America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  Apart from the actual record of courage, success, and self-sacrifice on the part of blacks and other racial groups in the military, of great importance has always been Hollywood’s presentation of this, which in turn forms part of a wider pattern by which Hollywood films with a populist nationalist cultural tinge (Westerns, police films, sports) have deliberately sought to include a wider and wider range of Americans and present them as valuable citizens.

  A recurrent theme of John Ford’s work is the integration of old and new Americans (and of former Confederates and Unionists) through military service, settlement, and defense of the white frontier. Particular attention was paid to the Irish—not surprisingly, since his original name was Sean Feeny. By 1956 and The Searchers, the slow acceptance by the protagonist (played by that arch Jacksonian film icon, John Wayne) of a part Cherokee relative as a comrade has become a central theme, though only because this character is both culturally completely white and his ally against the savage Comanche, who were to be fought without mercy. One of Ford’s last films, Sergeant Rutledge, has as its subject a brave and dedicated black soldier on the frontier, wrongly accused of the murder of a white girl; it is essentially a nationalist treatment of the theme of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, with its backdrop being the U.S. Army rather than the U.S. legal system.96

  During and after World War II, Hollywood made a point of stressing the courageous war service of American Jews (e.g., William Wellman’s The Story of GI Joe, 1945, with Robert Mitchum). More generally, American war films—like their Soviet equivalents—turned the multiethnic American unit into a formula, with stock white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), Southern, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other elements.97

  Over the past decade American television soap operas have begun to play a not wholly dissimilar role in promoting racial mixing, though here the field is that of love—or sex—rather than battle. After some four decades of television in which it was wholly absent, interracial “dating” on television has become, if not common—it is hardly common in society—then at least present (though more between whites, Latinos, and Asians than whites and blacks).98

  Another great patriotic film hero, Clint Eastwood, has made a point in some of his films of making a black (or, in his great The Outlaw Josie Wales, an Indian) into his character’s closest friend and helper, and not as a “Tonto” caricature, but as a dignified, honorable, and intelligent character who provides ironic comments on white society and hypocrisy.99 Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge is a very Soviet-style example of the mixed-race platoon genre. His late masterpiece Gran Torino is almost a locus classicus of belief in new, multiracial integration through adherence to middle-class values, telling the story of how an affectionately caricatured deeply conservative elderly veteran combines with decent, hardworking Hmong immigrants against a Hmong youth gang. Coming from directors and actors whom the South and the Heartland have revered, this approach probably had a greater effect than the more overt antiracism of directors like Norman Jewison and Denzel Washington.100 For if Billy Graham and Clint Eastwood both suggest a change in racial attitudes, even the most benighted conservative white American must feel somewhere in his heart that his God too is speaking.

  However, two critically important sets of qualifications need to be added to this picture of benign change, and both had a great impact on Obama as first black president. The first set is the well-researched difference between conscious and unconscious prejudices, and between the explicit expression of such prejudices and their rendering in a coded and indirect form. The second, which brings us back to the comparison with the Russians and Chinese, is the complex relationship between racial prejudice and cultural prejudice, linked in turn with questions of state loyalty.

  In the case of white conservative hostility toward Obama, this can be summed up by saying that while there have been very few public racist attacks on him (since American public culture now strongly discourages this), there has been an enormous amount of indirect racism rendered through doubts expressed as to whether he truly shares American culture (especially the persistent propaganda that he is Muslim, encouraged by his father’s identity and his Muslim middle name), and whether he was actually born in the United States.101 Moreover, in a strikingly brilliant—and deeply evil—maneuver, some right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck have managed to play the racist card—while shielding themselves from accusations of racism—by accusing Obama himself of being the antiwhite racist. In Beck’s words, President Obama “has exposed himself as a guy…who has a deep-seated hatred for white people.”102 In the words of Nicholas Kristof:

  Religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.103

  These campaigns had an effect. In a poll from October 2010, 58 percent of white respondents expressed some doubt about Obama’s place of birth.104 Even more worrisome, by August 2010 almost 20 percent of Americans—and a majority of registered Republicans—believed that Obama is Muslim; and for such Americans, “Muslim” equates instinctively and almost automatically with “potential traitor.” In a tribute to the power of Fox News and other conservative outlets, 60 percent of those who believed this said that they had learned it from the media. This is a continuation of the McCarthyite tradition of branding liberals as traitors to America, but—thanks to 9/11—with an even uglier edge. This prejudice has been diminished by President Obama’s role in authorizing the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011, but assiduous attempts are being made to keep it going.105

  However, the surprising thing about the election of a black president of the United States in 2008 was not that it happened, or that it happened when it did. As already mentioned, General Colin Powell could have had the Democratic or Republican nomination virtually for the asking, and would most probably have won. The surprising thing is that the first black president was not a retired general or admiral—both because military service has been the passport into establishment careers for so many blacks, and because, for reasons set out above, patriotic service partially defuses remaining racial hostility in the white middle classes.

