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Contents Preface: Graduation Day Introduction: Patriotism and Imperialism Part I. 1630¿1825 1. An Almost Chosen People 2. On the Path to Nationhood 3. An American Republic Part II. 1825¿1912 4. A Democratic Sense of Self 5. National Democratism 6. God¿s New Message in Lincoln¿s America 7. A ¿Reconstructed¿ Nation 8. Robber Baron America 9. America Renewed and Debased Part III. 1912¿2006 10. Premonitions 11. Missed Opportunities 12. Decline and Fall 13. Wars of Religion in Bush¿s America Epilogue Notes Index Preface: Graduation Day It¿s graduation day at the most prestigious law school in the United States: a picturesque and typically American ceremony. These one hundred students are a carefully selected group. Most of them will within years or even months belong to America¿s governing elites. Some in a few weeks will find places on Wall Street: at the age of twenty-five, they will earn more than do university professors at the end of long and brilliant careers. Others have concerns of a very different kind. Here are Ethel Tucker Legaré and Margaret Bryan Thurlowe, both brilliant, both beautiful, both from old southern families. I chat with one of them, the daughter of an ambassador, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and of a seventeenth-century Indian princess, about literature and science; about Oxford and Cambridge; about the Lycée Louis-le-Grand for math, and, for letters, the Lycée Henri IV¿of which she has first-hand knowledge; about Harvard and MIT. These young women are, as Boston Brahmins used to say, ¿perfectly perfect.¿ L¿Amérique est leur patrie. (America is their homeland.) They introduce me to their friend Zora Tanner, an African American born in New York City to a single mother. And next to their friend sits her mother, immensely proud, as she might well be: her daughter¿s success is a fair reward for her lifetime of hard work and sacrifice. L¿Amérique est sa patrie. (America is her homeland.) This brings to my mind an incident in Paris that both surprised and shocked me: a beur, a young Frenchman of Arab descent, had parked his delivery van in such a way that I couldn¿t move my own car forward to unload it. We exchanged words, bantering back and forth, our mood gradually more tense: harsher on the one hand, more demanding and ironical on the other. I ask him: ¿Haven¿t you noticed that I have the right to drive a car through here, whereas you are parked illegally?¿ He explodes: ¿Goddamn France. I could give a shit about your rights.¿ Would an African American speak that way of the United States with an easy conscience? Many would still think ¿I have a dream¿¿a dream invariably frustrated but constantly reborn. Here is Ephrem Immanuel Kaplan, whose philanthropic family has been in the United States for four generations. His branch of the family, to the amazement of their relatives, has just moved to an Israeli settlement in Trans-Jordan. He wears a kippah and earlocks. America is one of his two homelands. And here are Zahiaya Banjeree, Srinivas Nehru Kandaswamy, and Alexandros O¿Brien Papandrenos: America is their homeland. I move on to meet John Bouvier Reeves. He¿s six foot two, with light blond hair and dark blue eyes. He looks like a movie star. His tranquil manner does not conceal a determined certainty. His friends tell me laughingly that he will soon be governor of Iowa, and then, not much later, president of the United States. He smiles, but doesn¿t deny what they say. America is his homeland. And here is Victor McMeekin Weinberg, an activist from Oregon, who is planning to work for a pittance at a London-based NGO. America, he believes, will realize itself fully as a nation only when it puts itself at the service of humanity. As he speaks, I hear in his words the echo of the Fourierists and the Kantian Transcendentalists, those American utopians of the nineteenth century who were fired with those same ideals of truth and justice. We chat about Lincoln¿s Gettysburg Address, that mystical speech of 1863, which Victor knows by heart, and which, more than any other document, explains to America¿s citizens what their country truly is or should be. Did Lincoln, in a sudden flash of inspiration, spontaneously add those two fateful words, ¿under God,¿1 words that abruptly made of a self-centered nation engaged in a destructive civil war an ¿almost chosen people,¿ under the orders of the Lord, a nation whose victories had to be those of good triumphant over evil. Victor is sure of it. I tell him Bismarck¿s joke about the United States, that there really is a God who protects America, but with that special providence which he reserves for drunkards, idiots, and Americans. Victor smiles¿one would be hard-pressed to find a group of young people more polite or more affable¿but, clearly, Bismarck¿s cruel joke does not please him. L¿Amérique est sa patrie. Patricia Isabel Rivera, Winfield Yu, Akira Yamaguchi, Susan Ju Yoon Li: America is their homeland, as America may be, soon, for Ibrahim ben Salah, here on a scholarship from Ramallah. What American generosity allowed this son of that most frustrated and humiliated of peoples to pay for three years of study in this wealthy, and costly, university? We say the United States ¿is,¿ in the singular; but oftentimes we should perhaps say instead (as the early Americans did and as the French still do) that the United States ¿are.