IQ2 debate: America has lost its moral authority

Big names at last Tuesday’s Intelligence Squared debate. Our beaming chairman Adam Boulton called on Will Self to propose the motion that America has lost its moral authority. In his sharp black suit, Self glared at us like an undertaker whose hearse has just failed its MOT and rattled through the sins of ‘the paternalistic superpower’. America guzzles up vast quantities of nature’s resources. It has a ‘systematically biased corporate media’ and a justice system ‘where 25 per cent of black males are either in jail or on bail’. He produced a killer statistic to highlight its oligarchical political system, ‘The re-election rate for congressmen is 98 per cent.’ An exhilarating speech full of flashes of surly wit. For the opposition, Simon Schama questioned Self’s figure of 98 per cent which, were it true, would mean the Senate could not have changed hands in 2006. Exuding sunniness, Schama reminded us that millions of Americans were ‘flocking to the polls to express their nausea’ at George Bush’s ‘eight aberrant years’.