Even usually moderate figures succumbed to the hysteria, with Thomas Friedman declaring in the New York Times that “France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.” French opinions were, moreover, worthless in any case because “France has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern Arab world.”
Friedman therefore adopted, in essence, a mild version of the same position taken up by Charles Krauthammer and others: because other countries hate us, and for ignoble, wicked, and illegitimate reasons, their opinions do not count, and we are free to do whatever we like. These words were written in September 2003, by which time France’s warnings about the consequences of war had been shown to be amply justified. They are an example both of the degree to which even centrist Americans can become the captive of nationalist emotions, of a nationalist insistence that the only acceptable criticism of America is by Americans, and of a belief that in a time of war, even this right of criticism should be suspended.163
At the time of the Iraq War, not just extremist publications like the Washington Times, but the Washington Post and New York Times became vehicles for “a well-orchestrated campaign of innuendoes, distortions and lies aimed not only at discrediting French arguments but France itself.”164 Articles accused France of harboring fugitive Ba’ath officials, possessing banned stocks of biological weapons, and supplying Iraq with weapons—all charges that were later admitted to be completely groundless.165
This Jacksonian nationalist background has important implications for the future behavior of the Tea Parties and the groups that gave them birth. On the one hand, the leaders and members of the Tea Parties are even more indifferent to the details of foreign policy than they are to the details of domestic policy. Most hardly get beyond passionate but ritualistic commitments to defend Israel and resist terrorists and Islamists—and even when it comes to the latter, this is often more likely to be focused on the imagined threat of Islamisation within the United States rather than what might be happening in the Muslim world. In keeping with the Jacksonian tradition, there is absolutely no desire for more U.S.-led “nation-building” exercises in the Muslim world or anywhere else.
This is, however, extremely unlikely to lead to any serious or consistent movement on the part of the Tea Party constituencies for U.S. strategic withdrawal. The Republican foreign and security establishment, the U.S. security establishment, and the U.S. military are all utterly opposed to this. Not merely are the leaders of the Tea Parties simply not intellectually equipped to argue with them, but the Tea Parties are nationalist to the core, and as described in the last chapter, a sense of America’s global mission is deeply and permanently bound up with that nationalism, even if it often takes a back seat in response to particular reversals and disappointments. Thus Sarah Palin quotes approvingly a passage from National Review:
Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth. These qualities are the bequest of our founding and of our cultural heritage. They have always marked America as special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary.166
In addition, to judge by the works of Sarah Palin and others, a consistent sentiment that extends across the Tea Parties as far as security politics is concerned is a deep love of and reverence for the U.S. armed forces, in which so many of their relatives serve or have served (including Palin’s son, an Iraq War veteran).167
Palin’s chapter “Why They Serve” makes no attempt to analyze, understand, or justify the Iraq War or any other recent U.S. operations, but is absolutely, passionately convinced that whenever and wherever American soldiers are fighting they are “defending freedom.” The nearest she comes to a policy prescription in this chapter is the following quote from a country song by Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red White and Blue:
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The US of A,
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American Way.168
This sentiment means that if a U.S. administration can get America into a war, or if an expansive U.S. strategy (with which most Tea Party members might actually disagree) leads to any kind of attack on U.S. troops, this section of the U.S. population can be relied on, for a while at least, to support a ferocious military response.
The only consistent isolationists among the prominent figures of the Tea Parties are Senator Rand Paul and his father Ron Paul, and they have been subjected to relentless attacks for this by much of the liberal media as well as the Republican establishment. As one of Paul’s supporters wrote of the Tea Parties in an article entitled gloomily “Prepare to be Betrayed,”169
just as with old-time conservatives, there are many issues on which the Tea Party tends toward inconsistency. The military and the issue of war is a major one. Many have bought into the line that the greatest threat this country faces domestically is the influx of adherents of Islam; in international politics, they tend to favor belligerence toward any regime that is not a captive of U.S. political control.
This view is endorsed from a different angle by Walter Russell Mead, who sees the Tea Parties as overwhelmingly Jacksonian in their basic attitudes to security and foreign affairs: “The contest in the Tea Party between what might be called its Palinite and Paulite wings will likely end in a victory for the Palinites…Although both wings share, for example, a visceral hostility to anything that smacks of “world government,” Paul and his supporters look for ways to avoid contact with the world, whereas such contemporary Jacksonians as Sarah Palin and the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would rather win than withdraw. ‘We don’t need to be the world’s policeman,’ says Paul. Palin might say something similar, but she would be quick to add that we also do not want to give the bad guys any room.”170
In certain respects, however, the Tea Parties are operating in a more dangerous world than their McCarthyite predecessors, and pose a more dangerous threat to peace. McCarthyism took root at a time when white middle class and working class living standards and opportunities were improving at a faster rate than at any other time in American history. This socioeconomic context was crucial to the speed with which the McCarthyite movement receded again. China is a vastly more formidable opponent than the former Soviet Union, with a very prickly nationalism of its own. Finally, America has become embroiled in the Middle East in ways that expose the United States to terrorist attacks and risk drawing America into clashes with local states.
