A Twelve-Step Program for English-Speaking Democracies
Britain and America Walk Into a Meeting. Neither Thinks They Have a Problem.
I spent this morning in a 300-comment Threads argument with British people about GDP per capita. It started as a simple data point—the UK ranks 51st, below all 50 US states, dead last, and Brits surveyed about this guessed they ranked 7th—and it metastasized into a full civilizational audit. By the time we were done we had covered the slave trade, kitchen knife restrictions, the Epstein files, Powerball, Oxford Polytechnic, the class politics of semi-detached housing, and whether bankruptcy is a moral failing or a financial instrument.
Nobody changed their mind. That’s not the point.
The point is what I noticed underneath all of it—the architecture of denial that both countries maintain with extraordinary dedication, each one convinced that the other’s dysfunction is visible and their own is not. The British see American gun violence and feel confirmed. Americans see NHS waiting lists and feel confirmed. Both are right about the other. Neither is right about themselves.
This is not a new problem. It’s the human problem. But it has a solution—or at least a framework. The 12 Steps were designed for exactly this: the structured dismantling of the stories we tell ourselves so we can function without changing. They work on alcoholics. They work on nations.
So. Let’s begin.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our national mythology—and that our self-image had become unmanageable.
Britain: The Empire ended. The sun set. The manufacturing base collapsed, the coal mines closed, and the global reserve currency changed its address. And yet. The accent still lands with authority. The BBC still sounds like God’s own press office. There is a deep, structural confidence in British cultural output that is completely decoupled from British economic output—which, as established, ranks 51st.
America: We export our dysfunction in HD. Poverty porn, mass shooting coverage, political circus—and almost nothing about the 51% of households that are upper-middle-class or above, the GDP per capita that beats every European peer, or the fact that our “poor” states still outrank entire wealthy nations. The rest of the world has been convinced America is a failed state. We did that to ourselves. We are the only country on earth that is genuinely bad at its own PR.
Step 2: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Britain: That power is the NHS. It functions less as a healthcare system than as a national theology—the thing you point to when someone questions the faith. Never mind the waiting lists. Never mind that the private healthcare market just hit £12.4 billion and is growing at nearly 18% a year because the people who can afford to leave the queue are leaving the queue. Never mind that the Nuffield Trust—not a right-wing think tank—is warning Britain is heading toward a three-tier system: NHS for the lucky, private for the rich, and a waiting list for everyone else. The NHS is the argument-ender. It is the sacred cow in the room that no one is allowed to examine.
America: That power is the market. The belief that the invisible hand, left alone, will sort everything out—including the parts of everything that the invisible hand created in the first place. The opioid crisis was market-driven. The medical bankruptcy system is market-driven. The $1,000-a-month truck payment that working-class families carry as a proxy for dignity is market-driven. We worship the mechanism that is eating us and call it freedom.
Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the national narrative as we understood it.
Britain: The national narrative is: we are a small, wise, civilized island that punches above its weight, invented democracy (technically the Greeks, but close enough), fought Hitler more or less alone (technically not, but close enough), and now models for the world how to be decent, orderly, and fair. This narrative requires ignoring that Britain also invented the modern concentration camp (Boer War), ran the largest empire in human history, was the primary architect of the transatlantic slave trade, and currently has some of the most aggressive speech criminalization laws in the democratic world. Posting the wrong opinion online in Britain can get you a knock on the door. This is not metaphor. This is policy.
America: The national narrative is: we are the land of the free, the home of the brave, the indispensable nation, the last best hope of mankind. This narrative requires ignoring that we incarcerate more people per capita than any country on earth, that our healthcare system is designed to extract wealth from sick people, and that our political class is roughly as corrupt as anyone else’s—just louder about it. We believe in freedom so loudly that we occasionally forget to practice it.
Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Britain: The class system did not end. It laundered itself. The old markers—accent, address, school tie—still operate, just more quietly. Oxford Polytechnic became Oxford Brookes. The comprehensive school system was supposed to democratize education; instead it sorted children by postcode. The girl I knew in Dublin in the early nineties made me drop her off four blocks from her public housing block so no one would see which door I was driving her to. The shame wasn’t poverty. It was address. That’s not a working-class problem. That’s a class-system problem. And it’s still there.
America: We do not have a class system. We have a wealth system, which is different because theoretically anyone can join. The practical operation of these two systems is nearly identical—your zip code determines your school quality, your school quality determines your opportunities, your opportunities determine your outcomes—but the American version has the advantage of feeling like a meritocracy from the inside, even when it isn’t. We are very good at making structural disadvantage feel like personal failure.
Step 5: We admitted to ourselves the exact nature of our wrongs.
Britain: You restricted kitchen knives. Not ceremonially, not as a thought experiment—actual policy, actual enforcement. Pointed kitchen knives. In fish and chip shops. For adults. In America we give safety scissors to preschoolers. You apparently got there with the general population. This is what happens when you keep pulling the thread of state protection: eventually the state is protecting adults from cutlery. The logic is unbroken from hate speech laws to rounded tips. It’s the same logic. The state knows better. The citizen cannot be trusted with sharp things—verbal or physical.
