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Throughout my life, I have watched the world become more American. On every continent, people learn English, watch U.S. films, wear blue jeans, and aspire to live in pluralist, capitalist, and individualist societies. The dissemination of American values was one of the happiest facts of the 20th century. But I fear that the 21st century has brought an altogether darker cultural export.

The core American value used to be freedom. Freedom of speech meant no one could drag you to jail for saying the wrong thing. Freedom of assembly meant no one could close down a political party, labor union, or church congregation for sedition. People chose their jobs, their homes, their spouses. America was conceived in liberty, and when countries escaped fascism in 1944, or communism in 1989, they aspired to be more like America.

That was then. Starting in the late 20th century and accelerating terrifyingly around 2015, the United States has switched from elevating individual rights to elevating group rights. It has, in other words, returned to the tribal thinking that its creation was intended to defy. The precepts that drove the campaign for civil rights race doesnt define you, everyone is equal before the law, character trumps skin color are now deemed reactionary and offensive. Ethnic differences (and, to a lesser degree, differences of sex, sexuality, and so forth) are deemed supremely important. They define your place in an imagined hierarchy of privilege and determine what you can say, what college scores you need, and what positions you can occupy.

We can argue about the origins of this tendency. Did it come from the notions of guilt and justification that animated the earliest settlers? (I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.) Did it arrive later, brought by socialist German academics? Or was it an overcorrection, a reaction to the ugliness of slavery and segregation?

Whatever its genesis, the American virus has leaked out and become a global pandemic. Across the West, especially in other white-majority, English-speaking countries, social questions are now seen through the distorting prism of Americas civil rights struggles.

In Britain, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. are (along with Nelson Mandela) among the most familiar historical figures, with hundreds of classrooms and junior schools named after them. Almost any British child can identify them, whereas perhaps one in a hundred could tell you anything about, say, John Locke.

Our vocabulary has become Americanized. People talk of all-white juries as though there are alternatives in chunks of rural Britain. Race relations are presented in Black Lives Matter's terms, although black people in Britain are just 3.3% of the population, less than half as numerous as, say, South Asians.

Even if we accepted the fundamentally illiberal premise of a universal black experience or a universal white experience, there is no real comparison between the American South and the rest of the Anglosphere.

There were very few black people in Britain before 1948. The first arrivals from the Caribbean had, in many cases, served patriotically in World War II and did not regard themselves as immigrants at all. Slavery was abolished in all of Britains colonies a generation before the U.S. Civil War. In the mother country, a court ruling in 1772 had established that any slave brought to Britain was free the moment he set foot on our soil.

Yet, to this day, white conservatives in Britain are trolled with images of burning crosses and Klansmens hoods, while black conservatives are called Uncle Toms and house Negroes. Quite apart from being terrifically rude, what have these things got to do with Britain?

It all comes down to the extraordinary cultural reach of American media. We watch not just The West Wing, House of Cards, and Veep, but nonpolitical dramas and comedies that shape our sense of current affairs, from Billions to The Simpsons.

I have written before about how the understandable American squeamishness about blackface now dictates that white British actors cant play black roles a wholly imported taboo. I have written about how the American Lefts anathematization of the term Anglo-Saxon has spilled over into the United Kingdom.

Some British universities have even, hilariously, picked up the acronym BIPOC though the indigenous people represented by the I are, in Britain, white. Nothing, though, beats Britains BLM protests, which saw largely white crowds shouting, Hands up, dont shoot! at unarmed London coppers.

Even in the U.S., bringing people up with inherited grievances based on how they look strikes me as dreadful. But for the rest of the world to be importing someone elses quarrel is beyond tragic.

Original post:
The world is being infected by America's race pathology - Washington Examiner