One word is missing in the American debate over the debt crisis: austerity. It's a revealing absence. In spite of the vast deficit, and despite the US being the home of individualism, no way is being offered for individuals to make a difference by changing their lifestyles.
In the UK, we've become familiar with talk of the "new age of austerity". Politicians of both left and right use the expression to frame the narrative about the cuts we're now facing. While both sides "warn" about this coming era, austerity is not negative in the British psyche. Here, associations with wartime soften it. Austerity is associated with personal changes which benefited society and made sense to people who learned to tackle wastefulness, to "make do and mend". Long before the current cuts, austerity was making a comeback here, associated with the environmental issues of recycling, cutting consumption and reducing our carbon footprint. Indeed, the New Economics Foundation recently launched the New Home Front, arguing that wartime lifestyles are positive models for reducing our environmental impact. When we think growing our own veg, staycations rather than vacations, cycling rather than driving, it has a fashionable appeal.
Not so in the US. In the five months I spent there earlier this year, I never heard the word austerity in political discussion. The Republican discourse is all about how the government is spending too much. The government must tighten its belt. There was nothing about individuals living beyond their means and no suggestion that individuals have a role to play in the solution.
Yet the US deficit is founded on overconsumption, made possible by too much consumer credit and, less well recognised, too much environmental credit. In the current war of words in Congress, there are no references to the immoral lending that encouraged people who could not afford it to invest in the American dream. That's what led to the property crash and the financial crisis. That has disappeared totally from political argument.
From individuals I heard nothing about the need for prosperous people to change their ways. There are, of course, many worthy "green shoots", such as the "locavore" movement or the "greening the campus" initiative at the university I was visiting, where a newly appointed sustainability officer heroically tries to cut energy use. But people like him have their work cut out. The whole of the east coast and the rust belt are vast, shocking landscapes to which many Americans seem oblivious. This is a society which has lived not just beyond its economic means but beyond its environmental ones too as the hundreds of miles of abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, and endless highways bear witness to.
Yet the American dream survives. You're either in it, or out of it. Being out means destitution. Individual lifestyles are boom or bust. In the UK I know many people who reject consumerism, getting involved in poorly paid environmental or political work. We regard them as rather honourable. In the US, if you don't have money you don't count.
None of this is supposed to indicate we've got it right here. Far from it. David Cameron, the politician most often heard referencing austerity, has not linked it to a vision for a green economy. And the relaxation of planning controls with the potential to trash the environment would be a case in point. But at least words like thrift, simplicity and sustainability don't carry such negative connotations. They suggest we have, at least, a place to work from. In the US, the ideological mindset makes these negative terms, which in turn makes the future there look bleak. Their problem isn't just fixing government spending, but ultimately counting the real costs of the American way of life.