Understanding America (By an Australian "Intellectual")

The Centre for Independent Studies ^ | April 3, 2002 | Owen Harries

[Timesink]

Understanding America

Owen Harries

CIS Lecture presented at ABN AMRO, Sydney, April 3, 2002

We all know America, don’t we? While we may confess to ignorance about Japan or Russia, or even France—all those impossibly difficult languages apart from anything else—we are confident that we know America. It is, as they say, everyone’s second country.

We have seen perhaps a thousand American movies, from Clark Gable to Gwyneth Paltrow. We have seen hundreds of American sit-coms. We know the words of dozens of American popular songs, most of the better ones written, incidentally, by first or second generation immigrants from eastern Europe. We have read Hemmingway and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Bellow and Updike. We have a common language, more or less, and by now we are even familiar with American idiom and regional accents.

We know the American landscape about as well as we know our own: the prairies, the Manhattan skyline, the white spires and fall colours of New England, those dangerous small towns of the Deep South-to some degree they are all part of our inner landscape. So are episodes from America’s recent history: the assassination of John Kennedy, the protest marches and Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, Clinton solemnly lying to the camera, and now the terrible images of those aircraft flying into the World Trade Center on September 11.

Yes, we all know America. The trouble is that many of the things we know are not true, or are only partly true, or are true only in a very particular sense.

One of the things we know is that, by Australian standards, and by British and European as well, Americans are brashly and complacently self-confident, over addicted to self promotion and boasting, ‘full of themselves’ as we would say. Yes, up to a point. Yet it is also true that Americans are the most self-critical people on earth. Everything bad we know about America-its crime and its excessive punishment, its corruption, its graft, its racial tensions, its inane political correctness, its vulgar excesses-we know because Americans have told us about them.

Relentlessly washing its dirty linen in public is an American specialty-though, unlike much Australian self-denigration, it does not usually take the form of simply knocking, nor of a wallowing in guilt, as in the ‘I am ashamed to be an Australian’ litany that we have been subjected to so much in recent months. It is in my experience more discriminating, more measured and better informed. Americans are seriously and pragmatically dedicated to self-correction.

And their optimistic self-confidence is often seriously qualified. In 1988, for example, when the United States was on the verge of winning the Cold War, two books that were at the top of the best seller list were Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which predicted American overextension and decline, and Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a withering  critique of the American cultural scene. Four years later, when the United States had actually won the Cold War, and when it was already being widely accused of arrogance and ‘triumphalism’, the leading  New York magazine, Commentary, was running a lengthy two-part symposium under the title, ‘Is America On The Way Down?’ Many of the contributors, in the main conservative intellectuals not the alienated left, thought it was. Not much complacency or arrogance there.

Take another thing that we ‘know’ about America: that it is a ‘young country’, usually with the connotation that it is immature and naïve in its ways, especially in comparison with an old, more mature and more sophisticated Europe (not to speak of China). To take a typical example, James Callaghan, a one time British prime minister and not normally a silly man, once loftily declared that ‘Europeans have a better understanding of the complexities of the present world difficulties than the United States.’ This air of patronising superiority towards America’s alleged naivety and innocence is by no means confined to the political Left; there is a well-established tradition of right wing anti-Americanism in Europe.

The fact is, though, that the United states is an older country than Germany, Italy, and a dozen other European states, not to speak of Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia. It is the oldest extant democracy on earth, the oldest republic, and the oldest federal system-as well as the largest, most complex, most open and most tested (something that one might not readily have grasped from the facile attempt to ridicule and patronise America during the last disputed presidential election).  Consider that during the time that this supposedly young country has existed, France, that epitome of European sophistication, has gone through five different republics, two emperors, two monarchies, and a puppet regime. How sophisticated can you get.

Intellectually, too, the rest of the world is in no position to patronise the United States-though, of course, much of it does. The best American universities-Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Princeton-are easily the best in the world. And there is a social club on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington-the Cosmos Club-whose members, over the years, have won many more Nobel prizes than has the whole of Asia (28 the last time I counted the names on its wall).

A third thing that we-or some of us-‘know’ about America is that while it is great at handling success and triumph, it is an uncertain quantity-at best untried, at worse very suspect-when it comes to adversity and setbacks. The American temperament as a nation is considered suspect: they have had it easy, have been blessed with so many advantages, that they are not really conditioned, not tempered, to handle bad times well. Their stamina and resilience are questionable. True or false?

