America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  In the words of the great Russian-born student of America and editor of The Nation Max Lerner, “the cult of the nation as social myth has run as a thread through the whole of American history.”11 Alexis de Tocqueville noticed its strong presence in the 1830s, and traced it to the fact that “democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their country, and of themselves.” (In an irritated moment, he also remarked that “it is impossible to conceive of a more troublesome and garrulous patriotism.”12) At that time, even in France, ordinary country people often still had no real conception of France or French identity, and were attached instead to purely local loyalties.13

  The greater age of American mass nationalism is closely related to other key features of American “exceptionalism.” The North American colonies inherited from Britain strong elements of a relatively clear-cut national cultural identity centered on a mixture of the Protestant religion and belief in the institutions of law, liberty, and representative government.14 This was incarnated both in their own institutions and later in the American Constitution.

  The fact that as colonists in a new land Americans were in some sense truly “born equal” has been advanced by many scholars from Tocqueville on as the fundamental difference between the political traditions and cultures of the United States and Europe; the United States, lacking a feudal tradition and an aristocracy, also escaped violent social revolution, socialism, and most of the political forms and traditions that stemmed from these movements and collisions.

  The result was that under the froth and spume of political clashes lay a remarkably homogeneous, continuous, basically unchanging, universally held civic nationalist ideology—“an absolute Americanism as old as the country itself.”15 By the early twentieth century, as Herbert Croly wrote in 1909,

  the faith of Americans in their country is religious, if not in its intensity, at any rate in its almost absolute and universal authority. It pervades the air we breathe. As children, we hear it asserted or implied in the conversation of our elders. Every new stage of our educational training provides some additional testimony on its behalf. Newspapers and novelists, orators and playwrights, even if they are little else, are at least loyal preachers of the Truth. The skeptic is not controverted; he is overlooked. It constitutes the kind of faith which is the implication, rather than the object, of thought, and consciously or unconsciously, it enters largely into our personal lives as a formative influence.16

  This tendency has been strongly marked in the response of conservative Americans to the combination in recent years of economic recession, long-term decline of the middle class, and the relative decline of the United States on the international stage. It has encouraged a desire for a return to the past, based on a deep but unthinking attachment to a supposedly perfect and therefore unchangeable U.S. Constitution. This, in turn, has discouraged deeper thinking about America’s problems and how address them, and has tremendously served the short-term interests of economic elites concerned with preventing any reform of the existing U.S. system. This need on the part of the elites has grown still further as a result of the economic recession starting in 2011, which might have been expected to lead to a fundamental rethinking of aspects of the American capitalist system, comparable to the changes introduced by Roosevelt’s New Deal.

  The nationalist cult of American “exceptionalism”—which in populist and Republican discourse is a barely veiled euphemism for American superiority to all other nations—also legitimizes ferocious criticism of anyone who suggests that America in some respects has fallen behind other countries, and can learn from them. Thus the public debate on health care reform was greatly hampered by the difficulty supporters of reform have found in publicly comparing the U.S. health care system to those of other Western countries, and thereby bringing out how much more the United States pays for worse results. Such a comparison would be instinctively felt to be unpatriotic by many Americans.

  Imperialism and Nationalism

  As stated in the introduction, the Bush administration and its intellectual backers—who as of 2012 continue to dominate thinking on foreign and security policy in the Republican Party—also exploited American nationalism to tremendous effect in the service of what was in fact an imperialist agenda. This does not, however, necessarily reflect conscious hypocrisy or cynical and cold-blooded manipulation of the public, though these elements have certainly been present.

  The point is rather that, as with their equivalents in the Europe of the past, the nationalist Right in the United States absolutely and sincerely identify themselves with their nation, to the point where the presence of any other group in government is seen not as a defeat, but as a usurpation, as something profoundly and inherently illegitimate and “un-American.” They feel themselves to be as much “America” as the Kaiser and the Junkers felt themselves to be “Germany” and the Tsar and the Russian noble elites to be “Russia.”

  In European history, closely linked to this identification of elites with their countries has been the exploitation of nationalism for the purposes of imperialism—also seen by elites as a higher national good that the ignorant masses cannot understand and into which they have to be led, if necessary by deceit. Rudyard Kipling and other imperialists notoriously despised the ordinary people of their countries, with their pathetic ordinary lives and dreams, their banal indifference to imperial visions, and their unwillingness to die for such visions.