Finally, in the late 1940s and early 1950s fundamentalist religion, though a very important force in American life, played a very limited overt role in U.S. politics. Today, fundamentalist religion plays a vital role in conservative politics and an important one in the Tea Parties. In both domestic politics and attitudes toward foreign policy, some strands of this religion are helping to drive disastrously irrational and paranoid responses to America’s problems. This aspect of the American nationalist antithesis is the subject of the next chapter.
Four
Antithesis Part II: Fundamentalists and Great Fears
Our God is marching on.
—Julia Ward Howe, Battle Hymn of the Republic
A vital though informal part of the American Creed has long been the belief that the United States epitomizes the triumph of modernity in economics, technology, and culture as well as in its democratic arrangements. This successful modernity, with the economic opportunities, the material culture, and the consumerism that it generates, is also at the heart of what has been called the “American Dream.” This is, above all, true of consumer culture and mass entertainment. In East Asia, for example, Europe is hardly present as a trendsetter in these fields. This image of the United States has been undermined by the economic recession that has continued since 20
08, the decline of U.S. industry, and the rise of China, but it remains extremely strong.
America is also seen as the country that has tended to undergo the fastest economic and cultural changes of any country in the developed world, and the one that is the most open to change. Closely connected to this is the fact that the United States is exceptionally open to immigration, and consequently has experienced the most radical demographic changes of any country in the Western world. It is still generally believed that “there has from the start been a marriage of true minds between the American and the type-man of the modern era, the New World Man.”1
Yet amidst all this change, America is also home to by far the largest and most powerful forces of fundamentalist religion in the developed world. The attitude of these forces toward key aspects of modernity as this is usually understood was summed up in the 1960s by the leading Pentecostalist preacher A. A. Allen: “The most treacherous foe in America isn’t Communism (as perilous as it may be), Nazism, Fascism or any alien ideology, but MODERNISM [capitals in the original].” This call to arms appeared in a booklet entitled My Vision of the Destruction of America. This title in itself brings out the contrast between the optimism of the American Creed and the profound pessimism of Protestant fundamentalism as far as progress in this world is concerned.2
As Samuel Huntington has observed, “those countries that are more religious tend to be more nationalist.” Looking at the contrast between the United States and the rest of the developed world, Huntington and others have explained early twenty-first century America’s greater nationalism partly in terms of its greater religiosity. As will be seen, this is especially true of American fundamentalist Protestantism, which, as described in chapter 3, has particular roots in the nationalist culture of the white South.3
American conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism have not remained unchanged over the years; indeed, much of their modern history and growth has been produced precisely by reaction to change, and also by adaptation to change. Evangelicalism is “a religious persuasion that has repeatedly adapted to the changing tones and rhythms of modernity,” especially of course when it comes to the employment of modern mass media and modern techniques of mass mobilization.4 Furthermore, across large parts of America, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century churches played a central part in civilizing—and therefore to a great extent modernizing—what might otherwise have remained semimedieval frontier societies.
By no means all evangelicals are either fundamentalist in religion (though evangelicalism and fundamentalism share most core beliefs) or right-wing nationalist in politics. For example, belief in the literal truth of the whole of the Bible (known as inerrancy) is critical to fundamentalist belief, but many members of the broader evangelical tradition take a more nuanced position. They are also less conservative in politics. Moreover, blacks make up a very considerable proportion of the evangelical population in the United States and the American South; for obvious historical reasons, they are not often led by their religious beliefs into right-wing political positions.5
The fundamentalist wing of the evangelical tradition is nonetheless a very powerful ideological force in large parts of the United States. Christian fundamentalism does not dominate the Tea Parties, but is certainly strongly present in them, and seems to play an important part in shaping the Tea Parties’ view of America and its government. Republican Congresswoman, Tea Party leader, and 2012 presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s faith and views were strongly influenced by the fundamentalist thinker Francis Schaeffer, who preached that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment both represented dangerous turns away from the “total truth” of the Bible. Schaeffer represented the “Dominionist” strand of fundamentalist theology, which draws on the phrase in Genesis about God giving to man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”6 This appears linked in the minds of many fundamentalists with instinctive hostility toward belief in climate change and any action to ameliorate it, and also with faith in technological progress and rightful and righteous American power.