Well, it might be worth beginning by observing that American prosperity is comparatively recent.  Whatever its merits and demerits, the frontier experience was not a soft one. At the beginning of the last century, Australia’s per capita income was higher than America’s. As late as 1930, 50 million Americans—44% of the total population—still lived rural lives. Almost none of them had electricity and 45 million had no indoor plumbing.

At the same time tens of millions of recent immigrants lived in overcrowded, unsanitary Jewish ghettoes, Little Italys, and Little Polands, couldn’t speak English, and worked 12 or more hours a day in sweat shops and on assembly lines. Things were so hard for the migrants that a large proportion of them-nearly a third of the Poles, about half the Italians, more than half the Greeks-returned home. America’s affluence, as a general condition, is quite a recent, post World War II, phenomenon.

As for coping with adversity, one could say of America what was said of the 19^th century English statesman, William Ewart Gladstone: that, after a setback, he was tremendously formidable on the rebound. The United States has faced three great crises in the last 150 years: the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the upheaval and turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. In each case it came back from adversity rapidly and with tremendous force.

In the Civil War, America suffered over 600,000 deaths-more than it has suffered in all the other wars before and since combined. A large part of the country-particularly the South-was utterly devastated. Yet in less than a decade after the end of the war, America had entered into an age of tremendous growth-the so-called Gilded Age-and in the course of a generation had transformed itself from an overwhelmingly agrarian country into a great industrial state, first challenging and then, around about 1890, surging past Britain and Germany.

In the 1930s the United States, along with the rest of the industrial world, suffered the Great Depression—a depression of such severity that the prevailing wisdom among western intellectuals was that capitalism and liberal democracy were finished and  destined to be replaced soon, either peacefully or violently, by some form of socialism. Yet by the middle of the next decade the United States had fought and won a great war, had emerged as the leading power on earth, and had entered into a long period of unprecedented prosperity.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States experienced huge turmoil: the Civil Rights movement, the student protest movement, a social and moral revolution, defeat in Vietnam, and a political crisis that unseated a president. Predictions of inevitable decline were widespread. Yet again, within 15 years the United States had emerged victorious from the Cold War, was the sole remaining superpower, and enjoyed a political, economic, and military dominance that in the opinion of most judges is unprecedented in recorded history.

Not a bad record for a country whose toughness and ability to handle adversity are regularly questioned.

A last item in this list of things we confidently know about America, and the most important for my purpose tonight, is the belief that it is the most materialistic of countries. The United States virtually invented modern consumerism, and the American people are notorious for their insatiable appetite for the acquisition of material goods and for conspicuous consumption. Again all true as far as it goes. And don’t we and other Western people enjoy ridiculing and scolding these American excesses-though it has to be said that, once given the chance, we ourselves have not exactly proved backward as consumers.

But the real point to make here-and in terms of what I shall go on to argue, it is very important-is that as well as being the most materialistic, of modern western countries, the United States is certainly the most idealistic. In the first place, it is the most religious, not only in the sense of believing in God but of actually going to church regularly. While in much of the West religion is dying and churches are neglected and being turned into bingo halls or keep-fit centres, in the United States they thrive.

But religion apart, in the secular sense too, this most materialistic of countries is also the most idealistic. This to the extent that over the last 200 years it has regularly been asserted that America and Americans are to be defined by an idea.

Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke of a nation ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition’. He spoke of reverence for the laws as ‘the political religion of the nation’. As the writer Robert Penn Warren put it, ‘To be an American is not . . . a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea-and [its] history is the image of that idea.’

Another writer, Theodore White: ‘Americans are not a people like the French, Germans or Japanese, whose genes have been mixing with kindred genes for thousands of years. Americans are held together only by ideas.’

Many non-Americans have agreed. G. K. Chesterton maintained that ‘America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.’ And Margaret Thatcher has contrasted European nations, as the products of history, with the United States, as the product of a philosophy.

