For more than two centuries, nationalism in all its various
forms—from the high-minded chauvinism of the British Empire to the
virulent poison of Nazism—has been a familiar, and often negative,
phenomenon. Emerging first in Europe, which it nearly destroyed and
which has now apparently learned to control it, extreme nationalism
still erupts from time to time in other parts of the world.
The word “nationalism” never quite seemed to fit the United
States, where continental vastness and enormous power have hitherto been
tempered by an often-expressed distaste for empire and by the notion of
world leadership by example. Two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson
and Franklin Roosevelt, both sponsored world organizations whose primary
objective was to contain and disperse the aggressive force of
nationalism.
In the first years of the twenty-first century, however, in a
dramatic departure from traditional policy, the spirit of unilateralism
and militant nationalism began to dominate Washington’s policies and
attitudes toward the outside world. Reaction to the attacks of September
11, 2001, gave new force and a new direction to this change. Anatol
Lieven’s
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism
examines the roots of longstanding American nationalistic tendencies
that have given public support to this fundamental change in United
States policy. As is already clear from some reactions to his book, for a
foreigner (a Washington-based British journalist), and a European
intellectual at that, this is a courageous, even foolhardy, undertaking,
but it may well be that an outside observer can best approach such a
sensitive American subject with candor and objectivity.
1 Lieven is relentlessly candid, and has produced a remarkably thought-provoking book.
1.
Lieven contrasts the high idealism of American civic
nationalism, the “American Creed”—liberty, constitutionalism, law,
democracy, individualism, and the separation of church and state—with
current hypernationalistic attitudes that influence both domestic and
foreign affairs. His book, Lieven writes,
should in no sense be read as an attack either on a
reasonable American nationalism or on the war on terrorism in its
original form of a struggle against al Qaeda and its allies. As I shall
argue throughout this book, American civic nationalism is a central
support of American power and influence in the world, and has
tremendously positive lessons to offer to humanity.
Lieven maintains that because American-style free-market
liberal democracy has now become ideologically acceptable in most of
the world, logically the United States should be “behaving as a
conservative hegemon, defending the existing international order and
spreading its values by example.”
Instead, the George W. Bush administration has attempted to go in
the opposite direction. “American power,” Lieven writes, “in the
service of narrow American…nationalism is an extremely unstable basis
for hegemony.” Particularly after September 11, when there was a chance
to “create a concert of all the world’s major states—including Muslim
ones—against Islamist revolutionary terrorism,” the Bush administration
“chose instead to pursue policies which divided the West, further
alienated the Muslim world, and exposed America itself to greatly
increased danger.”
It would be foolish to try to summarize in detail a book as tightly written and extensively researched as America Right or Wrong.
But on a subject so vitally relevant at the present time, it is worth
outlining some of Lieven’s main ideas. After setting out what he calls
the “American Creed,” Lieven examines the historical roots of its
antithesis, a “wounded and vengeful nationalism.” Irrational hatred,
even fear, of the outside world, combined with an obsessive belief in
the treachery of American “elites” and intellectuals, is not only
destructive at home; it also demeans the traditional idea of a people
with a special mission to help other nations that has been variously
described over the years by many leaders and thinkers. For one example,
Lieven quotes Woodrow Wilson, speaking at the end of World War I:
“America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving
the world.” Ironically, it has taken Nature itself, in the Asian
tsunami disaster, to show us once again that only the United States has
the will and the resources—ships bearing helicopters and a worldwide
logistics network—to respond immediately to such a vast emergency. Can
this terrible experience help revive the reputation of Americans as a
people with a compassionate mission in the world?
The missionary
idea is further distorted, Lieven argues, by the Manichaean notion,
frequently invoked since September 11, of the struggle between
Good—America and those who unreservedly agree with it—and Evil.
“Wherever we carry it,” George W. Bush told the graduating cadets at
West Point in June 2002, “the American flag will stand not only for our
power, but for freedom.” Such rhetoric has not only fueled
self-righteous and nationalist extremism; it has also distracted the
United States from the basic measures needed for a successful campaign
against Islamic terrorism, including the serious pursuit of peace in the
Middle East; and it has badly strained relations with the outside
world. “If we have any sense at all of history,” Lieven writes, “we
should know that our system does not represent the ‘end of history,’ is
not divinely ordained, and will not last forever.”
In a chapter entitled “The Embittered Heartland,” Lieven examines
the paradox that while much of the world sees the modern history of
America as “an almost uninterrupted chronicle of success” (Senator
William Fulbright’s words), very large groups inside the country itself
do not see anything of the kind. Their sense of inherited defeat and
humiliation not only poisons domestic politics but is also an important
ingredient in America’s particular form of radical nationalism. Lieven
identifies an original source of this feeling in the fear on the part of
the first, fundamentalist Protestant, Anglo-Saxon core of settlers that
it was losing its control of politics and culture to more recent
immigrant groups, “cosmopolitan elites,” and the like.
