America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  Contrary to fears in the aftermath of 9/11, terrorist attacks on the American mainland have not become a pattern, thanks both to the weakness of the terrorists and effective security measures put in place by the Bush and Obama administrations. As a result, efforts by the Right in America to whip up a permanent state of anti-Muslim hysteria have had only limited success. However, the danger of further terrorist attacks has not gone away. Plans to carry out such attacks have been made, and in other parts of the world they have succeeded: in Madrid, London, Moscow, and many parts of the Muslim world.

  If, God forbid, more large-scale acts of terrorism within the United States do occur, the mood of the American population could become one of a permanent “state of siege” and atmosphere of war, with civil liberties restricted and chauvinist politicians fishing assiduously for opportunities in the stew. In this context, it should be remembered that vigilantism and racial justice on the U.S. frontier ended only with the frontier itself, and the atmosphere of racial fear and a belief in potential conflict in the South also lasted for by far the greater part of American history, and ended only when the Southern racist system was overthrown by intervention from the rest of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. September 11 knocked U.S. pluralist democracy off balance. Further terrorist attacks might increase the list and make it permanent.

  Closely connected with this new threat is the fact that the United States is involved in the greater Middle East in a way with no real precedent in U.S. history. In the case of all the other U.S. international military involvements throughout history, the United States was able to either pacify an area or withdraw from it, or both. In the case of Europe, Japan, and South Korea after World War II, the U.S. military remained present, but in peaceful countries that accepted the U.S. presence. In Vietnam, once it became clear that pacification was impossible, the United States was able to make a completely clean break and withdraw. This was, of course, very humiliating, but in the end it proved politically acceptable within the United States, and led to no truly harmful results for the nation’s security.

  In the Middle East, in contrast, the United States appears hopelessly and permanently bound to an unstable, violent, and hostile region by two immensely strong ties. The first is the defense of the “American way of life” as presently defined, insofar as this has come to be associated with the gas-consuming automobile. This requires continued American access to cheap and guaranteed supplies of oil. Less and less of America’s oil comes from the Middle East, but that region has a critical effect on the international price of oil, and is therefore vital to U.S. energy needs. The second tie is the American attachment to Israel, which involves the United States in a national struggle with Arab nationalism and Muslim radicalism—also, so it would seem, for the foreseeable future.

  Further terrorist attacks on the United States are a potential danger. After the first edition of this book appeared in 2004, the second great threat that I described became an actual and acute danger. This is the fading of the “American dream” as far as large portions of the American middle and working classes are concerned, due to economic change and the effects of globalization. Over the past 30 years, this central part of American society has seen incomes stagnate or even fall, with the skilled and semiskilled working classes suffering particularly badly. Meanwhile, incomes at the lower end of the scale have been held down by the resumption of mass immigration, both legal and illegal. This combination of factors has undermined the “moral economy,” which prevailed for most of American history, whereby a man who worked hard, was honest, and did not drink or take drugs could be assured of a steadily rising income, enough to support himself and his wife in their old age, and to give his children a head start in social advancement through education. The decline of the middle class has worsened drastically as a result of the recession that began in 2008.

  Although America will no doubt recover sooner or later from the present recession, the overall trend is likely to continue, for it is rooted not only in global economic trends that are beyond America’s control, but in the growing inability of American governments to take the kinds of actions that could make a real difference. This it seems would require not just a new consensus for economic reform among the American people, but quite far-reaching changes to the U.S. Constitution. Tragically, much of the evidence that I have examined for this book suggests that both these outcomes may be unlikely, in part because of various aspects of American nationalism.1 Instead, civic nationalism is helping to ossify the Constitution and justify what risks becoming a political system more and more blatantly skewed to the advantage of a shrinking proportion of conservative white Americans—above all, through the composition, powers, and rules of the Senate.

