All Episodes
Previous Next
April 3, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:31
Reflections on America

Why is America so different to England?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So I thought I would just share with you some reflections that I have on my recent visit to the United States because it's becoming apparent that the distance between their civilization and our civilization is growing and this is, I think, not to our benefit.
And it's becoming just very stark at this point.
And I couldn't help but notice it when I got there.
So modern life in England is quite depressing at the moment and there's a general pall across the country.
People feel that the country is not going in the right direction and that things are not getting any better.
The people in charge are not listening to us.
We are not in control of the state, our government, the general management of things as they are on a day-to-day basis.
And nobody is happy with this.
Everyone can see that this is having a direct detrimental effect on our lives in general.
And this doesn't feel like the experience that the Americans are currently having.
Because like I said, when I was young, it didn't feel like the distance between American culture and our culture was actually very great.
England felt like a prosperous place.
It felt like a first world country.
It felt like a country with a future.
And getting into the late 90s and early 2000s, Britain did have an increase in wages and purchasing power.
And it had a kind of cultural prestige.
There was this, whether you like it or not, you look back on it, it's no cringe now, there's this cool Britannia movement, right?
It was this kind of, you know, we're British and we're proud of being British and we're great.
And this was very successful.
You know, it seemed that Britain had a lot of self-confidence and was looking towards the 21st century with optimism in the same way that I feel that the Americans are looking at their own future.
Because it seems to me the Americans are far happier than we are, actually.
And I speak to a lot of English people in England and they're not very happy.
I speak to a lot of Americans in America and they seem very, well, I guess chipper is the way to put it.
They're very bubbly and optimistic.
They think that things are going quite well and they personally seem to be doing well.
I mean, if you look at the amount of money the average American household makes, well, it's pretty good compared to ours.
And they seem to feel like they're going to keep getting ahead.
Whereas people in England definitely don't feel that way.
And so the first place I went was to Tim Paul's show in West Virginia.
And I have to say I really liked West Virginia.
I've taken this image as just an example of a place in West Virginia, literally one of the first ones off Google, because West Virginia is the place in America that most reminds me of Wiltshire, where I live in the southwest of England.
And in fact, it's peopled by mostly English settlers back in the day, as I understand it.
And so it's got that kind of English vibe to it, a kind of old English vibe to it, which is really nice.
The people are very, very, very polite.
And they're very, very nice.
And they're very, just, just normal.
I mean, I would call them homely, but in America, that's actually an insult.
In England, that's a compliment.
They're just normal, right?
And they've got a nice rural area.
And there's no trouble.
Everything is just, you know, smoothly ticking over the sort of bucolic life of the countryside.
And it was just really lovely.
And so the place is like a well-tendered garden.
And it's just very relaxed.
All the people there have been very relaxed.
And I've been there a few times now.
And it's always just been a really pleasant experience.
Everyone's just been really, really nice.
And it's like, hey, this is what England used to be like before things changed and people started becoming more withdrawn.
And I've noticed that on the way over, I was rude to people without meaning to be rude to them.
Because of course, normally I think I have impeccable manners, right?
And I've always, I mean, people can say a lot of things to me, but that I'm rude to other people in person is not one of those things.
Because, of course, I'm an Englishman.
I've been raised properly.
But I've noticed that I've become more withdrawn in public recently.
And I wonder if this is the consequence of the Boris wave and the diversification of my country, making things seem more alien.
And so rather than being as comfortable, relaxed, and therefore as open and polite as I previously was, I'd noticed that when I was traveling, I was closed and I was kind of just cold-faced almost towards these people.
And they were being very, very polite.
The first example of it was when I was on the train towards Heathrow, and there was an American couple who were with their kids in the aisle, and they were just waiting to get off the train as it pulled up.
And I mean, you know, I wasn't thinking any of it.
I just stood up, put my bag on, but I'd done it quite briskly.
And I hadn't thought anything of it.
But the lady there, you know, sort of in her mid-30s or something, she had said to me, I think I'd startled her a little bit.
And she said to me, oh, I'm sorry, did you feel trapped?
And I was just like, no.
I didn't understand the question, but she was very, like, the concern for my feelings was very personal and very immediate.
And I was just taken aback by this.
I was like, oh, no, no, I'm fine.
Thank you.
I didn't, I didn't, I didn't know how to respond to it, frankly.