And so on and on. Now it would be very easy to dismiss all this as hyperbole, or hypocrisy. It is certainly true that America is many things as well as an idea—a history; a set of customs and traditions; various institutions, political and otherwise; and, as we have become increasingly aware, a complex of power and interests. But ideas are a very important-an exceptionally important-part of the whole, and to the extent that Americans believe that these ideas are central to its identity and acts accordingly, it has important consequences.

I want to say something about two of those consequences, one internal and one external.

Insofar as Americans rejected the belief in a nationalism of blood and soil-the sense in which nationalism was mainly understood in its European heyday, and still is in places like Croatia and Serbia-and instead put ideas centre stage, it made the country very receptive of immigrants. The Economist magazine once put it this way:

America is an immigrant’s land, open to anyone of any race or culture who accepts the ideas of the European Enlightenment on which it was founded. Provided the ideas remained intact, an America populated with Martians would still be America.

There has been, in other words, a minimal and accessible qualification to becoming an American: adopt the creed and you are in. This has made it possible for the United States not only to absorb huge numbers of people, but to alter the composition of its population radically, without major disruption.

There have been three stages. From the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until just before the Civil War in the 1860s, the United States was a country of Anglo-Saxon stock and Protestant religion. The population was overwhelmingly of British origin. By the very end of this period, increasing numbers of Irish and Germans started to come, driven by famine and political upheaval at home, but the Anglo-Protestant character still easily predominated.

Just before the Civil War there began a period of massive immigration, reaching its peak in the period 1890 to 1914, when-as its industrial economy was making gigantic leaps-the United States was absorbing people at the rate of a million a year. Only a small proportion of these was Anglo-Saxon. They were overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, Slav and Jewish. Their religions were Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish. In the course of a few decades America was transformed from an Anglo-American Protestant society into a multidenominational Euro-American society. By 1920 the percentage of Americans of British origin was down to 40% and still falling rapidly.

These were the years of the famous ‘melting pot’ and of the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, with its eloquent lines, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free’. A policy of assimilation was energetically applied, and it was belief in the creed and institutions of liberal democracy that provided the glue to make a nation of these disparate elements.

[Timesink]

I'm sorry, but just what is your definition of screed?

screed (skrd)
n.

1. A long monotonous speech or piece of writing.

As you can see, it was so long it took me three posts for the FR software to even accept it. Therefore, screed. The term carries no inherent negative context.

MikeK, Multitaskmom, I'm sorry you misinterpreted the word. GuillermoX, you can blow YOUR obnoxious holier-than-thou lies out your ass.

[Brian Allen]

My mate, Barry Humphries, may very well be Australia's defining intellectual. Although John Singleton is a pretty darn stimulating dinner companion, too.

[JSteff]

re#12: I think part of the reason they are is because they share so much with us. Huge land mass seperated from others by oceans, started from basically a hodge podge of cast offs, original primary ties to a relatively democratized intelligent country- England.

They also have that same "cut from the frontier" spirit and attitude. There can not be more like them from around the world because the "seeds and the soil" are different for any other countries than our's.

What that they were not so geographically isolated they would have been even more similar in population, GDP, and power to us. It is nice though to have them as our friend and allie, probably the best we have.

[untenured]

This is a great read. I winced at some of his observations, mostly because the criticisms of friends are the ones that cut the deepest. For whatever they are worth, here are my thoughts:

1. We are a nation founded on an idea, and a remarkable and fundamentally moral one at that -- that the only hope for human dignity lies in the recognition that each individual is fit to run his own life.

We have on numerous occasions betrayed that idea, but reminding us of that has always been a powerful tool to change how we behave. (Think of the strident arguments against colonization of the Philippines and Cuba, driven in part by the knowledge that as Americans we had no alternative, or the way MLK used the very words of the Revolutionary documents against his adversaries.)

I have inveighed against American tribalism and multiculturalism on this forum many times. The reason is that I believe that its intellectual foundation - that no idea is particularly good - is dangerous and a fundamental threat to the original American idea, which is the best the world has yet seen. Once tribe becomes the most lucrative way to define yourself vis-a-vis the government, the incentive to define yourself around tribe rather than the other components of your identity becomes overwhelming. More self-emphasis on tribe leads to more tribal politics, which leads to more self-emphasis on tribe, ad infinitum.

I am not sure our grand American idea can survive the postmodern zeitgeist, with its evil multicultural spawn. On that question hangs whether or not a constitution or idea can in fact make a nation.

