America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  This clash has generated much of the electricity that drives the turbines of nationalism and other radical political tendencies across the world. A classic example of this is the role of the endangered and declining nobility, peasantry, and traditional middle class (mittelstand) of Germany in generating German “radical conservatism,” and the new nationalism that was its intimate partner, in the later nineteenth century.15 These social strata generated movements that often combined radical economic protest against the new capitalism with intense nationalism and cultural conservatism.16 And as the example of the Prussian nobility shows, absolute decline does not necessarily have to occur to drive an old elite in a radical direction—the threat can be enough.

  Anti-Semitism has been described as the “socialism of the petty bourgeois,” but in fact it formed part of a much wider complex of radical attitudes and resentments. Ultranationalism, and reproaches to “cosmopolitan elites” for not being nationalist enough, have long formed one path for the expression of socioeconomic grievances on the part of groups that for whatever reason could not turn to Socialism: “Having gained a foothold in the world of bourgeois respectability, they stood in danger of being plunged back into what they viewed as an abyss of powerlessness and dependence. It was that fear that made the middle class, even more than those who were truly rootless and indigent, a politically volatile group.”17

  The United States is not only the home of rapid, unceasing capitalist modernization and unceasing change, it also contains large middle class groups who at certain times in history—including today—have suffered badly as a result of the workings of this same capitalism; especially when compared to other developed societies, this capitalism is also less restrained and softened by state controls and state-funded social support mechanisms.

  Over the centuries, the socioeconomic anxieties of the white middle class and rural populations have often been suffused with ethnic and racial fears. These fears stemmed originally from what used to be called the “native” Americans—not the American Indians, but the white Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish populations of the eighteenth-century British colonies.18

  At the time of independence from Britain, the 13 colonies, far from representing great diversity of ethnicity and culture, were, if anything, rather less diverse than the kingdoms of Britain and France. This statement is not true if one includes the blacks and the Indians—but then, nonwhites were not included in the American states as they then understood and defined themselves, nor would they be for almost another 200 years.

  Leaving aside the blacks and Indians, white America at independence was overwhelmingly made up of two ethnicities, Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish (Protestant Scots who had settled in Ireland as part of the wars against the native Gaelic Catholic Irish), with significant numbers of Dutch in New York and Germans in Pennsylvania and a few other places. And although overwhelmingly Protestant at this stage, even these Germans attracted considerable hostility and fear from the English colonists, including the supposedly pragmatic and tolerant Benjamin Franklin, who was not even sure that the Germans and other Europeans were really white: “The number of purely White people in the world is proportionally very small…In Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion, as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of White people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased.”19

  However, the vast majority of the white American population spoke English, and equally important, were Protestant. These were divided into different churches and sects, and displayed very considerable cultural differences (especially between the English of New England and the Scots-Irish of the frontier and the South). They also shared a great many attitudes, not least their deep distrust of Catholicism. Especially in the South and on the frontier, Americans perpetuated not just the Protestant religious culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Scotland, but also aspects of their language and folk culture. And the English had already developed strong elements of a common national identity even before the first settler set foot in North America.20

  Compared to Britain and France, America lacked the huge Gaelic-speaking Catholic population of most of Ireland, the still Welsh-speaking population of Wales, the numerous mutually incomprehensible languages and dialects spoken by ordinary Frenchmen, and even the suppressed but still considerable and deeply disaffected Protestant minority of central and southern France.

  By historical standards then, the population of the new United States was relatively homogeneous ethnically and culturally. By European standards it was also relatively homogeneous socially. Except for the great plantation owners of the Southern states, there was no aristocracy—and even the Southern planters were vastly closer to the mass of the white population than the Duke of Norfolk and the Prince de Rohan were to their tenants.

  In reality, if not legally, this was a Protestant nation in which Catholics and others were protected and tolerated, and for many years even toleration “was regarded more as an arrangement among the Protestant sects than a universal principle” (for that matter, it may be remembered that John Locke, philosophical father of the American political Enlightenment and national creed, had explicitly denied toleration to Catholics).21 “Most of the proponents of the various religious positions did not really believe in either freedom or toleration. Freedom came to the Western world by the providence of God and the inadvertence of history.”22 To this extent it must be said that Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, and others on the extreme right are correct about the America of the “founders”—though how they think that this can be re-created in the United States of 2012 is another matter.

  This belief in America as a Protestant country was, if anything, only encouraged as more and more German Protestants immigrated and later joined the elites. The view of the United States as “an essentially Protestant nation with free exercise rights constitutionally guaranteed to minorities” remained widespread well into the twentieth century, and in many ways up to the election of the nation’s first (and to date, only) Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, in 1960.23

  Of course, this nativist stream has changed greatly over time. Most notably, it has continually attracted to itself sections of those immigrant populations that formerly were precisely those that stoked the fears of the “true stock.” In the process, it has infected these groups with some of its own “paranoid style.”24

  Although sections of the old core groups felt embattled and even defeated, such was the strength and conviction of their culture that over two centuries they were able to turn even a largely immigrant America into a “protestantoid” nation, in which the white middle class (including the upper proletariat) across large parts of the country in fact now share a culture that is rather homogeneous and above all, as already noted, very conformist.

