In Defense of America

by Bronwen Maddox

  Hollywood’s success within the United States and abroad began with its skill at responding to the extraordinary challenge it faced at the start of the twentieth century: trying to appeal to an American audience of immigrants, many not speaking the same language. “These circumstances forced editors, writers, and producers to invent cosmopolitan techniques for reaching out to the largest possible crowd of readers, listeners, and viewers,” argued the academics Michael Werz and Barbara Fried in their study of anti-Americanism in 2007. Hollywood, “a community of émigrés,” provided “entertainment to an audience that otherwise lacked common traditions or backgrounds, thus serving as a tool of orientation amid the unfamiliar living conditions of the New World.”12

  To dismiss this pursuit as “mass culture,” uninterested in subtleties, is to ignore the intelligence of the techniques and Hollywood’s importance as a unifying factor in the United States. But in any case, you could not reasonably call it an exercise in trying to dominate the world with a uniform American culture. As Hollywood knew best of all, there was no such thing.

  And as Hollywood’s investors have been all too aware, its global reach has not been matched by steadiness of profits. For all that critics attack the “Hollywood formula,” there is no such thing as a reliable recipe for a hit. The unpredictability of the winners, the expense of the failures —the studios have had limited success in shielding themselves against these constants from the start. According to Screen Digest, the major studios’ entire list of 132 films in 2006 was set to lose $1.9 billion over the five-year period when all the revenue from cinemas, television, DVDs, and the Internet would come in.13 Also the studios, terrified of Internet piracy, have not been sure-footed in exploiting this new medium.

  Now, heading toward the same fate as that suffered by other iconic American brands, Hollywood is gradually losing share as other countries realize they prefer their own movies —and can make them, too. For example, India’s Bollywood appears finally to be breaking out of the box in which it has been trapped for two decades, making extravaganzas out of singing, dancing, stories of evil landlords and brothers separated at birth —movies which packed cinemas but failed to make much money by international standards. Between 1985 and 2000, its revenues stalled at about $1 billion a year, less than a third of the box office take of a leading Hollywood studio, according to an analysis in Newsweek.14 But more recently, buoyed by the emergence of an Indian middle class and an affluent expatriate audience in Europe and the United States, Bollywood is producing movies that appeal to the new market.

  It would be hard to call Bollywood conservative, given the sexiness of the costumes and the dancing. But all the same, many countries have found that developing their own movies and television shows offers them an escape from what they perceive to be an American wave of loose morality, violence, and materialism bearing down on them.

  Declining Influence of the American Media

  The same pattern of gradually waning influence is true more generally of the American media, preeminent for most of the twentieth century. As Jeremy Tunstall, a professor of sociology at London’s City University, reported in his book The Media Were American, the United States and UK in 1948 had 98 percent of the world’s television receivers (although U.S. TV sets outnumbered UK ones fourteen to one). The American lead peaked around that same year, particularly in its movies and popular music, in its news magazines such as Life and Time, and in its news agencies, the AP and the UPA. But after that, while “looking superlative,” American media actually began to lose market share, while McCarthyism and then Vietnam chipped away at their moral authority, Tunstall suggests. He also describes how the world outside the United States now devotes only 10 percent of its time to American media; 10 percent to other media imports; and 80 percent to domestic national media.15 It is astonishing how quickly that change can take place. In Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 military coup but who, as dictators go, was at the relaxed end of the spectrum, allowed private television to start up for the first time, and thirty stations sprang up within six years. The lesson is clear: people prefer products tailored to their own tastes where they can get them.

  American Distrust of Big Business

  Another oddity of the portrayal of America as the land of uncurbed capitalism is that it ignores America’s historical suspicion about the motives of business tycoons. This suspicion has taken a most vigorous and principled form in the antitrust legislation which has underpinned American competitiveness. But it is also reflected in its literature of the early twentieth century, from Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier in 1912 and The Titan in 1914 to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in 1922. Of course, there are parallels in European literature, but those authors are hardly writing against the grain of their countries’ economic organization.

  The rigor with which the United States is prepared to deploy its competition policy on its most successful businesses would not be replicated easily in many European countries, which remain highly protective of their own “national champions” (even if entirely happy to join America in attacking Microsoft’s market dominance). Europe’s politicians profess to believe in the benefits of free trade for both sides, even if one side can make everything more cheaply —but they do not easily shed the instinctive fear that their side will lose out.

  The Price the United States Pays for Federalism

  A third point missed by the United States’ critics is that not everything works well there, and sometimes this is the result of putting its principles of federalism (the respect for states’ rights) and its passion for curbing potential monopolies above convenience, progress, and profit. These critics imagine an America in which the pursuit of profit always carries the day, but the picture is much more complex.

