Oh, America!

The United States of America has a “culture of ignorance”. Around half of all Americans appear to feel no shame about that being so.

In the south the total probably goes up to around 65 per cent, whereas in the north (and including California), it goes down to 35 per cent.

It is a rough and ready way of putting it, but it is the other 50 per cent who voted for Obama.

Obama-types are less religious, more scientifically orientated, less racist, more pro healthcare for the poor, more aware of the world outside, more convinced that war solves little, and knowledgeable to the extent that they know their immediate neighbour, Canada, does a much better job of making a good life than their country does.

It’s the “culture of ignorance” half that is now pushing for a tougher military response to the menace of Daesh, of pumping up military muscle power vis-à-vis Russia and of persuading itself that more troops in Iraq could sort out what eight years of military occupation did not and could not.

It is this half which tried to sabotage America’s economic recovery after the 2008-9 crash by demanding tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in social welfare for the poor, and refusing to study or countenance Keynesian uplift economics.

I left England to do my master’s degree in America. I worked on the staff of Martin Luther King. I wrote a foreign policy column for nearly 20 years for a famous American paper and was selected for that role by one of the greatest editors of modern times, an American Jew who told me the day he took me on, at the age of 33, to “write what I wanted, when I wanted”.

I campaigned from a distance for Obama and think what he has achieved is historic (although I think his Russian policy is gravely mistaken).

Every time I see him on television I am reminded that no European leader has his charisma, his intelligence or his ability to talk in the most sophisticated and learned of ways.

So I love America. But I also despise America.

 I’m afraid of America’s footprint in the world. I think Europe and Canada make sense and America does not.

Dylan Roof, the young man who went into a black church in Charleston and murdered nine worshipers, is a child of the 50 per cent who make up the “culture of ignorance”.

He may be an extreme form of it, but the ingredients are all around him.

Fifty years after Martin Luther King and his winning of historic civil rights legislation, and after nearly seven years of Obama, the undercurrent of racism is alive and well.

Tied into a knot with the culture of gun ownership and the murders it breeds, it shows no sign of abating.

The senators and representatives who lead the “culture of ignorance and violence” make sure that there will be no controls on the owning of arms, even those purchased from factories that produce for the army.

These congressmen and their many friends in the media, business and finance manage to denigrate coherent, intelligent argument as somehow unpatriotic, conducted by those unaware that America is “a beacon upon a hill”.

I recall president Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, who in one diatribe spoke of America’s thinking class as “pointed headed intellectuals who can’t even park their bicycles straight”.

He would have liked the chairman of the Senate environmental committee who brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax. (I doubt either of them could throw a snowball straight!)

Half of America sincerely believes its country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom and that the quality of life surpasses that anywhere else on the planet.

Yet international rankings place America barely in the top 10.

America’s rates of murder and other violent crime dwarf the rest of the Western world and those of much of the Muslim world.

So does the prison incarceration rate, not least of young black men often convicted of non-violent, petty, crimes.

The US’ average levels of educational achievement and scientific literacy are, in world terms, embarrassingly low. (Nevertheless, its “good” 50 per cent sustains the world’s best universities, produces the most Nobel Prize winners for science and the highest standards in medicine — if one can afford it.)

In the military, one can hear high-ranking officers proclaiming that they believe in an inevitable confrontation between good and evil and that we live in the “final days”.

America teeters on the edge of abandoning reason.

Obama has tried to fight this. He has partly won and partly failed.

Sad to say, it is doubtful that any successor will do better.