Against American Parochialism
What Americans lose when they ignore international perspectives
My Sunday morning ritual in recent weeks has solidified. Our commute to and from church takes about 50 minutes, which I fill with a couple of my favorite podcasts that usually release the day before. On the way to church, I listen to the Good Faith podcast with David French and Curtis Chang, a podcast I’d describe as being on “healthy Christianity”, to prepare my heart and mind, as Christians often put it, for the service.
And on the way home, I listen to a very similarly-named podcast The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, a political scientist focused on defending and promoting lowercase liberal democracy throughout the world. His podcast often features in-depth discussions with guests who are experts on the political systems of countries whose political history I admit that I’d previously been only passingly familiar with, from India to Turkey to Spain. And the intro often features either Mounk’s own thoughts on recent political discourse or a blurb for a recent article published on his newsletter called Persuasion.
In that intro on today’s most recent podcast (whose main conversation featured a fascinating discussion on refugees and the politics of immigration), Mounk expressed a general frustration with the recent brouhahas over Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Rogan, and Ilya Shapiro. He admitted that while he often wants to defend the US to his fellow Europeans — he became a US citizen in 2017 — he admits that he agrees with a common European critique of American “Puritanical censoriousness.”
This sort of reaction surprised me, and I can see where the Europeans are coming from. Whether it’s firing an employee who feels threatened in a park or banning a graphic novel from public libraries (sending it straight to the top of all the bestseller’s lists!), censorship is one of the most common tools that both sides of the usual American dichotomy employ. The most common opinions tend to range from “all the censorship the left does is legitimate and all the censorship the right does is illegitimate” to the other way around.
In this political moment, while there is still plenty of censorship on the right, mostly centered around loyalty to Trump (e.g. the censure of Republicans Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for serving on the House 1/6 committee), it’s still widely recognized that the most zealous censors tend to be left of center. So as Americans usually conceive of Europeans generally being to the left of the US, it struck me as surprising that they would find the tactics their putative allies on the US left employs today tiresome.
That surprise leads me to an obvious conclusion: Perhaps progressives just have a different way of pursuing common progressive goals in Europe. And perhaps just thinking through those international differences in approach could very well be instructive in deciding what to do in one’s present context.
I had a similar reaction upon hearing another fascinating Good Fight episode from November 2020, with former Charlie Hebdo journalist Caroline Fourest, discussing some of the nuances around the French concept of laïcité, commonly translated as “secularism,” and how it doesn’t actually line up with the American conception of the separation of church and state.
In the episode, Mounk raises a few examples of French laws that in an American context would often be seen as Islamophobic, which Fourest replies that the Anglophone press had missed too much of the context. For instance, laws prohibiting female-only swimming pool time sessions were actually feminist reactions to a phenomenon in certain places of those women who chose to go swimming outside of those sessions being denounced as whores.
Fourest also expresses concerns that the American political concepts, and in particular, the emphasis on identity, had seeped too much into French discourse. Mounk raises an interesting example of a brief spat between the comedian Trevor Noah and the French ambassador to the US over a joke about France’s World Cup win actually being Africa’s due to the race of many of the best French players. While it was comedic, the ambassador sternly criticized that sentiment, saying that those players are fully French, and to distinguish between them would be a form of racism itself.
Fourest’s monologue at the end of the podcast is so good and so relevant to this subject that it’s worth paraphrasing here in full:
“We should all be very careful not to simplify these very complex issues. We should be modest sometimes that maybe there are different ways to fight racism depending on the context. When you’re facing both fanaticism, radicalism, terrorism AND racism, you need to adapt and be strategic and fight both types of dangers simultaneously. Respecting that diversity, that complexity, should be what a progressive is.
“What I see in the American news is a simplistic woke morality that I feel is so helpful for the extreme right. If it’s all about identity, then white people will see themselves on the side of Donald Trump. No, anti-racism is about being in this together against racism. We need white people to be on the side of equality. If we forbid people from speaking or penalize them for misspeaking, there can be no conversation, no persuasion.”
The very name of the holidays this week raises another example of this diversity of approaches towards achieving diversity itself. In the US, it’s become accepted wisdom to call the lunisolar calendar’s first day “Lunar New Year” to be accommodating to non-Chinese Asian Americans who also celebrate the holiday. Some would even characterize white people with a partial understanding of the holiday wishing a “Happy Chinese New Year” as a microaggression.
Meanwhile, in Singapore (which despite the misconception some Americans have is not a part of China), everyone just calls the biggest holiday of the year “Chinese New Year.” Friends I’ve discussed this with here have confirmed that the same is true in Malaysia and Thailand. This raises a question: If the concern with “Chinese New Year” in the States is that it isn’t accommodating to non-Chinese Asians, but those same non-Chinese Asians prefer to just call it “Chinese New Year” anyways, is this just another Latinx-like example of some sort of some kind of failed pandering?