2. We are a nation that criticizes itself loudly, and learns from its self-criticism. I believe this to be an immense strength. Anyone who thinks that Americans are slavishly obedient to whatever the government or the marketers say really does not know us. The essence of critical thought is not rebellion against the dominant idea, but a willingness to change your mind. In comparison to other peoples I believe we do extremely well on that score. (I am reminded of that soldier in, I think, Tora Bora who improvised on the spot to wipe out a group of Al Qaeda who, under the original battle plan, were not only surviving but actually taunting him.)

3. The realignment of nations to confront hegemonic dominance is an old story. While modernity makes this kind of disruption costlier than before, we would be foolish to assume we are immune to this.

4. Are terrorists "elusive"? Not so far. The combined persuasiveness of our military might and the global economy it undergirds may yet, I hope, persuade nations of the nature of the evil that we face. Combined with the effects on the terrorists themselves, persuading nations of the evil will be sufficient to triumph over this particular evil, I now believe.

4. Ah yes, evil. We do, like the cornpone rubes M. Vedrine thinks we are, happen to think that there is in fact good and evil in the world, and that good should triumph. Only the Anglo-Saxon nations (or at least their governments) seem to share this view, but it is what makes us tick.

5. We are not a nation institututionally built for hegemony. The national-security apparatus that reached full flower during the Cold War is a tremendous burden on our liberties. But now, the jihadists have made it essential for at least the immediate future. I have for years felt that with the collapse of totalitarian communism the U.S. should mind its own business. But history has placed us in this spot, and even if we closed every overseas military base tomorrow the jihadist fanatics would still want to annihilate us, because as the absent-minded avatars of modernism we -- whether as McDonald's, as the First Amendment, or as a refutation (for now) in our everyday lives of the notion that tribe is everything -- represent a direct threat to their ability to control how others live. I hope that we can triumph over this particular evil quickly and easily, so that I can feel comfortable again working for a downsizing of the rule U.S. role in the world.

But only God knows how that will turn out. In the meantime, we must play the hand that we have been dealt.

[untenured]

"(Think of the strident arguments against colonization of the Philippines and Cuba, driven in part by the knowledge that as Americans we had no alternative, business building an empire, or the way MLK used the very words of the Revolutionary documents against his adversaries.)

Sorry, that made no sense as it was written.

eddie, it seems as though you and I see it pretty much the same way.

[tpaine]

-- I too was struck by the authors confused conclusion about our constitutional ideal. [I edited a bit for clarity] :

The United States opted for multiculturalism, for the conclusion was that as long as everyone accepted the civil/political order they should be free to keep their own cultures.
-- I believe it is worth considering a critique of this multicultural conclusion that has been made in the United States.
-- It has been well stated by Michael Lind: 'By making political idealism—and only political idealism—the  thing that connects diverse Americans, cultural pluralists and democratic universalists put a burden on the American political tradition it cannot bear. A constitution is not a country; an idea is not a nation.'

-- I disagree with this critique totally.
-- We had better restore exactly these constitutional ideals, - and ignore our cultural diversities, - or this nation will not survive.

These ideals, -- that regardless of what your neighbor looks like, plays or prays to;
-- that as long as he obeys the rule of constitutional law, --he is an american, -- cannot be seen as a 'burden'.
They are the very cornerstone of our republic. They have worked for two hundred years.

The idea that our constitution can be ignored, that its ideals are not an intristic part of our nation, these are the reason for our current problems, - not 'multiculturalism'.

[dread78645]

The only factual error I saw in there was describing the USA as "the oldest democracy extant". Iceland or Switzerland would be on line for that honor, depending on the definition of democracy.

Iceland was under the Dane monoarchy until 1874 and became a republic in 1944.

And as you said "depending on the definition of democracy", I'd suggest the UK, Switzerland, and maybe Portugal are older than the US.

The 19th and 20th centuries were brutal to dictators and the aristocrats.

[old blue beemer]

((( ping )))

[maxwellp]

What do I, as an American, think. They are long-winded.

[Restorer]

And as you said "depending on the definition of democracy", I'd suggest the UK, Switzerland, and maybe Portugal are older than the US.

The UK didn't approximate an American-style electorate till Disraeli's reforms (1870s(?)).