  If, as seems all too probable, secure working class jobs continue to become rarer and rarer as a result of economic change and globalization, the resulting economic suffering and anxiety concerning social status and security will be gravely worsened by the lack of state-funded safety nets. The danger to the ability of the American economy to serve a majority of the American people is increased both by the expense of America’s international hegemony, and by the apparently insatiable nature of American free-market capitalism.

  If the middle classes continue to crumble, they will take with them one of the essential pillars of American political stability and moderation. As in European countries in the past, this would be the perfect breeding ground for radical nationalist groups and for even wilder dreams of “taking back” America at home and restoring the old moral, cultural, and possibly racial order. Such developments might lead to unrestrained strikes against America’s enemies abroad, or they might lead to isolationism. Or, if past patterns are anything to go by, it might lead to first one and then the other.

  Such a combination would be especially dangerous because of a quite new historical factor: the decline of the United States on the world stage and the rapid rise of China, to the point where if present trends continue, China will overtake America as the world’s largest economy sometime in the 2020s. The precise impact of this on the American psyche cannot be foreseen, but is unlikely to be pleasant. Not since the mid-nineteenth century has the United States faced a geopolitical rival that at the same time was economically more powerful than itself.

  Nothing in the U.S. experience of the past century has equipped the U.S. elites and people to work out how to respond to this new situation, or to play second fiddle in the world. Even Americans who are at heart deeply hostile to an expansive and expensive U.S. role in the world are likely to find this new position psychologically very hard to bear.

  Meanwhile, as this book has argued, strong forces in the U.S. establishment will go on pushing for a confrontational strategy toward China, modeled on the cold war and justified in the civic nationalist terms of America’s mission and duty to lead “democracies” against the “threat of dictatorship.” And as Chinese power grows, the Chinese too cannot be relied on to stick to their “peaceful rise,” or to respond peacefully to anything they see as an American provocation. In these circumstances, a combination of an overall tendency toward U.S. withdrawal into isolationism with periodic outbursts of chauvinist reaction could have truly catastrophic consequences.

  America’s immunity from the world clearly no longer exists, and as the twenty-first century progresses, it will be more and more vulnerable to a variety of international infections. The dangers posed to America and the world by America joining the world in this way are greatly increased by certain features of American nationalism that I have described in this book: not only the strength of this nationalism, and its alternation between messianic idealism and chauvinism, but also its highly unreflective character. In the past, because America was so victorious, so isolated, and so protected, even American intellectuals never had to reflect on their own nationalism to the extent that was forced on Europeans by the disasters of the twentieth century. It is now urgently necessary that they begin to do so, and I hope that this book
has provided a small impetus toward such reflection.

  To examine their own nationalism in this way, it will be necessary for Americans to be willing to learn from the often terrible example of other nationalisms in modern history and around the world. This requires an ability to step outside American national myths and look at America with detachment, not as an exceptional “city on a hill,” but as a mortal nation among other nations, better than most, no doubt, but also subject to the moral hazards, temptations, and crimes to which many peoples have been exposed.2

  American intellectuals have a special responsibility in this regard, given the rise of irrational hatred on the Right, the spinelessness of all too many establishment liberals in Washington, and the tendency of progressives either to adopt unrealistically dogmatic positions (as witness some of the attacks on Obama from the Left) or to retire from public debate into narcissistic conversations among themselves. Stephen M. Walt has described his own decision to become involved in public debate in words with which I am glad to associate myself. Reacting to the growth of hysterical Islamaphobia on the Right, he wrote of how as a student he attended lectures on Weimar Germany by the historian Gordon Craig: “The lesson I took from Craig’s lecture was that when intellectuals abandon liberal principles, disengage from politics, and generally abdicate their role as ‘truth-tellers’ for society at large, it is easy for demagogues to play upon human fears and lead a society over the brink to disaster.”3

  The disastrous outcomes for America that I have sketched are certainly not inevitable, given the tremendous resilience and dynamism of American society, American values, and the American democratic tradition, but to prevent them will require not just thought, but serious action by the American political class. At home, this means action to restrain the excesses of capitalism and reshape the American economy so as to serve the American people. Abroad, it requires action to make America once again a leader by consent, concerned for the health, stability, and longevity of the present international system, and dedicated to working with other responsible states so as to achieve these goals.

