Brits need to abandon their reticence about ideas and follow the American Dream

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

“We had renounced the evils of feudalism. We had escaped from the evils of European religious bigotry. We had found broad spaces for the satisfaction of human desires in place of the crowded Europe….We were God’s “American Israel.”

These words belong to one of Barack Obama’s favourite philosophers, Reinhold Niebuhr. For, perhaps more than any other nation, the United States is founded on ideas, richly expressed in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere.

Its truths are self-evident.

It is, in the conception, a new and perfectible frontier in which all are equal, free, independent, enjoy ownership and strive to make themselves better. It is an idea that is infused with liberalism, republicanism, and morality.

Today’s United States is far from the agrarian idyll conceived by that monumental Virginian Thomas Jefferson. Each would have their plot, till their land, and make their wealth so that they could retire in leisure. Rather than the limited republic that Jefferson imagined, it now more resembles empire. Those original elemental truths remain but are now funneled through the architecture of one of the great powers that world history has seen.

So ideas have a very powerful influence indeed. Barack Obama understands this as much as anyone else. His entire campaign was constructed on this set of ideas. His movement was infused with history. It would not be going too far to say that in imagining his presidency he excavated the past in order to present a new vision of the future. That very act was richly American.

In his Democratic National Convention speech in 2004 Obama said: “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” It was precisely the same sentiment expressed by Abraham Lincoln in exactly the same spot where Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was launched in 2007. In Springfield Illinois Lincoln in 1858, Lincoln declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Barack Obama reached back to Martin Luther King – another man infused with the passion of ideas and history. In his victory speech in Iowa, his acceptance speech in Denve r- 45 years to the very day since Reverend King’s “I have a Dream speech” – and, of course, his victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago, he reached back to one the greatest figures in American history. “Our time has come”, “we are the people we have been waiting for”, “America, we cannot turn back, we cannot walk alone” are all King-ite sentiments.

In his ‘more perfect union’ speech in Philadelphia in the midst of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright scandal and again in his inauguration speech, he reached back to the founding fathers themselves. In the inaugural, President Obama said: “With eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.” This is a national journey towards justice. Little wonder that his favourite saying, one of Martin Luther King’s, of course, is: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” That is the essence of the idea that is America.

And yet, we British, where many of these ideas and values were cradled, exude a strange reticence when it comes to scouring our past to discover inspiration for the future. As if in the aftermath of an awkward family row, we leave our past undisturbed, let bygones be bygones, let sleeping dogs lie. Gone is the collective memory of our own struggles for justice: more than three centuries of toil that remain unresolved. But we lost our steam.

Britain is a place rather than an ideal – one built just as solidly on freedom, difference, progress, and morality as the United States was. Yet we lack a common narrative, a single thread, a language of expression to give these people on these islands a meaning that is greater than rising house prices and consumer choice. Like an unsecured trailer, our history – beyond swashbuckling tales of monarchs and Generals – has been left behind.

Given that the trailer’s load is very valuable indeed, we can ill afford to just carry on regardless. Just as President Obama re-ignited the American idea, re-directed for our age in the process, we must do the same. Britain cries out for women and men of vision. It craves inspiration. It needs ideas. We will only be able to the face the monumental challenges that lie before us if we can marshal our history – our own search for justice – toward a better future.