Freedom to Change

About fifteen years ago I was having a quiet dinner with a good book in a branch of the Olive Garden restaurant chain in Atlanta, Georgia. Being alone it was easy for me to eavesdrop on conversations going on around me, so of course I did. One in particular has stuck in my mind. A waitress was chatting with a couple at a table near me.

“So, you moved from New York! You must be finding it’s so different here!”.

I couldn’t resist a small snigger at this statement. To my European eyes and ears the differences between New York and Atlanta were so tiny as to be insignificant. OK it was a few degrees warmer here and the accent was strange in a slightly different way but in every respect that actually matters to people’s lives there was no difference between the two cities.

I thought about that conversation today while I was pondering the innate conservatism of the USA. For a country that prides itself on being the land of the free it certainly accepts a whole lot of constraints on how it goes about its business. Perhaps the clue is in that last word, business. It was Calvin Coolidge who said that “the business of America is business”. Actually he said “the chief business of the American people is business” but the first version is snappier. The context was a discussion about press freedom but I suspect the applicability is a lot wider.

One of the biggest advantages that American businesses have over those in other parts of the world is an absolutely enormous domestic market that plays by a consistent set of rules from sea to shining sea. It is this advantage that the European Union is trying to emulate by the adoption of the single market provisions of the Maastricht Treaty and of course the single currency. It’s fair to say that the former has so far been more successful than the latter but that neither of them comes close to providing the homogeneity of the USA. But I digress.

American business, and so by extension America, likes predictability. It establishes structures that are surprisingly rigid, perhaps to give it a firm platform from which to launch new ventures. Sometimes this works very well. Every electrical outlet in the whole of the USA will take the same plug. Consumer goods come in standard size packages wherever in the country you happen to be. The success of Silicon Valley over the last couple of decades is built on a platform of education, financing, infrastructure and a huge domestic market that have no equal anywhere in the world. Sometimes though the expectation of predictability applies constraints that don’t happen anywhere else in the world. Just recently I have been struck by examples of this where the USA does things differently in two superficially quite distinct areas of endeavor – high politics and professional sports.

Take sports first. During the football season that just finished the FA Premier League in England was won by Leicester City in one of the greatest underdog-comes-good stories of all time. A year ago Leicester were on the edge of relegation from the Premier League but a new manager somehow set them on a path to beating the best in the land on a regular basis with a team that cost a fraction of those fielded by Manchester United, Chelsea and the rest. It was a story that resonated around the football-playing world because pretty much everywhere in that world the top teams achieve that status by consistent excellence over many years. If they fall from grace they can be relegated to play in lower levels of competition, sometimes to return after a period in the wilderness, sometimes to continue falling through to lower and lower leagues until eventually disappearing from the map altogether. Not so in US professional sports. Teams there are first and foremost businesses and the financiers that own them wouldn’t invest if there were any possibility of relegation. Not only that but the system is arranged such that each year the best new players are allocated to the teams that had the worst record the previous season. There is no need for teams to scout the country for the best young players and it would actually be pointless to do so because they wouldn’t be allowed to sign them anyway. This system means that the professional leagues are self-perpetuating. The same teams will always play against the same teams. There are no long-term progressions. There are no existential failures. To an outsider’s eyes this lack of risk makes US professional team sports inherently uninteresting. And yet they are wildly popular in the USA. There is something in the national character that values spectacle over meaningful competition, continuity over Darwinian struggle.

The same tendencies can be seen every four years as the Presidential election cycle comes to a climax. It may not have been designed that way but the modern sequence of primary elections, caucuses and party conventions means that the process for deciding who will stand before the American people in November is a hugely expensive and complicated closed shop. I know of no other country in the democratic world where citizens need to state a party affiliation when registering to vote or where the state colludes with political parties in quite the way that it does in the USA. I checked the US Constitution. The word “Democratic” does not appear at all in the document or any of its amendments. The word “Republican” does appear but only in the context of the Constitution guaranteeing a “republican” form of government to the States. And yet everyone behaves as if the two-party system were laid down by law to provide the only possible channel for political activity. This has some strange consequences, most notably the way that there is almost no political coherence or discipline to either party. Both of them are merely vehicles. As an outsider looking at the first two years of the Obama presidency I couldn’t understand why it seemed impossible to get anything much done when the Executive and the Legislature were controlled by the same party. Eventually I understood that the two parties are actually corporations and the real politics takes place in structures that have nothing to do with whether the politician follows the donkey or the elephant. In Europe over the past few years insurgent politicians have started their own parties like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain. In the USA the insurgents – Trump and Sanders - have been constrained to operate under the banners of the establishment.

So what does this all prove? I’m not really sure but there are one or two lessons. Mostly it is that there are more cultural differences between the US and Europe than may be obvious at first sight. The idea of freedom is so central to the American self-image and yet in many ways the American Way is much more constrained than systems in other parts of the world. For two hundred years the American system delivered wealth and power greater than any country has ever known. The desire not to try to fix something that ain’t broke is strong. However in the last decade or so something has gone awry. How else to account for the rise of Donald Trump? Maybe it’s almost time to loosen up some of the bindings and try some other kinds of freedom. Lyndon B Johnson famously said that “Freedom is not enough” while Robert Frost said that freedom lies in being bold. Wise men both.