¿ It would be unfair and absurd not to acknowledge and recognize the immense good qualities, and the immense variety, of the American people. This book is often critical. At times, it is quite harsh. But that is because its subject is the nature and history of American nationalism, which is a passion that is dark and dangerous. But one could just as well have written a wholly positive history of American philanthropy, American generosity, American medical and scientific research, American universities and museums, American literature and film. And why not, also, a history of American kindness and amiability? Even those Americans whose political ideas are the most violent and ill-informed often are, in their private lives, gentle, open, welcoming people. And how could one not admire, and even love, a patriotic and universalist America, which, in spite of everything, is still alive and well? This book is not intended as a criticism of the day-to-day America as most of us know it experientially: open-minded, welcoming, at the forefront of nearly everything, and, in so many ways, the freest country in the world. Indeed, the book¿s aim is to praise this libertarian America, but it does certainly also aim to criticize the threat to world peace that is posed by the nationalist, reactionary traditions of that America¿s darker twin. Is America today at a turning point for the worse? It often seems so: the gap between an older (and wiser) Europe and an America that carries forward retrograde European religious and economic traditions, which Europe has now left behind, is wide and widening. And so it matters today that all of us, both in America and in the world at large, should be aware of the connections that bind the dark chapters of America¿s past to its darkening present. George W. Bush¿s America is a threat to the world and to itself. The enemy of his administration is not just ¿Old Europe¿ but the welfare of the American people. A natural link exists (and has always existed) between the progressive America of the Enlightenment, of what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, and forward-minded Europe. (There are in Paris a Rue Lincoln, a Rue Benjamin Franklin, an Avenue du Président Wilson, a massive equestrian statue of George Washington, and a Métro station named for Franklin Roosevelt.) After two disastrous twentieth-century world wars, libertarian and historically informed progressive America, like chastened and historically minded Europe, understands that particularist nationalism is the worst and most disastrous of all public passions. But the United States, or rather its leaders in the administration of George W. Bush, refuses to grasp this basic historical truth. We have to hope that Europe today will be the enemy of Bush¿s America, but only insofar as Bush is the enemy of America¿s own libertarian history and its common sense. In consequence, the first purpose of this book is to follow, critically, the course of the ¿American national idea¿ and its occasional propensity to ¿attendant cruelties,¿ not just during the adulthood of the United States as a nation since 1776, but also during its earlier Anglo-American ¿childhood,¿ in a story that stretches from early massacres and enslavement of Native Americans during the 1630s to Bush¿s preemptive and criminal invasion of Iraq. And the second purpose of this book is to chart the other, sunny, tradition of inclusion, which has always been the first characteristic of American life. As Walter Lippmann put it in his Essays in the Public Philosophy of 1955: ¿Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned.¿ It is with that idea in mind that I write this book. The richness and the fruitful ambiguities of America¿s national antecedents allow us still¿though with growing difficulty it is true¿to suppose that United States remains the western nation that has the best chance of being worthy of its universalist, republican, patriotic and pacific, ideational past. It may still be that Americans can rediscover, in Lincoln¿s words, those ¿mystic chords of memory¿ that link its present to its inclusive, universalist past and to the Declaration of Independence, that ¿American Scripture,¿2 with its central message of national becoming and enlightened tolerance. As Lincoln, again, said in December 1862, America may still be ¿the last best hope of earth.¿ Introduction: Patriotism and Imperialism Americans love their country. They feel it has a mission, as befits, in Lincoln¿s words, again, ¿an almost chosen people.¿1 But less obvious to them (and us) is what their almost divine mission is all about; and why they tend to believe that America¿s historical experience is an example that every other nation will want to follow or must be made to follow.2 For many, like Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the message has been that America should be open to the world because it is the best hope of humankind. But others have imagined it instead to be primarily industrious and modernizing, as did Jefferson¿s contemporary Alexander Hamilton. (Calvin Coolidge surely had that tradition in mind when he said that the business of America was just that: business.) Moreover, these different views align and realign themselves in unexpected ways.3 Hamilton was opposed to slavery, while Jefferson was convinced that African Americans¿including, or so we must suppose, the children he had by Sally Hemings, his African-American mistress, slave, and sister-in-law, were hopelessly handicapped from birth. And as regards their national character, many Americans have imagined their nation to be simultaneously pragmatic and idealistic, or generous and fierce, as was their greatest statesman, Abraham Lincoln, during their terrible civil war: typically, Theodore Roosevelt¿himself a puzzlingly divided person¿described Lincoln as ¿the great example of sane and temperate radicalism.¿4 Two themes, however, have from earliest times structured¿and remarkably enough, still structure¿this American, and, as shall be seen, divided but durable discursive sense of self, which has proved uniquely impervious to massive material changes of many kinds. The more consequential of the two has been the importance in American life of religion and of its many derivatives: messianism; moralism; and an often unfocused yearning for transcendence. Today 96 percent of Americans say that they believe in God; 80 percent believe in the existence of the devil; in 2002, more than 20 percent thought that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had been predicted in the Bible.5 Most of them go to church at least once a month; and most of them by far claim to have a particular relationship to God. American religion seeps through the entire fabric of ¿Americanness.