The relationship between this traditional white Protestant world and the forces of American economic, demographic, social, and cultural change may therefore be compared to the genesis of a hurricane. A mass of warm, humid air rises from the constantly churning sea of American capitalism to meet a mass of cooler layers of air, and as it rises it sucks in yet more air from the sides, in the form of immigration. The cooler layers are made up of the white middle class and their small-town and suburban worlds in much of the United States, the old white populations of the Greater South, and the especially frigid strata of old Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish fundamentalist Protestantism.
The result of this collision is the release of great bolts and explosions of political and cultural electricity. Like a hurricane, the resulting storm system is essentially circular, continually chasing its own tail, and essentially self-supporting, generating its own energy until, at some unforeseeable point in future, either the boiling seas of economic change cool down or the strata of religious belief and traditional culture dissolve, or the American system itself disintegrates. Among these bolts is hatred, including nationalist hatred.22
Externally directed chauvinist hatred must therefore be seen as a by-product of the same hatred displayed by the American Right at home, notably in their pathological loathing of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In Europe, Clinton was generally seen as a version of Tony Blair, a centrist who “modernized” his formerly center-Left party by stealing most of the clothes of the center-Right and adopting a largely right-wing economic agenda. Similarly, Obama was seen as a moderate conservative, engaged in highly limited reforms to preserve the existing system. And indeed this was not simply a perception. The program of Obama has in fact been a moderate conservative one, which would have been wholly acceptable to President Dwight Eisenhower, and in many respects to President Richard Nixon—both, of course, Republicans. Indeed, many more radical Democrats have accused their own president of “governing like a Republican.”
To radical conservatives in America, this has been irrelevant. They have hated both Clinton and Obama principally not for what they did, but for what they are: the representatives of a multiracial, pluralist, and modernist culture and cultural elite that they both despise and fear, just as they hate the atheist, decadent, unmanly Western European nations not only for what they do, but for what they are.
In the U.S. context it is also crucial to remember that, as in a hurricane or thunderstorm, rather than simply being opposing forces, the two elements that combine to produce this system work together. The unrestrained free-market capitalism that is threatening the old conservative religious and cultural communities of Protestant America with dissolution is being urged on by the political representatives of those same communities. This is especially true of the Tea Parties, with their cult of low taxes (including for the rich), deregulation, and small government.23
This was not always so. In the 1890s and 1900s, this sector of America formed the backbone of the Populist protest against the excesses of American capitalism, and in the 1930s it voted solidly for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today, however, the religious Right has allied itself solidly with extreme “free-market” forces in the Republican Party—though it is precisely the workings of unrestrained American capitalism that are eroding the world the religious conservatives wish to defend.
In the economic sphere, the populist tradition has abandoned its former critique of free-market capitalism (except in the form of an empty rhetoric directed against banks) in favor of an exclusive concentration on debt as the source of the nation’s economic woes. This focus on debt owes much to old cultural traditions, but it has also been deliberately and systematically fostered by right-wing portions of the U.S. media and the corporations and elites they represent—to the extent where the Tea Party obsession with the issue is beginning to threaten the U.S. economy and the long-term interests of those same elites.24
The clash between cultural and social loyalties and the imperatives of capitalist change is an old dilemma for social and cultural conservatives who at the same time are dedicated to the preservation of free-market economics. As Garry Wills has noted, “there is nothing less conservative than capitalism, so itchy for the new.”25 Karl Marx wrote of the inexorably shattering effects of capitalism on traditional societies in words that remind us that “globalization” and consequent unending and disruptive change are as old as capitalism itself:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…All fixed, fast, frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind…the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.26
A vital function of myth in political culture is to reconcile such conflicting pressures, or rather to create an appearance of doing so that is sufficiently convincing to the society concerned.27 Chapter 2 will examine how American national and nationalist myths do so in the case of the contemporary United States.
