It had to be the French....though I wouldn't go as far as calling them intellectuals.
Cheese-eating, surrender-monkeys has a much better ring to it..
"The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing"
There are no intellectual origins of America-Bashing, just moronic origins.
But by the mid-1860's, when Marx wrote Capital, it was already becoming apparent that this set of events was at least delayed if not outright invalid. By the time Baran wrote his thesis it was so glaringly wrong that something had to be done to preserve it, and that Baran did by proposing that the immiserization had been distributed to the developing world, not, incidentally, in the least Marxian in that the newly immiserated were not the industrial proletariat.
There was another turn in the plot in the French academe in the 1960's when such luminaries as Foucault proposed that Marxian power relationships between economic classes were, in fact, prevalent between classes described by ethnicity, sexual preference, gender, sanity, nearly anything but economics so long as the Marxian "class consciousness" was retained, and sometimes despite the fact that it wasn't.
Marxism's true roots were always sociological rather than philosophical, historical, or economic, and by the time of Foucault practical Marxism had been systematically stripped of nearly everything but. Though yet another twist its remnants found a home in post-modernism, with the latter's heavy emphasis on dialectical and textual analysis and its distillation of modern thought into a form of quasi-literary criticism. None of this is what Marx had in mind; indeed, if his reactions to similar heresies during his lifetime are any guide, he would have exploded.
This analysis is brought to you by the letters N and V.
First off, check out my handle. Yes, I am in fact a visiting liberal. I understand that most of you won't agree with me on many ideological issues, and vice versa. I peruse Free Republic to get an idea of how conservatives think, because I honestly believe we should try to understand one another better.
That being said, this particular article inspired me to comment for the first time. I see the term "America-Bashing" used regularly in reference to liberals, and it honestly confuses me.
I love America. I grew up here, I've lived here all my life, and I wouldn't choose to live anywhere else unless I absolutely had to. But this doesn't - at least for me - equate to loving the government of America, or its policies. To me, love of America means supporting it when it's in the right, and correcting this country when it veers off course.
When the American revolution happened, this country's first patriots knew what it meant to love the British people and hate the British government. The first Americans basically were British, and thought of themselves as such. But the government had become too greedy, too powerful, too overbearing, and was punished for it.
We have a better system of punishing the government now. We remove our officials from office peacefully during elections. If they are criminal while in office, we remove them immediately and put them in jail. We replace them with, hopefully, better people. But we aren't beholden to them... They are beholden to us.
Now, it happens that you and I disagree on who in our current government are worthy individuals and who are not. We also strongly disagree on current foreign policy. You believe we are largely on the right course, while I believe we are not.
But what in that leads you to believe I actually hate America? Does a mother who corrects her child's misbehavior hate her child? No. She does it not despite her love, but because of it.
Disagree with me all you want... Disagreement is one thing that makes America great. But don't accuse me of hating my country.
I can see why the Muslim Arabs like this theory - it says their failure isn't their fault. Then they use the USA as a scapegoat.
This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the context of a class war within a society an actual civil war between different classes of one and the same society, and not between different nations on different continents.
Which explains the fanaticism of the leftist mania for immigration. They are importing a proletariat to make that confrontation local, and the inevitable confrontation will be terrible because it will be racial: between a largely white ruling class and a non-white working class. In fact, because modern capitalism is seen as a white phenomenon the mere presence of these non-white immigrants is considered to be revolutionary since it is in and of itself destructive of the culture that nutures capitalism.
Bump for later
Actually, as far as internal America-bashing goes, we inherited a lot of it from the British. There's a reason that Koko's little list (in Mikado) includes an entry for 'All those who praise with enthusiastic tone/Every century but this and every country but their own.'
American success is a contradiction of almost every leftish principle, but American republicanism has been rejected by both left and right since our Revolution.
Nice summation, moral immaturity are the two most succinct words to describe those on the left and their infantile trust in government.
God Bless America