America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

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America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

By Anatol Lieven
Oxford University Press, 304 pages, 2004

Reviewed by Gerald Rellick

I first became familiar with the writing of Anatol Lieven in an article he wrote for the London Review of Books in October 2002 entitled “The Push for War.” It came at a disturbing time in America, as the Bush administration was ratcheting up its Iraq war rhetoric. Lieven was able to capture the mood and sense of the illogic that drove the Bush people, and much of the country, in very lucid and forceful prose that I found both illuminating and refreshing.

Now, more than two years later, after what has been clearly a period of very thorough research, Lieven, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, has put it all together in a superb book, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism -- and it could hardly come at a more meaningful time, as America still struggles to regain its footing after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

With its wealth of economic and military power, what is it exactly that such a great nation should do in the face of this unorthodox challenge to its own security? One bleak answer, evident from the recent presidential election, is for America to flirt with a more authoritarian style of government, a government more belligerent toward those who disagree with it, including its own citizens, and a government intent on projecting its raw military power in the most unsubtle of forms. This certainly has an appeal to the more macho of Americans; but to those more thoughtful about the calibrated and wise use of American power, it is deeply disturbing.

Central to Lieven’s analysis of the factors that drive current U.S. thinking and U.S. policy is the idea that the American experience has produced a distinctly unique form of nationalism. Lieven captures it well when he writes, “American culture historically has embodied a strong strain of isolationism . . . which should not be understood simply as a desire to escape from the world.” Rather, “ forms another face of both American chauvinism and American messianism, in the form of a belief in America as a unique city on a hill.” As such, America feels duty bound to be in absolute control “and must under no circumstances subject itself to foreign control or even advice.”

Another concept that is key to understanding America’s perception of uniqueness is the “American Creed,” described by Lieven as, “the set of democratic, legal and individualistic beliefs and principles on which the American state and constitution is founded.” He adds, “The sense of Creedal civic nationalism and belief in the value of the Creed for America and humanity are perhaps the only things on which Pentecostalists in Texas and gays in San Francisco can agree.” But a closer look reveals that the Creed is but a thin veneer over a menacing American mythology that drives the real American psyche, manifest in much of America’s down side -- its sense of exceptionalism and innocence, its messianism, and very strikingly to many perhaps, Americas sense of conformism. Lieven quotes Alexis de Tocqueville on his now-famous visit to the U.S. in the late 1800s: “I know of no country where there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.”

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http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=991

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1. Lieven quotes Alexis de Tocqueville

Lieven quotes Alexis de Tocqueville on his now-famous visit to the U.S. in the late 1800s:

“I know of no country where there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.”

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This is the fly in the American ointment, and the creeping essence of the impending fall. Freedom is as Freedom does.