PA G E
4
AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG
BY BRIAN URQUHART
“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the
cost. As the vice regents o f God, we are to exercise godly
dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools,
our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our
entertainment media, our scientific endeavors — in short, over
every aspect and institution o f human society. ”
~D. JAMES KENNEDY
Pastor o f Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
(co-founder Moral Majority; head of Coral Ridge Ministeries
& “Godfather” o f the Christian Dominion Movement)
For more than two centuries, nationalism in all its various
forms — from the high-minded chauvinism of the British Empire
to the virulent poison of Nazism — has been a familiar, and often
negative, phenomenon. Emerging first in Europe, which it nearly
destroyed and which has now apparently learned to control it,
extreme nationalism still erupts from time to time in other parts
of the world.
The word “nationalism” never quite seemed to fit the
United States, where continental vastness and enormous ppwer
have hitherto been tempered by an often-expressed distaste for
empire and by the notion of world leadership by example. Two
American Presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt,
both sponsored world organizations whose primary objective was
to contain and disperse the aggressive force of nationalism.
In the first years of the 21st century, however, in a
dramatic departure from traditional policy, the spirit of unilateral­
ism and militant nationalism began to dominate Washington’s
policies and attitudes toward the outside world. Reaction to
the attacks of September 11,2001, gave new force and a new
direction to this change. Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong:
An Anatomy of American Nationalism examines the roots of
longstanding American nationalistic tendencies that have given
public support to this fundamental change in United States
policy. As it is already clear from some reactions to his book,
for a foreigner (a Washington-based British journalist), and a
European intellectual at that, this is a courageous, even fool­
hardy, undertaking, but it may well be that an outside observer
can best approach such a sensitive American subject with
candor and objectivity * Lieven is relentlessly candid, and has
produced a remarkably thought-provoking book.
Lieven contrasts the high idealism of American civic
nationalism, the “American Creed" — liberty, constitutionalism,
law, democracy, individualism, and the separation of church and
state — with current hypemationalistic attitudes that influence
both domestic and foreign affairs. His book, Lieven writes,
Should in no sense be read as an attack either on a
reasonable American nationalism or on the war on terrorism
in its original form of a struggle against al Qaeda and its allies.
As I shall argue throughout this book, American civic national­
ism is a central support o f American power and influence in
the world, and has tremendously positive lessons to offer to
humanity.
Lieven maintains that because American-style
free-market liberal democracy has now become ideologically
acceptable in most of the worid, logically the United States
should be “behaving as a conservative hegemon, defending
the existing international order and spreading its values by
example.”
Instead, the George W Bush administration has
attempted to go in the opposite direction. “American power,"
Lieven writes, “in the service of narrow American...nationalism
is an extremely unstable business for hegemony.” Particularly
after 9/11, when there was a chance “to create a concert of all
the world's major states — including Muslim ones — against
Islamist revolutionary terrorism," the Bush administration “chose
instead to pursue the policies which divided the West, further
alienated the Muslim world, and exposed America itself to greatly
increased danger.”
It would be foolish to try to summarize in detail a book
as tightly written and extensively researched as America Right
or Wrong. But on a subject so vitally relevant at the present time,
it is worth outlining some of Lieven’s main ideas. After setting
out what he calls the “American Creed," Lieven examines the
historical roots of its antithesis, a “wounded and vengeful
nationalism.” Irrational hatred, even fear, of the outside world,
combined with an obsessive belief in the treachery of American
"It was designed as a flag, Buddy—not as a blindfold."
B ILL MAULDIN (1969)
“elites" and intellectuals, is not only destructive at home; it also
demeans the traditional idea of a people with a special mission
to help other nations that has been variously described over the
years by many leaders and thinkers. For one example, Lieven
quotes Woodrow Wilson, speaking at the end of World War 1:
“America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and
saving the world." Ironically, it has taken Nature itself, in the
Asian tsunami disaster, to show us once again that only the
United States has the will and the resources — ships bearing
helicopters and a worldwide logistical network — to respond
immediately to such a vast emergency. Can this terrible experi­
ence help revive the reputation of Americans as a people with
a compassionate mission in the world?
The missionary idea is further distorted, Lieven argues,
by the Manichean notion, frequently invoked since September
11, of the struggle between Good — America and those who
unreservedly agree with it — and Evil. “Wherever we carry it,”
George W. Bush told the graduating cadets at West Point in
June 2002, “the American flag will stand not only for our power,
but for freedom." Such rhetoric has not only fueled self-righteous
and nationalist extremism; it has also distracted the United
States from the basic measures needed for a successful
campaign against Islamic terrorism, including the serious pursuit
of peace in the Middle East; and it has badly strained relations
with the outside world. “If we have any sense at all of history,"
Lieven writes, “we should know that our system does not
represent the 'end of history,’ is not divinely ordained, and will
not last forever."
In a chapter entitled “The Embittered Heartland," Lieven
examines the paradox that while much of the world sees the
modem history of America as “an almost uninterrupted chronicle
of success’ (Senator William Fulbright’s words), very large
groups inside the country itself do not see anything of the kind.
Their sense of inherited defeat and humiliation not only poisons
domestic politics but is also an important ingredient in America's
particular form of radical nationalism. Lieven identifies an original
source of this feeling in the fear on the part of the first fundamen­
talist Protestant Anglo-Saxon core of settlers that it was losing its
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control of politics and culture to more recent immigrant groups,
“cosmopolitan elites,” and the like.
The various revolutions of the 1960s — sexual, racial,
feminist, and behavioral — certainly gave a powerful impetus to
this large group's resentment. In our time the “Gingrich Revolu­
tion's call to “take back America" echoes the old battlecry. As
the epitome of such thinking Lieven quotes the French extreme
reactionary Charles Maurras as saying during the 1930s, “In
order to love France today, it is necessary to hate what she
has become." Pride, economic setbacks, and resentment have
bred an intensely conservative and religious culture that is also
intensely nationalistic.
However, Lieven observes, American radical nationalism
unlike similar movements elsewhere, has hitherto shown no clear
impulse to move toward authoritarian rule. Pride in traditional
democratic constitutionalism and in the strength of democratic
culture has always contained any tendency to dictatorship.Time
after time “the demons of American radical nationalism have...
been bound again sooner or later by the power of the American
Creed....Periods of intense nationalism...have been followed by
a return to a more tolerant and pluralist equilibrium."
Lieven writes that while, to the world, American may
epitomize the triumph of modem society in all its forms, it is
“also home to the largest and most powerful forces of conserv­
ative religion in the developed world." He quotes a survey from
2000 which found that white evangelical Protestants made up
23.1% of the population; Catholics, the largest Christian group,
were 27.3%. The first figure is certainly larger now. Fundamen­
talist evangelical beliefs, Lieven argues, are pre-Enlightenment
in origin and anti-Enlightenment in substance. Both modem
science and a rational basis for human discourse are highly
suspect in these circles. Treacherous East Coast liberal and
intellectual elites, atheist Europeans, the godless United Nations,
and others who have proudly embraced the Enlightenment are
particular villains.
Lieven notes that in 1925 there was general mockery
of fundamentalism after the much-publicized Scopes trial
— Samuel Eliot Morrison referred to the trial as part of “19th