Switzerland is made up of semi-independent cantons. Some were run by aristocratic or oligarchic groups till well into the 20th century.

Portugal was ruled by a semi-fascist dictatorship from 1910-1975.

[Mike K]

"screed (skrd)

n. A long monotonous speech or piece of writing."

Yup, my bad. And here I thought my vocabulary was up to snuff. You're right though, screed always held negative connotations for me.

[Eagle74]

I seldom agree with Poohbah, but this is indeed an outstanding and generally fair characterization of our own national self-image. And he has the right of it as to the portents of our current trend of having to go it alone. But I guess I am not afraid to try if that is our fate. We have a nation to protect, and the very idea of individual liberty to uphold.

I agree, a sound analysis of America. He even identifys the risky nature of our present response, as well as the fact that we could have responded in no other way. The future will see if we can meet the challenges those risks demand, as the US always has before, or finally go down in flames as so many powers have be for us.

[newwahoo]

Bttt for an interesting read. It seems to reflect what Kissinger wrote about in his book "Diplomacy". The constant struggle in American foreign policy between our idealism and our realism.

Which makes me wonder if ol' Owen pulled a Doris Kearns Goodwin on this one.

[Eagle74]

While I feel this is a sound analysis of America, a number of points were incomplete or hollow.

First, his point on multiculturalism, ignored the huge loss of support for this position in recent years.

Second, he places blame for america's failure to go hide in a hole, partly on the military, diplomatic, industrial complex's unwillingness to give up turf. How he can say that, when funding for the Defense and Intelligence complex has declined since the cold war, I don't know. Especially when the loss of funding and strength, are probably what allowed the 911 attack to succeed.

Third, his worry that a world wide coallition will form against the US. Excuse me! Isn't that what the UN is. Also, he mentions how many scholars are saying their may never have been a more dominate power in human history. While believing the debating society, the anti-american coallition is, could ever agree on any unified response(talk about impotent). Europeans couldn't even deal with the problems in Yugoslavia(their own back yard), how are they a factor. The Arabs can't unite to do anything as the recent arab summit proved. Lip service is all any anti-american coallition will ever achieve. World opinion must take a back seat to moral princple, and the american people as the only self critical people on earth, will decide what that is.

While I think the author is sound in his historical analysis. His analysis of recent history, and future projections are very flawed, and exibit an australian bias. By that I mean, he sees a threats to australia in multiculturalism and US power and so argues against them. His case for the US, to not throw it's weight around, is that a coallition will form against it. He states that coallitions formed against other great powers, without providing reasons why it will happen again. All I think he sees, is that if the US is overwhelmingly dominate, then Australia must be less so.

[Drew68]

bump to read later

[brat]

"after World War II, they were in balance; after the third conflict, the Cold War, they have to very considerable extent merged to produce a kind of oxymoron: a crusading realism, Wilsonianism with muscle."....er, its more to the point that the realists have been pushed into the corners. After 911 though, the realists are coming out fighting. They may very well save our land from the globalism that is trying to absorb it. 911 may be the best thing thats happened to this country in a very long time.

[BJClinton]

Future reading bump, great article.

[Southack]

"Rosemary Righter, chief leader write of the London Times, has observed recently that ‘America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Vietnam’-and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East, but of London and Paris and Berlin..."

Children often criticize the teacher and students often mock the coach. They still remain childish, however.

Likewise, the arrogant psuedo-intellectuals in Europe would do well to remember that the U.S. can do without them, doesn't have to listen to them, and can pull our military out of their nations in a single night. The ensuing vaccum from said military departure would drain Billions in Euro-funds and leave Putin as the most powerful Euro-leader.

In short, the Euro's had better start behaving lest we show them that we still understand how to dish out corporal punishment to our misbehaving children...

[LadyDoc]

...by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behavior—is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards her.

By making restraint and moderation impossible? Heck, we could have nuked Afghanistan and Bagdad and be done with it but we didn't. But no one noticed that or thought it was restraint.

It's like the Palastinians in the Nativity church: they know that Israel will not blow them and the church up. However, Palastinians applaud blowing up a bunch of civilians celebrating a religious seder, which essentially is worse, since it was the equivalent of shooting people at a church service.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

The author's conclusion is dead wrong.