  And indeed, while Powell would probably have won a majority of white as well as black votes, in the 2008 election Obama lost among whites (though he won among younger white voters) but was carried to victory by the support of an overwhelming majority of blacks and (to a lesser extent) Latinos. By October 2010, the difference between support for Obama among whites and blacks had widened enormously, with only 34 percent of whites giving Obama a positive rating compared to 84 percent of blacks.106

  More widely, successful service in the military is implicitly seen as acceptance of that complex of cultural attitudes that self-define the U.S. “middle classes,” and of which patriotism is the single most important factor. By curious paradox, however, Obama has not suffered from the middle-class prejudice normally associated with his skin color—that directed against the supposedly lazy, shiftless, criminal, drug-taking black underclass—but from a quite different but equally old one that will be discussed in following chapters: that is, white “middle class” (in U.S. terms, embracing what in Europe would be called working class) resentment directed not downwards but upwards, against the supposedly arrogant, domineering, atheist, liberal, “bleeding-heart,” multicultural and culturally alien “East Coast elite.”

  And indeed, through his mother this is in fact to a great extent the class to which Obama belongs—while his Kenyan father, who separated from his mother not long after he was born, bequeathed him very little except the color of his skin. Barack Obama’s mother did not come from the hereditary East Coast moneyed classes, but with her two interracial marriages, long r
esidence abroad, and love of Indonesian culture, in other ways she conformed all too closely to certain hate images among white middle-class conservatives. In present day America, the focus of Republican slurs has been on the fact that Obama’s father was a Muslim. A generation or two earlier, it would have been that his parents met at a Russian language class.

  The perception of Obama as elitist also comes from choices that he himself made—and probably had no choice but to make if, as a black who was not a member of the armed forces, he wished to join the U.S. establishment. His career path included Columbia University and Harvard Law School (perhaps the single greatest source of members of the Democrat establishment), where he was president of the Harvard Law Review, as well as a period as a community organizer in Chicago.

  In his personal style, Obama is entirely a member of America’s liberal establishment—not just in his policies, which by historical standards are in fact those of a moderate conservative with a love of compromise and consensus, but even in his dress. Trying to explain the hatred that this arouses among the lower-middle-class white constituency of the Tea Party, an old-style Republican friend of mine said the following: “You know, leaving aside the color of his skin, Obama would have been a natural invitee to Hyde Park (the aristocratic country residence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt). And so would Sarah Palin. The difference is that Obama would have been invited to the front door, and Palin to the servants’ entrance.”

  Here then lies the tragic paradox of Obama’s presidency: To dispel prejudices against him as a black outsider, he had to conform to the white establishment, abandoning in the process any real economic radicalism, and thereby any real ability to appeal to the class resentment of lower-class white Americans against the capitalist elites. But by conforming to the white establishment, Obama has associated himself with a class that many lower-class white Americans have always hated. If, on the other hand, Obama were to run on a platform of economic radicalism, capitalist interests would use coded language to brand him in the eyes of the white middle class as the representative of a radical, shiftless, and un—American black underclass.

  It is impossible to say at the time of this writing whether this hatred will lose Obama the November 2012 presidential election, but since 2008 it has been proved again and again how these white resentments, assiduously fomented, shaped, and directed by right-wing capitalist interests and their media, have largely crippled his ability to implement what has in fact been a program of moderate conservative reform. The fact that the Republican Party of the early twenty-first century has so savagely and comprehensively rejected reforms that would have been promoted by Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon is also a stark sign of the radicalization of that party since the 1970s. The roots of this radicalization will be the subject of subsequent chapters.

