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

UNTIL ONLY a few years ago, anti-Americanism was a tribute to the global hegemony of American national culture and the solid realities of American power. The tribute was unwitting, and doubtless unwilling. It was nevertheless unmistakable, shown in the reactive and defensive stance of foreign critics of American society and foreign policy, and in their continuing dependency on American largesse and military protection. Anti-Americanism in Europe was often merely a surrogate for endorsing Soviet objectives; but it also reflected--especially among European conservatives--the resentment of old elites who conceived themselves and their cultures to be doomed to irreversible decline, and who perceived in American postwar hegemony the innocence and arrogance of an arriviste power, whose supremacy was nonetheless accomplished fact. In this anti-Americanism, despair about the prospects of European cultures coexisted with an ignorance of the spiritual wealth and achievements of American civilization, while hatred of American power confessed an embittered sense of Europeans' own impotence. In the Third World, by contrast, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism were more or less synonymous. There, as in Europe, anti-Americanism flourished on the soil of despairing indigenous cultures, ignorance of American civilization, and impotent resentment of American power. Yet, in Africa and Asia, the United States evoked even greater hostility than the old European powers, in virtue of its opposition to colonial possessions--an opposition seen in the Third World as at once hypocritical and expressing a callower and more invasive imperialism. What better testimony could there be to America's postwar primacy than this universal resentment?

American Anti-Americanism

IN AMERICA, of course, the decades of postwar hegemony were a period--especially from the early Sixties onward--of an indigenous anti-Americanism at least as virulent as any abroad. Indeed it is tempting to speculate that, in the obsessional intensity of its self-loathing, American anti-Americanism, particularly during and after the Vietnam War, provided a model for anti-Americanism throughout the world, and most obviously for that in Europe. For it was in these years that anti-Americanism acquired its most radical form--as an attack, not just on the policies and institutions that happened then to prevail in the United States, but on the values and way of life most definitive of America itself. For the Sixties radicals, these were individualism and capitalism. For them and their European counterparts, America embodied modernity in its most extreme and threatening form--a culture founded on experimentation and novelty, unencumbered by tradition or history, in which both communal life and individual identity had to be constantly reinvented. It can even be said that America showed the threatening face of modernity to these radicals in what they saw as its pervasive anomie--in the felt lack of any common or authoritative meaning of life itself. Whether they knew it or not--and some undoubtedly did--the radical critics of America were critics of the modem age of which America is the most unequivocal exemplar.

That both native anti-Americanism and the anti-Americanism of America's foreign critics expressed a deep fear of modernity is acknowledged and emphasized in Paul Hollander's comprehensive and admirably balanced study Anti-Americanism: Critics at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1992). Hollander's book analyzes indigenous anti-Americanism--as it is found not only in the universities, but also, and more importantly, in the churches and in the mass media--and the anti-Americanism of America's critics in Europe, in the Third World, and in Mexico and Canada. Throughout his account Mr. Hollander makes a distinction between the legitimate criticisms that may reasonably be advanced of American policies and institutions, as of those of any other country, and the unreasoning animus toward the United States that inspired the varieties of anti-Americanism he identifies. It is this latter attitude that he sees as inspired by a fear of modernity, and it is a dread of modernity that moves the most radical forms of anti-Americanism--those expressed by Americans themselves. Native anti-Americanism also expresses a distinctive American cultural trait, noted by Mr. Hollander: an ideological commitment to optimism which, when it is inevitably disappointed by the drift of events, easily turns to anger and political bigotry.

Here Mr. Hollander's argument suggests questions he does not himself pursue. It is a commonplace truth that the most typical forms of contemporary antinomianism--multiculturalism, radical feminism, Afrocentrism, and so forth--though they are found in all Western liberal cultures, are most frenzied, virulent, and powerful in the United States. Nowhere else, for example, does the atavistic and farcical movement for political correctness enjoy anything like the clout it has here. One may even, without too much exaggeration, describe these movements as peculiarly and natively American. Some questions then suggest themselves: What is it in American culture that renders it uniquely vulnerable to such pathologies? Are we to suppose that the unparalleled strength of these radical movements in America is merely accidental? Or does the fact that America must now have the most leftist political--and popular-culture on earth call for an explanation?