America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  125. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), 40–49; for the debate on this question, see Talmon, ed., Totalitarian Democracy and After (New York: Frank Cass and Co., 2002).

  126. Ralph Reed, “Separation of Church and State: ‘Christian Nation’ and Other Heresies,” in Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 373–379.

  127. Quoted in Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6–9; see also Kelley, Cultural Pattern in American Politics, 39ff.

  128. Cf. Walter Russell Mead, “The Jacksonian Tradition,” National Interest 58 (Winter 1999/2000); and Mead, Special Providence, chapter 7 and passim; Lind, Made in Texas; Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (New York: Free Press, 2004), 115–135.

  129. Cf. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 307–332.

  130. “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee;

  We don’t take our trips on LSD

  We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street;

  We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.

  I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,

  A place where even squares can have a ball

  We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,

  And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all.”

  (Merle Haggard, Okie from Muskogee).

  It should be said that given Haggard’s own hell-raising past, this song has ironic and even mocking overtones that (as with Springsteen’s Born in the USA) have been completely lost on most of the people who sing it.

  131. Cf. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 558–569.

  132. Helen Lee Turner and James L. Guth, “The Politics of Armageddon: Dispensationalism Among Southern Baptist Ministers,” in Religion and Political Behavior in the United States, ed. Ted G. Jelen (New York: Praeger, 1989), 203.

  133. Mead, Special Providence, 236, 245.

  134. For an account of the abuses by the journalist who broke the story, see Seymour Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, May 10, 2004; and “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib,” May 24, 2004; see also Scott Wilson, “An Iraqi Detainee Tells of Anguishing Treatment at Iraq Prison,” Washington Post, May 5, 2004; Scott Wilson and Sewell Chan, “As Insurgency Grew, So Did Prison Abuse,” Washington Post, May 9, 2004; Dana Priest and Joe Stephens, “Secret World of U.S. Interrogation,” Washington Post, May 11, 2004; Ian Fisher, “Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops,” New York Times, May 4, 2004; Ian Fisher, “Iraqi Tells of U.S. Abuse,” New York Times, May 13, 2004. For a discussion of the abuse and the background in Bush administration thinking, see Mark Danner, “Torture and Truth,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 2004; and “The Logic of Torture,” New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004.

  135. For a recent new account of atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam, see the Toledo Blade’s series on the killing of civilians by the “Tiger Force” in 1967: Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands,” Toledo Blade, October 22, 2003; and Nicholas Turse, “The Doctrine of Atrocity,” Village Voice, May 11, 2004.

  136. Poll by the Roper Center, University of Connecticut, May 27, 2004, at abcnews.go.com/sections/US/Polls/torture.

  137. For the Gonzales memo and Powell’s dissent, see Michael Isikoff, “Memos Reveal War Crimes Warnings,” Newsweek, May 18, 2004. For the other memos, see Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith, “Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture,” Washington Post, June 8, 2004; and Edward Alden and James Harding, “U.S. Lawyers Said Interrogators Could Violate Torture Laws Abroad,” Financial Times (London), June 8, 2004, and “Bush Team Accused of Sanctioning Torture,” Financial Times (London), June 9, 2004.

  138. Quoted by Charles Babington, “Senator Critical of Focus on Prisoner Abuse,” Washington Post, May 12, 2004.

  139. Lott quoted in “Media Notes,” Washington Post, June 4, 2004; see also Zoe Heller, “How Quickly America Forgot Its Outrage,” Daily Telegraph (London), May 15, 2004; for attempts in the right-wing media to defend what happened at Abu Ghraib or play down its importance, see, for example, Wesley Pruden, editor in chief, “He Said the Word. Who’s Sorry Now?” Washington Times, May 7, 2004; James D. Zirin, “The Objective…and a Metaphor Too Far,” Washington Times, May 17, 2004; Victor Davis Hanson, “Abu Ghraib,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2004; Mark Alexander, “The Abu Ghraib Feeding Frenzy,” The Federalist, May 7, 2004; Deroy Murdock, “Kinder, Gentler War on Terror: Are We Overreacting?” National Review Online, May 17, 2004; Reuel Marc Gerecht, “Who’s Afraid of Abu Ghraib,” Weekly Standard, May 24, 2004.

