The manipulation of education is more subtle and, arguably, more insidious than it was 50 years ago at the height of the Cold War and the great Red Scare. Then, the battle for hearts and minds was about the straightforward exclusion of certain books and topics in pursuit of a political agenda…These days, the issue is no longer banning books, even if that still goes on in parts of the heartland dominated by the Christian right, but rather systemic conformism. It used to be that an inspiring teacher could overcome the shortcomings of bland textbooks and blinkered administrative madness. But with the curriculum now much more closely defined and homogenized…[teachers] are effectively forced into complicity with the textbook pretence that every historical struggle has now been settled and can be summarized in a few soothing lines of near-meaningless analytical blancmange.69
Gumbel quotes a song from his son’s elementary school class:
America, I love you!
From all sorts of places,
They welcomed all the races
To settle on their shore …
To give them protection
By popular election,
A set of laws they chose.
They’re your laws and my laws,
For your cause and my cause
That’s why this country rose.70
These words would cause any historically aware black or American Indian to grind his or her teeth—but, as Gumbel points out, are taken by most American children as simply natural. This nationalist tendency is greatly encouraged by a wider decline in historical studies and, indeed, in general culture (a decline of course not confined to the United States). As a result, Americans’ knowledge of the world, and their own history, has not declined over the past 60 years—but it has also not improved from the miserable level of that time. In 2001, 57 percent of American high school students were graded “below basic” in history, with only 11 percent rated proficient or advanced.71 In many individual cases, the result of this is pure ignorance; but this cannot be true of a society as a whole, which needs some kind of basic cultural operating principles in order to function. For America as a whole, the absence of historical knowledge does not mean ignorance, but the presence of myth.
Michael Lind has also argued cogently that a combination of political correctness with a system of (very limited and selective) positive discrimination for minorities actually serves the interests of what he calls the “overclass.” This overclass is still overwhelmingly white, and even white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), but creams off and co-opts small numbers of black and other elites while diverting the energies of radicals into essentially pointless struggles over symbols—and away from concrete transracial issues like immigration control and raising the minimum wage, which would genuinely help ordinary members of the racial minorities, who on average remain markedly poorer than the white population.72 In a way, the supreme example of a content-free multiracial symbol has proved to be the election of Barack Obama. Endlessly celebrated as demonstrating American progress and achievement, apart from a very limited health care reform he has proved unable to do anything much at all for most black Americans.
Political correctness of this type is not simply the result of a swing to the left in academia, on the one hand, meeting a newly radicalized Right on the other. It also reflects profound changes in U.S. society from the 1960s on: the freeing of the blacks as a serious political force, and the resumption of mass immigration without racial restrictions. The resulting new society is one to which Americans of many different political allegiances have had to respond.
Thus not just official U.S. patriotic propaganda, but the visual propaganda of the nationalist and religious Right is also now in general deliberately multiracial (Lynne Cheney’s patriotic primer is full of drawings of black and Asian American toddlers waving flags and playing at being U.S. soldiers).73 Indeed, to be fair, one could almost say that America over the past generation or so has become so complicated that its education system is more or less forced back upon simplistic myths, for trying to teach or discuss the full reality would simply be physically impossible.
