New York Mayor Zohran Mandami’s speech on the Friday before America turned 250 (4th July) has been justifiably skewered for the trash it was. Even duller was the reality: it wasn't his speech, but his father’s – the “anti-colonial” scholar Mahmood Mandami, whose course on “Problematising Africa” was too radical even for the University of Cape Town.

Mamdani Jr, you see, isn’t an original guy – sometimes, if he’s addressing Indians, he’ll speak with a South Asian accent. If African Americans are his audience, then they get the whole ghetto thing – whether they want it or not. But whatever the speech was about, and it's hard to see anything behind the bland, plodding universal grievance template, it wasn’t the worst speech made by a Ugandan Indian about America in the lead-up to its big day.

That belonged to a woman called Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a notorious political commentator who is ostensibly British by citizenship, but Muslim by identity. Addressing a video filmed by her newspaper The i Paper, Alibhai-Brown said, “Happy Birthday, America, you have no idea how hated you are.”

Alibhai-Brown is much, much older than I am, but I think I know America better.

Life was different in 1996 when I visited New York City for the first time at the age of 17. Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t exist – but there was a guy going around hurting people. On my second day the news broke that a kindly, popular laundromat owner called Evelyn Alvarez had been bludgeoned to death in an attempted robbery. The cops were hot for her killer, who they believed had attacked other women in the days preceding, including someone in Central Park.

The city was gripped, but I was too busy getting my head blown clean off by the city’s cultural features. The way people dressed, the subway, how martinis were served in bars, the dining room at the St Regis, department stores, and Harlem jazz clubs. Occasionally I’d pass a bodega and see the efforts to apprehend the suspect via statements from the police and city councillors playing on box televisions.

Collared

I was in the company of an older woman in the bar at the Peninsula when the 22-year-old suspect was collared two blocks away. Rudy Giuliani broke onto the screen alongside Police Commissioner Howard Safir reassuring New Yorkers that they could go about their lives. Two weeks later Eric M Nelson, now the Professor of Government at Harvard University, wrote in the Harvard Crimson that he “did not believe that retribution was a vice”, adding he’d feel zero remorse for Evelyn Alvarez’s killer were he to be sentenced to death.

It's funny to think an institution that once thought so sensibly would go on to appoint a woman like Claudine Gay as president (later sacked for plagiarism) – but these were forces ushered in by the Mamdanis of academia, and the Alibhai-Browns of media.

In 2023 I lived above Will Rogers State Beach in Los Angeles, the place where Baywatch had been filmed. This was more Alibhai-Brown and Mamdani’s idea of America – fentanyl zombies shuffling up the beach paths, used syringes abandoned in the sand, shops on Wiltshire Boulevard sitting empty and Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK) on holiday, frequenting the Taylor Swift spin class in the Soul Cycle studio. Friends of mine living in Venice and Marina del Rey discovered tweakers trying to burgle their houses and the Pacific Coast Highway heading north to Malibu was lined with airstreams, the occupants busy cooking up meth. Small comfort lay in the rumour things in San Francisco were worse.

The Mamdani/Alibhai-Brown hatred of America isn’t because of hyper-capitalist billionaires or failed regime changes or its eagerness to enforce its own laws.

It's because most of the country refuses to submit before self-destruction.

Contentious Portrayals

The America I know and love is vastly different to their contentious portrayals. When I think of it, I see a blend of Walt Whitman and Jack Welsh or Larry Ellison – of difference, co-existence, depth, and meaning. It is Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cole from True Detective with Thomas Sowell, Emerson with Kerouac, George Gershwin with Marilyn Manson. What made Alibhai-Brown’s invective so strange is that the country has always struggled to be defined. Neither an angry woman nor a cosplaying chancer is going to change that.

But to deny that their views are not in the ascendant would be unwise. Both are pushing at open doors in Great Britain and South Africa, where narratives have been punctured with falsehoods deliberately instigated for local expedience. The infantile name “AfriMAGA” now smears groups appalled by corruption and double standards; in the UK, not a week goes by when Donald Trump’s name isn’t thrown around in Parliament, as if he is responsible for the failure of today’s political class.

Unlike other countries, America never sought reparations from Great Britain post-independence. Instead, the countries embarked on a monumental trade arrangement, primarily in financial services, that saw institutions in both countries flourish, forming one of the foundations of – until recently – a very special relationship. This was on display at the jubilee hosted last week in the grounds of the United States (US) ambassador’s London residence, Winfield House. Bands came from universities and schools in Arkansas, the home of the ambassador and recently the 50th US state to become richer than the UK. Underneath the goodwill, a layer of caution as a plea to the Mamdani/Alibhai-Brown narrative: Great Britain, re-locate the good judgement you once possessed.

Similarly, the elder statesman Thabo Mbeki’s remarkable speech, addressed to the US Ambassador to Pretoria, L Brent Bozell III – warm, gracious, nostalgic, supremely diplomatic, and clearly felt, against waves of asinine commentary originating from a hostile media and opposition party profiles. Listening to him, the US ambassador may have remembered that in 2016, his name was used on the cover of National Review as it pronounced its opposition to a Trump presidency. That’s fine. Things change. America and its people have always accommodated the bends and adapted to the demands of circumstance. It has been around for a lot longer than presidential profiles and wars and vitriol, and will be there long after.