  140. Rush Limbaugh, on May 6, 2004, http://americanassembler.com/newsblog.

  141. Michael Savage, on Savage Nation (radio show), May 12, 2004 at http://mediamatters.org.

  142. Figures at www.wjno.com/hosts/rush and www.talkradionetwork.com.

  143. “Red Double Cross,” Wall Street Journal editorial, May 14, 2004.

  144. John McCain, “In Praise of Do-Gooders: The Red Cross Is Right to Criticize the U.S. Military When It Steps Out of Line,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2004.

  145. Mead, “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy.”

  146. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 12.

  147. David Brooks, “The Mother of All No Brainers,” New York Times, July 4, 2011.

  148. Matt Kennard, “Times grow hard for working man as unions lose grip,” Financial Times, September 23, 2011.

  149. U.S. Census Bureau, “The Changing Shape of the Nation’s Income Distribution 1947–1968,” http://www.census.org/prod/2000pubs/p60–204.

  150. Emily Beller and Michael Hout, “Intergenerational Social Mobility: The United States in Comparative Perspective,” http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/docs/16_02_02.pdf.

  151. Tom Hertz, “Understanding Mobility in America,” Center for American Progress, 2006, http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/hertz_mobility_analysis.pdf; and Isabel Sawhill and John E. Morton, “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?” Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%20Dream%20Report.pdf.

  152. See “The Middle Class Squeeze 2008,” the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/library/report.php?ID=74.

  153. Merle Haggard, America First, from his album Chicago Wind (Capitol Records, Nashville, Tennessee, 2005).

  154. Cf. Max Lerner, American Civilization: Life and Thought in the US Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 907ff.

  155. Niall Ferguson, “American Terminator,” Newsweek (January 2004).

  156. Cf. Max Boot, “American Imperialism? No Need to Run Away from Label,” USA Today, May 6, 2003.

  157. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 69.

  158. Irving Kristol quoted in Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation 278, no. 7, (February 23, 2004).

  159. Tom DeLay, “Power and Principle,” Washington Times, May 26, 1999.

  160. Cf. Phillips, American Dynasty, 236; Meyrav Wurmser, “No More Excuses: Anti-American Leaders Stand to be Accused,” Washington Times, September 17, 2001; Zev Chafets, “Arab Americans have to Choose,” Daily News (New York), September 16, 2001.

  161. Cf. Senator Trent Lott, “New World, New Friends,” official press statement, March 21, 2003, http://www.lott.senate.gov; Helle Dale, “The World According to Chirac,” Washington Times, June 4, 2003; Editorial, “Thanks, but No Thanks, France,” Washington Times, March 19, 2003; Paul Johnson, “Au Revoir, Petite France,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2003; Holman Jenkins, “A War for France’s Oil,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2003.

  162. Cf. the extraordinarily bitter and mendacious attack on France by David Frum and Richard Perle in An E
nd to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), 238–253; and “David Frum’s Diary” in the National Review Online of February 19 and March 11, 2003. For French reporting of these charges, see, e.g., Denis Lacorne, “Les dessous de la francophobie,” Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), February 27–March 5, 2003.

  163. Thomas L. Friedman, “Our War With France,” New York Times, September 18, 2003; Justin Vaisse, “Bringing Out the Animal in Us,” Financial Times, March 15, 2003.

  164. Stanley Hoffmann, “France, the United States and Iraq,” The Nation, February 16, 2004.

  165. For the weapons charge, see William Safire “The French Connection,” New York Times, March 13, 2003; Bill Gertz, “Iraq Strengthens Air Force With French Parts”, Washington Times, March 7, 2003. For the biological weapons charge, see “Four Nations Thought to Possess Smallpox,” Washington Post, November 5, 2002. For an official French rebuttal of all these accusations, see the Fact Sheet issued by the French Embassy in Washington on May 14, 2003, and published in the Washington Post on May 15, 2003.

  166. Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, quoted by Sarah Palin, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 63–64.

  167. Palin, America by Heart, 35–60.

  168. Quoted in Palin, America by Heart, 44.

  169. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “Prepare to be Betrayed,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/prepare-for-betrayal155.html.