America: We have 400 million guns and roughly 45,000 gun deaths a year. The honest version of our gun argument is not that guns are good—it’s that the alternative (the state having a monopoly on violence) frightens us more than the current casualty rate. That is a coherent position. It is also a position that requires acknowledging the casualty rate, which we largely decline to do. We talk about the Second Amendment as an abstraction. We don’t talk about the 45,000 as individuals.
Step 6: We were entirely ready to have these defects of character removed.
Neither country is ready. This is the hardest step. Moving on.
Step 7: We humbly asked our national mythology to remove our shortcomings.
Britain: The mythology cannot remove the shortcomings because the mythology is the shortcoming. The confident authority of the British voice—that received pronunciation carrying its unearned gravitas into every argument—is itself the problem. A British person can say something completely wrong and Americans will nod along like they’re hearing Churchill. It is the greatest unfair advantage in any argument and it has been used to paper over an enormous amount of structural rot.
America: We do not do humility at the national level. We do contrition, briefly, followed by reassertion of exceptionalism. After every national failure there is a period of self-flagellation followed by a return to the default position that we are still, net, the greatest country in human history. This is probably true. It is also completely compatible with being deeply, structurally broken in ways we refuse to examine.
Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends.
Britain: The list is long. It starts with Ireland, runs through India, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and most of the Middle East, and ends somewhere around the Falklands. The postcolonial instability that Britain now tut-tuts about in the UN was largely architected by British foreign policy over three centuries. The borders that don’t make sense in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia—those are British borders. The conflicts that followed are at least partly British conflicts.
America: Our list starts with the indigenous population, runs through slavery, through the banana republic interventions in Latin America, through the Iraq War, through the financial crisis we exported globally in 2008, and continues. We are aware of most of this. We teach some of it in schools—or we did, before we started arguing about whether teaching it constitutes a form of abuse. Neither response is making amends.
Step 9: We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Britain: Reparations discussions exist but are largely conducted as a philosophical exercise rather than a policy commitment. The monarchy still exists. The Crown Jewels still contain things that were taken. This is not nothing.
America: We are still arguing about a monument. We have not gotten to amends yet. We are at the stage where we are arguing about whether the harm happened.
Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
This is where the Threads argument lives. I was wrong about the education point—Britain has polytechnics and mature entry routes, and I should have known that before I said otherwise. I corrected it. My interlocutors were wrong about what “bankruptcy” means, what GDP per capita measures, and what the Financial Times actually said—and most of them did not correct it. Being willing to say “I got that wrong” is not weakness. It is the only mechanism by which arguments actually move.
Step 11: We sought through reflection and honest inquiry to improve our understanding of reality, seeking clarity rather than confirmation.
The Powerball expansion to the UK this summer is a data point worth sitting with. Thirty-one million Britons already play the National Lottery. Now they want access to $2 billion jackpots. This is not the behavior of a population that has transcended materialist aspiration. This is the behavior of a population that has been told a story about itself—contented, post-materialist, quality-of-life-oriented—that its own lottery ticket purchasing behavior quietly contradicts.
We are all buying lottery tickets. We are all telling ourselves we play for fun.
Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other nations, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
We are nowhere near Step 12. Step 12 requires having actually done Steps 1 through 11, which neither country has. What we have instead is the conference—Britain and America sitting across from each other in the church basement, each one absolutely certain the other one is the alcoholic, each one absolutely certain their own drinking is recreational.
The meeting has been going on since 1776. The coffee is terrible. Nobody has stood up to speak yet.
But here’s what I’ll say, having spent a morning in the argument:
The British system produces a certain kind of life that is genuinely good—safe, ordered, predictable, cushioned. The NHS, for all its dysfunction, means that nobody goes bankrupt from a cancer diagnosis (bankruptcy, as I spent considerable time explaining, being a financial instrument, not a moral verdict). The pub is real. The beer garden on a Sunday is real. I lived in Berlin for years and I know what that kind of leisure culture feels like from the inside, and it is not nothing.
The American system produces a different kind of life—louder, more chaotic, higher variance, with steeper peaks and deeper valleys. The possibility of getting spectacularly rich is real. The possibility of getting spectacularly ruined is also real. We trade security for optionality and most of us keep choosing the trade.
Neither system is lying about what it is. Both systems are lying about what they aren’t.
That’s the meeting. That’s the step work.
I’ll see you in the basement.
Chris Abraham writes at chrisabraham.substack.com. His previous piece, “For Your Protection,” examined how altruistic authoritarianism—the Iron Fist wrapped in the language of care—has become the defining feature of progressive governance in the English-speaking world. This piece is its natural companion: the national mythologies that make the Iron Fist feel like a hug.