  Take, for example, the restriction on banking across state borders —or even on banks having branches within one state —which has been in place for most of American history, relaxed only in the last twenty years. The United States, in contrast to most countries, spawned tens of thousands of banks, many of them tiny community ones, but has been slow to develop customer services such as nationwide networks of ATMs and debit cards. Until recently, it was a painful experience to try to persuade a shopkeeper in one state to accept a check from a bank in another.

  These regulations, reinforced after the 1929 crash with the 1933 Banking Act, put the ability of even national banks to expand in the hands of state governments. At the same time, the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking. It was only in 1999 that Congress, after eleven failed attempts at reform in twenty years, finally managed to shed the antiquated laws and take the United States closer to the modern banking regulation it needed.

  Banking is the starkest example —given the United States’ image as the pinnacle of capitalism —of where America’s history and federal structure hamper its economy. But it has handicapped itself in the same way in telecommunications and electricity, two services whose costs affect everyone and every business in the country, and whose regulators have struggled to foster an efficient and competitive industry, and have still partly failed.

  In 2001 the world looked on, astonished, as California, whose name is synonymous with sunshine and the good life, imposed the first mandatory power cuts since the Second World War, after households had suffered months of soaring electricity bills. That was the result of deregulating electricity without having increased the supply.

  Across the country, more than a decade after the hugely ambitious 1996 Telecommunications Act, which tried to set the terms on which long-distance and local phone companies should deal with each other, competition between telephone companies is still patchy. The United States may have driven the rise of the Internet, but was slow to develop networks of cellular phones and, now, broadband.

  The hidden cost of federalism was a theme thoughtfully developed by John Donahue, an associate professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, in his book Disun
ited States, which argued that competition between the states often hurt the American economy overall. Donahue pointed to the huge amounts of money that states were using to lure businesses —and jobs —across state borders, including, famously, Alabama’s successful courtship of Mercedes, counterbidding against almost every state in the South. Alabama’s package of subsidies and tax breaks eventually approached $300 million, a cost per job approaching three times the previous record.

  In February 2008 the Supreme Court ruled that federal laws should prevail over often tougher state laws aimed at protecting consumers’ health and safety, when it barred a suit from a man injured by a heart catheter which had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The Court “showed its appreciation for the problem of the Balkanization of the economy by state laws and the difficulties of having to comply with inconsistent state laws in a national economy,” said Robin Conrad, executive vice president of the National Chamber Litigation Center, the legal arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.16

  I don’t cite these examples to show that American capitalism does not work; manifestly, it does. But they do show that the United States has often, in industries that are at the heart of its economy, put that pursuit of profit below the principle of states’ independence.

  Wounded Giant?

  Even before the sudden slowing of the American economy in early 2008, the United States’ share of the world economy was beginning to shrink. The contribution it makes to the world’s overall economic growth is dropping —from 19 percent to just 12 percent in the past decade. The International Monetary Fund expects the world’s economic growth to be 4.8 percent in 2008, but within that, the United States will be expanding at less than 2 percent, and the rest of the world together almost three times as quickly. The United States will lose its claim to some of the superlatives (and that was on the cards even before the slowdown of early 2008). It is indeed set to be overtaken by China as the world’s biggest economy, although that depends on how you measure size and translate Chinese figures —and as I discuss in chapter 9, those projections rely on a lot of questionable assumptions about China’s ability to manage its own growth. Germany is already the world’s biggest exporter, despite having an economy less than a quarter the size of the United States’.

  But for America, that is neither a source for humiliation nor a reason for gloom. It is easy to exaggerate the potential of China, India, and indeed Asia. For all the uncertainties of the sudden slump in 2008, the proved success of the United States’ economic engine is not about suddenly to dissolve. Rather, the quick reaction of the Federal Reserve, in using taxpayers’ money to rescue Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s fifth-largest bank, shows the poverty of the usual caricature of American capitalism as unbridled, unaided, and unregulated. America is the heart of capitalism, but woven through it is a long, messy history of intervention and regulation.

  The pity of critics’ resentment of American economic strength is that they regard it as a zero-sum game: as if America’s gain is their loss. But it isn’t. They do not comfortably acknowledge that the United States could be better off for its innovation, or for the success of its companies, or for its trade —and so could they. That is the hopefulness of American society; it is a shame that this is not one of its more successful exports. The United States has, however, found capital markets easier to promote than its own version of democracy. The next chapter argues that in American foreign policy, the pursuit of democracy is also an admirable goal.