  170. Mead, “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy.”

  Chapter Four

  1. Max Lerner, America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the US Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957).

  2. Quoted in Howard Elinson, “The Implications of Pentecostal Religion for Intellectualism, Politics, and Race Relations,” American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 4 (January 1965).

  3. Samuel Huntington, “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite,” National Interest 75 (Spring 2004): see also Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  4. Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 234–235.

  5. Cf. Corwin Smidt, “Evangelicals within Contemporary American Politics: Differentiating between Fundamentalist and Non-Fundamentalist Evangelicals,” Western Political Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1988).

  6. Ryan Lizza, “Leap of Faith: The Making of a Republican Front-Runner,” New Yorker, August 15, 2011.

  7. 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 23, 2011, 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 10, 2011.

  8. For individual motivations for new converts to the fundamentalist churches, see Robert R. Monaghan, “Three Faces of the True Believer: Motivations for Attending a Fundamentalist Church,” in American Mosaic: Social Patterns of Religion in the United States, ed. Phillip E. Hammond and Benton Johnson (New York: Random House, 1970), 65–79.

  9. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “US Religious Landscape Survey 2011,” http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. For the situation in 2000, see Churches and Church Membership in the United States, 2000: An Enumeration by Region, State and County Based on Data for 133 Church Groupings (Atlanta: Glenmary Research Center, 2002). See especially the attached map.

  10. Cf. Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 49.

  11. See Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland, History of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 152–175; Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27.

  12. James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 71–79, 143ff, 282ff.

  13. Cf. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 113–124.

  14. George Grant, quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 37; Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 238.

  15. Cf. Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalism Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 106ff.

  16. Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt-1955,” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 64, 85.

  17. Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 39.

  18. Cf. Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 200ff.

  19. See Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 4.

  20. Cf. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

  21. Cf. the Christian Coalition’s “2001 Senate Score Card” and “2001 House Scorecard” at http://www.cc.org.

  22. Howard Fineman, “Bush and God,” Newsweek (March 10, 2003).

  23. Cf. Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 233.

  24. Matthew 12:30, cited in Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon at the start of the Civil War, “The Battle Set in Array,” in God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, ed. Conrad Cherry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 169–183.

  25. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003); see also the critique of Bush’s religion in Phillips, American Dynasty, 228–244.

  26. The provenance of the president’s phrase was pointed out by Reverend Fritz Ritsch in his article “Of God, and Man, in the White House”, Washington Post, March 2, 2003.

  27. Stephen Marshall, quoted in Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 147.

  28. Norman Podhoretz, “How to Win World War IV,” Commentary 113, no. 2 (February 2002).

  29. Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of George W. Bush (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2003), 174.

  30. George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 6; David Gergen, quoted in “A President Puts His Faith in Providence,” New York Times, February 9, 2003; see also Elizabeth Bumiller, “Talk of Religion Provokes Amens as well as Anxiety,” New York Times, April 22, 2002; for Bush’s religion and its political uses, see Phillips, American Dynasty, 211–244. See also Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 75.

  31. Woodward, Bush at War, 67.

  32. Mansfield, The Faith of George W. Bush, 172–173.

  33. Cf. Phillips, American Dynasty, 211–244.

  34. Cf. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 457, 523–558.

  35. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

  36. Morone, Hellfire Nation, 260–273.

  37. Ira M. Wasserman, “Prohibition and Ethnocultural Conflict: The Missouri Prohibition Referendum of 1918,” Social Science Quarterly 70, no. 4 (December 1989).

  38. For a reasoned argument in favor of Prohibition and its partial success, see Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us From Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), especially 145–153.


  39. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 79–106.

  40. Morone, Hellfire Nation, 304.

  41. 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), 208–237.

  42. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 88.

  43. Quoted in Cherry, God’s New Israel, 269.

  44. Stanley Coben, “A Study in Nativism: The Red Scare of 1919–20,” Political Science Quarterly 79, no. 1 (March 1964). For a description of the two scares, see Bennett, Party of Fear, 183–198; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin, 1994), 206–219. For the World War I hysteria in Texas, see T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 643–648; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, V vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 80–81. For pressure on the (traditionally pro-German) Yiddish press during World War I, see Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 538–540.