I was born in the United States but I haven’t lived there since 2010. This doesn’t often cross my mind but whenever it does it surprises me. I realize that I’m not sure what it feels like to live there anymore. But I still feel like I know the country well, maybe even better than I did when I lived there. At least that’s how it feels.
I think I know the country differently now, in part because I’ve been able to watch it from Mexico, a country that operates differently but is still deeply intertwined with the U.S. I am constantly exposed to what’s happening in the U.S. but I’m not drowning in it. This distance feels helpful. It’s like the fable of the young fishes and the old fish, as told by David Foster Wallace: There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?” (If you think is a parable for the inherent wisdom and self-awareness of old age, I have a president I’d like to introduce you to.)
It’s natural for us to think that what is around us is “normal” and, as such, to not really think about it at all. Everyone everywhere does it. You grow up going to Catholic mass every Sunday? Normal. You drive around in a car to go anywhere? Normal. If you live in a demographically homogenous suburb, like I did growing up, this sense of normalcy is compounded. Normal is normal for you and everyone you know.
So it’s no surprise that almost every American sees their political system and culture as normal. So do people all over the world who stay in their homeland. Normal usually feels comfortable and correct.
Living abroad, especially as a journalist, has had a wonderful “denormalizing” effect for me. You learn a different normal. If you are fortunate enough to be able to travel a lot as I have, you get to see many normals.
Forgive me because I know I’m starting to sound like your friend who spent a semester abroad in England and came back calling you “mate.” Or the once who spent time in France and insists of pronouncing croissant with a soft r. Or the one in Spain who calls everyone tío and must show off their Spain lisp.
I assure you there’s no magical power granted by being abroad. But it can make it easier to gain a different perspective, and that perspective shift that can be applied from anywhere. And if there were any moment in U.S. history to break from what we consider normal, now seems like a pretty good one.
Advantages
I don’t often write about U.S. politics, but it’s usually present, if not explicitly stated in lots of my work. I certainly follow U.S. politics much more than I did when I was still living there, and following it from a distance has been very useful.
The first advantage is the natural act of categorizing the U.S. political system in a global context. Trying to understand politics in another country usually starts with your brain taking you back to civics class: the three branches of government, how a bill becomes a law, federalism, etc. You compare what you know about the U.S. to how things are somewhere else.
When you look at the U.S. government in the context of global politics, it becomes clear how very strange many of its features are. It makes you reconsider some fundamental truths of American politics. This is especially jarring around election time.
Here’s an example: could you explain to someone from another country what the electoral college is? Could you explain to them why we follow it and why it’s overruled the popular vote twice in the last 20 years?
Witnessing other types of elections (parliamentary style, two-round presidential runoffs) provides the context to question what type of election garners the greatest possible consensus for choosing a head of state and government.
Here’s another: why do you have to register to vote? Here in Mexico for example, one registers to vote by getting their INE identification, the nearly universal ID citizens use for almost everything. You get your INE, you’re registered to vote. It’s not a perfect system but it presents far fewer barriers to voting.
How about election funding? Why has $144 million dollars been raised in the South Carolina senate race? What about the $135 million raised for a seat in Kentucky? Does that seem like a useful way to spend that much money? Another example from Mexico: elections are publicly funded with part of the election funds being distributed evenly among parties and the rest distributed based on vote total from previous elections. Does this prevent all illicit campaign financing? No. Does it prevent the country’s richest from purchasing favor with political candidates? It helps.
We can debate the benefits of different political structures but learning about and experiencing something different has allowed me to better engage in that kind of discussion.
Here’s another thing that is especially interesting observing America from afar, and reading news about many different countries: why is their one dictionary for American politics and another for politics elsewhere?
Take the term oligarch, “a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.” American cable news spends lots of time talking about Russian oligarchs, a term that usually seems appropriate. It’s an exhilarating word to hear. It sounds mysterious, nefarious. It evokes smoky backrooms, briefcases of cash, and midnight assassins.
And it sounds totally foreign to the American political experience. But what do we call people like Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Mark Zuckerburg, the Murdochs, and so on, those who use their wealth to influence politics? Oligarch seems like a proper term for those people in a political system increasingly shaped by money, but we rarely hear it.
Oligarch is just one of many terms applied unevenly at home and abroad. Here’s some others, compiled in part via Twitter: cronies, regime, strongman, state repression, iron fist, paramilitaries, vigilantes, corruption, forces loyal to [head of state], propaganda, the troubled region of, despotic, tribal, state-sponsored violence, plutocrats, insurgent, loyalists. This language imbalance is used (often innocently) to 1) make foreign countries seem sinister, undeveloped, backwards, or savage and 2) to sanitize the nature of American politics. It’s a tool to separate normal from abnormal.