¿ It is with good cause that a recent commentator has observed that religion is one of the most pervasive but least understood forces in American history.6 As Gary Wills puts it: ¿Religion has been at the center of our major political crises, which are always moral crises¿the supporting and opposing of wars, of slavery, of corporate power, of civil rights, of sexual codes, of ¿the West,¿ of American separatism and claims of empire.¿7 A long list which could also be extended to include America¿s understanding of its material success: How could God not want to reward those who are truly worthy? In America, divine providence has been ceaselessly invoked, even when¿or perhaps especially when¿the nation¿s blind violence has taken an unusually violent turn, with atomic bombs, agent orange, the Trail of Tears, or Sherman¿s march to the sea. In the American imagination, materialism, brutality, and a yearning for transcendence have often walked hand in hand. Like Proteus, a Greek God who took on many shapes, human or natural, solid or liquid, the deity who is said to protect America¿s innocence has taken on different guises: in the days of Calvin and the New England Puritans, God was seen as stern and unbendable. Much later, in Lincoln¿s day, many thoughtful Americans¿like Emerson and Lincoln¿preferred to think of a more benign providence. And it matters, sadly, that in our own day American Protestant thinking has taken on one of its most dismal colorations: namely, biblical and apocalyptic fundamentalism. This is the sensibility that inspires George W. Bush, who sees himself as the archangel of sacralized democracy, engaged in a life-and-death struggle between the forces of good and those of evil. The second central theme in the evolution of America¿s sense of self¿one that feeds both left and right¿has been a deep concern for the individualization of property and social life, with its various correlatives: an unrelenting suspicion of the State, a deep devotion to self-improvement and self-government; a deep respect for the dignity of every person¿s labor; a belief in ever renewed economic opportunity; a dedication to the legal rights of the accused and to the idea of self-becoming. Don Quixote, literature¿s most famous wanderer, preferred the road to the inn, and so it is, for example, that among the classic topoi of American literature is the road novel (as in Emerson¿s ¿everything good is on the highway¿). As is the invention¿or more particularly, the Augustinian reinvention¿of the self. In the words of Jimmy Carter¿s favorite hymn, ¿Amazing Grace¿: ¿How sweet the sound ... I once was lost but now am found.¿ Sojourner Truth: what a wonderful American name! In their imagined Eden, Americans, from first to last, have assumed that it was they and God who had created their society, rather than the other way around. ¿Men make their history,¿ said Marx, ¿but they do not make it as they please.¿ That is not the way Americans have imagined their society and their history. To be sure, communitarian traditions have also been strong in America, though more so perhaps in fiction than in fact. Tocqueville, for example, was struck in 1831 by the importance of associationism in American life, of town meetings, or religious communities, political parties, and so on, a quality that reminded him, no doubt, of the corporate (and aristocratic) loyalties that had structured pre-Revolutionary France and now¿in his country¿were no more. Nonetheless, America¿s communitarian transcendentalism (which was largely religious before 1750, and was then secularized in the nineteenth century¿as in the case of Jane Addams¿and which is often today, once again, expressed in strictly religious terms), has had clear limits. In the end, in America, a sense of community has ordinarily been the handmaiden rather than the rival or the enemy of individuated and even self-seeking passion. Here, we can conjure the image of American pioneers¿in the movies, and perhaps in real life as well¿circling their covered wagons to face and defeat their ruthless and cruel Indian enemies. The point of those uplifting stories, however, is that after a drastic emergency of this kind, the pioneers will soon separate and find their private paths to some empty, inviting, western, promised, and enriching land. In the American historical experience, universalist republicanism and political liberalism have always had to be mindful of economic individualism: Schopenhauer¿s images of porcupines come to mind here, of animals that fear being alone and cold, but also fear the pointed, wounding nature of each other¿s quills.8 In the imagination of Americans, material progress, democracy, and individual liberty do occasionally¿but only occasionally¿require the communitarian regularization of institutions. ¿It was not the policy of the liberal system,¿ wrote a mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts publicist, ¿to abstain from all regulations whatever, upon the notion that the present private interest is in all cases coincident with that of the public.¿9 The first national plan for the rationalization of America¿s economic life was¿unsuccessfully¿proposed to Congress by Albert Gallatin in 1808. Americans, especially when they are rich, like to receive governmental subsidies and grants-in-aid. But they are all individualists in the end. Americans are awed by the universalizing and sublime majesty of nature, a trait which is common to all human beings; but they yearn also to dominate this selfsame nature, to use it for their private purposes, and even to destroy it for no reason at all. As Leo Marx explained, the myth of American nature, ¿in its simplest most archetypal form ... affirms that Europeans experience a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier men.