America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  28. For Rick Perry’s indebtedness for foreign policy advice to former members of the Bush administration, see Josh Rogan, “Rick Perry, the Hawk Internationalist,” Foreign Policy (online), August 20, 2011, at http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/10/rick_perry_the_hawk_internationalist.

  29. I am indebted for this comparison to Dr. David Chambers of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

  30. Fouad Ajami, “The Falseness of Anti-Americanism,” Foreign Policy September/October (2003) at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2003/09/01/the_falseness_of_anti_americanism.

  31. Charles Krauthammer, “To Hell With Sympathy,” Time, November 17 (2003), at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,557638,00.html.; or see Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About America (Washington, DC: Regnery Books, 2002) by another American right-wing nationalist intellectual of recent immigrant origins.

  32. On The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel, January 17, 2003

  33. Brian Klug, “The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Anti-Semitism,” Patterns of Prejudice 37, no. 2 (2003).

  Chapter One

  1. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 42.

  2. The phrase is that of Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); see also Minxin Pei, “The Paradoxes of American Nationalism,” Foreign Policy May–June (2003): 30–37.

  3. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 100–102, 140–161, 215–216.

  4. “The Elusive 90 Percent Solution,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, March 11, 2011, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1925/elusive-90-percent-solution-gas-prices.

  5. William R. Brock, “Americanism,” in The United States: A Companion to American Studies, ed. Dennis Welland (London: Methuen, 1974), 58.

  6. Jim Brosseau, ed. A Celebration of America: Your Helpful Guide to America’s Greatness (Des Moines, IA: Meredith Publications, 2002).

  7. Lynne Cheney and illus. Robin Preiss Glasser, America: A Patriotic Primer (New York: Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing, 2002); cf. also George Grant, The Patriot’s Handbook (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House Publishing, 1996).

  8. Washington Post, Parade section, November 9 and December 20, 2003.

  9. Cf. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

  10. Cf. Conrad Cherry, ed. “Introduction,” in God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Conrad Cherry, “American Sacred Ceremonies,” in Social Patterns of Religion in the United States, ed. Phillip E. Hammond and Benton Johnson (New York: Random House, 1970), 303–316; W. Lloyd Warner, “An American Sacred Ceremony,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

  11. Max Lerner, American Civilization: Life and Thought in the US Today (New York: Simon & Schuster 1957), 903.

  12. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, trans. Henry Reeve (1835; repr., New York: Bantam Classics, 2000), 281, 704, 764–766.

  13. Cf. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 19; cf. also Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945: Intellect and Pride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3ff.

  14. For the formation of a British identity and patriotism in the 18th century out of the different Protestant nationalities of the British isles, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Yale University Press, 1992). For the ideology of the law as a state-supporting force in 18th-century England, cf. Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in 18th Century England (New York: Random House, 1975), 32–39.

  15. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1991), 9, 307.

  16. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 1.

  17. Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA:, Mass., Harvard University Press 2004), 237; Bill Maher, “Introduction,” in When You Drive Alone You Drive With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism (Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2003).

  18. Cf. Joe Galloway, “Thanks to Rumsfeld, Iraq is Still America’s to Lose,” military.com, December 17, 2003; Max Boot, “Washington Needs a Colonial Office,” Financial Times, July 3, 2003; Hendrik Hertzberg, “Building Nations,” New Yorker, June 9, 2003.

  19. Polls at http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.

  20. “Presidential Debate Clouds Voters’ Choice,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, October 10, 2000, http://www.people-press.org/2000/10/10/presidential-debate-clouds-voters-choice/.

  21. New York Times, August 10, 2000.

  22. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

  23. Cf. Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); for an attempt to place the Russian disaster in Chechnya in this historical perspective, see Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 150–151, and passim.