  As Walter Russell Mead has written, the American sense of “folk community” (in the German sense of volk), from having been originally not merely white but Protestant and Anglo-Saxon or Scots-Irish, has gradually become synonymous in the minds of its proponents with “the American middle class.” However, it has still retained the meaning of a community of shared and narrowly defined cultural values, closed to many categories of outsider.25 This conformism gives tremendous opportunities to any political force that can seize upon key symbols of public consensus for its own ends. The whole ideology and self-perception of the Tea Parties stems from their belief that the white middle class from whom they stem represents the true American people.

  Furthermore, from the first, both the size of America and the nature of the American system made compromises between these groups a necessity. Thus, despite pathological fears of Catholicism among nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestants, a political alliance has existed on and off between the “Jacksonian” tradition in the South and West and sections of the Catholic Irish in the Northeast ever since the 1820s. The ethnic and regional
background of right-wing Fox News talk show hosts is a good representation of the traditional Jacksonian alliance: Rush Limbaugh, with his family’s Confederate ancestry, from the South; Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly for the Irish; and Glenn Beck (until he was removed from Fox for being too inflammatory even for them) for the West. One essential ingredient in the glue holding this alliance together has always been common hatred of the “East Coast elites.”26

  In our own time, too, a determined and partially successful attempt has been made to create an alliance between this tradition and American Jewish groups on the basis of support for Israel and a strong U.S. military policy in the Middle East, and of hostility to Muslims and Arabs, and to Americans and Europeans who criticize Israel.

  One aspect of this history has indeed been the attempt of older immigrant groups to ingratiate themselves and deflect hostility by attacking either more recent immigrants, racial minorities, or both. The Jacksonian alliance of Southern whites with the Irish and other Northern “ethnics” has always owed much to shared fear of and hostility toward blacks. After World War I, “even liberals such as Fiorello LaGuardia and Representative Samuel Dickstein began to bait Asians and Mexicans in order to protect Jews and Italians.”27

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the most important targets of nativist Protestant movements like the Know-Nothings were Irish Catholics. A century later, the descendants of this tradition had taken up a German–Irish Catholic as one of their great heroes. Progress? Not entirely. His name was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Similarly, it is at first sight wonderful that the Christian Right tradition has shed much of its ancestral anti-Semitism and come to identify closely with Israel. The problem is that the Israel in question is that of Ariel Sharon, the Likud, and even more extreme forces in Israeli society and among the settlers in the Occupied Territories.

  The “Jacksonian” and Frontier Traditions

  As chapter 5 explores, sympathy for Israel on the part of the American nationalist Right also owes a great deal to the ferocious history of racial conflict on the North American continent. This history also created the figure who more than any other has been seen to symbolize the populist nationalist tradition in the United States, and who has indeed given his name to one of its dominant elements: President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845).

  The Jacksonian tradition continues to have an impact on conservative populist politics in the United States. During the campaign for the Republican primary in South Carolina in January 2012, a supporter of the victorious candidate, Newt Gingrich, wrote as follows on FoxNews.com:

  It is no accident that Gingrich made frequent mention of one of South Carolina’s favorite sons, Andrew Jackson. Jackson, born in the Appalachian foothills in South Carolina’s upstate, was the father of the Democratic Party as it existed from the 1820s until the turn of the 21st Century: a party for poor folks with blue-collar white voters at its core.

  Jackson, bearing a saber-scar on his face delivered by a redcoat when he was a lad, was the angry attack muffin of his day. He stole his wife from another man and horsewhipped and shot some of those who called her an adulteress for it.

  He brawled and battered his way through his life as a lawyer and a military officer. His presidential candidacies were fueled by rage at the vested powers in Washington, which were either mercantile elites from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, or planter aristocrats from Virginia.

