by Paul Henninger

Any American who has attended dinners in the UK or elsewhere outside the United States has no doubt been called to explain what, in God’s name, is going on with the U.S. Presidential election. Not at every dinner, mind you. Many non-American’s appear to be of the reasonable opinion that every American should does not represent every aspect of American politics and culture and can therefore not necessarily defend it or even, sometimes, explain it. But the Presidential election does seem to force the question of what the heck the United States is doing into the spotlight, even if it’s mostly as a topic for chit chat over dinner or before a meeting starts late on a Friday afternoon. Perhaps, that’s because in many respects the support of non-traditional candidates in this Presidential campaign very much does represent a national struggle of identity, of what, if anything, it means to be America in 2016.

This informal interest in the American psyche is different from the highs and lows of the American reputation post 9/11. Immediately after 9/11 the United States enjoyed a brief period of sympathy and solidarity overseas. People on airplanes would strike up conversations to offer their condolences and support to any American they might have been seated next to, regardless of whether they had a direct connection to the event itself. And equally, as the Bush family led their campaign against Iraq loosely in the name of a war on terror, the same random Americans were called to task as representatives of a simple and straightforward arrogance and hegemony.

This time around, the question is more of a question. Less of a judgment, one way or the other. And although we’ve argued here that popularity of Donald Trump in particular is at least in part linked to the rise of right-wing, nationalist movements world-wide, there does seem to be something particularly curious about the extent to which the American electorate, or at least part of it, has woken up and engaged in this election. No doubt this engagement had it’s emotional origin in the relative fervor enjoyed by the Obama campaign, now well squandered by a disappointing 7 years of meager progress. Obama offered Hope and Change and people got excited.

Regardless of what side of the fence you were on, it was a lot easier to get excited by the vision of a vision presented by the Obama campaigns, particularly offset against the profoundly uninspired parade of post-Clinton presidential candidates. That’s what was most ironic about Mitt Romney coming out against the Trump campaign. Who cares what Mitt Romney thinks?

Through that same period, the American experience and reputation worldwide was represented largely by a waning entertainment hegemony and a sprawling set of corporate brands. Should America fade into post-empire irrelevance, historians may track the count of Coca-Cola’s consumed, Starbucks opened, burgers sold, and sitcom episodes viewed as the greatest legacy of the height of the American Imperial powers. And despite the continued success of Google and Facebook, the distinctly international character of those operations, the underappreciated rise of certain apps, local or otherwise, based on popularity in China or South America, the increasing importance of foreign markets in the profitability of an increasingly corporate U.S. entertainment machine means that although there are still strong signs of American influence everywhere you go, the sense you get as you travel world-wide is more the power of global brands and corporations and less the influence of any particular nation, America included.

So while America pulls back from actual and media-driven hegemony, and a rapidly changing economy creates domestic challenges with employment, healthcare and other Really Big Issues, more and more Americans really do seem to actively engaged with the question of what, exactly, America is going to be? Should we abdicate the role of the world’s police force as we assuredly have in Syria and elsewhere? Does increasing energy independence mean we can abandon the Middle East to fight amongst themselves? Where should we lead on Global Warming? Do we even have a right to lead on Global Warming or anything else?

The one thing that Trump and Sanders supporters seem to agree on is that the wan abdication of that last question is unacceptable. Americans have always been an impetuous bunch and even if we seem to be attempting to pull the eject button on a late-empire swoon purely out of that pathological embrace of the new, part of that embrace seems to be a suggestion that America should at least be something on the global stage. As arrogant as it seems to say it, the world seems better off when some interpretation of the principals at the heart of the American experiment, democracy and independence, are well represented on the world stage.

So it might be hard to answer that dinner table question precisely: “What on earth is going on over there in America.” But it seems certain that America as a nation is fervently engaged with that question for the first time in quite a while. One would hope that we don’t have to count the outcome of this present election as a final answer in any sense, but as a draft declaration of some kind of uniquely American agenda of independence that continues to stimulate debate worldwide, over dinner or otherwise.