The Threat of Nationalism
The historical evidence of the dangers of unreflecting nationalist sentiments should be all too obvious, and are all too relevant to U.S. policy today. Nationalism thrives upon irrational hatreds, and upon the portrayal of other nations or ethnoreligious groups as congenitally, irredeemably wicked and hostile. Yesterday, this was true of the attitudes of many American nationalists toward Russia. Today, it risks becoming the case with regard to the Arab and Muslim worlds, and most dangerously of all, to China. Chauvinism in the Republican Party was at its height in the years immediately following 9/11, but as of 2012 there was very little sign that Republican leaders and their advisors had seriously rethought the attitudes of the Bush administration.28
In a striking essay, Fouad Ajami in 2003 unwittingly summed up the central danger of chauvinist American nationalism in imperial guise for the United States and the world, and also placed this nationalism squarely in the context of nationalist and imperialist history. The only specifically American aspect of this is his own non-American origins—and even this would have been entirely normal for great civilizational empires of the past. As chapter 1 will show, like America today, these empires did not distinguish between the racial origins of their subjects as long as they served the imperial state and accepted unreservedly the imperial ideology. To take a historical example from the Middle East, Ajami could be seen as a contemporary Arab Josephus working as an imperial propagandist for America’s Rome.29
Ajami’s essay ostensibly concerned anti-Americanism. He dismissed out of hand the evidence of Pew, Gallup, and other respected survey organizations demonstrating that hostility to America had increased greatly as a result of the policies of the Bush administration. Instead, Ajami argued, across the world—not just the Arab and Muslim worlds, but in Europe, Asia, and Latin America too—anti-Americanism is congenital, ingrained, and a response to America’s wealth, success, and modernity, which is forcing other countries to change their systems. The essay suggests that U.S. policies are completely irrelevant to international attitudes toward the United States, and the sympathy displayed by France and other countries after 9/11 was completely hypocritical: “To maintain France’s sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of Al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim World in some high civilisational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille?”30
A
jami’s argument was taken up in an even cruder form in an article for Time magazine by the leading right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer, entitled simply “To Hell With Sympathy.” In this he both attacked “the world” and sought to tar his domestic political opponents with the same anti-American brush:
The world apparently likes the US when it is on its knees. From that the Democrats deduce a foreign policy—remain on our knees, humble and supplicant, and enjoy the applause and “support” of the world…The search for logic in anti-Americanism is fruitless. It is in the air the world breathes. Its roots are envy and self-loathing—by peoples who, yearning for modernity but having failed at it, find their one satisfaction in despising modernity’s great exemplar. On September 11th, they gave it a rest for one day. Big deal.31
Or as Fox News star Bill O’Reilly put it, explaining the great difference between coverage of the push for war with Iraq in the U.S. media and internationally, “Well, everywhere else in the world lies.”32
The whole point of such arguments is that—like all such nationalist discourses—they are intended to free America from moral responsibility for the consequences of its actions, and therefore to leave America free to do anything. To this end, facts are falsified or ignored (e.g., that France strongly supported the United States in Afghanistan) and usual standards of evidence suspended. Thus reputable opinion polls, used as basic sources of reliable information in every other context, are suddenly declared to be irrelevant—leaving national prejudice and an assumption of national superiority as the only standards of judgment.
Other nations are declared to be irrationally, incorrigibly, and unchangingly hostile. This being so, it is obviously pointless to seek compromises with them or to try to accommodate their interests and views. And because they are irrational and barbarous, America is free to dictate to them or even conquer them for their own good. This is precisely the discourse of nationalists in the leading European states toward each other and lesser breeds before 1914, which helped drag Europe into the great catastrophes of the twentieth century. It was also a central part of the old hideous discourse of anti-Semitism.
Thus it is especially depressing that arguments of this kind in the United States are often linked to very similar ones on behalf of Israel, and intended to absolve Israel of any responsibility for the consequences of its actions—a theme that will be explored in chapter 6. In the words of Brian Klug:
If Israel is basically the victim of persecution in an anti-Semitic world, then it bears no responsibility for the situation in which it finds itself: the object of widespread condemnation…Nothing that the Jewish state does or refrains from doing could produce it or prevent it. All Israel can do, if it really is “the collective Jew among the nations,” reprising the role of pariah, is fight for its survival, defying the world and keeping it at bay.33
What also links this kind of radical nationalist discourse in both America and Israel is that the enemy is seen by its proponents as almost universal. Nationalists in other countries restrict their hostility to a limited number of other nations—and indeed, over the years I have seen this accusation of incorrigible and wicked anti-Americanism applied to Russians, Arabs, and Chinese as an excuse for America adopting whatever policies it likes toward them. But only in America, and Israel perhaps, could an influential political writer like Charles Krauthammer declare the world itself to be the mad enemy. And this language did not appear on some backwoods talk show, but in America’s leading news magazine and one of its foremost foreign policy journals.
If such visions come to dominate the politics of the United States, they will be disastrous not only for American interests and American security, but for America’s soul. Pathological hatred and fear of the outside world will feed the same emotions in American domestic politics, until America’s moral and cultural greatness lies in ruins and America’s legacy to the future is also ruined beyond repair.
