America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  Already, while explicit racism is relatively rare in the Tea Parties (though clear enough in the mouths of right-wing media figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, with their talk of the Obama administration supporting a new Black Panther party), white anxieties about the United States having a black president are very clear indeed, even if they take the form of coded fears that he is “not Christian” or “not born in the United States.” It hardly needs stressing how infuriating these attacks are to both blacks and Muslims.122

  The constitutional principle of states’ rights has been used as a racial tool before, in one way or another, for most of U.S. history. From the 1840s to the 1960s, this was the white South’s principal tool and argument in trying to block freedom and then civil rights for blacks. Indeed, the current Republican and Tea Party obsession with states’ rights is one aspect of the much-remarked “southernisation” of the Republican Party since the 1960s.

  In both the 1860s and the 1960s, however, white majorities in the United States as a whole eventually overcame Southern white resistance. In the future, there is a real risk that as a result of white middle class anxieties about economic, demographic, and national decline, a majority of whites will come together in defense of an increasingly dysfunctional and unrepresentative constitution that is more and more obviously being used to defend white dominance at the expense of nonwhites. Such a development would mark the end of America’s greatness and her democratic example to the world. In such circumstances, the wild rhetoric of the Right about resorting to arms in defense of the Constitution might also turn into something more than rhetoric.

  Thankfully there is nothing certain about this. As this chapter has noted, a central theme in America’s history has been the overcoming of ethnic and racial divisions and the gradual expansion of the categories of people considered to be true U.S. citizens. On the other hand, as the next chapter will explore, an equally central theme has been the bitter tensions and anxieties that have accompanied this process.

  Three

  Antithesis Part I: The Embittered Heartland

  Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,

  The blue bells of the Rockies,

  And blue bonnets of old Texas,

  By the Pittsburg alleys.

  Defeat of the alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.

  Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.

  Defeat of the young by the old and silly.

  Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.

  Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.

  —Vachel Lindsay, “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” (on the defeat of William Jennings Bryan’s Populist campaign for president, 1896)1

  Radical nationalism has many fathers, but its mother is defeat, and her milk is called humiliation. From this poisoned nourishment comes in part the tendency to chauvinist hatred that has streamed through so many of the world’s nationalisms. This is self-evidently true of the nationalisms of the former colonies, which grew out of their conquest and occupation by the European and other empires, and the destruction or forced transformation of their previous economic structures and traditions of moral and political authority.

  It is no less true, however, of those countries that avoided direct conquest, but in order to defend themselves were forced, as best they could, to imitate Western forms and reshape themselves radically in the process. Religiously ordered social and state traditions were particularly threatened. Where these survived, it was often by associating themselves with modern nationalism, sometimes—as in Japan—of a quasi-totalitarian kind.

  Russia, Japan, and Turkey are the best-known examples in this category. In the case of Russia, despite great military victories, the repeated failure of the country as a whole to “catch up” with its Western European and North American rivals produced an inferiority complex that has haunted Russian society and culture for almost three centuries.

  In a wider sense, this pattern has been true not only of most of the globe, but even of most European countries: in recent centuries all have been forced to adapt themselves as best they could to a model of modernity and progress that they did not create and over the shape of which they have had little say—whether that model was set by Holland, France, Britain, or most recently the United States.

  The tensions, insecurities, and hatreds produced by this pattern sometimes endure long after the country concerned has in fact liberated itself from its oppressors, and even in those rare cases where it has caught up with its Western rivals. Thus German nationalism was born in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in large part out of a profound sense of inferiority and vulnerability to France. Culturally speaking, this was produced by the overwhelming dominance of French language and culture in eighteenth century Europe, leading in Germany to that humiliating aping of French words and forms that was so bitterly denounced by Herder, Fichte, and the rest.

  For ordinary Germans, there was the repeated and unpleasant experience of invasion by French armies, culminating in those of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. And for the German elites, there was the ruthless reshaping of Germany’s political and social structures by French diktat—all of which was made possible by Germany’s radically disunited condition, compared to the “grande nation.” The resulting resentments were watered by a steady drizzle of French contempt for German boorishness, drunkenness, and general absurdity, well publicized by German nationalists.2

  As a consequence, Germans developed a national inferiority complex that persisted even after Germany’s unification in 1871 and emergence as Europe’s most militarily powerful and economically successful nation: the psychological pattern by which, as Bismarck put it sardonically, “a German generally needs to drink two glasses of champagne before he feels himself to be his full height.” This legacy was not least among the causes of the edgy arrogance, restlessness, and paranoia of Wilhelmine German foreign policy, which, when combined with overwhelming German power, did so much to alarm other European powers and unite them against Germany. There is reason to fear today that this may be true of China, as it rises to become the world’s greatest economic power even while many of its peoples are still obsessed with their country’s past humiliations at the hands of Europe, the United States, and Japan.