¿10 True enough, but it was also because Africans were considered closer to nature¿and to barbarism¿that antebellum southern whites thought it both sensible and fair that whites had enslaved them. America¿s parks and garden are indeed a communitarian paradise, but one that is marred by many a destructive snowmobile. Economic individualism in America is not a force that can be trifled with. A mixed heritage, then, but, curiously, an extraordinarily stable one. Of course, other national images have been durable as well: consider the place of romanticized nature in German culture; of aristocratized elegance and cold lucidity for the French; of rugged, yeoman self-government for the British. These national conceptualizations too have had a long shelf-life. Indeed, it often happens that a nation will loop back upon itself and find it impossible to break out of its inherited legacies. Some Alamos are all too easily remembered: on the eve of the Great War, for example, the French, however democratic and pacific they may have been, found it impossible to forget their lost eastern provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, which Germany had annexed in 1871. Likewise, Tocqueville¿s first theme in his Ancien Régime of 1856 was precisely to point out that the French were the victims of ancient ways: try as they might and republican as they might be, they could not shake off the habits of centuries of centralized monarchic rule. Napoleon¿s authoritarian rule was for Tocqueville no accident of modern French history, but, on the contrary, a mere remake of pre-1789, centralized government, where new Napoleonic authoritarian prefects had simply slipped into the shoes, now restyled, of the old royal ¿intendants.¿ In a different and more republican mode, it is also evident that the prestige today at home and abroad of the French model of citizenship¿which denies the relevance of ethnicity just as it denied the relevance of class in the nineteenth century¿has more to do with the weight of French legacies than with the model¿s contemporary efficaciousness. Nonetheless, the stability of America¿s creation myths does stand out from what holds true for most other nations¿and above all else, for what holds true of other modern nations. As Judith Shklar explained, ¿The longevity of the ideology that goes under the entirely appropriate title of ¿the American Dream¿ is indeed an extraordinary phenomenon.¿11 It is a striking fact that a hyper-industrialized and ethnically hybrid country like the United States should rule itself today through an inadequate and even paralyzing constitution that was created when its inhabitants were in their overwhelming majority white, Protestant, and still protected from the rest of the world by tyrannous distances¿by Governor Winthrop¿s ¿vast and furious ocean.¿ National American income in 1787 (if translated into dollars adjusted for their value in 2000) was four billion dollars, where in the year 2000, American national income was in the order of ten thousand billion dollars, or 2,500 times the earlier sum. But that ancient constitution, like America¿s earliest myths, is still cherished today, and often absurdly so, to the point that learned legal experts¿grown men!¿struggle to resolve highly contemporary technical problems by referring to what the Founding Fathers might think of today¿s technological wizardry. It is striking also that most Americans are unaware of what is at stake in their perpetuation of their country¿s ancient image of itself. They too live at times in the past, but nevertheless they are sure they are living their future at this moment. As a well-known student of America¿s self image put it half a century ago: ¿A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.¿12 So it is that America¿s constant dedication to these ancient images of its larger sense of self (as God¿s chosen nation, as the enlightened homeland of individuated freedom, and as the site also of the American economic dream) is sui generis and unusually durable. ¿Enlightenment,¿ in the words of Aleida Assmann, ¿means a break with tradition,¿ to which we would add, in all societies but one.13 Indeed, these same broad and inherited constructs, simultaneously divergent and convergent, are oftentimes determining for what happens from day to day as well. One example among many of that quotidian compulsion will perhaps suffice: it concerns Theodore Roosevelt and his comments in 1901 on some press reports of American atrocities in distant lands. These imperial incidents, he patiently explained, while blamable in themselves, had to be set in a larger frame. The larger point that was at stake (namely defeating and civilizing the Filipino rebels) was not negotiable. That work had to be done. Moreover, Roosevelt thought that America¿s historical experience in the West showed the way in the Philippines as well because the Americans of his day would easily overwhelm Aguinaldo¿s rebels just as their forefathers had easily defeated the Indians. What had worked against Sioux and Apaches would work in Manila also. (On this same subject of continuities and the Philippines, of the thirty American generals who served there at the time, twenty-seven had also fought in the western United States.14 And it is also suggestive that the principles of war that these officers first used in the West and then re-used in the Philippines had been developed at the time of the Civil War. During that conflict, reminisced General Sheridan in a letter to General Sherman in 1873, ¿did any one hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women or children were within its limits? ... if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.¿15 History does have a way of sounding familiar.) ¿In a fight with savages,¿ to quote Roosevelt once again, ¿where the savages perform deeds of hideous cruelty, a certain proportion of whites are sure to do the same thing ... In each individual instance where the act is ¿performed¿ it should be punished with merciless severity; but to withdraw from the contest for civilization because of the fact that there are attendant cruelties, is, in my opinion, utterly unworthy of a great people.