But she was, again, very open and very just, you know, very caring, it felt, you know, and it was like, okay, that's not the norm here as it is in America.
I mean, to be honest, I felt it was excessive, frankly, but like it was obviously well-meaning.
I didn't want her to feel that I was being rude.
And there were other examples where, like, on the plane, I got up and I wasn't as polite to the people that I walked past as maybe I ought to have been.
I saw it on their faces.
I'm like, oh, God, this guy's rude.
And I felt bad about it.
And I was like, right, okay.
But I'm not normally like that.
So something has actually changed.
And I didn't realize that this thing has changed.
It was only when I was exposed to these kind of minor social interactions with Americans where I've seen that, oh, that's not polite, that I realized.
I started paying attention to it.
And then for the rest of my journey around America, I was just paying more attention to these minor social interactions.
The Americans were insanely polite and insanely friendly and just very relaxed and open and unguarded.
And that's not how people in England feel now.
There's definitely a lot more closedness, a lot more guardedness, a lot more tension in the country.
And it became palpable when I came to America and felt just the ease with which they were living.
And this wasn't just in West Virginia.
It was also when I went to Austin, Texas.
Again, it's a big city.
So you would expect people to be more guarded.
But no, everyone was very relaxed.
Everyone was completely off guard.
Everyone was acting as if everything was completely normal and nothing untowards was happening in their world.
And I don't know what the crime rates in Austin, Texas, are like or anything like that.
But the atmosphere was very, very palpable.
And I could also tell that Austin was becoming more leftist, right?
It was becoming bluer.
Now, I understand Austin is quite a blue place in an otherwise sea of red.
But it was this that really bothered me.
This in the airport, you get off the airport and you see this guitar with this keep Austin weird donating by the Milton Verit family.
Now, this is very similar to the Keep Portland weird thing.
What this is is, hi guys, can we be leftists, please?
Can you give us permission to be leftists?
And in this day and age, I don't really think people should actually be given moral permission to be leftists.
And then, in fact, if you look on the back of it here, it says, local, liberal, and loving it.
Okay, yeah, you're the problem, right?
You're the problem.
Like, don't mess with Austin women.
It's like, okay, being weird isn't enough.
Notice how the subversion is.
And this is how the subversion will continue if you don't essentially address it, call it out, and point out actually the reason that Texas is a nice place is that it's not California, is that it's not New York, it's that it's not Portland, it's that it's not Detroit, it's that it's not Chicago, it's that it's not governed by the left.
And already for some, I mean, maybe I'm just hypersensitive to this, and no doubt that I'm hypersensitive to this, but I can see exactly what you're doing.
You don't fool me, and I don't think that the good people of Texas deserve the things that you plan on doing to them, which is why, and I heard this multiple times when I was getting like in lifts and just waiting for an Uber to turn up.
I would hear people talking, right?
There was one particular example in the conference hall hotel, and I got into a lift and two other people got in.
One of them was working at the thing and one was visiting.
And they were speaking to each other.
And it's, oh, I'm from California.
Oh, I'm from California too.
It's like, oh, that's interesting, isn't it?
That's interesting how Californian refugees are actually coming to Austin.
It's a real phenomenon, right?
The Californian refugees are fleeing California, coming to Texas.
I wonder how they're voting now they're in Texas.
It's one of those things, isn't it?
You know, one of those things.
And people are pointing out that, yeah, this has been a liberal town for a while.
It's like, yeah, well, don't let them get away with it.
I think this is a problem.
But anyway, while I was there, I decided to join the Confederacy.
I realized the war's been over for 120 odd years or something, 150 years.
But I still thought it was probably the right thing to do because I'm kind of getting sick of northern aggression.
No, some US senator had made a joke about how, oh, look at this, the Confederate battle flag looks a lot like the British flag, doesn't it?
Because they both got the St. Andrews Cross on it.
Well, as I understand it, the southern states are mostly peopled by Scots and Irish anyway.
So I'm not surprised that they have the St. Andrews flag.
But also, there's not really a direct genealogy between the British flag and the Confederate battle flag anyway.
So this is a kind of absurd point to make.
And so for a joke, I thought, yeah, I think I'd just join the Confederacy because I'm going to become a true southern gentleman.
Thank you very much.
I'm working on the accent.
And when I was out there, I tried the food.
Now, the food itself, I went to a restaurant called Roaring Fork, and it was really nice.
