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

What do these examples, and others in history, tell us of the prospect for America today? The liberal project of destroying a common national culture in America, and so of hyphenating American national identity, has been under way for some time, and has already had consequences that are probably irreversible. It has not, of course, diminished ethnic conflict-America must now be the most ethnically obsessed and divided of any of the world's liberal democracies--but it has further Balkanized American political life into a contest between ethnic and other special-interest groups for group rights and similar legal privileges. Is it still a real option for America to reassert its identity as an historic nation having a common culture? Or has that option already been closed by liberal multiculturalism? These questions can be put in another way. Can America now do without the liberal civil religion of universal nationhood, when the particular content of its historic national identity has been largely drained away or at least discredited in acceptable political discourse as "nativism" or "racism"? And what does history--that ghost at the feast of liberal ideology--suggest about the fate of a state whose civil religion is based on denying the necessity of a common national culture?

Friends for Enemies

THE IRONIC answer, initially at least, may be a transformation of enemies into friends and vice versa, as America's foreign critics find in American ideological enthusiasm a mirror of their own antinomian preoccupations. For those critics, America embodied the modern project itself, about which they had the most intense ambivalence (many of them, ironically, were nonetheless captivated by Marxism, the most stupendously fraudulent of the modernist political religions). Particularly in France, where fashionable political radicalism has always gone hand in hand with monocultural chauvinism, and multiculturalism is still largely unheard of (except for a few nods to the French regions), America has always evoked a mixture of fear and envy as the very quintessence of modernity. It is perceived as embodying the liberal experiment in its most uncompromising form.

In post-Communist Europe the excesses of the American counterculture--now, with the coming to age and power of the Sixties radicals, virtually the dominant culture--are regarded with a mixture of bewilderment and sadness, their rationalist ideological posturings eerily recalling those of the discredited Communist nomenklatura. In the increasingly self-confident cultures of East Asia, where the promises of liberalism have never been taken very seriously, the Balkanized chaos of American public life, and the cultural suicide on which the United States appears to them to be bent, are viewed less indulgently, evoking a response of incredulous contempt.

Paradoxically, however, this perceived eclipse of American global hegemony-America's inability to confront its own domestic problems, and its increasing unwillingness to project its still massive military power except in the service of delusive internationalist goals--has has been associated with a waning of anti-Americanism in Europe and in Asia. As America suffers a creeping Brazilianization of its institutions, economy, and public life, its status as a unique exemplar of modernity is ever more compromised, and anti-Americanism loses much of its rationale, and even its thrill. We are probably only a decade or so from a situation in which anti-Americanism is as rare, as incongruous and as irrelevant in global terms as anti-Brazilianism. Insofar as the American civil religion is visibly failing, while traditional American national identity has been delegitimated by multiculturalism, it is inevitable that anti-Americanism should survive, if at all, only as a matter of local sentiment or historical memory.