Sometimes a nation’s most cherished idea about itself can act like a slow poison. That is what happened in Britain after the Second World War with the idea that Britain remained a great power. This folie de grandeur not only produced the debacle of Anglo-French Suez intervention in 1956. It prevented Britain from becoming a founding member of the European Union (and thereby shaping it in a more liberal direction) and distracted it from the labor of rebuilding the economy.
The equivalent across the Atlantic is the idea that America is the world’s greatest meritocracy — and a living rebuke to the closed aristocratic societies of the Old World. This assumption was reasonable in the 19th century when millions of immigrants fled class-bound Europe in search of wealth and opportunity. It was a reasonable assumption for much of the 20th century — particularly after the Second World War — when an expanding economy created the world’s biggest middle class.