News that Britain's new coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has agreed to place curbs on thousands of closed-circuit television cameras in public spaces has caught most Americans by surprise. The Republican Party’s insistence on just saying "no" to virtually everything the Obama administration proposes has made us think that noncooperation is the political norm everywhere.
But even more surprising have been the jokes made at the first joint press conference of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. From the 1950s classic, "The Lavender Hill Mob" to Monty Python, British humor, whether in the hands of Alex Guinness, Peter Sellers, or John Cleese, has consistently tickled the American funny bone, but the Cameron-Clegg joint press conference brought with it the unexpected—comedy at the highest governmental level, marshaled in order to further rather than impede political cooperation.
Among British commentators, the banter between the prime minister and the deputy prime minister initially drew cynicism. The two were called "TweedleCam and TweedleClegg," and their alliance was dismissed as likely to be short-lived, despite its approval by 80 percent of the British electorate.
But watching Cameron and Clegg from this side of the Atlantic has been a joyful reminder of what is missing these days in American political life: a sense of proportion and gentleness. In recent decades humor in American political circles has been a grim affair: what the American film critic David Denby has labeled snark, is the strain of snide abuse that seeks to demean a political opponent by putting him on the defensive.
The classic example of snark in recent years was the song "Barack the Magic Negro," which was repeatedly played on conservative Rush Limbaugh's radio show in 2007 and 2008. The essence of the song, in which the melody was based on the old Peter, Paul, and Mary hit "Puff the Magic
Dragon," was that Barack Obama was a counterfeit African American, a man whose Columbia and Harvard education made him acceptable to whites because it minimized his racial origins.
The song, masquerading as parody, appealed to racists by suggesting that only by turning white could a black be worthy of support. At the core of "Barack the Magic Negro" was the argument that an Ivy League education was sure to lead any African American to identify with the rich and the powerful.
Snark remains part of a contemporary American scene in which political opponents are the enemy who must be humiliated rather than the opposition who must be debated. In a culture in which "American Idol" makes laughing at the inept singer as much a ratings winner as applauding the good singer, snark is a natural fit.
Snark took center stage in the Clinton era when Republicans were able to make clinical details of President Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky a source of public humor, but in the Obama years, the impulse to sully the president has remained high. By contrast, the jokes of David
Cameron and Nick Clegg, who at 43 are the age John Kennedy was when he became president and captivated the nation with press conferences that consistently drew laughs, were designed to reduce the tensions their political battles had caused.
Had they said mean things about each other? Sure! But would they allow their past remarks to become grounds for retaliation? No! When Nick Clegg pretended to walk away from their joint press conference in a huff in response to criticism of him by David Cameron, he was, in the guise of a feigned outrage, making a clear statement. He was not so thin-skinned or fragile that he would let his ego get in the way of dealing with the tough political challenges ahead.
In a Great Britain in which the budget deficit equals 11.5 percent of the gross domestic product and Liberal Democrats want to change an electoral system that gave them just 9 percent of the seats in Parliament despite winning 23 percent of the vote, the political challenges are especially serious, but in an America in which banking regulation, immigration reform, and the approval of a Supreme Court justice lie ahead, the challenges are just as great. The problem for President Obama is that he lacks an opposition prepared to meet him half way with anything approaching civility, let alone humor.
Many in the Tea Party question if the president is actually an American citizen, and even mainstream Republican leaders hope to stall progress in Congress on major issues between now and the fall elections. As Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the number three Republican in the Senate gleefully observed of the delays likely to be caused by the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, "A Supreme Court nomination always stops things around here. It takes up most of the space for two or three months."
In this toxic atmosphere, the measured lightness of David Cameron and Nick Clegg is to be admired–indeed, envied.
Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author most recently of "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of age as a Superpower."