MOST members of the British political elite are citizens of two countries—their own and the United States. They follow American elections with obsessive zeal. They gorge on fat biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Alexander Hamilton. They scheme to get their children places at Harvard and internships in Congress. The dirty secret of the Brexit debate is that most British politicians are not so much hostile to the European Union as bored by it. America is where their heart lies.

For much of the past 40 years this love affair has served Britain well. It has strengthened the forces of reform and regeneration, enlivened policy discussions and put the kibosh on little Englandism. Thanks in part to its close relationship with America, Britain has been able to revive the position it seized in the 19th century in the slipstream of liberal thought.

The first example of this was Thatcherism. American thinkers such as Milton Friedman and George Stigler provided Margaret Thatcher with the academic firepower she needed to tackle overmighty trade unions, public-sector interest groups and unproductive state companies. Thatcher’s close relationship with Ronald Reagan allowed her to play a disproportionate role in the greatest drama of her time—the collapse of Soviet communism—and curbed her parochialism.

The second example was the Third Way. The task facing Britain in the early 1990s was to broaden and deepen Thatcher’s reforms. Neither the Conservative Party nor Labour seemed capable of doing this—the Tories because they were riven with internal splits and Labour because they were brain-dead. Bill Clinton’s New Democrats provided Tony Blair’s New Labour with the intellectual heft to make progressivism exciting again, after the dismal years of fights over nationalising the means of production and scrapping nuclear weapons.

The record since 2000 is more mixed. Mr Blair’s decision to support George Bush’s invasion of Iraq poisoned politics. David Cameron’s friendship with Barack Obama was benign but banal. But Donald Trump’s election in 2016 has turned what was once a clear positive into a clear negative. Thanks in part to Mr Trump himself and in part to the multiple dysfunctions that brought him to the White House, America is becoming a source of bad ideas rather than good ones, of polarisation rather than problem-solving and, bizarrely, of parochialism rather than cosmopolitanism.

The Brexit wing of the Tory party is intertwined with Mr Trump’s Washington. Last month John Bolton, the president’s national-security adviser, met senior members of the European Reform Group of hardline Eurosceptic MPs and suggested that Mr Trump wanted a trade deal with Britain as soon as possible. Downing Street was not told. Liam Fox, the trade secretary, boasts about his contacts with conservative Washington. This year’s winner of the Irving Kristol Award, presented by the American Enterprise Institute for “exceptional intellectual and practical contributions to improve government policy, social welfare or political understanding”, is none other than Boris Johnson.

Even if you believe that Brexit is a sensible policy, linking Brexit to Mr Trump is foolhardy. The president shows no sign of having the capacity to turn a vague promise into the nuts and bolts of policy. He is trying to undermine the EU just when Britain needs to exercise diplomatic restraint. Brexit is divisive enough without being associated with a president who will provoke mass protests when he arrives in London for a visit on July 13th.

The American left has also become a source of intellectual dysfunction. Mr Clinton’s “vital centre” has been destroyed by money-grabbing and complacency. During her run for the presidency Hillary Clinton presented few solutions to the problems created by the downside of her husband’s policies. At the same time, the so-called progressive left is taking the Democrats in a dangerous direction. It repeatedly flirts with illiberalism: witness the fashion for no-platforming heterodox speakers in universities, putting “trigger warnings” on books and privileging group rights over individual rights. It pays disproportionate attention to the plight of activist groups while ignoring or vilifying the working class.

The British left has gone further in importing American progressivism than the right has in importing Trumpism. The 2017 Labour Party rulebook, a 91-page document, contains 26 mentions of gender, 41 of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic), 43 of ethnic and 11 of race, but only two of class. Bahar Mustafa of the students’ union at Goldsmiths, University of London, banned white people and men from attending a diversity event and tweeted such things as “#killallwhitemen”. Cambridge University has put trigger warnings on works by Shakespeare.

Beware Friday the 13th

Bad ideas feed on each other. The more the progressive left focuses on the politics of minority groups, the more the Trumpified right will focus on the politics of national identity. They also distract attention from tackling pressing problems, such as poor productivity and pockets of social deprivation (Britain has six of the ten poorest regions in northern Europe). A struggling country can ill afford to waste its energies on American-style culture wars that can achieve nothing more than division and distraction.

There is more to America than the White House, with its bellicose nationalism, and the elite universities, with their tedious orthodoxies. State and city governments continue to focus on real problems. Silicon Valley companies are forging the future. It is time for the British political elite to re-examine its ingrained habits when it comes to the special relationship. Focus on the laboratories of democracy across the country, rather than on the White House and Harvard Yard. And pay more attention to innovations in other parts of the world—in Asia and Australasia, for example, and even, dare we say it, in continental Europe.