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

A curious development enhances this likelihood of American national solipsism--the emergence in Europe, particularly in Britain, of a pro-Americanism in which it is precisely the self-reviling American counterculture that is revered and admired! In France this admiration of American antinomianism has been expressed by post-modern cultural critics. But in Britain it has achieved a political expression, with left-wing groups such as Charter 88 upholding as ideals worthy of emulation the Freedom of Information Act, affirmative-action programs, and the whole apparatus of antidiscrimination in America. It is commonplace nowadays for left-wing theorists, whose devotion had hitherto been reserved for inaccessible socialist regimes and in whose theorizing America had figured as the Great Satan, to praise American radical feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism as models to be copied by European countries. This admiration echoes almost uncannily the conviction of American liberals that their country is not a nation deserving of instinctive allegiance, but an idea or civil religion that must be progressively implemented if patriotism is to have any justification. Indeed America is seen as the exemplar of what the British left-wing writer, B. Parekh, calls the "full liberal theory of the state" in which political allegiance depends not on a shared history or a common culture but on rational subscription to universal principles.

Displaced Patriotism

PRO-AMERICANISM of this sort is now commonly the displaced patriotism of the European Left, with America being adopted as the last best hope of universalist liberalism, the one remaining utopian experiment whose fate is yet in doubt. This pro-Americanism of the European Left is likely to grow and strengthen, as the utopian project of a federal European state disappoints them by finally running aground on the reefs of national sentiment. We are not far from the time when European sandalistas arrive as political pilgrims on American shores, seeking and finding in the fumbling incoherences of Clintonism a mirror of their own ideological preoccupations. It is easy to see how this perception of America would chime with the self-image, and nourish the self-absorption, of American liberals.

Neither anti-Americanism--in its radical native forms or its exogenous varieties--nor the new pro-Americanism of the European Left has an instinctive grasp of the prodigious virtuosity of American civilization, its extraordinary capacity for self-renewal through crisis and conflict. These are aspects of the American national genius that are always neglected, or underestimated, by America's critics--and by America's new friends in the European Left, who are perhaps more inimical to America than the older breed of anti-Americans. The present danger is nevertheless clear enough. It is in the paradoxical prospect that the United States is now so firmly in the grip of a universalist liberal ideology without leverage on the political forces that rule our age that America will turn inwards, away from an unintelligible world, into introversion and national solipsism, and in so doing forfeit the leadership on which the world still relies. It will be one of history's choicest--and cruelest--ironies if the end of American hegemony is signaled by the decline of anti-Americanism and the rise of a leftist pro-Americanism that feeds on the dissolution through liberal multiculturalism of America's national identity.