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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
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Dulwich students are sufficiently broad-minded to understand the former president’s appeal without condoning his policies
I wonder if you read about the school in suburban New York that was completely obsessed with the UK 2019 general election. Bleary-eyed American teenagers struggled to stay awake during registration after staying up late to watch Jo Swinson’s razor-close count in Dunbartonshire East. A group of Sophomore pupils tried to lure their History teacher away from their fascinating study of the structure of the League of Nations into a red herring about the relative gravitas of rival TV anchors Tom Bradby and Huw Edwards. Meanwhile, during morning break, a heated argument broke out among two 11-year-olds over whether Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral system should be replaced with the more proportional d’Hondt formula or Droop quota. Perhaps you didn’t. But for much of November, during the US presidential elections, a similar phenomenon seemed to take place at Dulwich College. Politics is studied as an A-level subject by around 35 students in the Upper School, but suddenly everyone from Year 7 upwards appeared to have an informed opinion on the merits of the Electoral College, the significance of the Rust Belt and the surprisingly high level of support for Donald Trump among Cuban-Americans in Florida. Lower School pupils attended lunchtime talks in droves. Even between lessons I could barely walk through the cloisters without an enthusiastic Year 10 calling out, from behind an illicit mobile and an animated face mask: ‘Sir, sir, another batch of votes is in from Pennsylvania and Biden is consistently averaging 57.3%.’ This interest continued well beyond November, taking in everything from the Senate results in Georgia and the riots on Capitol Hill to earnest discussions about Bernie Sanders’ woollen mittens on inauguration day. Record numbers of Year 11s have signed up to study the subject next year. The explanations as to why we in the UK are so obsessed with the soap opera of American politics are well-rehearsed. Their politics are bigger, brasher, generally more relevant, and often less cynical. They have The West Wing ; we have The Thick of It . Their president lives in the White House; Boris Johnson, our Trump-lite, bounces between a nondescript terraced house and his girlfriend’s flat in Camberwell. POTUS’s motorcade drives up to Air Force One in a car with eight-inch armour plating nicknamed ‘The Beast’; Mr Johnson has had a three-gear hire bike named after him.
More seriously, this Biden presidency will have a direct impact on British politics, from Brexit and climate change to the Good Friday Agreement. No one in Washington DC is debating what a Starmer premiership might mean for the USA’s border with Mexico. Or whether the fact Boris Johnson was born in the USA might make him more likely to put in some extra import orders for chlorinated chicken. But why do British teenagers, in particular, follow US politics with an enthusiasm rarely seen for, say, the German Bundestag elections? Are they the poor, tired, huddled masses, welcomed by the Statue of Liberty, yearning to escape the storied pomp of Europe, yearning to breathe free? Or do they simply want something else to read about apart from Covid? Partly, I think, it’s due to the character of Donald Trump himself. While I haven’t spoken to many students who agree with his policies, most admit that they find him hypnotically amusing, whether commanding huge rallies or simply updating his Twitter feed. One of our most memorable moments on a school trip to New York and Washington DC in October 2019 was watching his motorcade en route to a World Series baseball game, where he was loudly booed. As with Trump’s fellow populist Nigel Farage, introduced at one Republican rally as ‘the King of Europe’, Dulwich students are sufficiently broad-minded to understand the former president’s appeal without condoning his policies. Furthermore, although the transatlantic political traffic is generally one-way, not all of it is populist or illiberal. The word woke originated in America as, of course, did the
Black Lives Matter movement. Both concepts have made a significant impact on Dulwich students’ lives and will no doubt continue to do so at university and beyond. In some ways, of course, it’s an old story. Britain has been obsessed with its political relationship with America ever since Churchill labelled it ‘special’. Subsequent prime ministers have variously tried to recast that hoary old adage, whether dubbing it ‘close’ (Wilson), ‘natural’ (Heath) or, more imaginatively, ‘the transatlantic bridge’ (Blair). We have come a long way from Macmillan’s attempt to portray Britain as the wise, superior Athens to America’s young, brash Rome. More recently, despite my GCSE History classes asking with alarming frequency what it was like to live amid the fear and uncertainty of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I do actually remember the interest with which my generation greeted everything from the Lewinsky scandal to the Bush vs Gore recount to the Iraq War. No doubt there are some Dulwich parents and grandparents with fond memories of the anti- Vietnam War protests of 1968 in Grosvenor Square. Culturally, too, the young have always looked to the New World, from the jazz era to hippies to start-ups. Sometimes, in return, we loan them Harry Potter. Or Harry Windsor. Or, less successfully, the Kinks, Blur and Dizzee Rascal.
As George Bernard Shaw put it, we are ‘two nations separated by a common language’.
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