A model for whom?

Former British Ambassador and now political commentator and author Craig Murray blog about A Different Culture 01/24/08, talking about how he is struck by how much the United States is distancing itself from the European Union forms of democracy. He quotes from The Americans and us: nought for our or their comfort by Brian Barder, Ephems blog 01/24/08:

Then there's the paradox that while you in the United States have constitutional provision to ensure separation of church and state, while we in Britain actually have an established church (the Church of England being the legally protected religious arm of the state), in practice even devout religious believers like Blair are forced to try to keep religion out of their political utterances because in this profoundly secular society, religion is a big turn-off for the majority of the adult population: as Blair's press secretary and alter ego, Alastair Campbell, hastily interjected when his master was asked about his religious beliefs, "We don't do God."

It's sad because it's another example of the steadily widening gulf between the political culture in the US and that in the rest of the west, exemplified by the Iraq war (leaving aside, if possible, the UK's culpable complicity in it), the so-called "war on terror" and its implications for civil liberties, extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay, the role of religion, attitudes to capital punishment and the treatment of prisoners, demonstrative patriotism, and now the role of the US sub-prime market in bringing about the impending recession which will engulf the rest of us as well as the United States. Alas, it's no longer the case that the rest of the civilised world looks to the US as its moral and political leader. And I fear that the causes of this ever-widening gulf go much deeper than just the consequences of the catastrophic presidency of G W Bush: whoever succeeds him will not be able to build a durable bridge across it. Many of us small-L liberals used to feel that we had more in common with our American cousins than with our historical enemies just across the English Channel, the French and the Germans, and even our slightly more distant historical friends, the Scandinavians and the Dutch. I don't think that's true any more. (my emphasis)

Murray adds to Barder's comments:

I think we underestimate how different and dangerous the US now is. Last year I delivered a talk on Central Asia at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As I sat preparing my lecture, I had the television on low in my hotel room because I don't like complete silence. Gradually I found myself listening intently to an evangelical preacher, telling his TV congregation that they should not worry about casualties in Iraq because the Bible showed us that there had to be a great and bloody conflict in the Middle East before the Second Coming of Christ. So the more people who died in these wars, the closer we are to Jesus.

Now that message would be acceptable to very few people in the UK - just Tony Blair and his immediate friends, really.

We're going from Thomas Jefferson's "city on the hill" to Dick Cheney's Gulag in Guantánamo. This is not progess.

Tags: authoritarianism, european union

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