Ultimately, my answer to that particular question is no, but for subtle reasons that also bear some similarity to the misconceptions around Latinx. The problem is that it’s conflating Chinese as in “living in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau” with “ethnically Chinese”. It’s true that there are a large number of people outside of China who celebrate Chinese New Year, but in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, they are almost all ethnically Chinese. The concern with calling the holiday “Chinese New Year” isn’t that it doesn’t recognize the Chinese diaspora; it’s that it more precisely doesn’t accommodate the non-ethnically Chinese Asian populations, particularly in Korea and Vietnam, who have their own simultaneous traditions.
Even in the US, among a group (or family) of exclusively ethnically Chinese Americans, the holiday would also usually be known in English as “Chinese New Year”. It’s similar to the kernel of substance underlying the mostly ridiculous “War on Christmas” — exclusively among Christians, wishing “Merry Christmas” makes a lot of sense and is very common, but in mixed company, “Happy Holidays” is a more inclusive salutation.
And frankly speaking, there are few enough Koreans or Vietnamese in Singapore that the population of celebrants is almost exclusively ethnically Chinese (modulo those, like me, who trace their celebration of the holiday to others who are). Considering the difference between the Singaporean context and the American one is helpful both to avoid mis-generalizing conclusions reached in one environment and to properly understanding the underlying dynamics.
There’s another difference in approach worth highlighting around these holidays. In Singapore, most people got 2-3 days off this week for Chinese New Year, but that isn’t just a nod to the majority culture. Singapore’s official holiday calendar is peppered with Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim festivals and even includes Christian holidays like Good Friday that are usually only observed by religious schools and employers in the States.
Why does a minority-Christian society observe a greater number of explicitly Christian holidays than a majority-Christian society? The answer seems to be rooted in a profound difference in approach to multiculturalism.
Broadly speaking, many US holidays tend to be generic, so nearly everyone could plausibly observe them, resulting in a lot of these now kind of meaningless days off like President’s Day or Labor Day. There are some that were intended as nods towards specific ethnic groups, like St. Patrick’s Day for Irish immigrants or Columbus Day for Italian immigrants, but there’s no expectation that only those populations would want to celebrate them.
The controversy around Columbus Day actually illustrates this point. Whatever its origins, instead of treating Columbus Day as a nod to Italian Americans’ heritage and positive affirmation of their belonging in the New World, instead there developed a mythology around the figure of Columbus, attempting to recast the at best fraught historical figure as a hero for all American children, not just the Italians.
In the appropriate “melting pot” analogy, a broadly common American culture was supposed to subsume cultural difference, integrating immigrants from all cultures. This is where we get attempts to produce a “colorblind” society that seeks to overcome racism and ethnic difference by a shared culture.
Singapore took a different approach. Instead of seeking to erase difference in pursuit of equality, it sought to build in structural requirements of equal or proportional accommodations and representation to each ethnic group, a sort of negotiated representation, as illustrated by the inclusion of holidays for each represented major religion or ethnic group.
Thus, government housing includes explicit quotas on racial composition, requiring each estate not to deviate too far from national demographics. In the political representation, each candidate slate for any multi-member district (which represent a majority of the population) must field at least one non-Chinese representative, and the presidency is on occasion only open to non-Chinese candidates, with the recognition that it would otherwise usually be won by a Chinese candidate.
From that Singaporean context, Joe Biden’s commitment to reserve a seat on the Supreme Court for its first black woman looks entirely normal. That’s exactly the sort of thing you do to ensure equal representation. But in the American context, it comes across as affirmative action or pandering — even majorities of Democrats wish he hadn’t made that commitment. The colorblind ideal says that Biden should simply just pick the best candidate, and if that candidate happens to be a black woman, that would speak on its own to the progress black women have made in society.
A major part of the post-Ferguson racial reckoning has been a rethinking of that colorblind ideal. To those who actually want to find a better approach to race relations, I would encourage you to study other countries’ approaches. Beyond simply giving new ideas and a breath of fresh air, you can also learn from those countries’ successes and failures to find what actually works in reducing racial animus.
I get the sense that many Americans are tired of political debates. Every topic is cast onto a single axis, and you just hope that the wedge issues that are 70-30 in your side’s favor are the most salient when the next election comes about.
Take COVID policy, for instance. It’s pretty clear that public opinion on vaccines unites Democrats and divides Republicans, while opposition to school closure unites Republicans and divides Democrats. Both sides are held captive to their base, who disproportionately hail from those 30% minority positions, offering only the package deals of “constant vigilance” and “muh freedom.”