The various revolutions of the
1960s—sexual, racial, feminist, and behavioral—certainly gave a powerful
impetus to this large group’s resentment. In our time the “Gingrich
revolution“‘s call to “take back America” echoes the old battle cry. As
the epitome of such thinking Lieven quotes the French extreme
reactionary Charles Maurras as saying during the 1930s, “In order to
love France today, it is necessary to hate what she has become.” Pride,
economic setbacks, and resentment have bred an intensely conservative
and religious culture that is also intensely nationalistic.
However,
Lieven observes, American radical nationalism, unlike similar movements
elsewhere, has hitherto shown no clear impulse to move toward
authoritarian rule. Pride in traditional democratic constitutionalism
and in the strength of democratic culture has always contained any
tendency to dictatorship. Time after time
the demons of American radical nationalism have…been
bound again sooner or later by the power of the American Creed…. Periods
of intense nationalism…have been followed by a return to a more
tolerant and pluralist equilibrium.
Lieven writes that while, to the world, America may
epitomize the triumph of modern society in all its forms, it is “also
home to the largest and most powerful forces of conservative religion in
the developed world.” He quotes a survey from 2000 which found that
white evangelical Protestants made up 23.1 percent of the population;
Catholics, the largest Christian group, were 27.3 percent. The first
figure is certainly larger now. Fundamentalist evangelical beliefs,
Lieven argues, are pre-Enlightenment in origin and anti-Enlightenment in
substance. Both modern science and a rational basis for human discourse
are highly suspect in these circles. Treacherous East Coast liberal and
intellectual elites, atheist Europeans, the godless UN, and others who
have proudly embraced the Enlightenment are particular villains.
Lieven notes that in 1925 there was general mockery of
fundamentalism after the much-publicized Scopes trial—Samuel Eliot
Morison referred to the trial as part of “Nineteenth Century America’s
Last Stand.” Starting in the 1990s, the fundamentalists have now turned
that humiliation around by making a strong comeback. The teaching of
creationism is now being demanded in schools in more than forty states,
while the low voting turnout of other, nonfundamentalist groups
increases the fundamentalists’ political influence. The President
himself is publicly skeptical of scientific findings in many fields,
including global warming and stem-cell research. He promises to rid the
world of Evil, and, as he told Bob Woodward, he is “casting his vision
and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan.”
Radical religious nationalism, shrewdly exploited by Bush administration
strategists, has become a strong force in American politics.
2.
Lieven’s chapter on the Israeli–Palestinian question
is unusually forthright and is certain to give rise to much objection.
He believes that this question more than any other divides the United
States from opinion in most other countries. Critical discussion of
Israel’s record and its behavior toward Palestinians is often presented
as an assault by members of the malignant, anti-American, anti-Semitic
international community, symbolized in the hated UN. Such a presentation
strengthens unconditional support for Israel among most evangelicals,
regardless of Israel’s policies and actions toward the occupied
territories.
This point of view has become a matter of fundamentalist
religious belief. Lieven quotes Jerry Falwell as saying that “to stand
against Israel is to stand against God.” The Christian Zionist movement,
of which the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, is a leader in
Washington, is “a block of conservative Republicans whose strong support
for the Jewish state is based on their interpretation of the Bible.”
2
Such beliefs, which disregard international law, generally recognized
rights, rational discourse, or serious negotiation, fit conveniently
with the kind of neoconservative thinking to be found in the now famous
1996 position paper “A Clean Break,” written by Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith, among others, which advised the Likud government to
insist on “permanent control of the occupied territories,” as Lieven
puts it. They do nothing to encourage moderation among Arabs and
Muslims. After DeLay’s visit to Israel in 2003, during which the Texas
congressman told Israeli legislators that he was “an Israeli at heart,”
Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian legislator and negotiator, commented mildly
that DeLay was not helping the cause of peace by “being more Israeli
than the Israelis themselves.”
3
Lieven observes that the debate over the Israeli–Palestinian
question is far more open and uninhibited in Israel itself than in the
United States, where criticism of Likud policies or arguments that the
Palestinians have a case are apt to be construed as “classic
anti-Semitism.” Lieven quotes, for example, the passionate protest
against Likud policies by Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the
Knesset. “We cannot,” Burg said, “keep a Palestinian majority under an
Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in
the Middle East.”
It is one of the great tragedies of
history that during the years of moderate Israeli leadership and policy,
there was no recognition by either Israel or the US of a serious
Palestinian negotiating partner. The only organized representative of
the Palestinians, the PLO, was kept from the negotiating table until
1993, by which time both the Israeli settlement movement and the
indigenous Palestinian terrorist movement in the occupied territories
were well established.
As Lieven puts it, criticism of Israeli
actions in no way excuses the barbarities and brutalities of some of
their Palestinian opponents:
Yet by its settlement policy, Israel has passed up
the chance to end the conditions exacerbating the conflict, as have the
Palestinian groups through their continued pursuit of terrorism.
