American Nationalism

Anatol Lieven has an interesting book about American nationalism called America Right or Wrong. He says,

America enjoys more global power than any previous state. It dominates the world not only militarily, but also to a great extent culturally (p.1).

Despite this reality, many Americans are frustrated and angry. Lieven explains that they hold deep-rooted beliefs that often conflict with each other, and also with reality.

Most believe that Christian faith has made America great. Yet...

The religious beliefs of large sections of this core population are under constant, daily threat from modern secular culture, above all the mass media.

The extreme tension between fundamentalist religious values and the modern America mass culture, which now surrounds them is an important cause of the mood of beleaguered hysteria on the American right, which so bewilders outside observers (p.9).

Wealth

A “moral economy” prevailed for most of American history, whereby a man who worked hard, was honest and did not drink or take drugs could be assured of a steadily rising income, enough to support himself and his wife in their old age and go give his children a head start in social advancement through education (p.219).

Unfortunately, this seems to have stopped working.

Perhaps of equal importance in the long term will be the relative decline in recent decades in the real incomes of the American middle classes where these groups are situated socially.

This decline has had the effect of forcing more and more women to work, thereby undermine traditional family structures even among those groups most devoted to them (p.9).

Goodness

Like European imperialists of the past, Americans genuinely see their country’s national interests as coterminous with goodness, civilisation, progress and all the interests of humanity (p.28).

This belief in American innocence, of “original sinlessness” is both very old and very powerful. It plays a tremendously important role in strengthening American nationalism and in diminishing the nation’s willingness to listen to other countries, viewed in their turn as originally sinful (p.53).

Other nations are declared to be irrationally, incorrigibly and unchangeably hostile. This being so, it is obviously pointless to seek compromises with them or try to accommodate their interests and views. And because they are irrational and barbarous, America is free to dictate to them or even conquer them for their own good. (p.17).

Openness
Americans believe they are an open nation, welcoming refugees. Yet the long-standing tendency in American culture and politics reflects an expression of social economic, ethnic and above all racial anxieties.

These anxieties stem from the progressive loss of control over society by the “original” White Angle-Saxon and Scots Irish populations, later joined by others. Connected to these concerns are class anxieties.

In America, the supremely victorious nation of the modern age, large numbers of American feel defeated. The domestic anxieties this feeling of defeat generates spill over into their attitudes to the outside world, with 64 percent of Americans in 2002 agreeing that “our way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence”.

These fears help gives many American nationalists their curiously embittered, mean-spirited and defensive edge, so curiously at variance with America’s image and self-image as a land of success, openness, wealth and generosity. Over the years, the hatred generated by this sense of defeat and alienation has been extended to both domestic and foreign enemies.

Unfulfilled dream

This sense of America not just as an unfilled dream or vision, but also as a country with a national mission, is absolutely central to the American national indemnity and forms the core of the nation’s faith in its own “exceptionalism”. It was inscribed on the Republic’s Great Seal as America’s birth as a united nation Novus Ordo Seclorum: A New Order for the Ages (p.33).

Informally, an important part of the creed is also the belief that the United States embodies and exemplifies the only model of successful modernity in general: “Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind”.

The myths attendant on the Creed include a very widespread belief that the United States is exceptional in its allegiance to democracy and freedom, and is therefore exceptionally good. And because America is exceptionally good it both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot use its power for evil ends. The American Creed is therefore a key foundation of belief in America’s innate innocence (p.49).