  Chapter 5

  THE PURSUIT OF DEMOCRACY

  I was in the Karachi villa of a well-connected Pakistani couple on the night of October 19, 2007, just after Benazir Bhutto had returned from exile and a suicide bomber had killed 140 in her homecoming rally. The hosts were unsurpassably cosmopolitan, with museum-quality Islamic and European art on the walls (“Mummy picked it up over the years”), a sophistication compromised only by an impossible request for names of bargain restaurants in Mayfair, London’s district of ambassadors and hedge funds.

  For all their Western tastes, they maintained an absolute conviction that America had been the perpetrator of the attack, through its agent President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence services. There was no sense that these accusations might be proved or disproved by forensic analysis (and indeed, the police made little attempt to collect it —then or when Bhutto was later assassinated). It was preferable to assume an obscure purpose; there always had been one, in America’s manipulations of Afghanistan and Pakistan, they said.

  My Pakistani acquaintances are hardly alone in that preference for conspiracy as the prime technique of explanation. It is suffocatingly common in societies where people cannot readily establish the truth. This is a view of the world which finds incredible the innocence of politics in the West: those wide-eyed speeches in which Tony Blair professed his convictions; Gordon Brown’s invocation of his “moral compass”; George W. Bush’s declarations that Arabs want democracy, too; or even that disarming technique of State Department officials of explaining their country’s foreign policy by projecting a neat list of American aims onto the wall before their audience, the PowerPoint file carried with them in their pockets on a computer thumb drive.

  To call America naive in its foreign policy and particularly in its promotion of democracy, as so many have done after Iraq, is not wrong. But it captures only one reason for the gulf between the United States’ own vision of its mission to improve the world and the suspicion of critics that America’s actions are determined by its own interests and are only coincidentally benign. That is an unfair judgment. This chapter makes three points in defending the broad thrust of American foreign policy, particularly in the last century.

  First, America’s actions abroad, from its origins up to the Iraq invasion, have been inspired by a complex mixture of imperialism and idealism —a belief in its special mission to export its own values. That can be heavy-handed, but it is also admirable in many ways. Second, it has oscillated between introversion and engagement, and the rest of the world should overwhelmingly prefer America’s engagement, through which the United States has helped write international laws and arms control treaties. Third, the promotion of democracy, now mocked for its unforeseen consequences, is the idealistic essence of American policy. The United States’ best defense in its recent actions abroad is that it was acting in that honorable cause, and this goal should be salvaged from the icy bath of “realism” that has followed the Iraq debacle.

  A Moral Mission

  American foreign policy represents a long debate about whether it should intervene abroad or not. In two centuries, it has tried out both answers. In one of the earliest descriptions of the country’s intent, John Quincy Adams, then the secretary of state and later the sixth president, in a speech to the House of Representatives, declared, “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”1

  That is hardly an expression of imperial design. It is easier to find that later, in the 1880s, when America began to emerge as the world’s largest economic power. The Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the United States seized Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, marked America’s emergence as a world power. In his October 1898 decision to annex all of the Philippines, President William McKinley is reported to have said that God Almighty had ordered him to make the territory an American colony. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana echoed this in 1900, declaring, “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.”2

  America’s endeavors abroad have long produced a steady supply of such proclamations, althoug
h put as baldly as that, they carry an antique air no politician these days would venture. Many critics have argued that this instinct reflects America’s Puritan origins —its sense of being divinely anointed to redeem humanity —a case made particularly well by George McKenna, author of The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. McKenna, professor emeritus at the City College of the City University of New York, argues that these convictions have threaded through American foreign policy all the way to the present, and that they inspired America’s response to 9/11.3

  The American exercise of muscle in the Philippines did not go without opposition; it gave rise, among other critics, to the New England Anti-Imperialist League, established in Boston, whose members included Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. Rudyard Kipling, in “The White Man’s Burden,” in 1899, warned that America would not be thanked by the people it had taken on itself to improve.4 But many others agreed that the United States had all but a duty to press ahead.

  Conviction of moral purpose does not guarantee morally admirable behavior, of course; indeed it may convince leaders that they are licensed to suspend such standards in pursuit of their goals. The Philippine-American War is now compared to Iraq, given the United States’ difficulty in putting down a guerrilla movement supported by much of the population, and its resort to torture and burning down villages to do so. Nor does conviction guarantee success: with echoes of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished,” President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the Philippine war was over on July 4, 1902, when fighting did not stop for years.

  But to deny that this guiding inspiration exists is to misrepresent one of the dominant impulses of American policy. There is much that is admirable about it, including the belief that everyone is entitled to liberty. Those who rush to say that America’s foreign intervention is “all about oil” or some other tangible self-interest miss the deep strain of idealism in its motives.