Let us begin with a confession. I have grown weary of America. Not the land, for it is vast and beautiful, but the idea of it. The perpetual circus. The carnival of grievance that passes for politics. And now, this week, the circus has come to London. An American influencer, a loudmouth of the MAGA persuasion, has been arrested for an assault on the London Underground. The victim: a woman. The crime: ugly. The culprit: a self-styled patriot who, it seems, confused British civility with a green light to preach the gospel of American rage.
I should not be surprised. The MAGA movement has always harboured a peculiar contempt for Britain. We are weak, they say. We are decadent. We have surrendered our national soul to the European Union, to wokeness, to a thousand little compromises that make life tolerable. And yet here they come, these muscle-flexing pilgrims, to our shores, and what do they do? They brawl on the Tube. They shout at women. They get themselves locked in a British jail while their followers crow about persecution. It is pathetic, it is predictable, and it tells us something profound about the state of American political extremism.
Consider the historical parallel. The American colonies once rebelled against British rule, claiming they sought liberty from a tyrannical crown. Fair enough. But what happens when the spirit of that rebellion curdles into a toxic sense of entitlement? The American patriot becomes a bully. He mistakes rudeness for honesty and violence for virtue. He comes to London not to admire the Houses of Parliament or to ponder the Magna Carta, but to prove that he is unbound by the soft constraints of our society. He is a petulant adolescent in a MAGA hat, and he has disgraced himself on our soil.
This is not to say Britain is innocent. Our own politics are in a mess. We have our extremists, our demagogues, our populist pranksters. But there is a difference between a political movement and a descent into thuggery. The MAGA influencer did not merely disagree with a fellow passenger. He assaulted her. He used intimidation as a tool of expression. That is not patriotism. It is barbarism dressed in a cheap flag.
What then does this incident say about the state of America? It tells us that the fever has not broken. The Trump years left a wound that is still suppurating. The narcissism of the American right, its cult of grievance, its refusal to accept the basic rules of liberal society: all of this was on display in that Tube carriage. And while our own far right is not exactly a model of decorum, let us be clear about something else. The British brand of extremism, for all its faults, is not typically imported from across the Atlantic. We generate our own rage, thank you very much. And we deal with it, sometimes badly, but without the bombast and self-pity that characterises the American strain.
I return to Rome. The late empire was fascinated by the new, the barbaric, the purer forms of life that existed beyond its borders. But when those barbarians came to the capital, they often made fools of themselves. They could not handle the complexity, the ambiguity, the restraint of civilisation. The MAGA influencer is our visiting barbarian. He came to London expecting a stage for his brutishness, and he found a police station. It is a small, satisfying piece of Schadenfreude.
But here is the real tragedy. The incident will be forgotten in a news cycle. The influencer will return to America, plead guilty, or play the martyr. His followers will inflate him into a symbol of resistance against the soft tyranny of the British elite. And nothing will change. The American right will continue to glorify strength while acting like toddlers. And Britain, for its part, will continue to be a convenient target for their resentment, a nation that they despise and yet cannot stay away from.
Let this be a lesson. We can argue about Brexit, about the health of our monarchy, about our own national identity. But we do not need to be preached to by tourists who think that assaulting a woman on the Tube is a form of political protest. They are not patriots. They are not heroes. They are arrested. And that, for now, is the best we can hope for from the decaying empire across the sea.
