On Monday, I travelled back from Innsbruck, where I was twice asked to prove my UK residency (I have lived here for more than 30 years and am married to a Brit). As an American passport holder, I assumed it was a Brexit line of questioning: it was more sinister than that. The man at border control looked through my well-worn passport as though examining a specimen at a crime scene. “American?” he said in a thundering voice. For a minute, I had the sinking feeling in my stomach that he might not let me through. “I’m sorry,” I said, tucking what used to be a global status symbol back into my purse.
Behind me, I could see that people were staring. This was shortly after Renée Good was shot and killed in Minneapolis by ICE agents but before Alex Pretti succumbed to the same fate a few days later. Davos had just finished and with it, America’s reputation as being straight players.
The eyes piercing through my thick Moncler jacket were accusatory. Americans in Europe are now perceived as Maga Trumpers or cowards who won’t admit to it. We’ve all been tarnished with the same brush.
I’m a testament to an America people used to admire. My father served in the US government as a diplomat. My mother was a Russian refugee given US citizenship at the age of 14, who went on to translate (Russian English) officially for the Nixon, Bush and Clinton administrations. We are members of the “East Coast Elite”, now a pejorative word.
But to the border policeman and those watching from behind in Austria, I represented the new uneducated, conspiratorial, violent, lying, racist, sexist, pseudo-Christian, thuggish America, hellbent on destroying whatever vestiges of democracy are left. The last tiny benefit of the doubt in the UK died when Donald Trump said British soldiers “hung out at the sidelines” of the war in Afghanistan. He retracted his comments later as he always does but that’s part of the problem. America is perceived as a toddler with a severe learning disability.
It’s hard to reconcile the shame we now feel as Americans with the pride we enjoyed for decades. When I was at college in Moscow and visited my parents back home, I was tasked with bringing magazines (Time and Rolling Stone) back with me. All anyone wanted anywhere was American culture.
Americans wore their status lightly. We knew we were the world’s superpower, but we also knew we lacked the sophistication of Europeans.
Now we insult and push our allies around. We laud our wealth and killing power. My Trump-supporting friends no longer apologise. I know they voted for financial gain or favours from the administration (one of my friends is amongst Trump’s biggest donors). They may well be recoiling from the horrors shown daily on CNN, but they’re doubling down because they can’t afford for Trump to fail.
I used to come to blows about politics (I have voted both red and blue) but we’re way beyond arguments. I am not exaggerating when I say Americans are scared. We’re scared of this administration but also each other. It’s not quite 1984, but deleting social media is already part of daily life.
I have a friend who constantly sends me memes about “lefties” (he now lives tax-free in Dubai), referring pejoratively to the UK, where he lived as long as I have. He voted for Trump the first time but was humiliated by his British friends for it (so he shut up). Now he thinks “gotcha”.
Everything my Wasp father taught me is being challenged. He believed in education, thinking before speaking, manners, honesty, family values, the law, helping neighbours in need, compassion, paying taxes – the American dream, in other words. Now we see an administration that is getting off on cruelty and ignorance, lying constantly (and manipulating data to support those lies) and of course, padding pockets on a scale that dwarfs the Imelda Marcoses and Putins of the world.
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We’re watching this demolition theatre in real time. Americans used to believe the law is the law: now we see it as a boat that is easily capsized. Powerful CEOs we once associated with liberal values are paraded like poodles around the White House. Everyone is hoping someone else will speak up.
I suspect that Trump’s ambition is to remain US President for life, handing the baton (along with an outrageous fortune and immunity) to his children when he dies. Everything lines up when you see it this way.
This state of affairs is all anyone talks about. Americans in Europe want to cry when we hear European leaders speak out and push back. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos was sent from phone to phone.
I spoke to a few of my more active American political friends in the UK. One, a Harvard-educated philanthropist, is working out whether she needs to go home and “fight”. “I feel despondent and ashamed,” she says. “The first things we learn about the US Government in grade school are about the Bill of Rights, branches of government and separation of powers. We glorify civic values and the scaffolding of good governance. How can that all so easily turn into a mirage- it’s really just a ‘suggestion’?”
Americans used to feel welcome in the UK, she says. “When I moved here (five years ago), I was pleasantly surprised by how positively many Brits viewed the US. Everyone would tell me about their amazing trip, their child who lives there and the positive energy. Now, they look at me with sadness and confusion. I used to say I felt guilty living here, having a great time, when I should be ‘back there on the barricades’. That’s before I could imagine that there’d be real barricades and federal troops killing civilians.”
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A fellow American journalist friend is more philosophical than shocked. “I’m not ashamed of my country – look at how wonderfully many people are behaving?”, she says. “Right now, I actually hate the people who have got control of my country, though I try to feel compassion for them. And maybe I’m ashamed of those of us who might have been in a position to stop them if we had been paying attention to anything but our own self-realisation and self-aggrandisement – personal goals. That has always been the case in every country in the world. And the human species is human – not angels – so there is a lot of bad in it.”
The only thing keeping her going is what she calls “the heroic stuff in Minnesota”. “It’s all the grassroots level, neighbour to neighbour,” she says.I’m not surrendering my American passport yet. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say, I’m not giving up that easily.
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