What a Mississipi election and the Yorkshire bullying case have in common

Two disparate stories from opposite sides of the Atlantic but each bearing a reflection of the other.

In the first, here in the UK, another video surfaces that shows the virtues but also the virulence of social media. A young Syrian boy is bullied in his school in Yorkshire. The British public leap to his defence, sending money his way, offers of once-in-a-lifetime experiences, opportunities to relocate, as well, sadly, a mob of “defenders” eager to teach the bully a lesson.

There is much to admire about the story but some details that should concern us. Not long after the video surfaced, the bully was identified and his family’s possible involvement to other race crimes made apparent. Soon the bully was “doxxed”, meaning his personal details shared online. His home address was circulated but so too was the address of another house, presumably of innocents who have the misfortune of living on the same road. It seems glib and contrarian to demand due process and the rule of law when dealing with such bullies, but it should also be unnecessary to say that both are required.

In the United States, meanwhile, the Mississippi Senate race ended with the predictable election of Republican Cyndy Hyde-Smith over Democrat Mike Espy. The race had garnered much attention and not simply because it was one of the remaining unknowns of the midterms. Hyde-Smith had made comments that had been interpreted as being tinged with racism. She had joked that, if one of her supporters “invited me to a public hanging, I would be on the front row.” Innocuous, you might think, but this is in Mississippi, the state that has seen more lynching than any other. Also, bear in mind that the last lynching of a black man is still well within the living memory of many Americans. When was that, you ask? The 1930s? The 1960s? Or how about 1981, when Michael Donald was lynched in Mobile, Alabama by several members of the Klan.

This would all be a typical controversy of election season, but the result has greater significant once you understand that Espy outperformed even Obama in urban areas. He might well have flipped the state had Hyde-Smith not performed better in rural areas. In other words, welcome to America: A nation getting more divided by the day.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom share the commonality that they increasingly disunited. They share liberal audiences dismayed at the brutality of the world and demanding that somebody do something to fix it. Billy Baldwin tweets his horror about the Yorkshire bullying in the same way that J.K. Rowling tweets about Trump. This is a struggle against deep-seated prejudices that are hard to erase and, in some ways, becoming even more ingrained.

Liberal America, outraged by the excesses of the President, finds itself incredulous that they are ruled from the rural Bible Belt. Their complaint, specifically, is about the power that southern states have in the electoral college, forgetting that the system was created to do just that. Conservative America, in the meantime, is grounding itself more deeply in its opposition to liberal values.

Britain, on the other hand, is shamed by the actions of a bully on a playing field but the violence emerges from somewhere else, in a psyche shaped by enduring notions of “ours”, belonging, and perceived injustice. This too is about historical grievances that are proving hard to defeat and might well be deepening. It’s no surprise that the bully’s family appear to be tainted by far-right sentiments. This stuff is out there and is far more prevalent than we would hope, perhaps even as prevalent as many of us fear.

The reason it is so hard to dislodge is, perhaps, that culturally we have such a poor historical awareness. It’s a point that Allan Massey makes over at The Spectator this week when discussing Brexit and the breakup of the United Kingdom, which, he notes, “many nationalists consider […] a wholly artificial, and certainly anachronistic, construction”. Indeed, they would. What is nationalism if it’s not an appeal to something that rises above history or, rather, would demean history in order to make it support a crass stereotype, be that Braveheartism or the specialness of being English?

Nationalism is hard to dislodge because we are encouraged to think in ahistorical terms. The present entirely dominates our lives. We buy cheap milk every day, but we don’t understand the supply chain and the global forces that affect it. We drive our cars more in the belief it is a right rather than the good fortune arising from a rather astonishing sequence of historical events involving manufacturing, transport, logistics, taxation, fuel technology, and geopolitics. This is that very familiar problem we see whenever advocates of “good English” are appalled by variations, adaptations and outright innovations. They fail to understand that language changes. We cannot know how the influence of various sub-cultures will shape our language, but we can be certain that the English we know today will seem archaic to those living in four hundred years, just as much as Middle English is incomprehensible to today’s teenagers. In other words: a good grasp of what came before can help shape our understanding of what comes next. Without that, we labour under these naïve assumptions that are so foundational to both British and American nationalism.

This is why it’s perfectly fine and, perhaps, even healthy to embrace Patriotism if you also understand the thing you celebrate is rooted in history. Be proud to be British if you understand that the national anthem was adopted in 1745, the Union flag dates to 1801, and that the Houses of Parliament – the symbol of our democracy – are really the embodiment of the Gothic revival and it is not that old, only started to be built in 1840. Patriotism is a choice we make to cherish a totally constructed identity. Nationalism, on the other hand, is about celebrating a state of being from which we have no choice. (Cue the apocryphal story of the English MP, addressing a crown in Belfast, who says “I was born an Englishman, I have lived my life as an Englishman, and by God I shall die an Englishman!’, to which somebody in the crowd shouts, “Shite, man! Have ye no ambition?”)

This is at the root of the American psychosis, where the idealised nation is very different to the grim practicalities of its political system. America is almost surprised to discover a nation divided on race, yet the American Civil War created the modern nation only after a good deal of reconstruction, some of which even continues to this day. The war ended in 1865 or a just 153 years ago and not much longer than a lifetime. The South was segregated until the Civil Rights movement finally put an end to the Jim Crow laws but that movement, defining the liberal victory of the 1960s, is still so recent that its lessons have not touched all parts of America equally.

The video of the Syrian boy being bullied is properly appalling but more appalling are the attitudes it reveals as existing in many British towns. A teacher recently told me of an incident in their school when pupils where heard using antisemitic insults. When asked about it, the pupils admitted that they didn’t even understand what their words meant. Their taunts were entirely stripped of historical context. They had simply heard their parents use them and so now they use them. We are surrounded by a failure of historical knowledge. “Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times,” wrote Gustave Flaubert to the novelist, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (George Sand). “Man has always been like that. Several years of quiet deceived us”.

And so, it seems that we too are paying a price for so many years of quiet; of post-war prosperity, the expansion of the markets, the improvements that technology has brought to our lives. Somewhere along the way, we forgot to remember history and, this week, that continued to shame us.