitut are not the second language in Alaska. However, in Canada the whole country seems to be officially bilingual, so it might be expected that either the US as a whole has two official languages, English and Spanish, or that each state has an official second language such as German for North and South Dakota, but in fact the US has no official language at all. Maori is an official language in Aotearoa New Zealand, so it does happen that indigenous languages in English-speaking countries can have that status, and therefore it would also make sense for Navajo at least to be an official language in the states where it’s spoken. That, then, is one oddity about the US which could be normalised.
A second peculiarity is the nature of its democracy, more specifically the Electoral College. This exists because of the historically poor communication between Washington DC and the rest of the country, meaning that those present in the city would be better informed and make better decisions than elsewhere. It doesn’t make sense nowadays and many Western democracies have proportional representation. Therefore it could be expected that if the US was “normal”, it would also have proportional representation. There isn’t just one form of proportional representation of course, but it could be expected to have it in some manner. This would then have a knock-on effect on its party system. As it stands, the US has just two significant parties, which have moreover been rather similar to each other over much of their recent history, and this is where it gets complicated, because the right-wing nature of the Democrats has influenced party systems elsewhere in the First World. A four-year term for the Presidency, on the other hand, is pretty normal. But Congress would be expected to have a somewhat wider ranges of parties in it, and the oddity of having a President whose politics are at odds with the rest of the legislature is another anomaly which might be expected not to exist.
Then there are the three “biggies” in American politics which don’t occur much elsewhere in democratic countries: the right to bear arms, the existence of capital punishment and the strong influence of religious fundamentalism on politics. I’m not going to tell anyone else how to run their country, but I know that many Americans agree with my view on the right to bear arms, that it is not the right to bear firearms as they exist today and that they could be expected to exist within the setting of a militia. This is probably somewhat complicated by the popularity of hunting in the US. Practically anyone outside America perceives their gun culture as hazardous and pathological, even in countries which have their own such as Switzerland. I wonder in fact if the Swiss approach to firearms is closer to the intent of the US Constitution. Nonetheless, as far as I know no other Western democracy has the right to bear arms, although the fact that they’re “out there” does present a problem with gun control. There has been a similar problem in these isles with the north of Ireland in that respect. Responses to mass shootings in the rest of the world are usually to tighten gun control. It would certainly be expected that a “normal” US would have the usual prohibition of firearms to civilians.
Capital punishment is currently abolished in Europe except for Belarus and two small unrecognised republics in Eastern Europe. In North America, it exists in several Caribbean nations, including Cuba, and in South America it’s still on the books in Guyana but it’s a long time since it’s been used. On the whole the death penalty exists in countries which are either totalitarian régimes or have significant fundamentalist religious influence on their politics. This is a bit of a generalisation as, for example, it doesn’t seem to apply to India where it still exists. The biggest perpetrator by far is China. Consequently the US is definitely unusual in this respect.
Unlike the “U”K, the US is an officially secular country. For some reason this hasn’t stopped it from being strongly influenced by religion, and for atheism or non-religious sensibilities to be frowned upon in many communities. The oddity here is that the US is not unusual in being officially secular, given its position in terms of freedom and enlightenment, but it is unusual in having a strong religious influence on government policy, which is not the kind of thing you generally expect from a democracy in the developed world. In particular this influences the attitudes taken towards the queer community and abortion, as well as the teaching of evolution in schools. A more normal society would be more secular in its general community. There would be less church attendance, schooling would not be influenced by creationism, homophobia would be less acceptable and abortion rights would be enshrined in statute law rather than depending on case law. There would probably also be less support for Israel and less Islamophobia.
The issue of racism can’t be passed over here without comment. Overt and active racism is clearly endemic globally, and sadly the racism of the US is only remarkable in degree rather than qualitatively, but there would still be some differences. There would not, for example, be any attempts to impose literacy tests on the right to vote. In India, ballot papers have been illustrated for a long time and in this country we have logos representing the parties on our papers too, which I presume is linked to literacy concerns. The enormous Black prison population is also widely seen as a loophole in continuing slavery, so the prison population would be smaller and there would be more non-penal approaches to crime. But there would still be racism, and it would still be institutional and structural.
I therefore present to you the Unexceptional United States of America (UUSA):
The UUSA has a written constitution, four-year presidential terms, is a federal republic and is officially secular. In these respects it’s like the exceptional version. However, it also:
- Has proportional representation
- Has a smaller prison population
- Has the official languages of English, Spanish, French, German and Navajo, depending on the state, and possibly others.
- Has fairly liberal abortion laws
- Has several parties substantially represented in government at any one time.
- Has strong gun control.
- Is a place where racism and homophobia are considered far less acceptable.
- Has no death penalty.
I also think it would have some kind of socialised healthcare system and be less “patriotic”, e.g. there would be no Pledge Of Allegiance in schools and Old Glory would be less in evidence. American English is still spoken with its own grammar, vocabulary, accent and spelling, but they use the metric system.
Please note two things about this. Although I believe this would be a better country than the current US, I’m not explicitly advocating for this country. Also, although I’m extremely left wing, this is not a left wing America. It’s still a country where capitalism is relatively unfettered and has unfair advantages, where free enterprise is prized and where there is very little sympathy for communism. This is still a rich country with an aggressive interventionist foreign policy, and still a very unequal country, and in particular it’s still very racist.
The reasons the US is not like this are of course historical. It has a history of slavery, it was colonised by Puritans, practiced genocide on Native Americans and all of these things have left scars on its identity today. This is a fantasy America, and it would be difficult to imagine a series of events which could have led to its reality. But this is America as an unexceptional nation, and I’ve done this to illustrate what’s odd about that country. No intent to insult anyone exists here.
Have a nice day.
A Box Of Chocolates 