It seems as inevitable as the economic chaos let loose by Donald Trump’s mad avalanche of tariffs: a precipitous drop in the number of tourists visiting the US, which is now forecast to be even worse than initially feared. In February, overseas travel to the country was down by 5% compared with the previous year – and, now, reputable forecasters are predicting a drop of nearly twice that size.
We all know why. Trump’s hostile words about Canada and Mexico have hit the US’s top two markets for tourism. Finnish, German and Danish transgender and non-binary people have been advised by their governments to contact a US diplomatic mission before travelling there. Note also a trickle of reports about outsiders falling foul of the cruel stringency apparently now gripping the American authorities: a 28-year-old woman from north Wales held for 19 days in a detention centre and escorted on to her plane home in chains; the French scientist who was summarily denied entry into the US after his phone was found to contain messages criticising the president. Those stories intensify the Trump administration’s general air of brutality and belligerence, which also brings familiar fears to the surface: of guns, politicised thuggery and a country in a frighteningly volatile state. The result is the sudden understanding of the US as somewhere that may be best unvisited – which, for millions of people, brings on a very painful pang of loss.
Many of us, after all, have always had our understanding of the world shaped by what some people call American soft power. My first sense of the US’s allure came when I was a four-year-old, watching the glorious educational TV show Sesame Street, and being spellbound by its multiracial cast, and the way it offered a much more thrilling take on letters and numbers – and life – than the staid fare we got from the BBC and ITV. A little later on, I can recall a few lucky childhood friends returning from American holidays – in Florida, usually – coming home with comics and sweets that increased my sense of the States as a beguiling land of dreams. And then came the clincher: a great mountain of music, which still sits at the heart of my understanding of what the US is, and how it may survive its current crisis.
The best American music is nothing if not honest: for me, it worked as a corrective to any rose-tinted ideas I had about the US, while somehow making me even more dazzled. That is definitely true of a run of records made between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, which I still return to again and again: the music of the consummate social commentator Curtis Mayfield, or the mixture of small-P politics and joyous self-actualisation that runs through Stevie Wonder’s peak work, from Music of my Mind (1972) to 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life. By way of listening to something utterly different, when I first became immersed in country music, I heard another kind of American truth: the sound of men finding space to be wounded, broken and vulnerable – in retrospect, the complete opposite of the brittle machismo Trump has made his own.
And then I finally went there: first to the usual big cities, and then to parts of the country too often overlooked. Twenty or so years ago, I took repeated trips to the deep south – Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia – and found myself simultaneously holding two completely contradictory sets of thoughts. One was to do with the awful intersection of racism – institutional and everyday – and poverty, and the plain fact that the richest country in the world had left so many people to sink. The other, though, was a sense that at least some of these places were making fitful and hesitant progress towards something better. One of my guidebooks talked about a region going through something akin to the journey South Africa had taken after the end of apartheid: on a good day, it was just about possible to believe it.
One of my most vivid memories is of a stiflingly hot weekday night in the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale, which is still a byword for cotton and slavery, and their long and awful legacy. In a bar owned by the actor Morgan Freeman, I watched a prodigiously talented teenager from the Middle East – her family were refugees – who, thanks to an educational programme run by the town’s blues museum, had learned to play spellbinding lead guitar in the style of such stars as Buddy Guy and Albert King. She did her stuff watched by a mixed crowd, who were not just amazed, but seemed to share some idea that what we were watching was a small symbol of things improving.
Not long after, the advent of Barack Obama’s presidency seemed to spectacularly crystallise some of the same sense of everyday hope, and that very American line, paraphrased from the preamble of the constitution, about progress towards a more perfect union. Whatever that means – and notwithstanding all the hatred, hypocrisy, slaughter and cruelty woven through the American story – I can still feel its force.
But Trump, clearly, wants to take his country in the opposite direction, partly by trying to reshape his country’s culture and the image it presents to the world. This is the meaning of – among scores of other actions – the removal of black Americans from educational material produced by the Arlington national cemetery, his attacks on “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” within the Smithsonian museum network, and his self-installation as the chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Such Republican lawmakers as the surreally stupid congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene even want to defund Sesame Street. In the midst of all those unhinged economic policies and assaults on science and academia, these moves are in danger of being overlooked. But they are just as important.
My daughter is 15, and as interested in the US as I was at her age, something boosted by the fact that the country between 1789 and 1900 is part of her GCSE history syllabus. She wants to visit the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and Sun Studios, where rock’n’roll first took flight. When she finally gets to New York, her first stops will include the Museum of Modern Art and what remains of the old Greenwich Village. I now wonder: should we go? But I think we still will, for one very good reason: that in the end, everything those places and institutions represent will prove to be Trump’s undoing. Put another way, he is not America. And for those of us who remain fascinated by the US, the best response to his misrule is not to turn away, but to keep faith with the Americans who understand that – not as dazzled outsiders, but people whose future depends on something better.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