¿16 This was a view of life which the Puritans would have understood in the 1630s. It is also George W. Bush¿s understanding of America¿s situation in the world today. ***** Of course, we would like to be able to theorize about the genesis and development of the American national idea and of its nationalist excrescence. Here, however, the basic point is that most of the paradigms which social scientists have evolved to think about nationalism in general only serve to underscore the irreducibility and ¿exceptionalism¿ of the American experience. The collapse of European colonial empires in the 1950s, followed in 1989 by the death of what Ronald Reagan had labeled ¿the Evil Empire,¿ led, around the world, to a blossoming of those local, nationalist passions that domineering empires had previously forbidden. Eager to explain these surprising developments, many political scientists and some historians¿many of whom as private persons had also been affected and saddened by the decline of Marxism as a system of analysis¿labored to theorize what they had observed. Some of this literature does bear (tangential) relevance to the American case. It is interesting, for example, to distinguish¿as has often been done¿the historical experience of societies (like America and France) whose sense of national self has since their eighteenth-century revolutions emphasized abstract values largely derived from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Clearly, these two nations with their republican traditions are far removed from societies like Germany, Russia, or Japan whose nationalism has laid greater emphasis on ethnic, religious, or racial concerns. Jürgen Habermas has suggested that just as feelings can legitimize institutions, so can institutions generate sentiment, and this idea has some relevance to those nationalisms that emphasize abstract, non-territorial principle: as Rousseau put it, ¿National institutions mold the genius, the character, and the taste of a people ... They inspire in that people an ardent love of their homeland¿ (that is, of their ¿patrie¿).¿17 Of some relevance also to the American case is Elie Kedourie¿s analysis of African and Asian nationalism: here the emphasis is on the specificity and power of ideological motivations. Nationalism in this view often begins as a kind of ¿children¿s crusade.¿ (In 1776 Jefferson, Madison, Monroe¿and Lafayette¿were in their twenties or early thirties; Washington, at forty-four, was for them a kind of elder statesman.) In this Kedourian frame, national sentiment is a messianic promise that appeals to ¿marginal¿ young men fascinated by the (destructive) power of their xenophobic ideology¿a view that has to be of interest to those students of American life who emphasize the quasi-religious nature of American nationalism.18 Other interpretations of nationalism have been equally plausible and variably applicable to the American scene: Karl Deutsch focused on communication networks; and Ernest Gellner, in his admirable work of the 1960s, emphasized instead the functional importance of economic concerns to nation building. In that view, the invention of nationalism was mandated by economic need: to thrive, burgeoning capitalism and industrialism required the nation as a sociological form so as to guarantee the existence of its material prerequisites: namely, an educated workforce, a capital market, internal free trade. Industrialism required the existence of the nation, which in turn made of industrialization a national imperative.19 (National industry attracted to the city deracinated peasants to whom nationalism seemed a self-evident value.) But this view of life is of limited relevance to the United States, whose roots as a nation antedate industrialism by nearly two centuries. Theories of nationalism as an ¿imagined community¿ are, up to a point, of greater relevance. Here, the reasoning is that nations are constructed as a re-integrative force, often in response to an external colonizing might. Where community no longer exists, and especially where it is thought to have been destroyed by colonializing outsiders, national community has to be ¿imagined¿ anew, in Benedict Anderson¿s now famous formula. In this view, resentful colonials¿or ex-colonials¿imagine themselves as partners in a quest or journey of self-assertion whose ingredients (such as the assertion of a national language or some particular historical experience) will grow and change over time. The work of John Breuilly and Anthony Giddens is also set in this mode, but at times with paradoxical consequence: so is it for example that Breuilly argues that the American War of Independence cannot be considered a national rebellion because Americans lacked ¿an explicit and peculiar character¿20 which set them apart from their British rulers¿a view of that situation which will puzzle many historians of the period. Equally suggestive but in the end similarly peripheral are the highly interesting historicizing observations of Eric Hobsbawm on ¿the invention of tradition.¿ Here the argument will be that bourgeois states¿and, oftentimes, imperializing bourgeois states¿will legitimate their own existence, or their oppression of others, by developing a vast ceremonial panoply of rites, rituals, memorials, and the like. This idea is by no means irrelevant to American life. Statues of Abraham Lincoln do indeed abound in the northern states, many of them nearly as ostentatious as those dedicated in the southern states to Robert E. Lee and the ¿lost cause.