The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing

Hoover Institution's Policy Review Online ^ | Dec '02 | Lee Harris

[baseball_fan]

snip...

America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.

This is the specter that is haunting the world today. Indeed, one may even go so far as to argue that this America is the fundamental organizing principle of the left as it exists today: To be against America is to be on the right side of history; to be for it is to be on the wrong side.

But let’s pause to ask a question whose answer the America-bashers appear to assume they know: What is the right side of history at this point in history?

...snip

[baseball_fan]

The article portrays the left's irresponsible ideological fantasy of moral superiority so the dangerous trend of America-bashing can be thoroughly discredited.

[lovecraft]

Origins Of America-Bashing?

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..

[vetsvette]

"The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing"

There are no intellectual origins of America-Bashing, just moronic origins.

[dhs12345]

Oh, but watch out if you "bash" something that the left likes. Then you find out how intolerant they are.

[mmercier]

Too bad we have to build walls to keep all those bastards who hate us out.

In the good old days their dictators would build walls to keep them in.

America is hated because we freed the individual and made the government subservient to the desire of the governed. Some people still need their royal blood lines and rule by (their) arbitrary decree.

Their walls failed and the peasants revolt, why not have generational hatred for those who planted the idea that ruined their good thing.

[ncountylee]

"Dario Fo, the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, put it in a notorious post-September 11 email"

“The great speculators [of American capitalism] wallow in an economy that every years kills tens of millions of people with poverty [in the Third World] — so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre [of 9-11], this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”

[dhs12345]

Let me guess, he is a fan of Communism -- that killed 60 million people.

[ncountylee]

Let me guess, he is a fan of Communism -- that killed 60 million people.

Yep but over 100 million dead.

[MitchellC]

There are no intellectual origins of America-Bashing, just moronic origins.

I don't think the author meant "intellectual" in a good way.

[dhs12345]

I read that it was higher that 60 million but never had any stats to prove it. It is difficult to get an exact number since Communism was and still is very closed.

[Billthedrill]

This is an older article, I believe, or an extraction from a longer work by the same author. This is not necessarily the root of America-bashing but it is definitely a description of the first odd turn Marxism took to explain away the clearly invalid predictions in the Manifesto Of The Communist Party that were turning up even during Marx's lifetime. The "immiserization" process included features that were measurably incorrect, including increasing illiteracy on the part of the proletariat, increasing "alienation" caused by falling wages, decreasing employment, and the one cited by the author, falling profits. This was predicted in 1848 by Marx - the Manifesto, despite being credited to both he and Engels, was nearly entirely Marx - and was not all that unbelievable given the social turmoil of the late industrial revolution and the revolutionary atmosphere of 1848.

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.

[An Old Marine]

Let me guess, he is a fan of Communism -- that killed 60 million people.

COrrection - probably closer to 210 million

[dhs12345]

I figured it was higher. But didn't have any reference to the higher number.

Figured Mao killed more. Of course, no one will ever know for sure how many died.

[rightwinggoth]

This analysis is brought to you by the letters N and V.

[Visiting Liberal]

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.

[headsonpikes]

So I take it that you didn't actually read the article, which is an analysis of the Marxist response to the failure of Marx's essential thesis - that the constant squeeze on the bottom line caused by competitive enterprise would force capitalists to immiserate the working class to such a degree that revolution becomes inevitable.

No immiseration - no revolution. No revolution - no socialism.

Thence the move to condemning America as the immiserator of the world.

So as an itinerant 'liberal', are you for or against that analysis?

[RoadTest]

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.

[rogue yam]

But don't accuse me of hating my country.

Or else what?

[jordan8]

The first part of this article can be summed up like this: capitalism has produced such obvious benefits for workers in the West that it made Marxist theory implausible and unlikely to come true, so to continue the fantasy of Marxist inevitable victory they had to shift the victimization to the third world. This is sufficient setup for the last part of the article which attempts to show that this third-world theory is unlikely to produce revolutionary change since there is no direct contact, much less confrontation, between exploited and exploiter. This is all well and good as far as it goes, but it avoids examining the explicitly racial nature of this new Marxism. It isn't just capitalist exploiting labor, it's white exploiting non-white, and white countries exploiting non-white countries. (It is telling that Japan, long the world's 2cnd largest economy seldom gets this sort of criticism.) As long as conservatives remain too cowardly to confront that reality, central to the political struggles going on today, they are doomed to lose

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.