The conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University while speaking to students at a large public debate event. I know very little about him, beyond recognizing his picture and knowing he was closely connected with TPUSA, but every coldblooded murder under any circumstances is a loss to all of us. The event has led to a massive degradation of relations across all the political parts of social media, with endless accusations and recriminations, and some people, including teachers, who are, as they say, 'too online', have made fools of themselves and put their jobs in jeopardy by speaking positively of the murder. One would think it would just be common sense, regardless of one's political views, not publicly to celebrate a murder on a school campus at a student event if you are a teacher, but I suppose it's not actually difficult to find people without common sense in the teaching profession.
In any case, I was looking through a number of social media accounts this morning in a (futile) attempt to find more scholarly article and website recommendations for my occaional 'links of note' posts, and stumbled upon a debate about a particular case that pulled me up short a bit. It was about some positive comments made by a teacher in a high classroom about the murder of Kirk. That wasn't what made me pause. What caught my attention was that the high school was in Australia.
It's an old story. The provincials chat about affairs in the metropole in order to pretend to be cosmopolitans. What is peculiar about our moment of time is that the provincials deliberately make themselves provincials and treat the United States as the metropole even when there is no reason why they should. It goes far beyond what most people note on this subject, namely, that people pay attention to American politics because of America's global influence. This isn't like the Cuban Missile Crisis or trade wars. Rather, the domestic political issues of the United States are just copied. We saw this with George Floyd, in which you had people in foreign countries protesting a single policing incident in Minnesota, and here we have a teacher in Australia treating a political murder in Utah as if it were local politics. And it's become a joke on X.com and some other social media sites that the accounts most vociferously engaged with American politics always turn out not to be Americans. Half the world have volunteered to be an American colony, and treat themselves like the provinces of a metropole; there is a global tacit agreement for treating the US as the one place that really matters. All other political issues have to be shoehorned into American political disputes, otherwise they are treated as fringe.
It should go without saying, but perhaps doesn't, that this is bad for everyone. Most American domestic politics simply cannot bear that weight; most of it has no global significance at all. What is more, American domestic politics is weird. It does not work like politics in the rest of the world. Part of this is that we are an unusually successful republic, and republican politics always tends to be more paranoid and rough-and-tumble and tolerant of extremes than, say, the politics of parliamentary monarchies. The price of a republic is crazy people being the primary defense against crazy people, checks and balances carried to the point of a universal law, and we've been a prospering republic longer than most. We are also immense. There isn't really a single domestic politics in a population that's about a third of a billion people spread out from sea to shining sea in a federated system. There are lots of different domestic politics with fuzzy borders in a lot of similar-but-different political systems that work like capacitors, building up charge on particular issues that suddenly leap into national prominence; these suddenly-national topics then immediately start mutating on contact with new and different regional politics, in unpredictable ways. Local politics often makes a certain amount of practical sense, but in a system like this, at the national level there's not much rhyme or reason as to why at any given time we all happen to be talking about this topic rather than that. These topics get filtered through international journalistic institutions and arrive, in often highly simplified and distorted form, in other countries, where people naively take them up as a the topic du jour.
And the discussions are often quite ignorant. One of the things that I discovered very early as an academic is that academics located outside of the United States often have really strange interpretations of American politics; this is not so much their fault as the nature of the thing. It's what happens when your conceptions of an exotic country are built mostly out of secondhand rumors about it. And make no mistake, whatever country you may live in, whatever politics might be like there, in politics the United States is an exotic land of strange customs. It's hard enough to follow and understand US politics when you are an American in America; outside of that, you have little chance at all. What actually happens, of course, is that the American topics get mapped, badly and inconsistently, on the domestic politics of other countries, so that people in other countries think that the disputes are about X when that has never been the point of the dispute at all. Sometimes these confusions bleed back into the United States, to the muddling of everything.
But the whole thing is bad on the other side, as well. There is just no reason why Australians should be treating themselves as a cultural appendage of the United States, with the political events of such a globally significant powerhouse as Orem, Utah having a centrality and importance on a level with things that happen in Melbourne or Sidney. There is no value for Australia, or any other country, in turning themselves into peasants troubled by rumors about intrigues in the royal palace. It doesn't matter how influential American politics is; it's not your own, and it's usually not that valuable or important. This doesn't mean that you can't have an interest in it, of course, nor does it mean that there are never cases of genuine global importance (but they can come from anywhere, not just the United States), but there's no reason why these issues of domestic America should be taking up valuable real estate in another country's political consciousness.
I sometimes wonder, though, if it's deliberate; perhaps people around the world talk American politics so that they don't (directly) have to talk about their own. In any case, it's an impoverishment all around.