  24. Bacevich, American Empire 141–166.

  25. Cf. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 292–302. For the unpopularity of North African service, see the popular song of 1891 by Aristide Bruant, “A Biribi,” in Anthologie de la Chanson Francaise: Soldats, Conscrits et Deserteurs: Paris, EPM Musique, 1996).

  26. Quoted in Roger Magraw, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana, 1983), 261.

  27. Douglas Porch, The Conquest of Morocco (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 187–188, 293–294.

  28. Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977); Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, 1871–1962 (London: Penguin, 1990), 105.

  29. Cf. Perry Anderson, “Force and Consent,” New Left Review September/October (2002), pp. 5–30.

  30. Transcript of televised debate with Al Gore, Winston Salem, NC, October 11, 2000.

  31. Cf. William Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000), 9.

  32. Max Weber, quoted in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1993), 5.

  33. For works on the history of Wilhelmine Germany that have corrected both the traditional approach based on primat der aussenpolitik (the dominance of external relations) and simplistic Marxian versions of elite manipulation, see Geoff Eley, “The Wilhelmine Right: How It Changed,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 112–135; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867–1918: Politics, Culture and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Arnold, 1995), 166ff; David Blackbourn, “Introduction,” in The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).

  34. Sean Hannity, “The Battle over Competing Visions of the Family and Family Values” (speech, United Families International Conference, November 21–22, 2003), http://www.unitedfamilies.org.

  35. Cf. also Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1997); Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002), also raises the question of whether “an open society, where such criticisms are permitted and even encouraged, has the fortitude and will to resist external assault.”

  36. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century Ameri
ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 35.

  37. Gordon Alexander Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 206.

  38. George Kennan, quoted in John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 42–43.

  39. Quoted in David Brock, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002), 75.

  40. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); cf. also Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); for an American right-wing nationalist linkage of homosexuality with national weakness and decline, see Norman Podhoretz, “The Culture of Appeasement,” Harper’s October (1977); for a work linking Clinton’s sexual “decadence” with his foreign policy “weakness,” see Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Robert “Buzz” Patterson, Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003).

  41. Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (New York: Free Press, 2004), 69–84; Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Requires a Pagan Ethos (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

  42. Timothy Garton Ash, “Anti-Europeanism in America,” New York Review of Books 50, no. 2 (2003). For a sophisticated neo-conservative view of the underlying differences between the United States and Europe, see Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

  43. Cf. John W. Whitehead and Steven H. Aden, Forfeiting “Enduring Freedom” for “Homeland Security”: A Constitutional Analysis of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Measures (Charlottesville, VA: Rutherford Institute, 2002); Ann Beeson and Jameel Jaffer, Unpatriotic Acts: The FBI’s Power to Rifle Through Your Records and Personal Belongings Without Telling You (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, July 2003); Muzaffar A. Chishti et al., America’s Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity after September 11 (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2003).

  44. Cf. Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 277.

  45. Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal, Defending Civilisation: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It (Washington, DC: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, November 2001).

  46. David Frum, “Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War Against America,” National Review, April 7, 2003.

  47. Sean Hannity, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

  48. Saul Padover, ed., The Complete Jefferson (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1943), 385–386.

  49. Cf. Edward Shils, “Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Intellectual,” Sewanee Review 66, no. 3 (1958): 450–480.

  50. William J. Bennett, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 132–133.

  51. Mission statement and principles are to be found at the Project’s website, http://the912-project.com.

  52. John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 5–7.

  53. Quoted in James H. Moorhead, “The American Israel: Protestant Tribalism and Universal Mission,” in William R. Hutchison and Hartmut Lehmann, Many are Chosen (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), 163; for how this belief was reflected in American textbooks of the 1940s and 1950s, see Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: What History Textbooks Have Taught Our Children About Their Country, and How and Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 116–117.

  54. Cf. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 35–38.

  55. Cf. Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Lind, Next American Nation, 227–234.

  56. Cf. Paul Johnson, “God and the Americans,” Commentary January 1995.

  57. Herman Melville, White-Jacket (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1967), 150.

  58. Cherry, “American Sacred Ceremonies,” 111; Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: American Encounters with the World since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 204ff.