  In the case of the United States, such tendencies are extraordinary not in the context of the history of nationalisms in the world, which has obviously thrown up infinitely much worse examples. What makes it remarkable is once again the fact that the U.S. population seems at first sight to have had so little underlying reason—when compared to the historical sufferings and humiliations of other peoples—for a spirit of embittered, mean-spirited resentment at the outside world, and in particular at foreign countries that have in any way crossed their national will.

  Regarding particular animosities, one needs to examine the role of specific U.S. ethnic lobbies, and that of the American military–industrial–academic complex (Eisenhower’s original phrase). These two factors combined to prolong a widespread spirit of inveterate malignity against Russia for a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed and Moscow ceased to present any real threat to the United States. Clearly the Israeli lobby has also played its part over the decades in generating hostility toward Arabs and Muslims.

  However, it would be a mistake to accord either of these factors a central place in the overall pattern, which was shaped long before World War II and the cold war transformed the American state, and before the ethnic lobbies attained their full power. These groups would not have achieved their objectives had they not been able to tap the support of much larger bodies of Americans who have a natural tendency in the face of any disagreement to adopt harshly adversarial stances and who, when confronted with opposition from any other country, feel impelled automatically to take up positions of fear, hostility, militancy, intransigence, and self-righteousness: in other words, classically nationalist positions.

  This nationalist culture, and not only public ignora
nce, helps to explain how the Bush administration could transfer the anger Americans felt after 9/11 to targets that had nothing to do with that attack, and why the opposition by much of the world to the Iraq War caused such an outburst of chauvinist fury in portions of the American media and public opinion.

  This capacity for chauvinist nationalism in the United States is largely to be explained by the fact that the role of defeat in the genesis of nationalism resides not only in the defeat of nations as a whole, but of classes, groups, and indeed individuals within them; the hatred and fear directed abroad by nationalism often emanates in large part from hatreds and tensions at home, and this is strikingly true in the case of the United States.

  The appearance of nationalism in many countries has been correctly attributed in large part to the ascendancy and needs of new bourgeois classes, but it is equally true that many of nationalism’s darker features have been produced by classes in relative or absolute decline, or with good reason to fear such decline, and who have seen not only their status and security, but their cultural worlds undermined by economic and social change.3 This feeling is liable to become radicalized if a period of economic growth ends and is replaced by depression or stagnation; thus many of Europe’s modern radical conservative and radical nationalist movements had their origins in the first “Great Depression,” which lasted from the mid-1870s to the 1890s.4

  If one defining feature of many nationalisms has been a belief in a glorious future for the nation, another that is equally common has been the desire for a return to an idealized past of a culturally and ethnically purer nation, a stable, traditional society, and a “moral economy” in which decent, hardworking people are guaranteed a decent job: a shimmering, golden, ungraspable mirage, ever present, ever receding. In Germany, for example, this was the old world of the independent small towns, with their homogeneous religious cultures and their guilds guaranteeing employment to respectable insiders and the exclusion of outsiders. This sentiment lies at the heart of the Tea Parties’ desire to return America to an imagined previous age of small government and middle class responsibility, effort, and prosperity.

  In the United States, this sense of defeat and embattlement resides in four distinct but overlapping elements of the American national tradition. These are the original “core” white Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish populations of the British colonies in North America; the specific historical culture and experience of the white South; the cultural world of fundamentalist Protestantism; and the particular memories, fears, and hatreds of some American ethnic groups and lobbies.

  Daniel Bell’s words of 1963 remain true today: “What the right wing is fighting, in the shadow of Communism, is essentially ‘modernity’—that complex of beliefs that might be defined most simply as the belief in rational assessment, rather than established custom, for the evaluation of social change—and what it seeks to defend is its fading dominance, exercised once through the institutions of small-town America, over the control of social change. But it is precisely those established ways that a modernist America has been forced to call into question.”5

  Nativism and White Middle Class Anxieties

  In America, the vision of an ideal past has developed and changed with almost every generation, as formerly “outsider” groups join the white middle classes and form a new synthesis with the older Protestant culture. Like the Hindu nationalist tradition in India, this tendency today is no longer narrowly ethnic. The stream of feelings of dispossession, however, has flowed continually from one cup to another, from the old “Protestant nativism” through McCarthyism to the Christian and nationalist Right of our own day.

