America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two-thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies from Chinese authoritarianism to Islamism look deeply unappealing. There is a reason so many people are hammering at the republic’s borders.
Yet, at the same time, the U.S. is starting to behave like some of the tinpot autocracies from which those migrants want to escape. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.
Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a “Father of the Nation” type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a kind of treachery, the other things follow.
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that the rest of us refer to his country in English as “Turkiye”, he invites us to treat Turkey as a post-colonial failed state rather than as an ancient and mighty civilization. We use English exonyms for serious places. No one demands that we say Deutschland, Nippon, Magyarország. But touchy third worldists demand Cote d’Ivoire, Timor-Leste, and Cabo Verde — and, now, Gulf of America, the classic needy country move.
The ultimate defining feature of the Third World is corruption. In the classic distinction drawn by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, rich people in inclusive states are entrepreneurs, whereas rich people in extractive states are politicians. President Donald Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since he took office, mainly through his family crypto ventures. It might not be illegal, but it would have been regarded by previous generations of Americans as disgusting.
Imagine if, say, Bill Clinton or Joe Biden had set up family crypto businesses. Imagine if an Arab dictatorship had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Imagine if, a few weeks later, the Arab dictatorship had suddenly been cleared to buy advanced artificial intelligence chips that had, until then, been denied export permits on grounds of national security. What would have been the media response?
I think we all know the answer. Yet, in this case, the coverage has been bizarrely muted. Right-wing media have largely ignored the story, while leftist media have assumed a tone of exasperated resignation.
Is the story too complicated? No. It is at least as easy to grasp what Trump is supposed to have done wrong as to understand what Hillary Clinton was meant to have done wrong over Benghazi, or Joe Biden over his son’s laptop. And even if people really do struggle to understand the details of the chips deal, surely everyone can grasp that there’s something wrong with an American president accepting a $400 million private plane from a different Arab state as, for all intents and purposes, a personal gift.
Is the explanation, then, sheer chutzpah? Does Trump get a pass because he never pretends to be a saint? In a world where all politicians are assumed to be shysters, is he excused because he at least lacks hypocrisy? Has he intuited that, for most voters, corruption is defined as “holds views with which I disagree”, meaning that half the country will think of you as a crook regardless of how you behave. Has he clocked that this polarization paradoxically enables much worse behavior?
ORDINARY BRITISH VOTERS DESERVE THE BLAME
Perhaps. I think, though, that there is a much simpler explanation. Americans are simply unused to this kind of behavior from their leaders and lack the vocabulary to respond. For all that people moan about their politicians, the U.S. has always been a country where sleaziness, even when it stops short of outright rule-breaking, carries an electoral penalty. Until now. The sight of foreign governments piling into private Trump-owned companies so as to win his favor, or the sight of his extended family becoming implausibly rich with overseas deals — these things go under-reported because no one really knows how to react. The idea that the U.S. might actually be adopting a more Latin American approach to standards in public life seems too outlandish to contemplate.
Then again, as Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done cannot be undone”. Those who have downplayed, excused, or ignored Trump’s venality will struggle to find grounds on which to oppose equally sleazy behavior from a successor in either party. Standards have been permanently lowered. We will look back wistfully on what was lost.