The dangers of a chauvinist version of American nationalism may be greatest of all when it comes to relations with China. Here, the United States is experiencing a situation that it has never faced before in its history, that of a declining power confronted with a rapidly rising one. The historical precedents for such a situation are not at all good. Managing it will take immense restraint and moderation in both China and the United States. If, on the other hand, an embittered, resentful, and chauvinist American nationalism runs into an edgy and aggressive Chinese nationalism still obsessed with past Chinese defeats and humiliations, the results could be catastrophic for modern civilization.
One
An Exceptional Nationalism?
Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts.
—Reinhold Niebuhr1
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, struck a country in which the strength of its nationalism already made it very much the “outlier” in the developed world.2 Under the Bush administration, this feature of American political culture was one of the most important factors in alienating the United States from some of its closest allies in Europe and elsewhere. This nationalism separates the United States from what Europeans have come to think of (in their own Eurocentric way) as central patterns of post-1945 modernity, namely the overcoming of a culture of bellicose nationalism by “modern” civilization, and the replacement of nationalist unilateralism with international cooperation. To disagreements over policy, it adds the perception of profound cultural differences.
This general, deeply felt, and rather unreflective American nationalism was inflamed by the attacks of 9/11, and then exploited by dominant sections of the Bush administration for their own purposes: abroad, the expansion of American imperial power; at home, the further consolidation of the power and wealth of what Michael Lind has called the American “overclass.”3 According to the Pew Research Center in 2011, “the proportion [of Americans polled] saying they are very patriotic has varied by just four percentage points (between 87 percent to 91 percent) across 13 surveys conducted over 22 years.”4
Closely related is the very widespread presence in U.S. popular culture of national symbolism and national language. This extends from the most obvious symbol—the flag—through the patriotic celebrations and primers to be found at supermarket checkout counters. All of this is far more reminiscent of Europe in 1904 than Europe in 2004. The endless references to the nation also extends in small and unrecognized ways throughout American life, just as they did in Europe before 1914.
Visitors to the US are frequently impressed by the outward show and symbols of conscious nationalism. Children are taught to salute the flag, and it is flown by private individuals to demonstrate their patriotism. The word “American” is used with a wealth of overtones, so that to describe oneself or a custom or an institution as “American” is to claim a whole set of positive values. The all American boy has become something of a joke, but it is a character which most American parents covet for their sons. Conversely, to be “un-American” is not to be merely foreign or unfamiliar, but dangerous, immoral, subversive and deluded. Fourth of July orations are the classic expressions of American patriotism, but hyperbole is not confined to these rhetorical exercises; and to foreign ears, the discourse of public men seems to be marked to an extraordinary degree by appeals to the special character and destiny of the American people.5
William R. Brock wrote this in 1974, but it is no less true a generation later. As of 2012, there is no sign that the economic recession (including most notably the collapse of the housing market, of which Freddie Mac was a leading booster) has had any effect on these attitudes.
In my local supermarket I bought “A Celebration of America: Your Helpful Guide to America’s Greatness,” part of the “Better Your Home” series.6 The children’s section of Dalton’s Booksellers at Union Station in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2003 also contained a “Celebrate America” stand, with books with titles like American Patriots, God Bless America, and America’s P
romise, a small hagiography of Laura Bush, America’s First Lady, and a Patriotic Primer “for reading levels 4–8” by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney. The last stretches from “A is for America, the land that we love” to “Z is the end of the alphabet, but not of America’s story. Strong and free, we will continue to be an inspiration to the world.”7
Just as in Europe in the past, emotional support for the American armed forces (though, of course, not necessarily for their specific missions) is virtually omnipresent in the mainstream media. Time magazine made its “Man of the Year” for 2003 “The American Soldier.” The Washington Post Sunday Parade section regularly carries cover articles on military and patriotic themes. In an absolutely classic image of this kind, its last issue of 2003 carried a cover picture of an avuncular American military medic holding a wounded Iraqi child.
Another issue of Parade featured the former prisoner of war (POW) Jessica Lynch on the cover, declaring “The Pledge [of Allegiance] Will Never Be Just Words For Me” (months by the way after most of the details of her capture and recapture as reported by the Post had been admitted to be wild patriotic exaggerations).8 Advice columnists like “Dear Abby” often feature pieces about how readers can support the troops abroad. Very little of this kind of thing now remains even in Britain and France, the most military-minded of the European states, though once such images were omnipresent.9
Also entirely characteristic of old Europe are traditional ritual affirmations of American nationhood, like the daily recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and the celebration of Memorial Day in smaller towns. “The sentiment that is continually reaffirmed by these sacred ceremonies is the conviction that America is a nation called to a special destiny by God.”10 Of course, all European nations have their own national rituals and ceremonies. Only rarely, however, are these celebrated as widely or with so much emotional force as in the United States.
America Right or Wrong Page 3