¿ Schoolbooks (Noah Webster¿s dictionary); popular entertainment (Buffalo Bill); parades and conventions; the myth of a classical golden age (varyingly set in 1776, 1865, or 1944¿1945): all have their place as the supports of durable American memories and mythologies. But although very numerous, such artifacts of memory (often imperially conceived on the theme of landed conquest, as in Pilgrim ships at Plymouth, or, again, the Alamo), though not irrelevant to the development of American patriotic life, are nonetheless incidental to it. They are there to express and embellish a sentiment that would have existed¿and thrived¿without their support. On balance, then, theorizations of nationalism have had little to say about the American case; and, one is tempted to write, almost inevitably so, because most historians of this ¿nature of nationality problem¿ have been basically concerned to show how nationality has come into being, that is to say, how and why ¿pre-modern¿ societies have managed¿or have failed to manage¿their transition to modern democracy, be it formal democracy (with sham elections) or ¿constitutional¿ democracy (with the rule of law). Most developmental theories of nation have focused on the rise of contemporary nationalisms, many of them motivated either by the exemplary rise at the end of the nineteenth century of Zionism in Europe as a gesture of self-defense against the ambient anti-Semitism of European nationalisms; or (often) by the rise in the second half of the twentieth century of anti-Zionist or anti-European Arab and Asian nationalisms. These works are therefore focused on the often sudden and unprecedented appearance of national consciousnesses.21 By stunning contrast, the most conspicuous¿and as of now, incompletely theorized¿aspects of American nationalism have been, not its inception, but its ability to subsist and its ability to develop by accretion rather than by renunciation. Historically, what has mattered in America¿s growing and unchallenged self-perception has been not innovation but constancy. So it is, for example, that ¿the distrust of power, generated deep within the ideological origins of the Revolution [runs] through the entire course of American History and is as potent an element in our national life today ... as it was two hundred years ago,¿22 and this judgment by Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading twentieth-century historians of America¿s colonial period, could be duplicated for many other themes and moments of American history. ¿America,¿ wrote Walt Whitman grandly in 1855, ¿does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions. [America] accepts the lessons with calmness [and] is not so impatient as has been supposed. [America] still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of new forms.¿23 More humbly but just as tellingly perhaps, a study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1979 showed that opinions in that archetypal town of Middle America had not changed much since first studied in 1924. ¿In or about December 1910,¿ wrote Virginia Woolf, ¿human character changed (and) when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.¿ That may well have been true for the modernist elite of western Europe, but her remark has no bearing whatever on mainstream American life, either as it was in 1910 or as it is today.24 The genesis and development of America¿s national consciousness obviously deserve close attention. But, again, its most striking trait¿in our view¿is its ability to move through time as a consistent amalgamation of layered themes that can be either complementary or antithetical, as in the conjunction of communitarian religiosity and economic individualism; or again, of universalist Enlightenment values and the sense of America as a divinely elected place. ¿The United States,¿ concluded Octavio Paz, ¿is a society that wants to realize its ideals, has no wish to exchange them for others, and is confident of surviving, no matter how dark the future may appear.¿25 ***** The persistence of its central values, then, has been the most striking (and, as it were, vertical) aspect of America¿s national and universalist, democratic and religious consciousness. And the second (and, as it were, horizontal) characteristic of ¿The Creed¿ has been the ability of this American self-image to secure deep¿and indeed overwhelming¿support at home, and, at least in former times, abroad as well. Americans¿and this really does bear repetition!¿love their country. Political conflict (like violence) is as American as apple pie, but America¿s endless quarrels and debates about what is right and proper have not proved inconsistent with the forging of a broad consensus on the larger meaning(s) of Americanism. As Paz put it, one finds in the United States ¿a criticism [that] is valuable and forthright, of a sort not often heard in the countries to the south ... But it is a criticism that respects the existing systems and never touches the roots.¿26 Indeed, it may be because they agree on so many fundamental issues that Americans can afford to quarrel ceaselessly about which legalistic procedure will best give substance to their imagined sense of self. We can gauge the overall strength of American patriotism and nationalism in many ways, but most clearly perhaps in the juxtaposition of American unanimity about America¿s exceptional destiny with European divisions over what their nations were about: we could point to nineteenth-century westernizing ideologues in Russia who urged their divided countrymen to move toward western models and to renounce their debilitating Slavic roots. Likewise, at the other end of that older continent, we could juxtapose America¿s nationalism to the internationalism of the embattled twentieth-century French labor movement, which after 1871 turned away from its indigenous, syndicalist, and Proudhonist roots; embraced Marxist ideology, and in 1905 labeled itself ¿The French Section of the Workers¿ International.¿ From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Soviet Union was the true homeland of most French workers. These were unthinkable situations in the United States. In America, strikingly different regionalisms are seen as amusingly different aspects of one vast national sameness: in Italy, by contrast, regionalism today is an often embittered denial of national union. Why this broad and striking resonance in America of ongoing national values? A basic answer has to be that unquestioned American patriotism has made a great deal of sense to millions of migrants who have found in their new homeland two things that matter to them: an improvement in their material life; and the freedom to be themselves. These were the goals in the seventeenth century of English Congregationalists in New England, as they were also of late nineteenth-century Jews and Italians in America¿s major cities, as they will surely be tomorrow of today¿s migrants and refugees from Latin America, Africa, or the Middle