  This is how the Bush administration seemed at heart to view the American people too. As a range of observers from historian Andrew Bacevich to humorist Bill Maher pointed out, from the first days after 9/11 the Bush administration carefully omitted calls for sacrifice from its rhetoric to the American people, and indeed urged them to resume normal spending patterns to help the economy: “The primary responsibility of the average citizen for the duration of the emergency remained what it had been in more peaceful times: to be an engine of consumption.” Sacrifice was to be restricted to the armed forces.17

  Public disillusionment with the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan has revealed yet again the lack of appetite of ordinary Americans for direct empire, with all its costs in blood and treasure.18 This was despite the fact that—without any evidence, but with the encouragement of leading Bush administration officials and the pro-war media like Fox News—a great many Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, and therefore—by extension—that the war with Iraq was a legitimate act of traditional self-defense. In a Harris poll in February 2004, 74 percent of respondents still believed that a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda before the war was either certain or likely. An NBC poll in March 2004 showed 57 percent still believing that Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction.19

  In the 2000 American election campaign, foreign and security policy was overwhelmingly absent both from the debates and from the concerns of U.S. voters as expressed in opinion polls. Even declared Bush voters polled in September 2000 put seventh on their list of priorities, with only 6 percent saying the candidate’s stand on this issue mattered most to them. Top concerns were taxes and abortion, at 22 percent each. Al Gore voters polled did not mention defense as a priority at all. Neither set of voters mentioned foreign policy as such.20

  As the New York Times commented on Bush’s neglect of these issues, “but then, Bush may have decided that too much talk about foreign policy is bad business. He has talked often to friends and acquaintances about his father’s loss to Bill Clinton eight years ago, when the elder Bush focused on foreign affairs and the Arkansas neophyte emphasized the economy.”21

  An unwillingness on the part of the masses to make serious sacrifices for empire is not new. Until the World War I, the British empire was conquered and run very much on the cheap (largely by local native auxiliaries—not unlike the United States in Afghanistan after 2001), and this was true of the other colonial empires as well. The Royal Navy was, of course, expensive, but it doubled as the absolutely necessary defense of the
British Isles themselves against invasion or blockade.

  Then as now, given the overwhelming superiority of Western firepower and military organization, enormous territories could be conquered at very low cost and risk. When European empires ran into areas that would be truly costly to conquer and hold—the British in Afghanistan, the Italians in Ethiopia—they tended to back off. In the view of the British imperial historian Niall Ferguson, the unprecedentedly heavy British casualties in the Boer War can be seen as beginning the process of British disillusionment with empire.22

  This absence of a willingness to make sacrifices for empire among the European masses was something of which the general staffs and the conservative establishments of Europe were well aware. Students of both Clausewitz and of the reports of their police on the mood of the proletariats, they knew the importance of mass support for any serious war, and the limits on how far empire could be used for purposes of mass mobilization. So sensible governments with the ability to do so always used volunteer troops and foreign mercenaries, not conscripts, for colonial wars.

  The French Foreign Legion was created for this explicit purpose. The British Army was a small volunteer force, but also used Indian troops as much as possible for the task of colonial war and policing. When countries did use conscripts in colonial wars, the results were often disastrous both to the campaign itself and to domestic political stability—witness Italy after the defeat at Adowa in Ethiopia, Russia after the Russo-Japanese war, and Spain after the catastrophe of Anual in Morocco in 1921, which in some ways began the historical process leading to the Spanish Civil War.23

  The U.S. adoption of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” from the 1990s on, coupled with the use of local auxiliaries in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has been seen as a new imperialist version of the British use of “gunboats and Gurkhas” intended to spare the use of the imperial power’s troops.24 But as the debacle in Iraq after the initial conquest demonstrated, high technology and local auxiliaries only go so far. In a truly imperial strategy, the use of large numbers of U.S. troops will also be necessary—and this will not be popular at home, unless they can be shown to be fighting not for an empire, but for the nation itself.

  In Douglas Porch’s work on the French conquest of Morocco, the author presents a fascinating description of the various stratagems Marshal Hubert Lyautey and the other French imperialists used to convince a thoroughly skeptical French public to support this adventure, which many regarded as economically pointless and a costly distraction from the need to strengthen France’s defenses against the real national threat, Germany. French conscripts did serve to a limited extent in Algeria (legally not a colony, but part of France), and this was extremely unpopular with French youth. Fear of colonial military service fed in turn on much older hatreds of military service, especially among peasants, which extended across Europe.25

  The French ultranationalist Paul Deroulede declared that in Alsace and Lorraine he had lost two sisters, and all the French colonialists were offering him in return were “twenty black servants.”26 Hence the prominence of the propaganda concerning France’s mission civilisatrice and the need to create a modern Moroccan state and abolish “barbarism” there, but also suggestions that because Germany too had designs on Morocco, the wider struggle with Germany required French control of that country.27

  The central domestic political strategy of capitalist elites in Europe before 1914 was to rely much less on imperialism than on nationalism to rally democratic support as a defense against socialism. And in 1914, the impulse that drove the European masses to support the war and to immolate themselves in it was nationalism, universally expressed in the genuine belief that the homeland itself was in imminent danger of attack.

