Why the warm embrace a small city in Kansas gave the Algerian football team fills me with optimism for America's next 250 years: JUSTIN WEBB

By JUSTIN WEBB FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY Published: 22:03, 4 July 2026 | Updated: 01:54, 5 July 2026 Let me introduce you to the small city of Lawrence. It will tell you all you need to know about why America, to me, is still great, still surprising, still the future. Lawrence is in the middle of nowhere. If you think of a map of the whole of the USA, Lawrence is almost slap-bang in the middle.  It is a long way to the outside world. They call it the sixth biggest city in Kansas, but folks, there are NO big cities in Kansas. So how would it feel for the Algerian football team to be billeted there during the World Cup? Think of all the negative stereotypes, of the ignorant, gun-toting, tobacco-chewing rubes who inhabit these places.  The suspicion of strangers, particularly Muslims, from a place they would be wholly unable to find on a map. What a culture clash was in store! The offside rule would be the least of the things the locals would have to grasp. Would they manage? Would they heck! On the day Algeria was finally knocked out by Switzerland, the people of Lawrence gathered at 10pm local time to watch the match on big screens. Two Algerian football fans in Lawrence, Kansas, take part in a street party before the game against Argentina Algerian and Argentinian fans in Kansas Stadium during the Group J match on June 16 Algerian fans hold a banner thanking the town of Lawrence, where the team's base camp was located They let off green-smoke fireworks – the colour of the Algerian national flag – and shouted 'Vive l'Algerie! They danced and cheered for their adopted players, and when it was all done and Switzerland beat the Algerians, the people of Lawrence were as sad as anyone in Algiers itself. Lawrence resident Tommee Sherwood had a message for the team, telling National Public Radio: 'We love you and you are always, always, welcome in Lawrence Kansas.' The local chamber of commerce posted a message aimed at the whole nation of Algeria: 'Our home is your home.' What happened in Lawrence, I recognise from my decade in the US reporting for the BBC: real America is not what you see in the big cities or in the politics of Washington DC. Real America, to be clear, is not perfect. But it is genuine and often sweetly wholesome and filled with people who do not care at all about the divisiveness and hatred of the online world or the rows that swirl around the current incumbent in the White House. America is huge, but America is also small. To millions of Americans, life is not about Donald Trump, the latest outrage about something he has done or said. It's about their family, their friends, their work, the strangers they meet along the way. Algerian fans sing and chant as their team faces off against Argentina in the World Cup Fans take part in a street party as they watch the game near the University of Kansas The Algerian starting XI before kick-off against Argentina in the 2026 World Cup  Years ago, my family and I eased our lumbering people carrier down an exit ramp a few hundred miles south of Washington DC, near Charleston, South Carolina. We found a McDonald's with a huge, enclosed playpen for young children. Coffee refills were free on weekdays. No spitting allowed. Outside, beneath an impossibly huge Stars and Stripes, the endless seediness of America was spread out as far as the eye could see. Gas stations, tattoo parlours, Bojangles Pizza, Dunkin' Donuts, $30-a-night motels, car showrooms, gun shops. The air was filled with the smell of sweat and fried chicken and car oil. I realised that afternoon that I was in love with it all. In love with the seediness, but in love too with the gentle, beaten-up faces of the folks who lived in these parts or who were passing through. Drifting is what Americans do well. It has stood them in good stead in hard times before and it will do so again. The nation just keeps on moseying on. There is a single crystallising insight which is worth holding in all our minds. In a nation we associate, rightly, with striving – a nation born with ants in its pants, laying waste, refashioning, rethinking, now even inventing its own facts – there is a very large group of people doing none of these things. Algerian football fans watch the football after sundown in the town of Lawrence, Kansas Fans from both Argentina and Algeria gather to watch the two nations play each other They are just getting by, or trying to. Great swathes of America, huge numbers of Americans, often with rheumy eyes and saggy faces, are not going anywhere. And here's the kicker: they don't want to go anywhere. America at 250 years old is full of people who are much more content and much less ambitious than our stereotype.  And that matters because (once the price of petrol comes down again) they are much less angry than we think they are. This gives me hope for America's next 250 years. A quiet and meandering path towards restoration is part of the American habit. They did it after their nation's shaky start. After the war that ended slavery. After the Gilded Age in which corruption seemed to have taken over the whole system. Again after the Wall Street Crash. Eventually (after way too much time, as they would admit now) Americans addressed the horrors that kept civil rights from black citizens, the segregation, the lynchings, the cruelty and fear. Then they coped with the assassinations – actual and attempted – that scarred the late 1960s and early 1970s. All of it now in the rear mirror because America stumbles but never falls. Optimists – and there are more than you might think, even among those who oppose and dislike the current president – make this case.   They say America's problems are less political and more sub-political. That what is lost at the moment is a proper understanding of the humanistic core of the nation, a sense of purpose and of meaning. We don't always think of 'purpose', let alone self-knowledge, in our caricature of American life. The empty American core is a staple of foreign criticism – but also of American self-analysis. The great novelist Kurt Vonnegut says of one of his characters: 'Like so many Americans she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops…' Decades ago, American author David Brooks wrote a wonderful explanation in which he contrasted the useless, venal, meretricious vapidity of so much American life – the horror Vonnegut wrote about – with the simple fact that the place has been rather successful, economically and culturally, 'If Middle America is so stupid, vulgar, self-absorbed and materialistic, which it often is, then how can America be so great?' he asked. The reason Brooks gave for greatness? 'A Utopian fire that redeems its people.' Purpose, in other words. Brooks is optimistic because he thinks that purpose can be re-found, just as it has been in previous periods of American turbulence and tremulousness. And it comes from nowhere. Look at the 1950s, at the red-peril fakery of Senator Joe McCarthy, the crew-cuts and conformity. Then, suddenly, the 1960s happen. Hair is grown. Hippies happen. Nobody could have predicted this was round the corner. I am not blind to America's current self-image. Many Americans are truly worried about their future. But I am not betting against the place, either. It is stronger and much, much better than it often seems. Just ask the Algerians.  Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast on BBC Sounds and Today on Radio 4.  The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? 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