Let me write a sentence about recent American politics if the language were applied evenly.
“As the Trump regime deployed state forces to repress protests against police violence, paramilitary groups in the troubled region of Wisconsin have added to the chaos. One such child vigilante, Kyle Rittenhouse, recently killed a protestor, only to be praised by strongman Trump and his loyalists.” (Slate used to have a running series called If It Happened There that did this same thing.)
There’s a larger conversation to be had here about media, but I won’t go into it here. (I’d recommend you listen to the podcast Citations Needed, which always has very sharp criticism of American media.) But recognizing this language imbalance is a useful way of denormalizing political events.
Finally, the great advantage of watching America from abroad is that I can turn it off when I want to. Not completely, of course, as Donald Trump has a way of sucking up media attention all over the world towards whatever gaudy statement he made in the last hour. But if I make a sustained effort to not engage in social media or the news for a few days, the respite is blissful. And those breaks are necessary to engage in any meaningful way with the endless, ever accelerating news cycle. We can do this from anywhere, but the geographic buffer helps.
All of these things have been easier for me to see from afar but they don’t have to be done from another country. They just take a bit of a analytical stepping back from what seems normal.
Disadvantage
In decades past, the disadvantage of looking at the U.S. from abroad was probably information lag. Journalists memoirs of yesteryear tell tales of reporters calling their editors and reading aloud their copy (journalist lingo for the text of an article). The editor would transcribe it and then edit it, calling the reporter back to read the story through again and go over edits. American reporters abroad would have to read local press or call back home to get the news of the day.
This is ancient history (though some of my more experienced colleagues may feel offended by the descriptor). Nowadays, articles are edited online in real time. News is available all over the world at the same instant. One can (and some do) report on the U.S. from a foreign country.
In 2020, the information problem has been warped: we all of us live in information bubbles. This isn’t a personal failing; it’s the design of social media. We find things we like and follow them and then the algorithms at all our favorite platforms feed us more of the same. We follow and like those things and spiral further down and down into a tiny sliver of information.
In a way, this makes sense: there’s too much information out there for any of us to absorb and being led towards the things you’re already interested in can feel helpful and easy, despite it just being the way social media users like us are monetized. But being siloed off allows us to create whatever reality we want to see. Our view of whatever is happening is an abstraction created by the information bubbles we exist in. And that’s how I experience the U.S. now, especially having not traveled during COVID-19.
My information bubble essentially tells me this: election tampering and voter suppression is rampant; personal clashes over COVID regulations are heated, sometimes violent; hospitals are overrun with COVID patients; lines at food pantries stretch for miles; migrants are locked in tight quarters as COVID rages through detention centers; Trump voters are sinking their boats.
Are these things happening? Yes because I trust the sources I’m learning these things from. Is that a comprehensive picture of the country right now? No, because the U.S. is a gigantic, diverse country. But my information bubble is always going to try to simmer data down into a single digestible snapshot of reality for me. I can see whatever I want to see.
What I’m missing being abroad is a data point I can’t get over the internet or through friends or family: lived experience. Not only can I fact check something I see on the news about the place I live, but I can talk to people outside of my bubble (with COVID precautions), I can establish a sense of how something feels.
So, being a journalist or writer or whatever abroad, I can voraciously consume news to try to get a complete picture of what’s happening. But I cannot know what it feels like to be in the United States.
I suppose that might be a blessing right now.
James, I very much enjoy your perspective. I too, at a young age spent about a year (over the course of 18 months) "living" in Mexico while doing research for my degree in soil science. My later career gave me opportunities for extended stays in several nations, including a year in New Zealand and four months in Australia. Over the course of my life I've had significant professional and personal contact with folks overseas in a variety of capacities. America is the most myopic national culture in the world, IMHO. The two words most commonly heard from non-Americans (even those who support our "role" in the world) about American... and to some extent "America" are "naive" and "arrogant" a close third place is "uninformed" in terms of what is happening in the rest of the world.... i.e. the 7.5 or so Billion people and couple hundred nations that ar NOT America. One of the hardest messaging tasks in my life has been conveying these three critiques palatably to listeners... who by and large shrug off the insights (thereby somewhat validating the "arrogant" critique almost instantaneously). Keep writing I'll be in touch with one of your personal friends with some further comment that you might be interested in. Best regards, and keep up the good work. Bob Sojka-- in Idaho