It’s almost over. This week, hundreds of millions of citizens are off to the polls to play their part in the great American exploding gender reveal party. It’s the most consequential election in living memory. Again. and the whole world is watching through its fingers. Of course we are. No other nation with equivalent international hit points has actual elections whose results aren’t entirely decided by a handful of over-Botoxed old men trading favors on a golf course. Of course we’re all thinking about your elections. Sometimes it’s all we can think about, because what Americans decide this week will permanently impact the lives of billions of people who don’t get a voice in the process. Who can’t change the outcome. Who can’t do anything but watch, wait, wish you luck, and hope at least half of you stop dissociating long enough to avert disaster.
The rest of the world doesn’t get to tune out of America’s endless rolling technicolor political melodrama. We are involved. Those of us who can bear to watch the news watch your news much as one might a drunk friend flinging themselves into traffic, or into the teeth of another toxic love affair.
Democracies are a bit like love affairs. They’re best at the beginning. You start out with high hopes and fireworks, totally that there’s never been anything this pure and perfect in the history of human longing. Then a few centuries later you’re trapped in an endless petty power struggle with some angry lunatic who has disturbing personal values and a horrible haircut that they probably picked just to irritate you and spends way too much time on weird religious conspiracy chatrooms. And the memory of how magical it used to be isn’t enough. If you want to live together without killing each other, you’ve got to do the work.
Because unlike love affairs, when things get toxic and violent, you can’t just walk away. Which means that the rest of us can’t look away. America is so frantically omphaloskeptic, so hyperfocused on its own high-octane drama, that it forgets that the rest of us can hear you fighting through the walls. While you scream and throw things and threaten each other, we have to live here with you. And the house is on fire.
The obvious, uncomfortable truth is that every nation state, no matter how murderously it guards its borders, has to share the planet with hundreds of other nation states. The diseases and disasters that dominate the news cycle remind us relentlessly that no country has total control of its destiny. This is not news. Not only is it not news, it’s the major point of discontent for the far right, which is having its tantrum with reality all over the Global North- emboldened everywhere by the success of ethno-nationalism in the notional beacon of liberal democracy. There have been hundreds of elections around the world this year. None of them have mattered like yours does. It’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
Of course, millions of Americans also have reasons to feel disenfranchised. If you live in a Blue metropolis or a Deep red heartland, or if you’ve been disenfranchised by some savage facet of US electoral bureaucracy, you will know what it’s like to feel excluded from the party. Imagine being excluded by definition. Imagine spending two out of every four years experiencing the mesmeric febrile hegemonic production of American democracy entirely from the outside. Imagine knowing, for your entire life, that there exists on the edge of the ocean a colossal and capricious power whose whims can, at absolute best, be appeased- an immense country that most of us have never seen but encounter daily because of its absolute cultural dominance. It is worth asking how far global faith in democracy is shaped by the simple fact that most of us encounter American democracy as a terrible, endless ritual in which we are helpless spectators.
This sense of being at the mercy of every spasm of the American Id may explain why so many foreigners are convinced that the entire nation is dangerously insane. Even before the Trumpification of untelevised reality, many Europeans already imagined the average American as a heavily armed religious maniac-a gestalt Florida Man drunk-driving the bus of liberal democracy while the rest of us hang on for dear life.
Obviously, that’s not true. It feels true, but that’s not your fault. I know this because I have been to America; I’ve lived in five of your cities, navigated your healthcare system, reported on your riots and got nasty rashes hiking your national parks. I have visited your rarified coastal enclaves, stayed up all night in a Mississippi Waffle House because I had nowhere to sleep, eaten a Twinkie, and loved a great many of your strange, earnest citizens. I like America. I like how big and brash and profoundly extra it is, its desperate romanticism in the face of its own violent contradiction. It’s also the only place that really does Thanksgiving, the absolute best holiday for a foreigner with- for once- no post-colonial guilt or family obligations. If you can, definitely hint that this might be your first ever Thanksgiving. My record is three First Thanksgivings in forty-eight lying, gluttonous hours. I regret nothing. I like America. I like the wildness, the tacky excesses, the lack of deference, the desperate story it keeps on telling itself about itself until even the most milquetoast liberal centrists routinely fret themselves into hysterics over the Idea of America.
