Americans have expectations of England. We are a variegated and fissiparous people but we understand ourselves, however dimly, to have a source. It is over there, across the ocean, the place that sent forth the Mayflower and the Virginia Company and the idea of liberty, the nation against whom we rebelled and whose noblest self we fulfilled. It is what gave us our language, our political order, our belligerency and our ungovernability. We order ourselves after its ways. Every American suburb grasps toward an English town. Every American countryside is measured against the green and pleasant land.
The higher you go in the American societal strata, the larger England looms. Conservative parents of a certain type send their children to classical schools run along English models. The subculture of urban Catholic converts in the northeastern axis is more likely to invoke English saints than American.
Leftist parents draw their politics and their aesthetics from English templates. English cultural power means that a generation of American millennials think the house system in educational institutions is normative and that boarding schools are good, and a critical mass of them are determined to seek both for their own children.
Amongst a certain set along the east coast, a graduate degree from an English (or at least a British) school is a commonplace: they are simultaneously more prestigious and easier to get. The argot of the young and educated in New York City and Washington, D.C. is peppered with English phrases. Absolutely. Quite.
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