Ten years or so ago Stephen Fry, English polymath, writer, TV personality, stage and screen actor, and many other things, gave a Spectator-sponsored lecture at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. His theme was appreciation for America, where he said he would choose to live “in a heartbeat.” I know Stephen and paid extra attention to his speech because I’ve lived between his country and the U.S. for most of my adult life.

He said his love affair with Uncle Sam began by watching “Wagon Train, Rawhide, and The Lone Ranger, or with Bewitched, Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball.” It continued through the silver screen, through American actors such as Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and others like them. But what really turned him into an Americanophile was a Brit, P.G. Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves, who spent the latter half of his life as an American citizen. Everything Wodehouse wrote about the energy, vivacity, warmth, welcome, and excitement of America thrilled Fry.

Fry compared his drab, middle-class British childhood of “grey weather, grey trousers, and grey attitudes” to the “dripping colorful slacks, pants, and jackets, sparkling jewels, thrilling cameras, perfumed furs and expensive tchotchkes” of his relatives living in America. They would write and tell him of their ice cube makers and air conditioners, stereo sets, and color televisions. “Damn it, in Britain even our TV was grey!” Young Stephen would sit and dream about basketball sneakers, yard sales, drive-in movies, spelling bees, and homecoming queens (this last line got a laugh, because Stephen is a very gay man).

Fry almost became an American himself. His father was a physicist who was offered tenure at Princeton but refused it because he feared bringing his children up in America’s casual culture. As Stephen put it, it wasn’t that he didn’t like America, but that he feared “having ‘Gee Dad’ directed at him over breakfast.” I thought that a wonderful touch, comparing the British stiff upper lip with American informality.

Although Fry was born and lived in a large house in Norfolk with gardeners, staff, and a fireplace in every room, he imagined himself as an American named Steve, who was “confident and happy and strong and secure in exactly the way that I was unconfident, unhappy, weak, and insecure.”

Fry believes that falling in love with America depends upon falling in love with the “idea of America,” a phrase that makes little sense if one substitutes another country. For example, what is the “idea” of Greece—a bunch of ruins? Or of France— lots of garlic and the can-can? Of Britain— warm beer and a vicar on his bike? But America as an idea as well as a place does make sense—or used to.

Compare Fry’s view to those of two French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who some 70 years ago arrived in America fresh from surviving a German occupation of their homeland. Sartre was critical of the contradictions he saw between the American idea of freedom compared with what he saw as the reality of a country dominated by multinational corporations and individuals obsessed with sexual taboos. “There is a myth of freedom and there is the dictatorship of public opinion…. Nowhere will anyone find such a discrepancy between myths and men,” he wrote. La Simone, travelling in Texas, added rather acidly, “Everywhere we go there’s the smell of hatred in the air— the arrogant hatred of the whites, the silent hatred of the blacks.”

My, my, how things have changed in 70 years! I visit America twice a year nowadays, and I do agree with Simone: I too feel the hatred, but it’s the other way round. What the American idea meant to Fry was a restlessness that drove its capitalist economy and the hopeful can-do spirit of its people, who were able to “transform a disappointment into a dollar.” To the two French intellectuals, America was a place where spoilt children hated everyone that didn’t look like them, where universities produced practical scientists but ignored the intellectual life of the nation.

It would be interesting if we could have Stephen Fry, who is very much alive, and the two very dead French compare notes on the America of today: a nation where students place nooses around the heads of statues and drag them down and spit on them because they fought for the Confederacy; a place where grim antifa enforcers stalk campuses with baseball bats; where universities are gripped by a fanatical brand of left-wing identity politics that polices speech and suppresses contrary thought; where Hollywood actors demand blacklisting Trump donors.

Fry, de Beauvoir, and Sartre were lefties, but pro-freedom. I wonder what they would say about what the U.S. has become? Perhaps they’d see a resemblance to the Soviet Union circa 1936. After all, it had its Pravda, and we have The New York Times.