Into Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a character named “Senator Stuyvesant-Oglander”. Each and every drink has ice in it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of England’s great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing.
And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britain’s establishment was clear back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldn’t look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas.
If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression.