The language is strongly reminiscent of what George Mosse has called the “rhetoric of anxiety” among nationalists before 1914, focused both on external threats to the nation and on moral, sexual, and political subversion from within. This is also true of its markedly hysterical tone.40 And this is not just a matter of a few media squibs. In its anti-intellectualism, antielitism, antisecularism, and antimodernism, this rhetoric strikes very deep chords among that large minority of Americans who feel deeply alienated from the world in its present shape.
As Mosse’s work recalls, closely linked to this traditional nationalist “rhetoric of anxiety” is one virtually universal aspect of right-wing nationalist language throughout history, namely its obsession with threats to national virility and with the supposed effeminate weakness of critics at home and abroad: “Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus” in Robert Kagan’s phrase. More crudely, Europeans are “Euroweenies.” Lee Harris sees “Spartan ruthlessness” as the “origin of civilization.” Robert Kaplan calls for Americans to recover the “pagan virtues” in war fighting.41
In British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash’s summary of this kind of language about Europe in the United States, “if anti-American Europeans see ‘the Americans’ as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see ‘the Europeans’ as limp-wristed pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent or castrated…The word ‘eunuchs’ is, I discovered, used in the form ‘Eunuchs.’”42
Much of this could be seen as merely silly, though as Donald Rumsfeld’s attitudes and language concerning Europe as secretary of defense demonstrated, it does have serious consequences in the real world. Of much greater, and grimmer, significance is right-wing nationalist language about domestic treachery. In America and so many other countries in the past, such language has fuelled and justified domestic repression, and as some of the behavior of the Bush administration indicated, 9/11 and a war against terrorism with no foreseeable end have once again made this a matter of real concern.43
Not surprisingly, 9/11 led to a great increase in anti-Muslim feeling in the United States. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this might have been expected to diminish with time, given the lack of further Islamist terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland (the only serious exception being the shootings by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009). However, in the years following 9/11 there grew a network of right-wing nationalist groups, linked to the Israel lobby and fundamentalist Christian groups, that dedicated themselves to keeping fear and hatred of Muslims at the boiling point.
These campaigns included not only warnings about the threat of terrorism, but also a systematic attempt to block the building of new mosques in the United States and agitation over the alleged spread of Sharia law among U.S. Muslims. This latter agitation drew strength from growing anti-Muslim political movements in Europe, but against a quite different background. In Europe, both the much higher level of Muslim immigration and the concentration of working-class, poorly integrated Muslims from particular countries in particular European regions has made the issue of separate Muslim identities a real one.
In contrast, the Muslim population of the United States is smaller, far more fragmented, and on the whole much better educated and better integrated. The threat of the introduction of Sharia law in America is in fact a nonissue, approximately as realistic as past McCarthyite fears of Communist revolution. Yet the agitation against it has attracted not only leading representatives of the Israel lobby, like Daniel Pipes, but also former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director James Woolsey and leading Republicans including Newt Gingrich. In 2010 this campaign was responsible for a 70 percent majority of voters in the state of Oklahoma passing a resolution to ban the use of Sharia law in the state. The campaign against Sharia law was in origin quite separate from the Tea Parties, but many leading Tea Party figures added their voices to it, including Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. As with the Tea Parties, tremendous—indeed indispensable—help was given by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network and its associated media outlets, which relentlessly propagandized this issue.
This was also true of the protest campaign against plans to build a Muslim prayer center in lower Manhattan, not far from the site of the former World Trade Center. The most striking thing about this furor was that the leader of the Sufi body that planned to build the center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, had been sponsored by the State Department under the Bush administration to conduct speaking tours of the Middle East dedicated to condemning terrorism and advocating reconciliation between Muslims and Christians.
This formed part of a wider U.S. strategy of trying to back Sufism and other “moderate” forms of Islam against Islamist radicalism. None of this prevented leaders of the agitation—including many who certainly knew the facts very well—from branding him and his organization as extremists and terrorist sympathizers, undermining U.S. strategy in the “war on terror” and increasing hostility toward the United States in the Muslim world. Moreover, the New York agitation was only one of a number of movements in different cities against the construction of new mosques and Muslim community centers, including ones intended to serve America’s sizable population of Muslim African Americans. As with these agitations in general, the storm in Boston over plans to build a mosque in Roxbury, an African American neighborhood of the city, was to a great extent driven by the Murdoch-owned Boston Herald newspaper in alliance with Fox News.
This anti-Muslim tendency in the United States was in one sense quintessentially American, in that what is at the bottom of a movement of nationalist chauvinism has been largely couched in the language of the defense of law and liberty, and in particular the freedom of women. In parts of Europe like Holland, anti-Muslim feeling has also been bound up with homosexual fears of Muslim repression, but for obvious reasons this has emphatically not been the case on the American Right. The greatest danger of this movement is that in the event (God forbid) of another major terrorist attack on the United States, the fear and hatred it has inspired would burst the bounds of law altogether, and in certain parts of the country would lead to pogroms against local Muslim institutions and against Muslims themselves.
Even the hostility directed at Muslims in the United States by the Right is dwarfed by the campaign to denounce American liberals as traitors. Ann Coulter’s amazing book Treason is a sustained attempt to portray liberals and Democrats, categories which she treats as identical, as traitors to America both in the cold war and the “war against terrorism.” As noted, this accusation is the common stuff of right-wing media stars like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage, figures who have huge and appreciative audiences and, at their back, the tremendous power and reach of networks like Fox News.44
In the wake of 9/11, a body headed by Lynne Cheney produced a list of 117 statements by American academics and students that they deemed “morally equivocal” or anti-American, or both: for “college and university faculty have been the weak link in America’s response to the attack.” The statements cited for denunciation ranged from the genuinely wicked and unacceptable, like “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote” (no. 14) to “We should build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls” (no. 19), and “Ignorance breeds hate” (no. 49).45
Influential former officials and respected commentators like Richard Perle, David Frum, and Irving Kristol also made it a central part of their rhetoric, with Frum denouncing not only liberals, but “unpatriotic” conservatives who opposed the Iraq War for carrying out “a war against America.”46 Sean Hannity’s book of 2005 was entitled Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.47 The spirit behind the old, ugly German nationalist insult nestbeschmutzer (someone who “dirties his own nest”) is much in evidence in America today.
The willingness of large numbers of American politicians and intellectuals to use such language, and America’s difference in this regard f
rom Europe and other parts of the developing world—though this difference is diminishing with the rise of extreme rightist thought and language in Europe—has been closely linked to what is also the most important root of American “exceptionalism” in its positive sense, namely that the United States has been spared the greatest European disasters of the past two centuries, “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe,” in Jefferson’s phrase.48
The first, and critical, salvation, as Tocqueville noted, was from the French and other European revolutions after 1789, and the extreme reactions to which they gave rise. Thereafter, of immense importance in distinguishing the United States from the rest of the developed world is that the United States avoided the truly searing effects of war and revolution in the twentieth century. Of course, the United States participated in both world wars—the U.S. armed forces fought with magnificent courage and dedication in both, and individual units suffered terrible losses—but overall American casualties in proportion to the U.S. population were very small compared to those of the leading European states, and above all America itself was spared invasion or bombardment.
As memories of the first half of the century fade and economic discontent and fears of immigration grow, extremist politics are increasing in Western Europe. As of 2012, differences between the United States and Western Europe in this regard remain noticeable. Too many Europeans and Japanese were tortured, imprisoned, or executed for some form of “treason”—or did the torturing and shooting—for this word to be one that people from these countries use lightly. Too many people were killed, maimed, raped, or starved to death in wars for the language of militant, outwardly directed nationalism to be acceptable, not merely in political or intellectual circles, but in the vast majority of the population. Even the least-educated European can preserve a family memory of a grandfather killed at Ypres or an uncle maimed at Stalingrad, a home destroyed in Cologne or Warsaw, and rapes and forced prostitution from Naples to Berlin and Krasnodar.
Precisely because such language as that of Bennett was used incessantly by intellectuals and politicians in all the major European states in 1914–1915, and again by Germany and Italy in 1939–1941, it is very difficult indeed for any European today to write or speak in the terms used by William Bennett and quoted above. This is not just a question of thoughts that may be strongly held in private, but which can no longer be publicly expressed, like racism in the United States. It is psychologically extremely difficult for educated Europeans even to think in these terms.49 And this is as true of the European elites as the population at large. The European nationalist death ride unleashed in 1914 began by destroying the sons of those elites, and by 1945 had destroyed their dominance, and in many cases their countries as well.
American capitalists, however, like America as a whole, escaped the European catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. This was, of course, very fortunate for America, but it also means that the United States and its rulers escaped perhaps the most searing lessons the world has ever known in the need to keep social, class, economic, and national ambitions and passions within certain bounds. The greater radicalism of American capitalism therefore also stems in part from America having been spared the horrible consequences to which such capitalist excesses can contribute; and this form of American capitalism feeds in turn the greater radicalism of the American Right and the culture of American nationalism. This complex of radical attitudes can be seen in the editorial pages of the premier newspaper of American business, the Wall Street Journal. For a taste of the difference between the culture and politics of American capitalists, taken as a whole, and those of their European equivalents, one could not do better than to compare those pages with those of the Journal’s European equivalents—the Financial Times, Frankfuerter Allgemeine, Corriere della Sera, and so on. This difference was displayed, for example, in the horrified reaction of leading articles in the Financial Times to the Bush tax cuts.
Above all, what is striking in the Journal—a paper representing a presumably satisfied and dominant capitalist class—is its writers’ capacity for both radicalism and sheer hatred. Wall Street Journal editorials treated both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama as cultural aliens, dangerous radicals, and national traitors. This resembled the treatment meted out in the 1930s by the Journal and much of the capitalist classes in general to the “Communist” Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a man who probably did more than any other to preserve and extend American capitalism in the world. The explanation for this feral behavior is to be sought partly in the conservative cultural and racial anxieties that will be examined in the next chapter, but equally importantly in the pre-1914-style assumption of American capitalists of an unqualified right to dominate the state and to retain profits.
Since this is the behavior of a large section of the economic elites and the media that they control, it is not surprising that in the minds of the Tea Parties and the people they represent, the idea has taken hold that the moderate conservative Barack Obama is a Socialist or even a Communist.
The particular nature of American capitalism is reflected in the contemporary character of the Republican Party. Like so many party labels around the world, the historic names of the main U.S. political parties have long since lost whatever descriptive value they once possessed. As of 2012, it would not be easy to find a truly descriptive name for the Democrats, given the enormous and curious mixture of class, ethnic, cultural, and ideological viewpoints they represent. “Progressive Liberals” would perhaps be closest, and not very close at that, given the conservatism of many of their members. If, however, one were to seek a name for the Republicans that would situate them accurately in a wider historical and international context, there would be no doubt at all as to what that name should be: the Republicans would be renamed the American Nationalist Party.
This is not just because of the Republicans’ external policies and the political culture that underpins them, but rather, the entire contemporary Republican mixture is reminiscent of the classic positions of past conservative nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere. Abroad, these stood for “assertive nationalism” and often supported imperialist policies. At home, they were devoted to defending private property in general and the interests of the upper classes in particular, with a special stress on hereditary wealth.
Of course, they also portray themselves as the defenders of traditional national, religious, and family values against the rising tide of cosmopolitan, liberal, socialist, and foreign decadence. Especially in times of heightened national emotion, public adherence to these values was used to present themselves as “apolitical,” transcending political and class differences and appealing to the nation as a whole. Thus in the wake of 9/11, William J. Bennett wrote of
the spontaneous upwelling of national feeling that followed upon September 11th, the day of trauma. Quite suddenly, as if in the twinkling of an eye, everything petty, self-absorbed, rancorous, decadent, and hostile in our national life seemed to have been wiped away. Suddenly, our country’s flag was everywhere, and stayed everywhere. Suddenly, we had heroes again—and what heroes: policemen and firemen, rescue workers, soldiers and civilian passengers who leapt from their seats to do battle with evil personified.
It was true; for weeks and even months after September 11, partisan political issues seemed to fade in urgency, racial divisions to be set at naught. Cynicism and irony were declared out, simple love of country in…Something in those events, wrote an uplifted Peggy Noonan, “something in the fact that all the different colors and faiths and races were helping each other, were in it together, were mutually dependent and mutually supportive, made you realize: we sealed it that day. We sealed the pact, sealed the promise we made long ago…We are Americans.”50
In the same spirit, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared in August 1914 that “I know no parties, I know only Germans.” In the same spirit, in 2009, the radical conservative media
star Glenn Beck founded the 9/12 Project, appealing to the common spirit that supposedly existed in the United States on the day after 9/11. The project’s mission statement reads:
The 9/12 Project is a volunteer based, non-partisan movement focusing on building and uniting our communities back to the place we were on 9/12/2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with political parties, the color of your skin, or what religion you practiced. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created. Our goal is to bring us back to that same feeling of togetherness again.
Among the principles to which the 9/12 Project wishes to recall Americans are
1. America is good.
2. I believe in God and He is the center of my life.
“The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”—George Washington’s first Inaugural address….
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
“Everyone has a natural right to choose that vocation in life which he thinks most likely to give him comfortable subsistence.”—Thomas Jefferson
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.51
It hardly needs pointing out that these supposedly “apolitical,” “nonpartisan” appeals to “all Americans” are intended, among other things, both to encourage hostility to Americans who do not share these particular beliefs and to encourage people to vote for the Republican Party.
America Right or Wrong Page 5
