AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG. An anatomy of American nationalism. By Anatol Lieven. 274pp. HarperCollins. £18.99. 0 00 716456 4. US: Oxford University Press. $30. 0 19 516840 2
The Republican Party, which Anatol Lieven calls the American Nationalist Party, enjoyed a stunning success at the polls last year, despite unpopular social policies, rising unemployment, record poverty, unthinkable national debt, the collapse of the dollar, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, increasing difficulties in Iraq, the alienation of the Muslim world, and a separation from Europe. The majority of Bush voters voted against their own economic interests.
Many Americans seem to care little about the international consequences of American policy, indulging instead in a rhetoric of good and evil.
These mental habits may best be summarized in a word that Americans prefer to apply to others: nationalism. In America Right or Wrong, Lieven contends that patriotism, the conservative desire to preserve the patrie, fails adequately to define this mentality. Only in the light of nationalism, with its implication of a mission, can one see what Americans are doing to themselves.
Lieven's book oscillates between present and past, seeking to argue that American nationalism is part of a general trend of the modern world, while identifying its particular features. The author crosses the divides that Americans avoid: blue states to red states, North to South, secular to religious, Catholic to Protestant, mainstream Protestant to evangelical. He finds an American nationalism rooted in European beliefs that preceded emigration, hardened at the frontier by ruthless violence, and yet spared the horrors of total war. It is thus, in his account, simultaneously vicious towards other nations, and naive about the consequences of this attitude.
Because Lieven finds the core of American nationalism in the experience of immigrants from Europe, he notes that blacks sometimes find the dominant narrative alien. This is perhaps true; but, in this light, the ability of American nationalism to reach blacks, Asians and other non-Europeans deserves a bit more reflection. Many of the nationalists Lieven criticizes belong to this dominant narrative by choice rather than ancestry, and this powerful attraction is perhaps underestimated here.
Americans see themselves as a new nation. Yet, as Lieven points out, Americans are one of the oldest nations, if a nation is a mass society that regards itself as a political community. The claim that America is new is not temporal but spiritual.
It is conventionally associated with John Winthrop's image of Christianity in New England as a "Citty upon a Hill". Lieven argues that the rhetoric of novelty allows Americans to reconcile religious faith with national pride. The idea that original sin was left behind in the Old World weds the Christian story of origin to a national Creed. The United States Constitution, however, established the separation of Church and State, an institutional difference between the USA and much of Europe to which Lieven might have paid more attention. Most denominations, Catholic and Protestant alike, made their peace with state power thus conceived, and became institutions with a stake in the status quo. Some evangelical Protestants, however, continue to see America as a country (in the words of John Ashcroft, Attorney General until last November) with "no king but Jesus".
Lieven notes two key moments in the translation of such views into right-wing politics: when evangelicals came to rival mainline Protestants in numbers of believers (in the 1960s), and when evangelicals organized themselves within the Republican Party (in the 1980s). The image of flight from a sinful world does not convey overwhelming confidence. Most American fundamentalists do not feel powerful; they feel weak. The vast majority of Americans, and perhaps fundamentalists in particular, gain little sense of security from America's cultural and military might, so imposing from abroad. Even as US policy is perceived overseas as the main cause of globalization, inhabitants of Middle America see themselves as globalization's victims: which, in view of the withering effects of global competition on the heartland, is understandable. As Lieven points out, the unrestricted play of the market is no friend to traditional values. Only agribusiness can compete in national and international markets, and agribusiness has all but wiped out the American family farm.
Picturesque small towns -and once there were many -cannot thrive without downtown shops; and such small businesses have been crushed by Wal-Mart. The Republican Party humours the ideals of self-reliance and small-town life while undermining their material basis, growing great on nostalgia for a world that its own policies destroy. By voting Republican, as Lieven notes, fundamentalists ensure the dominance of unrestrained capitalism, thereby voting their own fears into reality.
