Why America Radicalizes Brits

I’d seen rich and poor America before, of course: the endless suburban wealth in places such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Austin, Texas, as well as the deprivation of Clarksdale, Mississippi. But the contrast between deindustrialized Youngstown, Ohio and reimagined Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just an hour apart, told the story of America’s hold on the British imagination better than anywhere I’d been before.

Take Pittsburgh first. Here was a place known as the Steel City: gritty, industrial, blue-collar—and, like most such cities, declining from the 1980s as its heavy industry closed, its companies relocated, and its population fell. The story is wearily similar to that of many cities in the U.K., including Liverpool and Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow. Yet, like other American cities (though unlike many in Britain), Pittsburgh has successfully reinvented itself as a tech hub, with booming incomes despite a still-falling population—and is now ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world.

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Had any English city so successfully regenerated itself, I wondered? Manchester, perhaps the most successful one outside London, was doing well, but could not be said to boast anywhere near as much wealth, or as diverse an economy, as Pittsburgh. According to official European Union figures, the average GDP per capita in Greater Manchester is £30,500, or about $39,700—10 percent below the EU average. In Pittsburgh, it’s more than £46,000, or $59,000, which is similar to the wealthy “Home Counties” near London.

Pittsburgh is the kind of city that stirs sympathy for America’s embrace of the creative destruction of free markets. Its success asks questions of Britain’s failures to achieve the same kind of economic generation. Put simply: Why aren’t more of our cities like Pittsburgh?

But that’s only one side of the story. The other comes in the hollowed-out city centers of old, deindustrialized Ohio. I went to two, Canton and Youngstown, each shocking in its own way and like nothing I’ve seen in England. In the dilapidation and hopeless poverty of some of their inner-city neighborhoods, both were unmistakably, obviously American—even though within a 10-minute drive of these areas, you would hardly know it.

In England, poverty and discrimination, like the class system, are less obvious, even if they are just as pervasive. The poor pit villages of the northeast wear their economic abandonment better; they kept going through better welfare, more state employment, and higher transfers of central-government income to maintain schools, roads, and other services in an area that has lost its economic reason for existing.

Of course, both small-town Ohio and big-city Pennsylvania are America. Academically, I already knew that, but feeling it is different. The question I Ieft with was whether you can have the creativity without the destruction, or does a country have to accept the abandonment of Youngstown to get the creative boom of Pittsburgh? If you stymie the bust, as in Britain, do you also stymie the boom? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I can see why people—Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Boris Johnson, and countless others—move to America and feel that they do, one way or another.

Tom McTague is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic, and co-author of Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.