Hating America

A link on Kim's website, sent me to this wonderful review of books purporting to be the authoritative views of America. Mr. Bruce Bawer demolishes the misconceptions found in the books in detail. He further examines the reality presented to the European point of view versus the actual state of affairs in America. Surprise! We're not the provincial buffoons that the media says we are. Well, Trent Lott is, but, that's another story. Here's some examples:

—Hutton insists he loves America. (As proof, he lists his pop-culture preferences: “I enjoy Sheryl Crow and Clint Eastwood alike, delight in Woody Allen. . . .”) Indeed, he claims it’s his “affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself.” Yet it soon becomes clear that for Hutton, the problem is not that America has abandoned its founding ideals; the problem is the founding ideals themselves.

The essence of Hutton’s argument is that “all Western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist” (note the sly conflation here of “liberal” and “leftist,” which in Europe, of course, are opposites), and that first among these ideas is “a belief in the primacy of society” as opposed to the insidious “American belief in the primacy of the individual.” Hutton traces the prioritization of society over the individual back to medieval feudalism, which he holds up—hilariously—as an ideal. The trouble, he explains, started when Puritan individualists “who passionately believed that they could individually establish a direct relationship with God” emigrated to North America and invented “an explosively new and radical ideology” that justified “an individualist rather than a social view of property.” This led to the American Revolution, which Hutton compares unfavorably with its French counterpart of 1789, since the former put the individual first (bad) while the latter introduced a “new social contract” (good). “The European tradition,” he instructs us, “is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society.” Well, he’s right: Europe has been more drawn than America to communitarianism than to individual rights—and it’s precisely this tragic susceptibility that made possible the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism and that obliged the U.S. to step in and save the Continent from itself in World War II. Nonetheless, Hutton has the audacity to insist that “it would all be so much better if the United States rejoined the world on new terms”—if, in other words, Americans exchanged Jeffersonian values for the currently popular European “ism,” statism.

Thanks, but no thanks.

and more:

Like Will Hutton, Clyde Prestowitz, a former Foreign Service Officer and international businessman, begins his critique of America by telling us that his reproaches spring from affection, not antagonism, and that, although his book is entitled Rogue Nation, he “in no way mean[s] to equate the United States with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or any other brutal, dictatorial regime.”⁸ Why the title, then? Because for this ex-diplomat author, it would seem, a “rogue nation” is not necessarily one whose rulers butcher their subjects by the thousands but one whose leaders refuse to play the diplomatic game of pretending that their counterparts in countries like Saddam’s Iraq are something other than butchers. To be sure, Prestowitz has some good things to say about the U.S. (he points out, for instance, that Americans give twice as much to charity as Europeans, a fact that would shock most Europeans), and many of his criticisms (e.g., of American health insurance, oil dependency, and failure to respond more usefully to the fall of the Soviet Union) are thoroughly consistent with a belief that America is, on balance, a force for democracy and justice in the world. But for the most part Prestowitz comes off as agreeing with Hertsgaard and Hutton that America is an outlaw state whose cultural values and political system are fundamentally flawed and whose interactions with the outside world do more harm than good. With Prestowitz, it sometimes seems, America just can’t win: he blames it for interfering abroad and for not interfering; for giving too much money to other countries and for giving too little; for exercising too much control over the world economy and for exercising too little; for protecting U.S. jobs through tariffs and farm subsidies and for not protecting them. By contrast, he adores the EU; several of his blurbs are from top EU bureaucrats.

Not all of the critiques are negative:
In Of Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan, who like Prestowitz worked for the State Department during the Reagan administration, serves up a dispassionate, definitive account of the current transatlantic strategic relationship. The book reminds us of some plain, but often obscured, facts. For one thing, America’s Cold War strategy of risking nuclear attack to protect Western Europe was “extraordinary”—a “historically unprecedented example” of “the most enlightened kind of self-interest.” For another, European history is not a cozy chronicle of congenial community, as Hutton and others would have it, but a long, grim tale of corrupt, power-mad kings and pointless, protracted, bloodthirsty wars. Europeans, Kagan points out, “invented power politics”; by contrast, “Americans have never accepted the principles of Europe’s old order nor embraced the Machiavellian perspective.” Far from evolving naturally out of the community-minded premodern Europe of Hutton’s (and others’) fantasy, moreover, the EU was the product of “an act of will” by “born-again idealists” set on “the integration and taming” of Germany. And why have these Machiavellians become idealists? Because they no longer have power —and, being powerless, they resent U.S. power, even when it’s used not to conquer but to help.

All in all, the entire review is a wonderful study in current world views and the misunderstandings and downright rejections of the American reality found in Europe today. And as I said earlier, they are demolished in detail. Go read it all.