The Left's last utopia - impact of liberalism in the United States; includes evaluation of Paul Hollander's 1992 book 'Anti-Americanism: Critics at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990' - Cover Story

National Review, July 19, 1993 by John Gray

The risks of modernity--which evoke the anti-Americanism of foreigners--are real enough. Decoupled from tradition and history and from any genuine transcendental faith, with inherited religious traditions having succumbed to the Pelagian heresy of the indefinite improvability of the human lot, modern man is defenseless when faced by the myriad political religions, projects of social engineering, and psychotherapeutic technologies that promise an exorcism of tragedy from human life. It is this spiritual emptiness from which the Enlightenment project--that is to say, the liberal project--emerges and which it aspires to cure. But a politics that promises to exorcise tragedy from history and to foster a new kind of human being is bound to bump up against such obstacles as traditional ways of living, cultural affinities, national loyalties, religious attachments, and so on.

Not a Nation but an Idea

IN THE case of American liberalism, this mode of politics has a conception of America as being not a nation like any other, having an identity grounded in the contingencies of language and cultural affinity, but an ideological construction whose identity derives from universalist principles, notably civil liberty and human equality. For the liberal, America is not a nation but a civil religion ("an idea"), and loyalty to it is a matter not of sentiment but of ideological commitment. But of course America is also--and first and foremost--a nation existing in history, with an unavoidable legacy of particular traditions, institutions, common ways of thinking and speaking. The actual nation is bound to clash with the civil religion from time to time. And given the tendency of American culture, noted by Mr. Hollander, to veer between idealistic optimism and anger when the idealism is thwarted, it was only to be expected that attachment to America as a civil religion should come to express itself as hatred of the values and institutions -that are most definitive of America as a historic nationality.

Hence the litmus test of liberalism in America today is the commitment to multiculturalism, with its concomitant delegitimation of all that remains of a common national culture. This liberal rejection of the very idea of a common culture as being itself repressive goes with the interpretation of the United States as being, not a nationality like others in the world, but a universal nation. This oxymoronic conception, endorsed not only by liberals but by many others, including prominent neoconservatives and libertarians, expresses the conviction that the United States is unique, the first of its kind, and the precursor of a new universal civilization.

Taking Nationhood for Granted

IT IS this understanding of the United States as the exemplar of a wholly novel civilization that distinguishes American multiculturalism from other contemporary experiments in nation-building, such as that currently being undertaken--more modestly, but also successfully--in Australia, which is not burdened by an apocalyptic sense of universal mission, and in which immigrants can therefore assimilate to an historic national culture without endorsing the dubious tenets of a liberal civil religion. Similar experiments in nation-building have been carried out in Latin America, sometimes--as in Chile--with considerable success. It is a feature of such successes in nation-building that, as in the United States in earlier times, they do not question the necessity of a common national culture, or deny that its content is a matter of historical accident, having the character of a particular cultural inheritance and not of an application of universal principles. Such humbler experiments in nation-building are typically more successful, if only because the nation which an immigrant joins is a particular historic community, a living common culture, rather than the supposed embodiment of universal principles whose contents are endlessly disputable.