Calling America: Hello?
Hello? Hello? Hello?
Published: November 2, 2013
SINGAPORE
— HAVING lived and worked abroad for many years, I’m sensitive to the changing
ways that foreigners look at America. Over the years, I’ve seen an America that
was respected, hated, feared and loved. But traveling around China and
Singapore last week, I was confronted repeatedly with an attitude toward
America that I’ve never heard before: “What’s up with you guys?”
Whether
we were feared or loved, America was always the outsized standard by which all
others were compared. What we built and what we dreamt were, to many, the
definition of the future. Well, today, to many people, we look like the
definition of a drunken driver — like a lifelong mentor who has gone on a binge
and is no longer predictable. And, as for defining the future, the country that
showed the world how to pull together to put a man on the moon and defeat
Nazism and Communism, today broadcasts a politics dominated by three phrases:
“You can’t do that,” “It’s off the table” and “The president didn’t know.” A
Singaporean official who has been going to America for decades expressed shock
to me at being in Washington during the government shutdown and how old and
emotionally depressed the city felt.
“Few
Americans are aware of how much America has lost in this recent episode of
bringing the American economy to the edge of a cliff,” said Kishore Mahbubani,
the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy here, and the author of
“The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World.” “People
always looked up to America as the best-run country, the most reasonable, the
most sensible. And now people are asking: ‘Can America manage itself and what
are the implications for us’ ” — if it can’t?
In
talking to Asian college students, teachers, diplomats and businesspeople, here
is how I’d distill what was on their minds: “Are you really going to shut down
your government again? Like, who does that? And, by the way, don’t think that
doesn’t affect my business over here, because I’m holding a lot of dollars and
I don’t know what their value is going to be. Also, how could the people who
gave us Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, I.B.M., H.P. and Google not be able to build
a workable health care website? I know it had five million users, but there are
48 million Indonesians on Facebook!”
Worse,
whenever you’d visit China or Singapore, it was always the people there who
used to be on the defensive when discussing democracy. Now, as an American,
you’re the one who wants to steer away from that subject. After all, how much
should we be bragging about a system where it takes $20 million to be elected
to the Senate; or where a majority of our members of Congress choose their
voters through gerrymandering rather than voters choosing them; or where voting
rights laws are being weakened; or where lawmakers spend most of their free
time raising money, not studying issues; or where our Congress has become a
forum for legalized bribery; or where we just had a minority of a minority
threaten to undermine America’s credit rating if we didn’t overturn an enacted
law on health care; or where we can’t pass even the most common sense gun law
banning assault weapons after the mass murder of schoolchildren?
I still
don’t believe there would be many takers for the commentary on the official
Chinese news agency Xinhua, after the government shutdown, suggesting that it
was “perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building
a de-Americanized world.” But Xinhua got the befuddled part right. Many people
would still line up in a blizzard to come to America, though for too many now
that is not because we’re the “beacon on the hill” but rather “the cleanest
dirty shirt.”
Singapore
is not a full-fledged democracy. What it does have is a government that wakes
up each day asking: What world are we living in and how do we best use the
resources we have to enable more of our citizens to thrive in this world?
Little things here catch my eye, like the E.R.P.: the electronic road pricing
system that greets you when you drive into the center city and tells you every
minute, via an electronic billboard, how much it will automatically charge you
when you drive into the downtown. It constantly adjusts the price based on the
number of cars that can comfortably fit the roads.
The Bush
team tried to fund a similar system to reduce congestion and pollution for
Manhattan, but it was killed by other boroughs and lawmakers in Albany. And
that is what bothers me most today. It’s not just that we can no longer pull
together to put a man on the moon. It’s that we can’t even implement proven
common-sense solutions that others have long mastered — some form of national
health care, gun control, road pricing, a gasoline tax to escape our budget and
carbon bind.
As Andy
Karsner, the former assistant secretary of energy who participated in last
week’s New York Times forum here, remarked to me: “This is the first time I
have visited Singapore where its modernity is not a novelty, but a depressing
contrast.” Because, he added, you know that all the modernity and prosperity
you see here “is not based on natural resources but on a natural
resourcefulness — and on implementing with ease best practices, many of which
ironically originated in the United States.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on
November 3, 2013, on page SR11 of the New York edition with
the headline: Calling America: Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?.