But again, one thing that I couldn't help but notice is how friendly and helpful everyone in America who was serving me in some capacity was.
And it was the second I got back to Britain, I ended up having an argument with some woman in Heathrow Airport because they told us that our bags would be coming on aisle one and they actually came down on aisle four and for some reason that wasn't announced on the Tannery or something.
And so there were me and a bunch of people on the flight back from, it was from Atlanta as a connection, but me and the bunch of the people on the same flight were waiting at the wrong thing going, well, where the hell are our bags?
And I'm there.
I hadn't slept in like 36 hours.
And so I'm sort of, oh, Jesus Christ, they've lost all my stuff, my suits, my presents that I got for my kids.
And so I wasn't happy, but I was like, look, guys, you've lost.
And then this woman, you know, she came over, okay, can I help?
I'm like, well, you've lost my.
She's like, well, I didn't do it.
It's like, when I say you, I'm talking to someone from customer service.
I'm obviously talking about the institution that you were a part of, to which I'm a paying customer.
And she started mouthing off at me.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I was particularly nice either, you know, but the fact that she was decided to just start mouthing off at me, it's like, I've just come from America where everyone was just ultra helpful and didn't even think about back chatting customers.
I was like, oh my God, they've got it so good over there.
Like, it was just so much nicer, so much easier to deal with.
And dealing with serving stuff in England, there's a textual quality there.
And you can see why the Americans are just clearly so much happier with their own world than we are with ours.
All of these tensions, I think, are layering up and becoming taut.
And in America, they just seem a lot more relaxed and a lot more friendly and open.
And honestly, I do think in many ways there's something we can learn from this.
So just be clear as well, the quality of their lifestyles is way better than ours, too.
So I decided to try cornbread, which I'd never tried before.
Turns out it's a cake.
For anyone who's outside of America, cornbread is a cake.
They put butter on it.
It's a little bit sweet.
Sometimes it's not sweet, but this one was.
It smelled like popcorn.
It was really nice.
But it was a dessert which was served as a starter.
Bit bizarre.
I tried grits, right?
So these are cheese and grits.
Grits are kind of like mashed potato, but just grittier.
And it was nice.
It was good.
You know, it was kind of like a cheesy mashed potato with a slight sweet corn taste.
But it was quite nice.
I quite enjoyed it.
But I hear that there are kind of you either like them or you don't, blah, blah, blah.
So then I had, basically, I'd ordered a massive spread, right?
So I'd ordered the cornbread as a starter.
A massive spread of grits, mashed potato, vegetables, loads of sauces.
But this, this like, you know, 12-ounce steak, which was really good.
That's some flavored butter, some herb butter it had on it.
It was really, really good and it was massive.
And then at the end of it, I decided that to hell with my diet.
This is my last day in Texas.
I had to end on pecan pie, which of course was amazing because pecan pie is incredible.
And I even got a tea afterwards, which is the first good tea I had in all of America, which I was very happy about.
The entire thing was only $103.
Now, you might say, well, that's a lot of money.
Yeah, it was about 80 quid, right?
But for what I was having, the meal was massive.
I didn't get hungry for a full day afterwards.
The meal was massive.
Couldneal, obviously.
And it was really high quality.
Like, this is a really, really good quality meal.
For 80 for 80 pounds, $103, I thought this was really good value because this was a really high-end place.
And the quality and the quality of the service was just superb.
The quality of the food, the quality of the service, the demeanor and the decor, the vibe in the thing was just totally lovely.
And it was like, right, it's hard to find somewhere of this quality in England, right?
And so this is something that a lot of British commentators are saying, like, well, look, American living standards are going to drop in the next three or four years because that could happen here.
It's like, listen, man, American living standards are way higher than ours.
Things are cheaper in the United States.
The high life is cheaper in the United States.
Like, God only knows what this full spread.
And I haven't even included like a bunch of the side dishes that I got because they weren't very important, like fries and, you know, mashed potato and stuff like this.
And all the sauces that I'd got to go with it.
I didn't even include all of that in what I've got here.
Like this, this would have been well over 100 quid in the United Kingdom just for the and for the amount of food that I got as well.
It'd been well over 100 quid at a really good restaurant with this sort of quality food.
And Gary here is like, yeah, well, I mean, living standards are going to drop here.
It's like, dude, living standards here are abominable.
We are an impoverished country at this point.
America is not an impoverished country.
And they live like they're doing well.
