America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  85. Cf. Lars-Erik Nelson, “Military-Industrial Man,” New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (December 21, 2000).

  86. Cf. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, 106–108.

  87. Transcript of the second presidential debate, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, October 11, 2000, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/debates.php.

  88. John Quincy Adams, presidential speech on July 4, 1821, quoted in Mead, Special Providence, 185.

  89. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 92ff; cf. Fulbright, Arrogance of Power, 21ff.

  90. George Kennan, “America and the Russian Future,” Foreign Affairs 29, no. 3 (April 1951).

  91. Johnson and Keehn, ibid; for the quasi-religious nature of American capitalist ideology, see Bellah, Broken Covenant, xiii.

  92. Cf. Stephen M. Walt, “Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies,” International Security 23, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 5–48.

  93. Edward Shils, “Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Intellectual,” Sewanee Review 66, no. 3 (1958): 450–480.

  94. Text of President Obama’s inaugural address, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/obama_inauguration/7840646.stmh.

  95. Newt Gingrich, “The Failure of US Diplomacy,” Foreign Policy (July/August 2003): 42–48. For his speech, “Transforming the State Department,” of April 22, 2003, see the website of the American Enterprise Institute at http://www.aei.org/search/Gingrich+the+failure+of+US+diplomacy. In support of Gingrich and against the “Road Map,” see also Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., “Mideast Road Trap,” Washington Times, May 6, 2003.

  96. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 15–16; cf. also Raoul Girardet, Le Nationalisme Francais (Paris: Points, 1983), 13.

  97. Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 205–207.

  98. Cf. Alterman, What Liberal Media?, 270.

  99. Cf. Adrian Karatnycky, “The 30th Anniversary Freedom House Survey,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (January 2003); for Freedom House’s “methodology” and mission statement, see http://freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2000/methodology.htm.

  100. Cf. FitzGerald, America Revised, 119ff; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 26–28, 211–228.

  101. Jacqueline Newmyer, “Will the Space Race Move East?,” New York Times, October 20, 2003.

  102. Cf. Foner, Story of American Freedom, 263.

  103. Cf. Lind, The Next American Nation, 3.

  104. Kirkpatrick, quoted in Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 286.

  105. Irving Kristol, “‘Moral Dilemmas’ in Foreign Policy” (1980), reprinted in Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, ed. Irving Kristol (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 261–265; for a neoconservative attack on just this line of argument, see James W. Ceasar, “The Great Divide: American Interventionism and Its Opponents,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 25–43.

  106. Irving Kristol, “The ‘Human Rights’ Muddle,” in Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, ed. Irving Kristol (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 266–269; for an almost identical statement by one of the greatest targets of neoconservative abuse, George Kennan, see his “Morality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs (1985). For the long-standing neoconservative hostility toward humanitarian interventionism, see John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–94 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 50ff.

  107. Cf. Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1991), 19–38, 64–81; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Towards a neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs (July–August 1996).

  108. Cf. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1982).

  109. http://whoisrichhand.blogspot.com/.

  110. Philip Rucker and Chrissah Thomson, “Two new rules will give Constitution a star role in GOP-controlled House,” Washington Post, December 20, 2011.

  111. Quoted in “The Perils of Constitution-Worship,” The Economist, September 23, 2010.

  112. http://www.nccsstore.com/5000-Year-Leap/productinfo/5000YL.

  113. John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Ada, MO: Baker Academic Publishers, 1995). See also David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution and Religion (Aledo, TX: Wallbuilder Press, 2008); and Glenn Beck, The Original Argument: The Federalists’ Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011).

  114. Phyllis Schlafly, “Beware of Clinton’s ‘web’ of Treaties,” speech to the Christian Coalition, Washington, DC, September 18, 1998, at http://www.eagleforum.org.

  115. Jeff Sharlet, “Is the Tea Party becoming a religious movement?” CNN, October 27, 2010, at http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/27/sharlet.tea.party.evangelical/index.html; Scott Clement and John C. Green, “The Tea Party, Religion and Social Issues,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, February 2, 2011, at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1903/tea-party-movement-religion-social-issues-conservative-christian. See also Amy Gardner, “Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America,” Washington Post, October 24, 2011.

  116. http://www.themountvernonstatement.com.

  117. Michael Lind, “Let’s Stop Pretending the Constitution Is Sacred,” April 4, 2011, at http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/04/lind_tea_party_constitution. See also Elizabeth Wydra and David Gans, “Setting the Record Straight: The Tea Party and the Constitutional Powers of the Federal Government,” Issue Brief No. 4, July 16, 2010, at http://www.theusconstitution.org. For a critique of the Tea Parties’ understanding of the history of the American Revolution, see Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  118. See Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama,” New Yorker, August 30, 2010; Frank Rich, “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party,” New York Times, August 28, 2010. For earlier background on capitalism’s funding of populism, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

  119. Cf. Kate Zernicke, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 135.

  120. Ezra Klein, “After Health Care, We Need Senate Reform,” Washington Post, December 27, 2009.

  121. For the U.S. Census overview, see http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010. See also William H. Frey, “Immigration and the Coming ‘Majority Minority’,” Brookings Institution, September 18, 2009, at http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/1218_immigration_frey.