Thus, according to CNN, 57 percent of Tea Party supporters polled agreed with the statement that “America is and always has been a Christian nation.” On issues like gay marriage and abortion, majorities of between 59 and 64 percent of Tea Party supporters agreed with conservative religious positions, while 44 percent of self-declared conservative Christians polled agreed with the Tea Parties, against only 4 percent who disagreed. Both Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are deeply committed evangelical and fundamentalist Christians whose faith has profoundly shaped not only their politics, but their personal lives.
However, there is also a libertarian streak in a fair number of Tea Party supporters, which opposes government regulation of morality. This tendency is represented by Ron Paul, who is also at odds with most of the Tea Parties on military spending and America’s superpower role.7
American fundamentalist Protestantism retains elements of thought that have come down with relatively few changes from much earlier eras. Its origins are pre-Enlightenment, and its mentality to a very great extent is anti-Enlightenment. It has also retained a strong element of geographical continuity. While many new adherents to these religious groups are from the heterogeneous ethnic and cultural worlds of newly growing cities in the Southwest and California, the heart of their support remains what it has long been, the white South and its outlying regions.8
A Pew survey of U.S. religious belief in 2011 still shows an unbroken belt of Southern Baptist majority counties stretching from central Virginia to eastern Texas, and taking in northern Florida and much of Kentucky and Missouri. Much of the remaining white population adheres to other evangelical and/or fundamentalist churches like the Pentecostalists.9 As already explained, this area is not just religious, but is also home to some very tough, strongly held, and ancient social and cultural traditions, the roots of which predate not just the nation’s independence, but the first white settlements in North America. A particular form of nationalism is one of the most important of these traditions.
The greater religiosity of the United States compared to Europe at the start of the twenty-first century, and the strength of Southern-based fundamentalist churches in particular, is rooted in key differences between European and North American history over the past 200 years or so. This involved not only the explosion of American Protestantism into a multiplicity of churches and sects (which at the same time were very homogeneous in their basic beliefs and cultural attitudes), but also the role played by those sects in the development of society on the frontier and in the backcountry of the Greater South.
The formation of these churches followed the old American tradition of settlers in the wilderness spontaneously creating their own churches. Although church membership was voluntary, it involved taking on serious duties in the church and the community as a whole. And since the church often in effect embraced the entire community, membership was often not truly voluntary. Leaving the church was easy only in the sense that it was relatively easy to leave the local community itself, by moving westward.10 While on the one hand the religious culture of these churches was derived from that of the Protestant sects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Scotland, each also presented itself as sprung directly from the Bible and the word of God, without historical precedent or intermediary.
The increase in the number of sects in the early and mid-nineteenth-century South was accompanied by a sharp decrease in cultural pluralism and a growing culture of orthodoxy, conservatism, and conformism in religion and in social and cultural life more generally. “By 1860, religious liberalism was virtually dead in the South.”11 The greatest beneficiaries of this religious wave were the Baptist churches, which have continued to predominate in the region to this day, followed by the Methodists. Of course, individualism of a kind has been a key part of Southern culture since its b
eginnings, but it is an individualism of action, not of thought.
In seeking to understand the deep cultural differences between much of the United States and Western Europe, a combination of the American frontier and the role of the American Protestant churches is of central importance. In both America and Europe, much of the rural population remained largely medieval in its thinking and behavior until the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century (the last burning of a witch in France, with the apparent collusion of local officials, took place in 1835). In Europe, first the local upper classes, and then the state, often through those upper classes, played a leading role in civilizing these populations. The churches played only a subsidiary role, and by the later nineteenth century were in full retreat across much of Western Europe.
In the newly settled parts of the United States, neither a truly functioning state nor traditional upper classes existed. In these areas, it was above all the churches that prevented the settlers from lapsing into not only complete barbarism, but isolation—very often the church was literally the only social institution in the entire district, the only place where the local population met regularly; and it was also responsible for the local school. Without the Protestant churches, the societies of the American frontier would have remained much more backward, violent, and medieval than was the case. The churches therefore played an ambiguous role with regard to the modernization of large parts of the United States: on the one hand, they chastened frontier medievalism, and laid the basis for a modern social and economic order; on the other, they created a religious culture that has been in many ways at odds with modern culture as understood in the rest of the Western world.
And in the South and West, these were churches that local people had literally made themselves. As a result, these populations retained all the traditional European peasant fear and hatred of the state, without being exposed to the dense web of state influences, institutions, and benefits that in Europe later diminished this fear; or at least, not until the twentieth century, by which time some basic features of these American societies had long since been set.12 This hatred of the state has remained strongly marked in portions of the U.S. population ever since, and forms the core ideological basis for the Tea Parties.
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