The Left's last utopia.

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?

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.

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.

The decline of anti-Americanism can only be accelerated by the evident obsolescence, in most of the world, of the modernist political religions of which American liberalism was only the most successful exemplar. The prospect is that America will no longer be perceived as a threatening embodiment of modernity, but instead as marginal--as one, but only one, and not the most successful, model of modernization. In this eventuality, America will increasingly be viewed not with hostility but with indifference.

The marginalization of America is likely to be prompted by increasing American introversion--by a turn in America's opinion-forming elites from concern with foreign models, real or imaginary (Sweden or the Soviet Union, Nicaragua or China) to exclusive concern with the local arcana of the American civil religion in its left-liberal form: "diversity" quotas in the news media, Political Correctness in universities, "rights" for groups defined by sexual behavior, etc. It is, after all, rather difficult to pursue the American liberal project through devotion to remote and exotic regimes, when these have actually collapsed, revealed themselves to all as bankrupt tyrannies, or avowedly adopted the market institutions against which American liberals had always inveighed. The displaced patriotism which Paul Hollander analyzed so brilliantly in his Political Pilgrims (Oxford, 1981), is hard to sustain when the foreign countries to which allegiance is transferred reject out of hand all the values which motivated the liberal switch of loyalties. (Boris Yeltsin's reported reference to President Clinton as a political tyro and, worse, a socialist, is a good example of the problem that is posed for American liberals by the Soviet collapse. What is the point of being pro-Soviet when the Soviets, or their successor-regime, are pro-American?)

A World They Don't Understand

IN THESE circumstances, it is only natural that American liberal opinion should turn inwards, away from a world it does not understand--a world animated by religious and national allegiances that liberal ideology does not recognize and cannot account for and which, if liberal ideology were well founded, should have long since withered away or become insignificant in political terms. So it is that we witness American opinion engrossed by the drama of the alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill, while Iran and North Korea proceed placidly to offensive nuclear capability; that the issue of defense policy that dominates the media is the question of the role of gays in the military, rather than the dangers of American involvement in remote and incomprehensible wars; and that Americans in general are baffled that public opinion in Britain is hostile to the loss of British sovereignty in a European superstate. These are only examples, of which many more could be cited. The truth they illustrate is that, insofar as it is governed by liberal ideology, American opinion is condemned to incomprehension regarding the forces animating political life throughout the rest of the world. The most natural response to such bafflement is a retreat into isolation, cultural as much as political, a kind of national solipsism in which American global leadership goes by default, and the rest of the world ceases to rely on the United States for protection or example.

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.

Mr. Gray, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, wrote this article during a period of residence as Stranahan Distinguished Research Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. His most recent book is Post-Liberalism (Routledge, 1993).