But the rest of the world does not root its identity in your civic religion. Don’t get me wrong, I know all the words to Hamilton just like any overgrown theatre kid, but I am not bound to respect your constitution, and I resent being conscripted into your culture war. For so many Americans, this electoral psychodrama is about sticking it to the other guy, gal or gender-ambiguous folk devil- a chance to pursue personal prejudice, or punish an imagined enemy. The rest of us just want half a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change or another world war. Which is why we would prefer a president who is, at minimum, sane.
In fact, it’s precisely in foreign, military and economic policy that the US executive branch has the most power to make a lasting impact – salutary or shattering. If Kamala Harris keeps the USA in the Paris climate protocols, children being born today are a lot less likely to grow old on a choking, boiling hellscape of resource wars. If Donald Trump sides with Putin over Ukraine, everyone in Europe will be affected. I understand the ostrich urge. I’m sick of thinking about it, too. But try to think about how hard it is for people watching this from the outside to hang on to respect for anyone with the actual right to vote in an American election who refuses to do so on principle, out of complacency, or in despair..
I’ve been writing this from the perspective of some sort of an ambient Ur-foreigner, but I ought to come clean and confess to being, specifically, British. You might well ask where the hell I get the nerve to complain about any other nation inflicting its particular psycho-political horrorshow on the rest of the world coming from a damp little island that’s exactly what would happen if small dog syndrome was a nation state. I’m in no position to judge: my country was making its neuroses everyone else’s problem long before yours was a glimmer on George Washington’s shiny false teeth. My country also lost its goddamn mind in 2016. Britain is still dealing with the fallout of our enormous, embarrassing public meltdown over not having an empire anymore. It’s not that we didn’t care about the impact of Brexit on any of the dozens of nearby nations whose socioeconomic stability we vandalized. It’s that we didn’t think about it at all. We were too busy yelling at each other and making cowardly, myopic choices to spite our neighbors. We failed to anticipate that when we decided by referendum that we were more important than other countries, other countries might not agree. And we’re hurting because of that. Our economy is tanked, our international reputation is wrecked, and everyone else is rerouting their diplomatic decisions around us- because they’re sick of our bullshit, and rightly so.
The difference is that Britain only thinks we’re important. Brexit was our last chance to make ourselves the center of attention by massively acting out and threatening to do something dangerously stupid. The United States gets to do that every four years. And perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps that’s part of the thrill of being an American voter, of any party affiliation or none. Perhaps being part of a democracy powerful enough to petrify everyone who isn’t part of the demos…feels good.
And you know what? That’s fine. This is a call to empathy, not action. I’m not advocating for actual foreign interference here, unlike the Republican base which seems relaxed about letting the likes of Putin and Elon Musk into the policy locker-room if it helps them lock down their base. I’m not suggesting that the rest of us should actually get a vote.
But what if I did?
Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this: what if, just as a thought experiment, I told you that the seven-and-a-half billion human beings who are not American citizens ought to get a say in American elections? Aren’t we affected? Shouldn’t we get a voice? What if I told you that I think I deserve a vote in your election, and so does everyone else in England, and Russia, and China. How would that make you feel?
Be honest. It’s okay to find that idea offensive. I would, if I were you. But I want you to pay attention to that feeling. To examine that outrage, and understand that that is precisely how far too many of your fellow American citizens feel about you getting to vote. If you’re Black, or a woman, or queer, or an atheist, or an immigrant, there are people who would rather destroy their own democracy than accept people like you as part of the people. They are actively preparing to stop your vote from counting this year, and if they get their way they will do what they can to cut you out of the process forever. And that’s not even the most frightening part.
The really frightening thing about all this is how quickly you get used to it. How fast you acclimate to the awful inertia of waiting and hoping some half-mad misogynist won’t set the whole place on fire because it makes him feel big and strong. You’d be surprised by how easy that is to normalize. How easy it is to accept that there’s nothing you can do and no point in staying angry. How easy it is to fold up your sense of unfairness and sink into complacency. If Trump’s Republican Party manages to monster its way back to power, that’s what it will feel like for American citizens, too. Not at first, but very fast, it’ll feel normal not to have a voice, or a choice, and it could feel that way forever.
Good luck.
Laurie Penny’s Substack is Penny Red