East. In that context of American opportunity and broad tolerance, it is easy to understand why Muslim migrants feel more at ease in the United States than they do in western Europe, where their right to exist has been loudly (but also vainly) proclaimed by states and constitutions. The core of ¿America from day to day¿ is in the satisfying conjunction of individualism, diversity, and pluralism, a union which found its letters of nobility in Walt Whitman¿s verse, in the pragmatism of William James, and in John Dewey¿s Instrumentalism. For tens of millions, then, the American dream of personal and libertarian betterment has been a ¿patriotized¿ reality that became normative first because it really did prove, in actual fact, not to be ¿an impossible dream¿ at all; and, second, because so many of those who failed to realize that dream were subjected to a cruel discourse of Calvinist origin which cast failure and poverty as sinful pathologies. Millions of defeated Americans were made to feel that they had only themselves to blame because ¿the system¿ was not at fault, a cruel self-deception that has been a persistent theme of American culture and literature since Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In the United States, the plight of the defeated has merely strengthened the happy optimism of the victors. It was in the United States¿and Argentina, where immigrants were also supposed to find effortless happiness¿that Freudian psychiatry (which neglects the relevance of economic context) found its largest audience. Americans fear, as Wallace Stevens observed, ¿that dreams and defeats are one.¿ Optimism and tragedy in their country are never far apart, but most Americans do not like to be reminded of this, and it is well nigh impossible for them to grasp that, in the words of the historian Scott Sandage, ¿failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it.¿27 So it has been that the achievements of the successful ones and the melancholic self-doubt and self-exclusion of the others have fed the idea which more than any other has defined America for Americans, and often for foreigners as well. Worldwide, America has been seen as ¿a shining city on a hill¿ (one of Ronald Reagan¿s favorite locutions), as a model society and a second Israel. ¿The chief circumstance which has favored the establishment and maintenance of a democratic system in the United States,¿ concluded a historian of this issue some time ago, is Americans¿ belief that ¿their ancestors gave them the love of equality and of freedom; but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.¿28 Unprecedented individual and communitarian freedom facilitated by unrivaled material betterment in a society sanctioned by divine Providence: moved as they were by this satisfying amalgamation of the practical and the mystical, American patriots have been by instinct nation-proud. Uninformed about and as a rule uninterested in the world beyond their borders, they have all too easily and all too often fallen into stances of tranquil superiority, an attitude which, incidentally, has been a source of exasperation for non-Americans in Europe and Latin America, and especially for those non-Americans who were¿by their own lights at least¿better educated, more cultured, and in a word, more civilized than the rich and boorish North Americans across the Atlantic or north of the Rio Grande. But to Americans themselves, looking inward to the state of their union, a patriotic devotion to country has always seemed to make sense; as it also has when they have compared their country with its rivals: it used to be that America¿s American neighbors to the north and the south were colonized and weak, that European powers were at least one ocean removed, and that distant Asian neighbors were of no consequence to Americans at all. From its location alone, America was born triumphant and a model for the whole of humankind: ¿The bias of Americans,¿ writes Roberto Unger, ¿is that the rest of the world must either languish in poverty and despotism or become more like them.¿29 So determining is this conviction that American foreign policy has often been conducted in a state of dense mental fog (President McKinley, for example, knew literally nothing about the Philippines, and had ¿to study a globe to determine the location of the ¿darned islands¿).¿30 Such mental fogs and ignorance are held by most Americans to be of no durable consequence: for McKinley¿and for most of his compatriots¿understanding the American experience was enough. Surely the principles that had prevailed in Republican Ohio would sooner or later prevail in Manila as well. History¿or so most Americans have assumed¿has confirmed their sense of superiority: and it is a fact that no other polity on any continent has ever experienced anything like the spectacular development of American society, and in so short a time, from the extreme frailty of the European colonies in the early 1600s, to an American century that began in 1898, and to global dominance today. Britain, it is true, also moved from relative insignificance on the edge of Europe in the late 1600s to world dominance in 1815, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain was no more than a primus inter pares, unable to defeat the French at Waterloo without the help of the Prussians, or the Russians in the Crimea without the help of the French, or the Germans in two world wars without the help of the United States. For continental Europe, the end point of Napoleonic or Hitlerian policies of national aggrandizement has been extreme and legendary defeat. But America¿s victorious trajectory has been a happy Pilgrim¿s progress through seemingly boundless space, from one ocean to the other in the nineteenth century, and in seemingly open-ended time as well: Americans are very reluctant to think that their empire, like all other empires, will one day fail. In brief, then, for America, we have progress without end in three successfully waged twentieth-century world wars that in one way or another have proved disastrous for all the other states which they engulfed. For many Americans, the question has been not ¿Why be an American nationalist?