  Most important of all, the American elites should show more concern for the example their country sets to the world, through their institutions, their values, and the visible well-being of ordinary Americans. This example remains of critical importance to democracy in the world as a whole, as the rise of China may present, for the first time in many years, a model of authoritarian development to rival America’s democratic model.

  It is America’s example that forms the basis of America’s “soft power,” and which thereby makes possible a form of U.S. hegemony by consent. It is these institutions and values that constitute America’s “civilizational empire,” heir to that of Rome, and which, like the values of Rome, will endure long after the American empire, and even the United States itself, has disappeared. The image of America as an economically successful pluralist democracy, open to all races, and basically peaceful and nonaggressive, has been so powerful in the past because it has largely been true. Americans must make sure it goes on being true.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. See Anatol Lieven, “China is the Quiet Big Winner in War on Terror,” The Australian, August 29, 2011; Timothy Garton Ash, “The Years Since 9/11,” The Guardian, September 8, 2011.

  2. For books on the Tea Parties by supporters of the movement, see John M. O’Hara and Michelle Malkin, A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution Against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless Spending and More Taxes (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011); Joseph Farah, The Tea Party Manifesto (New York: WND Books, 2010); Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: William Morrow, 2010).

  3. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1991).

  4. Don Siegel (director), The Shootist, starring John Wayne, 1976.

  5. Sarah Palin, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag (London: Harper Collins, 2010), 69.

  6. Cf. Steven Kull, “Americans on Foreign Aid and World Hunger: A Study of US Public Attitudes,” Program on International Policy Attitudes, February 2, 2001; Robert Bellah, in his foreword to Richard Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Introampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), x.

  7. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, quoted in Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 63.

  8. Figures in the public opinion survey “Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized: 2004 Political Landscape,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, November 5, 2003, at http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/196.pdf.

  9. For profiles of “Jacksonian nationalism,” see Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 218–263; Miintroael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 21–22, 166; Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 419–443; Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

  10. Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neo-conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1983), xiii. See also Kristol, Neo-Conservatism, Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1994), 365; and Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 149–153.

  11. Kenneth Minogue, Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  12. Richard Hoftstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 15.

  13. Figures in “Global Attitudes 2002: 44-Nation Major Survey,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, November 5, 2003, at http://people-press.org/http://people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/185.pdf.

  14. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), xlviii.

  15. 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), 7–8; for a succinct recent statement of the nativist position on the creed from a leading conservative intellectual, see Samuel Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy, Marintro/April (2004) at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/03/01/the_hispanic_introallenge; and “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite,” National Interest 75 (Spring 2004) at http://nationalinterest.org/article/dead-souls-the-denationalization-of-the-american-elite-620.

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

  17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I (New York: Bantam Classics, 2000), 51; for the decline of religious belief in Germany before 1914, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1997), 115.

  18. “Among Wealthy Nations, the US Stands Alone in its Embrace of Religion,” Global Attitudes Project report, December 19, 2002, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, November 5, 2003, at http://www.pewglobal.org/2002/12/19/among-wealthy-nations/.

  19. Cf. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1952; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New York: Arlington House, 1969), 614ff; Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Simon & Sintrouster, 1995), 99.

  20. D. G. Hart, “Mainstream Protestantism, ‘Conservative’ Religion, and Civil Society,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, ed. Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003), 197.

  21. Speaking of House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas. Quoted in Ro
bert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003) and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 759.

  22. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, 3.

  23. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (New York: Random House, 1962), 206.

  24. Sheldon Hackney, “The Contradictory South,” Southern Culture (Winter 2001): 77; cf. also Jerome L. Himmelstein, “The New Right,” in The New Christian Right: Mobilization and Legitimation, ed. Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow (New York: Aldine, 1983), 21–24.

  25. Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 382.

  26. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Morse (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 222–223.

  27. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 185.