In When America Stopped Being Great Nick Bryant gave us his take on the US trajectory since Reagan. Far from being a maverick, Trump was the fairly predictable symptom of a political malaise that had been at least 30 years in the making. In The Forever War Bryant steps back further and views the current hot mess from the perspective of US political history since its inception.
Not surprisingly, that inception was flawed. The right to the pursuit of happiness was never guaranteed to women or non-white males; slavery was permitted; the senate was designed to be unrepresentative and nowhere were fair elections provided for. How these design flaws played out through time is the subject of the book which could serve as a useful single volume primer for anyone wanting to come to grips with US political history since 1776.
Bryant argues that the US has always been a fairly divided country – divisions that its archaic constitutional arrangements succeeded in perpetuating to the point of civil war and beyond. The 6 January insurrectionists belong to a long tradition of violent political action. The Civil War was followed by Jim Crow era that was based on naked force to keep the Southern black population cowed. Political killings were regular events up until the late ’60s of the last century when JFK, RJK, Martin Luther and Malcom X among the victims.
Throughout US history critical problems have resisted rational solution, be that slavery, gun violence or healthcare. The reasons are complex but in Bryant’s view they come back again and again to political dysfunction courtesy of an 18th-century Constitution that is designed to make change very difficult.
All of this might make you wonder how the US became the most powerful country on the planet that was instrumental in winning two world wars and successfully saw off the Soviet Union. The chapter entitled ‘Toxic Exceptionalism’ manages to capture everything you ever disliked about American culture – from Harvey Weinstein to JD Vance; from fast food to opioid abuse; from police brutality to two million incarcerated – but leaves a lot of questions begged.
Bryant is a trained historian but a journalist first and his instinct for the story almost gets the better of his historical judgement. But not quite. The US has been through much darker times than the present – they did fight a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died. The ugliness of US politics is certainly amplified by social media but the issues remain recognisably progressive versus conservative. He sees encouraging signs in the results of the mid-term elections of 2022 and points to past bipartisan projects such as the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.
What Bryant doesn’t really explain is the peculiar form of the current polarisation – why the US in general and the US left in particular is so obsessed with identity politics rather than economic inequality. Democrats in general aren’t taking to the barricades fighting for a decent minimum wage or a decent health system (Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat) and the working class Americans who vote Republican are clearly not voting for their economic interests. For the answer to that I suggest the reader check out a writer like Joe Bageant – starting with say, Deer Hunting with Jesus.
Nevertheless, The Forever War is highly recommended for anyone trying to make sense of our special friends across the Pacific.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
During a career spanning almost 30 years, Nick Bryant came to be regarded as one of the BBC’s finest foreign correspondents and was described as ‘the new Alistair Cooke’. He has been posted in Washington, South Asia, Australia and, most recently, New York, where he covered the Trump years. His writing has appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Monthly and The New Statesman.
He broadcasts regularly on the BBC and ABC. Nick studied history at Cambridge and has a doctorate in American politics from Oxford. He now lives in Sydney with his wife and children. His book, When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present, currently resides on Joe Biden’s bookshelf in the Oval Office.
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