The Real America

The nationalisation of Citibank in all but name is nothing new in America, a country profoundly unlike that which its louder admirers, at home and abroad, like to proclaim. America is the land of big city government, of strong unions, and of very widespread co-operative membership, not least in housing. It was the first country ever to give effect to Keynesianism.

An entire episode of Frasier was once devoted to the eponymous hero’s efforts to take control of his condominium. Try and imagine anything set in Britain in which a psychiatrist and well-known broadcaster lives in a housing co-operative and devotes a week of his life’s spare time to its politics.

The decidedly Distributist tradition of small farmers who own their own land has long been under sustained threat. But it lives on.

And nationalisation is nothing remotely new there, either.