  But a wave of immigration from Jackson’s fellow Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, fueled by the availability of land to the West, had changed the composition of the electorate dramatically. He promised these poor voters, mostly subsistence farmers and “mechanics” (the blue collar voters of the day) that he would go to Washington and smash the establishment that was leaving them out.28

  The Jacksonian tradition stems above all from the experience of the American frontier, an experience that at one time or another affected all the states of the nation, and which remains strong to this day in the South and West.29 But as recorded by David Hackett Fischer and others, it also has older roots in the traditions and experience of the “Scots-Irish” Protestants, who after settling Ulster and largely exterminating its Gaelic Irish Catholic population, later brought both their fundamentalist Protestantism and their ruthless attitude to warfare with them to the Americas. In the words of one of Jackson’s early biographers, which would be endorsed by any student of recent Northern Irish history, “it appears to be more difficult for a North-of-Irelander than for other men to allow an honest difference of opinion in an opponent, so that he is apt to regard the terms opponent and enemy as synonymous.”30

  Born in North Carolina into a prominent Scots-Irish lineage, and later settled in Tennessee, Jackson’s entire career was shaped by conflict with the American Indians of the South and their British, French, and Spanish backers. Although General Jackson’s greatest victory was against the British at New Orleans in 1815, most of his campaigns were against the Cherokees, Creeks, and other Native Americans. It was as an Indian fighter and leader of local militias that Jackson emerged to prominence in Tennessee. And although Jacksonian nationalism contains other important elements, including nativism, anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and dislike of the Northeast, a strong sense of white identity and violent hostility to other races has also been at its core.31

  A classic collision between this strand of “Jacksonian” nationalism and the core principles of the American Creed as publicly formulated occurred in 1831, during Jackson’s own presidency. The Cherokee Nation, resident in what had become northern Georgia and parts of Tennessee and Alabama since long before whites landed in the Americas, appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States against new laws passed by the state of Georgia making them subject to its law and laying the basis for the Indians’ expulsion beyond the Mississippi to make way for white settlers. The Cherokees’ lawyers argued—quite correctly—that this was in violation of several treaties with governments of the United States. In accordance with the unarguable legal facts, a majority of the Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.

  To this Jackson reportedly replied, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” And although Jackson may not have actually said this, these words certainly reflected the spirit in which he acted. The U.S. government refused to defend the Cherokees against Georgia, and Jackson warned them that they had no choice but to leave, and within a few years (though after Jackson himself had left office) they were driven out of their ancestral homeland on the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma, on which a large number died of disease and malnutrition.32

  Jackson’s reported words, however, not only reflected his own implacable hostility toward the Indians, more importantly, his statement was descriptive of the actual situation in the South and West, and the attitudes of the vast majority of Jackson’s constituency, the white inhabitants of these sections. They were determined to drive out the Indians irrespective of what the U.S. government or U.S. law said. Folk law called for the expansion of white land and civilization at the expense of the “savages,” and protection of the white community from any possibility of a revival of the Indian raids of the past, or Indian alliances with foreign enemies of the United States.

  This folk law took precedence over the written code of the United States (even when the Indians concerned had been allies of the United States in war, and had in fact made great strides toward the adoption of “civilization,” including the creation of a written language). Together with this came a deep hostility toward humanitarian East Coast, or “Yankee,” lawyers and intellectuals, who, having gotten rid of their own Indians more than half a century before, now felt free to criticize and restrict the behavior of the West and South in this regard—a regional hostility that has replicated itself over numerous different issues up to the present.

  The other elements that over time have shaped the populist nationalist tradition in America include the Southern experience of slavery, the specific cultural and histor
ical traditions of the Protestant Scots-Irish, who dominated on the Southern frontier, and a communal culture heavily influenced by evangelical Protestantism.33 This tradition has reflected the culture, interests, and anxieties of the original Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish settler stock, though it has also been willing to forge political alliances with specific immigrant groups and, over time, accept as full members of the community aliens who are held to conform to communal and “civilized” values. In the past, this always meant white aliens, but in the last three decades it has expanded to include some nonwhites as well.

  Another element is a “producerist” ethos with very strong resemblances to the ideologies thrown up by lower middle class and agrarian-based radical conservative and nationalist movements in Europe of the past. As with the Tea Parties’ combination of hatred of government programs and adherence to the white middle class welfare programs of Social Security and Medicare, so the Jacksonian tradition’s public celebration of rugged frontier individualism masked the ways in which it was the state that in fact subsidized and largely enabled the expansion of white settlement on the frontier.34 In Orange County, the main base of right-wing conservatism in California, the great postwar boom was very largely fueled by state military spending.35

  This producerist ethos involved bitter hostility to “parasitic” elements of society—concentrated in the Northeast—that supposedly drained away the wealth from those who actually produced it: “finance capitalists,” snobbish “silk stockings,” hereditary rentier elites, overpaid intellectuals, “experts,” bureaucrats, and lawyers—all of them with suspect foreign contacts, influences, or antecedents (in the past, this tradition often involved anti-Semitism)—and also the equally “parasitic,” shiftless, lazy, drunken (or addicted) urban lower proletariat, above all when of alien or immigrant origin. Hostility toward the elites stemmed from the society of the frontier and the newly settled areas, but it also had roots in seventeenth-century English and Scottish Puritan hostility to the Anglican (and sometimes crypto-Catholic) English elites of that time, not only in the nobility and the clergy, but also in the universities and the legal profession.36