The US has become deeply embroiled in the Middle East
through the combination of strong, and sometimes unconditional, support
for Israel and dependence on Arab oil. This creates major problems for
its global leadership as well as a serious impediment to the successful
pursuit of the “war on terror.” There would now appear, at least, to be a
slightly improved prospect for peace between Israel and the
Palestinians. In view of the intrinsic importance of this question as
well as its effect on other matters, it is to be hoped that Washington
will adopt the courageous, objective, and active policy that might still
achieve significant progress toward the peaceful solution that both the
Israelis and the Palestinians desperately need.
America Right or Wrong is a valuable and also a
troubling book on a subject that is both crucial and in many ways
extremely sensitive. Historians may differ over Lieven’s interpretations
of American history or his assessment of the importance of this or that
factor, and others will certainly disagree with particular chapters.
Predictably enough, he has already been called both anti-American and
anti-Semitic.
4
It seems to me that Lieven’s book comes more in the category of what
is sometimes called “tough love.” Lieven is concerned, perhaps even
obsessed, with current crises—the Iraq war, the impasse in the Middle
East—and with tendencies such as the rise of radical nationalism that
seem to him to be compromising the American Creed and American
leadership in the world. He is also concerned with the absence of a
stringent public debate on such matters. He can be tactless, perhaps,
but that is hardly anti-American.
3.
In his recent book on the Scottish Enlightenment James
Buchan writes of Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century, “Men and
women were coming to suspect that knowledge acquired through skepticism
might be more useful in this world below than knowledge ‘revealed’ by
scripture.”
5
It is a painful thought that in the United States in the twenty-first
century we might be turning away from the world of the Enlightenment
which inspired the Founding Fathers. Of all the thoughts provoked by
Lieven’s book this is the most disturbing, both for America and for the
world. Since religious freedom and popular elections are both sacrosanct
rights of the American people, it is a particularly delicate one. Is it
possible that America could eventually vote to go back on the
Enlightenment?
Evangelical Protestants are a large and growing group whose
influence is greatly enhanced by their voting discipline in comparison
to other groups. Their influence is evident both in the rhetoric and in
some actions of the current administration, as well as in Congress. This
is clear in many domestic issues. The absolutes of Good and Evil, the
references to God’s will in relation to adventures like the Iraq war,
the idea that those who are not with us are against us, impose a
rigidity that dismisses criticism and makes it impossible to admit
reverses publicly or to correct mistaken policies. Such trends are a
serious hazard for such a powerful and important country. And at home,
the demonization of elites, anti-intellectualism, hostility to rational
discourse, and an aversion to scientific method can only stultify and
downgrade the educational system at a time when American leadership and
technological supremacy are being challenged as never before.
The influence of Christian evangelicals now extends to many
essential matters of foreign policy, quite apart from the Middle East.
Dogmatic, unilateralist, and radically nationalistic, this influence
ignores international law and is particularly hostile to international
organizations. In some of its literature the secretary-general of the UN
figures as the Antichrist. At a time when the United States is no
longer immune from the ills of the outside world, many key
problems—terrorism, energy, the environment, epidemics including AIDS,
the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, to
name only a few—can only be tackled usefully through international
collective effort. Dogmatic, faith-based denial of this fact of life
would be a disaster for United States leadership, and also for the hope
of finding solutions to problems that may well determine the future of
the human race on this planet.
The absolute right of individuals to select the religion of their
choice is not in question. But when particular denominations are in a
position to bring their special beliefs and taboos to bear on the
general interest and on public policy on secular matters, a dangerous
point has been reached. That is why the separation of church and state
is so important.
Lieven has undertaken the unpopular task
of trying to analyze religious forces and nationalist ideologies that
have an important bearing on the present situation of the United States
and to warn about their consequences. In a reply to one of his critics
he has explained that the failure to remember the searing lessons of how
America became involved in Vietnam seems to him
to
be closely related to an inability to reexamine certain fundamental
national myths…. To say this is not the standpoint of an arrogant
foreigner. It stands in a great tradition of critical American thought,
which should be revived as a matter of profound intellectual and indeed
patriotic urgency.6
Criticism by a foreigner on sensitive national issues is
always likely to raise hackles, especially when readers may have a
strong feeling that some of the criticisms are right on the mark. People
often do not appreciate being told in a foreign accent that they may be
heading over a cliff. In his intensity Lieven sometimes drifts into an
admonitory tone that some readers may find patronizing. But his
conclusion, far from displaying anti-Americanism, has a cautionary
perspective that Americans should take seriously:
Most important of all, the American elites should
have both more confidence in and more concern for the example their
country sets to the world, through their institutions, their values and
the visible well-being of ordinary Americans…. These institutions and
values constitute America’s civilizational empire, heir to that of Rome.
Like the values of Rome, they 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 that
it continues to be true.