  122. For racial anxiety in the Tea Parties, see Zernicke, Boiling Mad, 59.

  Chapter Three

  1. Vachel Lindsay, Selected Poems, ed. Mark Harris (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 124.

  2. Cf. David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 37–68.

  3. Cf. Hans J. Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).

  4. Cf. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).

  5. Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed,” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 12; see also Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt-1955,” in The Radical Right, 64–86.

  6. Samuel Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy (March/April 2004); Samuel Huntington, The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996), map, 205; see also his essay “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite,” National Interest 75 (Spring 2004).

  7. Cf. Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 30–35.

  8. Cf. Joseph Farah, Taking America Back: A Radical Plan to Revive Freedom, Morality and Justice (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003).

  9. Quoted in Garry Wills, “The Born Again Republicans,” New York Review of Books 39, no. 15 (September 24, 1992).

  10. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 474.

  11. Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); and America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

  12. For the immense importance of ethnic and regional origins in shaping different strands of American political culture, see Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 117ff.

  13. Cf. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 27–182; Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1952; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 19–23.

  14. Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment, 32.

  15. See John Weiss, Conservatism in Europe, 1770–1945: Tradition, Reaction and Counter-Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 71–89. For the role of the smalltown mittelstand and the effects on later German nationalism of the destruction of their ancient social and political order by the modern state, see Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1817 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially 405–431.

  16. Cf. Geoff Eley, “The Wilhelmine Right: How It Changed,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 112–135.

  17. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), quoted in Kevin Phillips, Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 233.

  18. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 79; cf. also Bennett, Party of Fear; Michael Kazin, “The Right’s Unsung Prophets,” The Nation, February 20, 1989; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 135, 175.

  19. Quoted by Larry McMurtry, in “Separate and Unequal,” New York Review of Books 48, no. 4 (March 8, 2001). See also Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 143–144.

  20. Cf. Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 97.

  21. David Morris Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Perennial, 1976), 243; Bennett, Party of Fear, 17–20.

  22. Reinhold Niebuhr, “A Note on Pluralism,” quoted in Sidney Mead, The Nation With the Soul of a Church (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 31.

  23. A. James Reichley, “Faith in Politics,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, ed. Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 175; cf. also Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 91ff; Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1963), 1–38.

  24. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, 3–40.

  25. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Shaped the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 241; see also Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New York: Arlington House, 1969), especially 290–392 (on the Midwest).

  26. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 222.

  27. See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Alan Wolfe, “Strangled by Roots,” The New Republic, May 28, 2001.

  28. Chris Stirewalt, “Newt’s Jacksonian Revolution,” FoxNews.com, January 23, 2012, at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/23/newts-jacksonian-revolution/#ixzz1kNIfFP8Y.

  29. For the role of the experience and portrayal of the frontier in American culture, see the three-part work by Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800; The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization; and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973, 1985, and 1998, respectively).

  30. Quoted in David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 781–782; for this trait in the Scots-Irish, see also James G. Leyburn, The Scots-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), especially 68–71, 290–291.

  31. Cf. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Penguin, 2001); Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 402–404, 419–443. For Jackson’s Scotch-Irish roots and character, see Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 643–644, 685–688, 755–776.

  32. Cf. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, 254–271. See also John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 230–264; and Theda Perdue, “Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 526–540.

  33. For some of the history of this tradition, see Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979); and Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

  34. Cf. Walter Russell Mead, “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy: What Populism Means for Globalism,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (March/April 2011.

  35. Cf. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 27.

  36. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 57; and Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1957), 30.

  37. For the ideas of Thomas Jefferson as a basis for Jacksonianism, see Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 45–46, 370; Bellah, Broken Covenant, 116–119; for the “agrarian myth” as a basis for both Jacksonianism and the later Progressive movement, see Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 23–59.

  38. Cf. Paul Krugman, “True Blue Americans,” New York Times, May 7, 2002,.

  39. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 65.

  40. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism, 146–151.

  41. Cited on the BBC, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16549624.

  42. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, vol. 2 (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 76–81.

  43. Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: What History Textbooks Have Taught Our Children About Their Country, and How and Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 74–75.

  44. Dinesh D’Souza, What’s Great About America, quoted in Louis Menand, “Faith, Hope and Clarity: September 11th and the American Soul,” The New Yorker (September 16, 2002).

  45. Michael Kazin, The Popul
ist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 19–22; see also Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 157–162.

  46. Cf. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, especially 37–40, 187–289, 315, 407–411, 461–474. For books setting the American populist tradition in the context of populist movements worldwide, see Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, eds., Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969); and Paul Taggart, Populism (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000).