  In each generation, a new fear of being “swamped” or invaded arises. Nor is this by any means restricted to poorer or more ignorant whites. In March 2004, Samuel Huntington issued a stern warning that the United States is in danger of losing its political culture and even its language as a result of Mexican immigration, and declared roundly that both the American Creed and the American dream are purely products of “a distinct Anglo-Protestant culture.” He warned of the risk of a fierce white “Anglo” backlash if this trend continues. The same theme was indeed present less explicitly in Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, in which he effectively classified not only American Latinos and Asians, but even blacks as members of non-American civilizations.6

  The radical edge that this lends to American conservatism also allows us to speak of the associated American right-wing nationalism as a “nationalism” and not merely a “patriotism.”7 Hence the phenomenon—so strange at first sight, but perfectly sincere, and entirely characteristic of the history of radical nationalism worldwide—of deeply conservative defenders of the American capitalist system like Newt Gingrich describing themselves as “revolutionary republicans,” and adopting a style and rhetoric of radical alienation from the supposed ruling elites and dominant culture. Hence the popularity on the American Right of speeches, books, and manifestos on the theme “taking America back”—a most revealing formulation. The demand to “take back our country” is at the heart of Tea Party rhetoric and sentiment.8

  As the right-wing conservative politician Patrick Buchanan put it at the 1992 Republican Convention: “We must take back our cities and take back our culture and take back our country,” the way (he said) that the U.S. military had recently “taken back” Los Angeles from the black and Latino mobs during the Rodney King riots.9 Ralph Reed has spoken of the need for Christians to “take back this country, one precinct at a time.” Laments about “the loss of the America we grew up in” are a staple of Rush Limbaugh’s broadcasts. This kind of radical Rightist sentiment was perfectly expressed by Charles Maurras, who declared in the 1930s that “in order to love France today, it is necessary to hate what she has become.”

  As such words reflect, this attitude stems from a feeling of dispossession and even alien occupation. It is common in this segment of American politics to hear talk of America being ruled by a “liberal (or gay, or feminist) dictatorship.” Such sentiments in turn feed dark fantasies about America being secretly ruled by the United Nations or other international conspiracies, and contribute to the general apocalyptic tendency of parts of American culture and the intense hatreds that suffuse the American radical Right. Barry Goldwater, who exploited this tendency in America, was once called “the favorite son of a state of mind.”10

  The Tea Parties too can be best described as the reflection of an anguished white middle class state of mind, rather than a political movement in any traditional sense, let alone one with a program for government. Sarah Palin’s highly emotional books, for example, are astonishingly free of specific policy prescriptions of any kind, beyond a vague and general demand for tax cuts and smaller government.11

  This tendency in U.S. political culture can be summed up by the wonderful name of a Texas-based right-wing organization of the 1960s: the “National Indignation Committee.” It is a tendency with numerous and extremely dangerous parallels in the history of radical conservatism and nationalism in Europe. Like such movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it also stems from the moral and cultural confusion of deeply traditional people (largely, but by no means exclusively, petty bourgeois and peasants) desperately trying to make sense of a world that has become alien, and doing so with the help of the only culture and ideas available to them.

  One could say therefore that the ethnic anxieties of sections of the original American stock created an enduring cultural mood in American society, a kind of rich layer of sediment that was later added to by other assimilated ethnic groups, and in which, over the generations, many different kinds of paranoia, fanaticism, and national ambition have been planted and have flourished.12

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the nativist “Know-Nothings” dreamed of a return to an earlier Protestant America without Irish Catholics and without the growth of the new capitalism.13 In the early twentieth century, a complex of Protestant nativist tendencies dreamed of an Ame
rica without a whole set of new immigrant groups, and also without the automobile (or at least its back seat) and its corrosive effects on sexual morality. Today, much of the white middle class in general (including, of course, Irish and many other ethnicities and mixtures) dream of an idealized version of the Eisenhower years of the 1950s, before the sexual revolution and the rise of African Americans, gays, feminists, and other hated groups. This particular nostalgia suffused the language of the “Republican Revolution” of the mid-1990s, and the memoirs by Pat Buchanan and other Rightists.14

  The real or perceived defeats that fuel such nostalgia have affected and harmed important groups within America just as badly as they have similar groups elsewhere. The American middle class may not have suffered so badly economically—though that may be changing as the economy ceases to generate adequate numbers of “middle class” jobs—but America’s openness to immigration means that they have suffered even more from demographic pressure and the cultural tension and change that this has encouraged.