  Just as at home, an absence of overt racism based purely on skin color has not diminished cultural prejudice, so attitudes toward the outside world among conservative white Americans in some respects conform to the old Roman or Chinese pattern of attitudes to barbarians. That is to say, foreigners are accepted only if they themselves accept the primacy of the United States and U.S. civilization, and are indeed willing to become Americans, if only culturally. Clyde Prestowitz has written of contemporary Americans’ “implicit belief that every human being is a potential American and that his or her present national or cultural affiliations are an unfortunate but reversible accident”—a very imperial Chinese or Roman attitude.107 Consequently, if other people refuse to behave like Americans, then it means that there must be something seriously wicked and malignant about them. In other words, this new order in the United States is a recipe for tolerance within the United States, not outside it. One good definition of solipsism, after all, is “someone [who] believes that he is the world.”108

  Max Lerner’s words of the 1950s remain true today:

  One of the American traits is the recoil from the unfamiliar…This seems the more curious when one remembers that America is itself a “nation of nations” and contains a multitude of diverse cultural traditions. Yet this fact only serves to increase the bafflement of the Americans abroad: since he has seen people of foreign extraction in his own country abandoning their customs and becoming “Americanized,” he cannot understand why people of foreign countries should not do the same.109

  Lerner adds that “there is little real hatred of outsiders in this attitude,” but that is only as long as outsiders appear completely nonthreatening, which is certainly not the case after 9/11 as far as many Americans are concerned.

  The most important qualification of all for becoming an American is to accept the U.S. Constitution and the democratic and legal values associated with it, which have been summed up in the quasi-religious phrase “the American Creed.” A naive belief has also existed that all over the world, people who become Democrats would also naturally associate themselves with the United States, not only culturally, but in terms of support for U.S. geopolitical goals. This belief in the universal power of American values provided the cultural and moral underpinnings for America’s global role in the twentieth century. It has also helped lead the United States into some notable disasters, including the war in Iraq. The American Creed and its political implications are the subject of the next chapter.

  Two

  Thesis: Splendor and Tragedy of the American Creed

  Even a good idea can be a little frightening when it is the only idea a man has ever had.

  —Louis Hartz1

  The American thesis has also been called the American Creed and the American ideology. It is the set of propositions about America that America presents to itself and to the outside world: “Americans of all national origins, classes, religions, creeds, and colors have something in common: a social ethos, a political creed.”2

  For most Americans, a central part of the creed, if only implicitly, has been the belief that the United States is the supreme example of democratic values and institutions in the world, and as such has the right and duty to show the way to other nations when it comes to achievement of these goals: “Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind.”3

  This belief has been nurtured over two centuries of American growth and expansion. A vital question for the American psyche and for American domestic and foreign policies will be the effects of this faith in an era of relative decline for America as a whole, and for the American white middle class in particular. Closely linked to this is the question of whether the creed remains, as it was in the past, a continual inspiration to Americans to renew and reform their institutions and their social and economic system, or whether for too many white Americans it is ossifying into a blind fetishism of their Constitution, economic system, and way of life as they presently exist—something that is strongly marked in the Tea Party movement. It would indeed be a tragic irony if a constitutional system that was the greatest expression of Enlightenment rationalism in politics should become an obstacle to rational thought; but alas, such ironies are not uncommon in history.

  The danger of such a development is rooted in the very depth of Americans’ faith in their system. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of adherence to American governing principles as a form of religious conversion. This thesis or creed, with its attendant national myths, forms the foundation for American civic nationalism, and indeed makes the public face of the United States an example of civil nationalism par excellence.4 In theory, anyone who assents to the American thesis can become an American, irrespective of language, culture, or national origin, just as anyone could become a Soviet citizen by assenting to Communism.5

  The principles of the American thesis are also rationalist and universalist principles, held by Americans to be applicable to peoples and societies everywhere, and indeed throughout time. In Tocqueville’s words, the Americans “are unanimous upon the general principles that ought to rule human society,” and this is no less true
at the start of the twenty-first century than it was when Tocqueville made his observation in the 1830s.

  Partly in consequence, this set of assumptions is also basically optimistic. It suggests both that the United States has achieved the highest possible form of political system, and that this great system can be extended to the rest of mankind. Centuries before Francis Fukuyama recoined the phrase, a certain belief that America represented the “end of history” was already common in American thought, and still more in the American subconscious. “I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time,” as Walt Whitman put it, speaking for his country.6

  In Richard Hofstadter’s words, “it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”7 This American thesis is also, both in American belief and in reality, the core foundation of America’s “soft power” in the world, and of America’s role as a civilizational empire; the American version of Romanita. Both in the past and at present, the American Creed has deeply shaped the conduct of American foreign policy.8

  The essential elements of the American Creed and American civic nationalism are faith in liberty, constitutionalism, the law, democracy, individualism, and cultural and political egalitarianism. They have remained in essence the same through most of American history.9 They are chiefly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are derived in turn from English roots; the liberal philosophy of John Locke and much older beliefs in the law and in the rights of free-born Englishmen.