  59. J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1806) (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1922), quoted in Lind, Next American Nation, 227.

  60. Quoted in Lind, Next American Nation, 230.

  61. Cf. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 68–69.

  62. Jules Michelet, The People, trans. John P. McKay (Champlain: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p.27.

  63. For French influence on the American Bill of Rights, see Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 19ff.

  64. “Il existe un pacte, vingt fois seculaire, entre la grandeur de la France et la liberté du monde.”

  65. Reported in the Financial Times, January 28, 2004.

  66. Quoted in Zeldin, France 1848–1945, 9; cf. also Jules Michelet, The People, 93–94.

  67. Karl Kaiser, quoted in Ash, “Anti-Europeanism in America,”.

  68. Cf. Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens, 162ff.

  69. Cf. Brubaker, Citizenship in France, 7–8, 13–14, 35–49.

  70. Cf. Johannes Willms, “France Unveiled: Making Muslims into Citizens,” Open Democracy, February 26, 2004.

  71. Hans J. Rogger and Eugen Weber, European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 579.

  72. Brock, Blinded by the Right, 59.

  73. Ernest Barker, quoted in Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 51.

  74. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 24.

  75. Cf. Magraw, France 1815–1914, 255–284; Cobban, A History of Modern France, 48–57, 86–91; Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 128–129.

  76. “Je m’écriais avec Schiller:/Je suis citoyen du monde…/De mes tendresses détournées/Je me suis enfin repenti./Ces tendresses je les ramene/étroitement sur mon pays/Sur les hommes que j’ai trahis/Par amour de l’espéce humaine.” Sully Prudhomme, extract in Raoul Girardet, Le Nationalisme Français (Paris, Points, 1983), 50.

  77. For the strength of such feeling in the Indian diaspora in the West, see the furious attacks on Western historians of India for allegedly “denigrating” Hinduism and the Hindu role in Indian history, reported by Shankar Vedantam, “Wrath Over A Hindu God,” Washington Post, April 10, 2004.

  78. For a comparison from the 1950s, see Lerner, American Civilization, 934–938.

  79. Quoted in Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 133.

  80. McDougall, Promised Land, 126.

  81. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Anglo Saxon Destiny and Responsibility,” Christianity and Crisis, October 4, 1943; reprinted in Cherry, God’s New Israel, 296–300; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 1018–1024; cf. also Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 65–68.

  82. Lind, Next American Nation, 105ff; Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland, A History of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 588ff.

  83. Foner, Who Owns History, 61.

  84. Cf. Arthur Cooper, trans. and ed., Li Po and Tu Fu (London: Penguin, 1973), 24–26. The Chinese, like the Russian Empire, admittedly also possessed ethnic groups of licensed semi-outcasts with strictly defined social roles. These people were often employed in the entertainment and sex industries: in Russia the Gypsies, in T’ang China the Tanka, a former tribal people of the southern coastal fringes. The Jews in Russia too were assigned pa
rticular socioeconomic roles, and attempts were made to repress them when they broke out of those roles and out of the geographical limits to which the state had tried to restrict them.

  85. For the difference between the rigid separation and subordination of the American “one drop of blood” system and the relatively more complex and tolerant racial shadings of Brazil, see George M. Fredrickson, “The Strange Death of Segregation,” New York Review of Books 46, no. 8 (1999).

  86. Robert J. Blendon et al., “America’s Changing Political and Moral Values,” in What’s God Got to Do with the American Experiment?, ed. E. J. Dionne and John J. Dilulio (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 26, 29; figures for attitudes toward interracial “dating” can be found in the public opinion survey “The 2004 Political Landscape: Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, November 5, 2003, 45–50, http://www.people-press.org/2003/11/05/the-2004-political-landscape/.