This connection between diversity and conformism is not only involuntary, but also quite deliberate. American public culture is so conformist because America is so diverse, and also because, concerning other races, its history is so foul. In this sense, political correctness can be seen as an aspect of what Ernest Renan said about the creation of modern nations: “Forgetting, I would almost say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality…The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”74
Precisely because a good many of the people and groups making up contemporary America actually have very little in common, in order for them to become a nation it may be necessary for Americans to be even more forgetful than other peoples. The example Renan used was that of the French religious wars of the past. Had he still been around in France after World War II, he could have used the treatment of the memory of the German occupation and Vichy; and this is true with even greater force of past racial oppression in the United States. In this sense, Americans can be said to be “held together only by ideas” in the same way that Soviet citizens were. The ideas of American civic nationalism are, happily, much more positive and valuable ones than those of Soviet Communism—but that does not change the fact that they cannot be seriously questioned without endangering the stability of the entire structure.75 Their absolutist character influences, in turn, the underlying ideology of American foreign policy, making it even more difficult for even highly educated and informed Americans to form a detached and objective view of that policy; for to do so would also risk undermining the bonds uniting diverse Americans at home.76
America’s Mission: Exemplary and Interventionist
So pervasive is the American Creed or ideology in American culture that even Henry Kissinger, no great idealist, has been moved to write that
the rejection of history extols the image of a universal man living by universal maxims, regardless of the past, of geography, or of other immutable circumstance…The American refusal to be bound by history and the insistence on the perpetual possibility of renewal confer a great dignity, even beauty, on the American way of life. The national fear that those who are obsessed with history produce self-fulfilling prophecies does embody a great folk wisdom.77
At least since President Woodrow Wilson took America into World War I in 1917, belief in American values and institutions has intermittently taken the form of a desire to spread them to the rest of the world as a matter of government policy, and even through by military means. This has usually occurred as a result of America going to war, or—in the case of the cold war—becoming engaged in intense rivalry with an antidemocratic state. According to Seymour Martin Lipset (in his great study of American exceptionalism), Bush and his leading officials possessed, and expressed, a boiled down, simplified and extreme version of a vision of America that is in fact held very widely in American society, and has deep historical roots: “The US primarily goes to war against evil, not, in its self-perception, to defend material interests.”78
The apogee of this tendency in recent times came in the wake of 9/11, when the Bush administration—rhetorically at least—made the “Freedom Agenda” a central part of U.S. strategy in the “Global War on Terror.” The locus classicus of American civic nationalism in messianic mode is to be found in Bush’s address to the U.S. Congress on September 20, 2001, when he identified America with freedom, and said that this was why America had been attacked:
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what they see in this chamber—a democratically elected government…Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our
time, and the great hope of every time—now depends on us.79
This idea was then set out formally in the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002, the prologue to which read:
The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.80
This belief found an even more strident and messianic expression in Bush’s speech at West Point on June 1, 2002, which also ushered in the “doctrine” of preventive war and helped lay the propaganda groundwork for the attack on Iraq:
Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom (applause). Our nation’s cause has always been larger than our nation’s defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors human liberty…The twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance.81
Like the Soviets, and like so many Americans—liberal as well as conservative—over the years, Bush cast America as the agent of a historical teleology.82 Statements that “our nation is on the right side of history” echo the Soviet Communist cliché, “the winds of history are in our sails.”83 Much of this language on the part of Bush and other administration officials might have come—word for word—from the Clinton administration, as expressed by Madeleine Albright and others, and indeed from President Woodrow Wilson, who declared in January 1917 that “these are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”
The argument that America needed to invade Iraq in order to liberate its people was used by the Bush administration and its supporters as a subsidiary justification for going to war. After the war, and the failure to find Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, it became the principal justification.84 Nor was support for the liberation argument confined to Republicans. On the contrary, it proved extremely useful in winning support for the war from many intellectuals from the Democratic Party. In this there was nothing new. Woodrow Wilson was of course a Democrat. Until the Vietnam War split the Democrats and recast the American party system, the chief home of a more active and interventionist version of America’s mission was the Democratic Party. The Republicans, in contrast, generally tended more toward the realist thinking of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Kissinger.
The neoconservative movement originated among Democratic intellectuals (often former Marxists) who supported the bitterly anti-Communist, pro-Vietnam War, and pro-Israel Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson.85 Although the neoconservatives soon gravitated to the Republican Party, this tradition remained strong among some Democrats. Many of the policies of the Clinton administration were based on a belief in America’s right and duty to lead other countries toward democracy, although Clinton in general attempted to do this with the help of multilateral alliances, and the Clinton administration’s rhetoric lacked the harsh nationalism of Bush’s followers. In the years immediately after 9/11, however, the language of more hawkish Democratic intellectuals about America’s role in the world was often barely distinguishable from that of the neoconservatives. This was especially true of members of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), an institution close to Hillary Clinton.
