The core American value used to be freedom. Freedom of speech meant no one could drag you to jail for saying the wrong thing. Freedom of assembly meant no one could close down a political party, labor union, or church congregation for sedition. People chose their jobs, their homes, their spouses. America was "conceived in liberty," and when countries escaped fascism in 1944, or communism in 1989, they aspired to be more like America.
That was then. Starting in the late 20th century and accelerating terrifyingly around 2015, the United States has switched from elevating individual rights to elevating group rights. It has, in other words, returned to the tribal thinking that its creation was intended to defy. The precepts that drove the campaign for civil rights — race doesn’t define you, everyone is equal before the law, character trumps skin color — are now deemed reactionary and offensive. Ethnic differences (and, to a lesser degree, differences of sex, sexuality, and so forth) are deemed supremely important. They define your place in an imagined hierarchy of privilege and determine what you can say, what college scores you need, and what positions you can occupy.
We can argue about the origins of this tendency. Did it come from the notions of guilt and justification that animated the earliest settlers? ("I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.) Did it arrive later, brought by socialist German academics? Or was it an overcorrection, a reaction to the ugliness of slavery and segregation?
Whatever its genesis, the American virus has leaked out and become a global pandemic. Across the West, especially in other white-majority, English-speaking countries, social questions are now seen through the distorting prism of America’s civil rights struggles.
In Britain, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. are (along with Nelson Mandela) among the most familiar historical figures, with hundreds of classrooms and junior schools named after them. Almost any British child can identify them, whereas perhaps one in a hundred could tell you anything about, say, John Locke.
Our vocabulary has become Americanized. People talk of "all-white juries" as though there are alternatives in chunks of rural Britain. Race relations are presented in Black Lives Matter's terms, although black people in Britain are just 3.3% of the population, less than half as numerous as, say, South Asians.
Even if we accepted the fundamentally illiberal premise of a universal black experience or a universal white experience, there is no real comparison between the American South and the rest of the Anglosphere.