10 November

All of the stuff about Nazis and authoritarian/fascist takeovers in the US are the sort of hysteria that is endemic to US culture. Nick Bryant was US correspondent for the BBC there for 13 years and I think nails much of what is broken in US culture, and which has always been broken. It's always been at war with itself, that's the culture. Just a small sample: The Revolution of 1776 consecrated the idea that resistance to authority could be sacred. From the Boston Tea Party to the Declaration of Independence, Bryant notes, America’s creation story sanctified defiance as a civic virtue. This “origin story” left an enduring cultural residue: rebellion became not the exception but a moral inheritance. Bryant shows that even violent movements define themselves as restorations of the true American ideal, not rejections of it. The American obsession with guns, Bryant argues, is less about hunting or self-defence than about a symbolic right to rebellion — a perpetual reminder of the people’s supposed sovereignty through force. Bryant traces a recurring American belief that crises cleanse the nation — that civil conflict, rather than consensus, is how renewal happens. From Lincoln’s rhetoric of “a new birth of freedom” through the Vietnam and Iraq eras, Americans have repeatedly framed internal struggle as redemptive.