In the years afterward, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, and anger at the way in which the Bush administration exploited the language of America’s mission for its own advantage, led to a revulsion of feeling among many Democratic intellectuals who had supported the Iraq War, and stronger opposition toward military intervention in the name of democratization. This was also because of the way in which the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” succeeded (with the exception of Libya) without U.S. support and encouragement, and even in the face of U.S. opposition. By the later years of the Bush administration, the contrast between the administration’s rhetoric of democratization and its actual Middle East strategy—that of supporting Sunni Arab autocrats hostile to Iran—had become glaring.
The shift of many Democratic intellectuals to an anti-interventionist position, however, implied not an abandonment of belief in America’s mission, but rather a reversion to an older version of it, that of America as example. For if belief in America’s uniquely valuable role in the world pervades American political culture (and has indeed often been justified by reality), this by no means necessarily implies a desire to carry out this role by active means, let alone military ones. Equally strong, and indeed historically more common, has been the belief that America’s mission to humanity consists above all of the force of her example.86 In the debates between Al Gore and George Bush in the presidential election campaign of 2000, both candidates stressed America’s mission to the world, but both also stressed that it should be exercised by example, with Bush famously declaring:
I think they [the people of the world] ought to look at us as a country that understands freedom, where it doesn’t matter who you are or how you’re raised or where you’re from, that you can succeed…So I don’t think they ought to look at us in any other way than what we are. We’re a freedom-loving nation. And if we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way. But if we’re a humble nation they’ll respect us as an honorable nation.87
One of the earliest and most famous expositions of this view was by President John Quincy Adams in 1821:
America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the powers of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom…She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.88
As these words imply, one underlying concern of many Americans who have opposed overseas interventions—including ones in the name of the American Creed—has been that they would tarnish the force of America’s example, and thereby in the long run make it more difficult to spread the lessons of the creed around the world.89 This is an argument that I would endorse from my own observation of how the prestige of American democracy and American material culture destroyed the faith of the younger Soviet elites in the Soviet system, and thereby helped destroy that system. This bore out the prediction of George Kennan: “The most important influence the United States can bring to bear upon internal developments in Russia will continue to be the influence of example: the influence of what it is, and not only what it is to others, but what it is to itself.”90
The alternation of activist and exemplary versions of America’s mission as the dominant intellectual force in the United States is heavily influenced by the course of America’s international experience. After World War I, the Wilsonian period was followed by almost two decades in which most Americans hel
d to an isolationist view of American policy. In our time, the bitter experiences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while they have not led to isolationism (at least in the policy elites), have certainly led to an immense reduction in the belief that America can successfully promote democracy through war, and can itself create new democracies from the ground up.
The Afghan experience in particular also damaged belief in a much wider intellectual trend that helped underpin Bush’s democratizing rhetoric, that of rational choice theory. This ostensibly scientific and objective approach to social and economic analysis is in fact both heavily ideological and rooted in American culture. Rational choice theory is really founded on an almost theological faith in the universal validity of a dogmatic (and in part imaginary) American-style economic individualism. In the traditional Christian faith, all human beings if taught properly and protected from the lures of the devil will become Christians. That is their default mode. In rational choice theory—and in the instinctive belief of many ordinary Americans—the default mode of humanity is to become Americans. This quasi-religious, utopian belief was strengthened still further by the fall of Communism.91
The extremely abstruse, “scientistic” style of this and other related approaches, however, makes it very easy to hide such basic assumptions within the model.92 As Edward Shils commented two generations ago, “it is not difficult to understand how the adoption of the scientistic tradition can prepare the way to the acceptance of a secularized millenarianism and thus lead on to ideological politics.” He was speaking of the link between scientism and Communism, but it is no less true with regard to the American ideology.93 Thus the great majority of official and semiofficial discussions on the subject of democratization that I attended in Washington, DC, between 2000 and 2005 were conducted as if no serious work of history, sociology, or political anthropology had ever been written.
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