Overnight Thread: Let’s Use de Tocqueville and Shirley Sherrod to Rip America!

Julia Baird, who hails from Oz, probably wouldn’t dare write this in Newsweek, where she’s currently (but for how long?) gainfully employed as a deputy editor. But she feels perfectly free to unload on the land that gives her sustenance in the pages of The Age, one of the leading Australian newspapers.

And you know what she thinks of America? She thinks it’s weird:

America’s weirdness is well documented. And I don’t mean just the plastic-surgery addicts in LA, the outsourcing, pill-popping perfectionists in New York, the toddler pageants, the deep fried Oreos, or even the testicle festivals, the smelly sneaker competitions or the towns that speak their own language and print their own money. Or the fact that four in 10 Americans believe alien abductions have occurred. Or even that in Connecticut you are not allowed to walk across a street on your hands. Nor are you allowed to cross the Minnesota border with a duck on your head. In Florida it is illegal to sing outside in a swimming costume, for unmarried women to skydive on Sunday, and for men to leave the house in a strapless dress. Which cuts out half of Sydney’s social life.

In truth, many parts of the everyday are more peculiar than the freak shows in the US, at least to the Australians who come to visit or live here for a while. At first it’s the enormous food portions, entire aisles of drugstores devoted to digestive aids, the blatant, direct advertising of pharmaceuticals, a sugar-drenched gastronomic culture which rebrands fatty meals as “family guy” specials and the fact that in Manhattan women use Botox to shrink earring holes and corner stores peel mandarins for you.

So far, so much fish in a barrel. America’s patchwork of crazy local laws, most of them superannuated and both unenforced and unenforceable, is a standing target easily perforated in five minutes’ research on the Internet.

But sometimes the surface weirdness can obscure the real differences between Australia and America. Most expatriates talk about how some things we take for granted back home – fully publicly funded healthcare, unemployment benefits (without an expiry date), compulsory retirement savings – are anathema to most people here. Many of the fundamentals of our system, such as these, are dismissed as socialism or scarily big government, even though the US government is running record budget deficits. Americans shrug off our example of a sustainable social welfare net as a consequence of a small population.

Yes, it’s breaking news that America is not Australia, and that while the two countries are roughly the same size geographically, Oz has two-thirds the population of California, and is only slightly larger than the Greater New York metropolitan area, so who really cares what they think?

The vapidity at the heart of this foolish article then leads Ms. Baird to a discussion of — of all things — de Tocqueville (whom it’s highly doubtful she’s ever read, except in excerpts). Steel yourself for some blinding insights into the American character from not one but two Australians:

But the most extraordinary and ongoing fight in America is that over democratic ideals, as Peter Carey has reminded us in his wonderful book Parrot and Olivier, which has just been nominated for the Booker Prize. In it, he retells the story of the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America in the 1830s and whose book, Democracy in America, provided startling and prescient insights into the American psyche and character.

Carey believes that many of de Tocqueville’s concerns about democracy and the national love of wealth have been forgotten. When it came to the rule of the majority, Carey told me, instead of an educated electorate, de Tocqueville saw a mob: “He feared that the lack of education, the obsession with money, the lack of interesting culture would lead to a very mediocre culture catering to people who had money and time.” This, Carey fears, has come true. De Tocqueville wrote, “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”

There it is: it all about money. No visiting foreigner’s ever made that observation before or since! But she’s not done:

The American experiment is continuing. It remains dynamic and robust, even if at times it is deeply unsettling – the tension and dark undercurrents are ever-evident, perhaps especially to outsiders, and particularly in the disastrous recent attempts to export it, in some angrier elements of the Tea Party movement, and in incidents like the racist nonsense that led to the unfounded sacking of Shirley Sherrod. As de Tocqueville predicted – and Carey reminds us – majority rule can be ugly, and mad at times.

And there you have it: the Democrat-Media Complex in full cry, pursuing a partisan issue under the pretext of writing somewhat incoherently about Tocqueville.

No wonder Newsweek is on the block — whether auction or chopping remains to be seen.