They live like they're a country that's affluent.
And we try to live like an affluent country, but we aren't.
And this can't go on forever.
We can't go on deluding ourselves that we are some sort of global player and that we are important.
And Peter Hitchens actually did a podcast with Aaron Bastani the other day, which he basically said this point, which I think is a really good point.
We could have a really nice country if we could just let go of the desire for global influence, right?
If we can say, look, we're just going to be our own little thing.
We're going to have our own little island and we're going to make it a polished gem.
We're going to make it a lovely little country that just does its own thing and just stops spending everyone else's money through the welfare state.
We can have a lovely country.
But instead, we're an impoverished country trying to keep up with the new global order to which we're frankly not very well geared and not really capable of performing because we're just not what we used to be.
We're not the country we were 100 years ago.
And we could be nice, but we'd never do any of the things required to make us nice.
And so we sit here and look enviously over at the United States with bizarre, totally delusional perspectives on whether America is good or not.
So Americans are living a great quality of life that we aren't living, right?
Like their towns and cities are much cleaner than ours.
They're in much better repair than ours.
Like you can use any town in Britain as an example of a town that is currently undergoing a period of disrepair.
Everything looks run down.
Everything looks old.
People aren't taking care of things.
People don't have pride in themselves.
People aren't, they don't feel good about their own nation.
They don't feel good about being a part of the nation.
They're not happy to be there.
And they feel put upon.
They feel like they're being taken advantage of.
And that's because they are.
They're absolutely being taken advantage of.
And so this kind of false highness that we say, well, you know, we don't want American standards.
I mean, they're going to fall.
No, no, that's not reality.
Right.
When you go over there, you can feel the in the in the air, the optimism, the happiness, the contentedness of Americans.
And they work really hard.
Do we work that hard?
Well, I mean, I personally work really hard, but does everyone else?
Possibly not, right?
I think there are a lot of people in this country who don't work hard and are given a free ride.
And that's not wise, is it?
That's not good.
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
And weirdly, we could look to America for a model for so many of these things, just like politeness, diligence, like perseverance.
Like to be generally more happy in the place that you are is something the Americans have achieved and we have lost.
Like Britain used to be a really happy place.
Like I remember it.
I remember people being optimistic, people being happy with where they live, people being excited for the future of Britain.
Like I was a young man.
I was an adult during this period.
And it looked like Britain had the world at its feet.
Yeah, we can do anything because we're great and we're not being crippled by the welfare state.
We're not being crippled by the NHS.
We're not being crippled by the holes torn in the social fabric by mass immigration.
We're not being crippled by the fact that we don't know any of these people around us and that the house prices are through the roof and that the job market sucks because there's so much competition for wages and the taxes are sky high and so nobody wants to set up businesses in Britain anymore.
We'ren't crippled by all of these things and the Americans aren't crippled by these things either.
And it's only because of 25 years of blairism that we are crippled by these things.
And at no point does anyone want to properly address it.
We have to scale back all of those things that we've done to ruin our country because we are ruining our country.
We're making it rubbish.
We're making it so that people are just desperate to get out of it.
And that's really not good, is it?
So there's a book that was written in, I think it was 1948.
It's a book called The Character of the English.
I can't remember, it was edited by, I can't remember who it was now, but it was a really great book.
And it's a collection of essays from professors of the time who were talking about just the nature of England with affection, with love.
They were trying to explain to people, look, this is what the English are like.
And one of the essays pointed out that the foreign traveler is the physician of his country.
Right.
The Englishman abroad is the physician of his country.
When he goes abroad, he sees how other things are and they could be better, they could be worse, but he learns a lesson from them in the difference between that culture and his own culture and he comes back and says, look, we need to change this.
We need to think about this, because other parts of the world are doing things differently and they're getting a different result.
And we could have a better result if we just adapted or innovated in some way along these particular lines.
And i'm telling you, the lines in which we need to adapt and innovate is just reduce the burden we have on people and all of these things that we are undergoing, the immigration, the taxes, the regulation, the oppressive nature of political correctness these are all burdens that we put upon ourselves that are making our lives worse.
They're making the country worse, they're making people more introverted, they're making people less willing to deal with outsiders and other people.
They're making people not the kind of people I think we actually want to be, And actually the Americans are doing a really good job of carrying the torch for polite civilization at the moment.
And that's something that really we were the ones who invented.
And we should be those people.
▲
Export Selection