America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in mid-June 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mom. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices for you to exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking.

On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammoni. No one wants to be that guy. And to get away from this menace, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings.

So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. Whereas the US had many midwives, its mother was unquestionably Britain. It was Britain that seeded the first colonies in Virginia. Britain that gave America her mighty language. It was largely Britons who drafted the US Constitution – indeed the Founding Fathers saw themselves, quite overtly, as more British than the British: more honorably in love with their freedoms.

As a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t

It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Americans have an Oedipally schizoid relationship to Britain, even today. On the one hand you have that entire Downton Abbey strand of American desires. Our accents are adored, poshness is weirdly revered, an idealized concept of echt Britishness – from manners to furniture to clothes (Ralph Lauren built a billion-buck business on this) – is admired and aped, or created ex nihilo. Donald Trump’s White House is probably the most pro-UK administration in several generations. Trump celebrates his Scottish roots; J.D. Vance holidays in the Cotswolds. Winston is back in the Oval Office.

At the same time, America has often scorned Britain, mocked her, bossed her around and generally treated Mum something terrible. And right now, and from the same Trumpite wing of US politics, the UK is facing a lot of this pitiless scorn. Across conservative social media we Brits are seen as decrepit, weak, cucked, lame, broke, snaggletoothed losers who are utterly doomed to extinction.

You’ll find this discourse everywhere. From Tucker Carlson lamenting that Britons are “slaves,” to Elon Musk calling us a “tyrannical police state” to internet pundit Charlie Kirk describing us as “a husk” and “a conquered country.” Earlier this month, after comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for his views at Heathrow Airport, the British politician Nigel Farage went to Washington to tell members of Congress that Britain had turned into North Korea. Americans listened avidly.

Whatever the provenance of these critiques – and plenty come from a place of grief, or regret, not mere contempt – they hit home. They can make Brits wince. And one of the times I’ve winced the most came via a much less well-known voice: a Substack called Starstack, created by – as far as I can see – a firmly right-wing but not crazy Republican, known on X as @youngtroon.

The particular essay about the impending doom of the YooKay (and he uses this demeaning nickname quite deliberately) is entitled “Mind the Gap,” but the subhead gives us the gist: “A powerful set of systemic factors are threatening to bring chaos unseen in centuries to the shores of the United Kingdom.”

I advise you to read the entire essay yourself. It is articulate, considered, perceptive and, if you are British, quite harrowing. He has given us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. And, my God, it is a dismal portrait. And it therefore deserves a close analysis, as a shining example of the genre.

The author attacks us from all sides. Not with pointless venom, but with outright astonishment at our grotesque and self-harming stupidity.

Here are a few choice descriptions: to him, Britain is “a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if it were run by your neurotic mother-in-law.” Parts of the North resemble “a collapsing civilization.” The National Health Service is “a black-hole money pit with some of the worst dollar-per-dollar outcomes.”

We also have “some of the nuttiest benefits handouts in the entire world.” He notes that our Chancellor recently broke down weeping in parliament. He says the economy is “effectively stagnant, and there is little or no plan to resolve underlying systemic factors.” He adds that Britain is a country “where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of white girls were systematically sexually exploited by gangs of Mirpuri Pakistanis” – a fact which was then covered up. Meanwhile, we are also a nation that “received well in excess of 1 percent of its population for several years straight during the ‘Boriswave.’” Mr. Troon does not see this as a good thing.

Then he really gets going. I’ll spare you the gory fiscal details, but it’s when the essay turns to our growing debt crisis – those gilt yields soaring over 5 percent – that the apocalypse promised by the subtitle begins to loom. It is not pretty.

Naturally, as a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t. I have been through the essay, insult by insult, and I’ve found only two arguable errors. Firstly, the UK does not – thank God – suffer weekly or daily terror attacks. Secondly, Britain does not have a “uniquely violent street gang culture.”

Apart from that, I cannot find major flaws. Which makes it all the more depressing, and makes me wonder whether the author’s prognosis is correct and Britain is, actually, “rapidly heading toward a grand and brutal reckoning” and that “the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely.”

To make it worse, the author does not see a savior anywhere, not in Reform, Labour, the Conservatives, because we have “one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet.” Ouch.

However, he does offer the motherland one brief filial hug at the end. The author states that, despite all the above, the native Britons have somehow managed to keep a functional country together, so far. And on that basis he predicts that, after the inevitable revolution, our innate virtues should prevail and we will rebound.

Nonetheless, as things stand, let’s just say, from a certain American perspective, Mom has drenched herself in gasoline. And is about to light a cigarette.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.