But government policy shouldn’t be constrained to those two packages, or even that single “vigilance” axis. By most international measures, Singapore would be considered one of the most vigilant countries throughout the pandemic, quarantining visitors like me during most of 2020 and 2021 for two weeks upon arrival in a hotel. But students here have been in school for all but a month or so in 2020, as they experimented with, and subsequently backed away from, “Home-Based Learning”.
The failure of Singapore’s approach to map neatly onto that axis extends to other aspects of the pandemic response. You need to be fully vaccinated to enter the ubiquitous malls here, and that includes a booster within 9 months starting next week, but workplaces are back up to 80% capacity (to my wife’s chagrin). Restrictions tightened in response to the Delta wave, but now we’re just letting Omicron wash over us — case numbers are through the roof, but life largely goes on as before, since the illness is milder both intrinsically and because of the robust immune protection we have.
I imagine if I hadn’t been living in Singapore for the majority of the pandemic, I probably would simply be lining up to support my preferred position on the vigilance axis (probably close to the middle ground “vax and relax”). I might have, like White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, scoffed at the notion of the government straight-up sending people tests directly if I hadn’t seen the Singaporean government do exactly that (and with high-quality reusable masks, too!).
Just listen to how NPR reporter Mara Liasson drove the point home: “All I know is that other countries seem to be making [tests] available in greater quantities for less money.” And this line was effective — just two weeks later, Psaki would announce a plan to do exactly what she had mocked, showing that, to employ a turn of phrase I’ve come to despise in pandemic-related discussions, American parochialism is literally killing people.
Speaking even closer to my heart, it’s been genuinely worrying to watch as parts of the American evangelical Christian world that I inhabit have gone genuinely insane during the Trump years. “But He Fights” has altogether displaced the “Moral Majority” as disturbingly high numbers of evangelical Christians fell under the sway of a cult of personality.
Yet all of that has always felt a step removed from my own experience, the friends I’ve made, churches and communities I’ve been a part of and the nationally prominent voices I follow. This entire experience has been like one of those Southern California earthquakes I remember from college — everyone else seems to have felt it except me.
Let me put it this way: The individual falls of Mark Driscoll and Ravi Zacharias — very different in their content but both rooted to a large extent in narcissism — each affected me and the communities around me in the past decade far more than the Trumpist turn of what polls suggest is a majority of evangelical Christians.
I’ll definitely need another post to sort out exactly how I managed to find myself on that island of relative stability within the broader evangelical Christian world. But in the context of this topic, I’d like to offer a simple observation: Those in the evangelical Christian world with an ear outside of the American context often found the parochial clarion call of Trumpism distinctly unappealing.
This is one reason why the appeal of Trumpism didn’t cut neatly along the same lines as the degree of zeal for Christian evangelism. For many of the most passionate, and particularly for the most prominent voices, that desire to spread the gospel led them to international missions, training and speaking engagements. Leaders like David Platt and John Piper engaged with so many Christians outside of the US that they simply would never have fallen under the sway of Make America Great Again.
Even the exception proves the rule: The public Christian figure I lost the most respect for in this period, Eric Metaxas, was initially stringently anti-Trump. Per his own account, his attitude only changed when he began to identify with a particular type of New York-style insecurity that he shared with Trump. Unlike fellow New Yorker Tim Keller and most of the Christian leaders I knew in the highly international Boston area, who often saw their ministry as an opportunity to reach the nations for the gospel, Metaxas’s focus had been on New York City itself.
From secularism to evangelism, racial harmony to pandemic responses, holiday wars to cancel culture, international perspectives bring vital perspectives and often offer better alternatives to the narrow range of opinions, often laid out in a one-dimensional partisan-coded axis, in the United States. As the temperature ratchets up, that international exposure goes from curious flair to an essential regulator.
Even if you, like me, maintain a somewhat Tocquevillian admiration for the American experiment, it’s important to remember that the founders built the country’s institutions on lessons they learned from the successes and failures of democratic rule around the world and throughout history, particularly in Europe. If we are to renew our country and return to those founding ideals, we need to relearn the premises they were built on, which means doing as the founders did and learning from abroad.
On the other hand, if you don’t personally find all that much inspiring about America, you’ll need to look elsewhere to identify positive examples of the sort of society you want to build. Otherwise, you’ll simply be a nuisance, constantly deriding your own country without a positive vision of an alternative. Your criticisms might very well be legitimate, but without a hope for anything better, the product will ultimately be the sort of cynical apathy that makes the situation worse.
American parochialism doesn’t serve anyone. It’s high time we look beyond it.
Closing the loop here, eliminating censorship and fostering communities of free and tolerated speech is fundamental. Glad to see you're on substack!
America is considered as “young” so there is much growth in the future.