  As Jean-Jacques Becker stresses in the case of France, despite the intense nationalism of much of French culture in 1914, the initial popular response to the crisis of July 1914 was worried and very desirous of peace. Only when the German ultimatum appeared as a clear case of aggression against the patrie herself did mass enthusiasm for war develop.28 Despite all the periodic flare-ups of tension over colonial rivalries, the great European powers in the decades before 1914 never did in fact go to war over a colonial issue (with the exception of Russia and Japan in 1904). One key reason for this was a well-based doubt in the minds of European governments and militaries about the response of the masses to a bloody war that had obviously begun as a squabble between two greedy predators in an unpronounceable African swamp.

  The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were a real and atrocious attack on the American homeland. Any U.S. administration—indeed, any self-respecting country in the world—would have had to respond to this attack by seeking to destroy the perpetrators. The war to destroy the Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and their Taliban backers was therefore a completely legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks, as are U.S. actions against Al Qaeda and its allies elsewhere in the world. What the Bush administration did, however, was to instill in the U.S. public a fear of much wider threats to the U.S. homeland from states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that had no connection to Al Qaeda. By doing so, they created a belief that anything America does is essentially defensive and a response to “terrorism.” By foisting this belief on the American people, the latter could therefore to some extent be mobilized for imperial war.29

  But even the Bush administration had to remain within certain limits. The common paradigm of hostility toward Muslims and the inability to distinguish between Muslims made it possible to mix up Iraq and Al Qaeda in the minds of a majority of Americans, but not even Bush would have gotten away with declaring that the terrorists on 9/11 were really Russians, or Chinese, or North Koreans. For that matter, Bush’s first election campaign deliberately concealed his followers’ imperial ambitions—as in his remark that the United States should adopt a more “humble” approach to international affairs, and that “I am worried about overcommitting our military around the world. I would be judicious in its use.”30

  The distinction between imperialism and nationalism is therefore an important one to keep in mind; and one key way of understanding the political strategy of the Bush administration after 9/11 is that—like some of their European predecessors before them—they essentially tried to drive a program of imperial hegemony with the fuel of a wounded but also bewildered and befuddled nationalism.

  Spared by History

  Like European imperialists of the past, many Americans genuinely see their country’s national interests and ambitions as coterminous with goodness, civilization, progress, and the interests of all humanity.31 Communal self-deception among members of a shared political culture, driven by a mixture of ideology and self-interest, is the issue here. Or, in the wonderful phrase of Max Weber: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”32

  To put it another way: the heightened culture of nationalism in the European countries was in part the product of deliberate strategies of the then European elites to combat the socialist movements and preserve their dominant positions by mobilizing mass support in the name of nationalism. But the resulting nationalism was a cause for which the sons of these elites, the officer corps of old Europe, sacrificed themselves in uncounted numbers and with sincere faith.33

  Self-sacrifice is admittedly not a thing for which America’s right-wing nationalist elites have shown much appetite, but their discourse at least has some sinister echoes of that of their European predecessors. This is especially true of two linked obsessions: cultural and moral decline, and domestic treachery—which together are used to explain national decline. Both have very old cultural, racial, and religious roots; were reshaped, strengthened, and perpetuated by the cold war; and have attained new force as a result of 9/11. Thus Sean Hannity links gay marriage somehow with Adolph Hitler as evil threats to the United States and declares “we have a battle within our country with those that want to tear down the foundation, the Judeo-Christian values that made this country strong
.”34

  The Catholic right-winger William Bennett exemplifies this concern with “decadence” as a source of national weakness, with particular focus on the liberal intelligentsia and the universities.35 Now it must be said that some of the criticism leveled by these forces at American left-wing academia is justified. The next chapter will touch upon some of the lunatic excesses of academic “political correctness,” and even the veteran radical Richard Rorty has denounced the fact that “we now have, among many American students and teachers, a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country.”36

  Rather than aiming at stimulating an engaged debate on improving the United States and U.S. policy, however, the approach of Bennett and his allies, like Lynne Cheney, was clearly intended to shut down debate. It also had some extremely troubling antecedents. Its language about the healthy, patriotic American people as opposed to the deracinated, morally contemptible intellectuals could be taken almost directly from European documents of the past, such as a German nationalist statement of 1881, with its talk of “sinister powers” sapping the religion, morality, and patriotism that formed the “ancient, sound foundation of our national character.”37 This kind of thinking in the United States was also enormously strengthened by the cold war, which saw repeated waves of anxiety that the United States was becoming too morally and physically soft to compete with the supposedly “purposeful, serious and disciplined” Soviet society.38

  Former Republican Congressman and House Speaker Newt Gingrich used to teach a course on “Renewing American Civilization” at conservative colleges in Georgia, the tapes of which were distributed to Republican activists. They suggested the following words to describe political opponents: “decay, failure, shallow, traitors, pathetic, corrupt, incompetent, sick.”39 And this is indeed the standard language of right-wing media stars to their immense audiences concerning Democrats, liberal intellectuals, and Europeans.