¿ but instead ¿Why not be one?¿ In America, nation, nationalism and imperialism have usually been paying propositions. ***** Nation and patriotism, then, on the one hand, but also, on the other, nationalism: should we think of these two strands of America¿s self-definition as one and the same thing? Yes and no. No, as a first response, and the argument of this book is that these two forces are indeed very different; but also yes, because they are in their origin very close, and in a fashion which is unique in the world. In many important ways, American nationality and American nationalism are indeed one and the same thing: even in those moments when America has been most divided, some underlying ground has been shared by all Americans. Franklin Roosevelt¿s New Deal was certainly much detested by many American plutocrats (many of them his peers by birth and at Harvard College), but his acceptance of capitalism as a way of life meant that the gap between his friends and his enemies was not as great as it might seem. In 1860 southerners dramatically rejected the northerners¿ view of what Americanness ought to be; but the Stars and Bars were in many key respects very much like the Stars and Stripes: in 1858, two years before secession, Jefferson Davis declared: ¿This great country will continue united.¿ That same year he told an audience in the state of Maine: ¿The whole [United States] is my country and to the innermost fibers of my heart I love it all, and every part.¿ And southerners, in many ways, were not at all as unlike their northern enemies as was believed both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, like northerners, were God-fearing (rural) democratic capitalists. Their favored justification of slavery was that its presence would make for a better white democracy. Besides, as Edmund Morgan remarked about colonial Virginians, southern whites ¿may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to Republicans, because they saw every day what life was like without it.¿31 And yet¿and critical to the argument of this book¿these common, shared, and national American values have seldom been expressed by a single voice. American patriotism and American nationalism, at once close and very far apart, have to be understood in conceptual terms that are particular to the United States. European social categories are largely irrelevant to the specificity of life in the United States. In order to sort out the differences between Europe¿s classic patterns and America¿s originality, a first step is to define and distinguish these two ways of understanding the meaning of the term ¿homeland.¿ What indeed is a nation, a ¿patrie¿? What is patriotism? A useful starting point for understanding the European situation is the classic text of Ernest Renan, ¿What Is a Nation?¿ of 1882. Written by a philosopher who¿to his embarrassment¿had been philo-German before France¿s defeat in 1871, this text defines peace-loving patriotism as a sentiment that arises from the shared recollection of happy events and symbolic figures: in the case of France, like Joan of Arc or the achievements of 1789. But although the patriot does remember some things very well, he also an amnesiac who does not remember many other unhappy and divisive moments. For the French, this meant that all would choose to forget the massacres of Protestants by Catholics in 1572, or the execution of royalists by republicans (and vice versa) during France¿s revolutionary decade. And in this same context of the importance of memory for state building, one could also cite, for example, the emblem of the Province of Quebec¿French and royal fleurs-de-lis, with, as a legend: ¿Je me souviens¿ (I remember). Here, French Canada chooses to remember its brand of Frenchness rather than its place as an orphaned province abandoned by its mother-nation. ¿Nationalism and national identity,¿ writes Thomas Bender, ¿are founded largely on a sense of shared memories¿32¿but shared forgetfulness as well. By contrast, Renan went on, the Germans cherished a false definition of nation, one that¿perversely, he thought¿emphasized race and also language, which Germans (wrongly) took to be the deeply rooted expression of some primal racial affinity. Thus, in Renan¿s view, German-speaking Alsatians should have been allowed to remain French because Alsace shared with other French provinces the universalist memory of 1789. Germany, in his view again, had had no right to annex this province in 1871. To the contrary, Prussia, the land of Immanuel Kant, had a moral obligation to respect Alsace¿s Francophile and libertarian wishes. In brief, Renan contrasted a constructed and historicized French ¿civilisation¿ against a more natural and sentient, German and emotion-laden ¿Kultur.¿ This is a useful starting point for understanding nationality since it opposes race¿a category that excludes¿to inclusive, diverse, libertarian, and fraternal patriotic remembrance. (This is to say that nationalism is to nation as vice so often is to virtue: less a denial than an unreasoning, and at times demonic, extension of the latter.) A patriot feels warmly about his country because¿ideally¿his homeland respects the equal rights and hopes of all its citizens. Patriotism¿ideally, again¿guarantees every citizen¿s fair right to public space. It works for the common good but it also respects social, ethnic, religious, and philosophical diversities. (One could cite here the legend on the crest of the Swiss canton of Vaud: ¿liberté et patrie.¿) It also works to create the material circumstances that give these rights practical and civic significance. In foreign affairs, it is pacific. Domestically, it works to preserve good government. In Renan¿s words, patriotism is a ¿daily plebiscite.¿ Nationalists, by contrast and by instinct, lean to exclusion: of countries other their own in international affairs, and of some of their fellow citizens at home, where, in George Orwell¿s celebrated phrase, all are equal but some are more equal than others. ¿Patriotism,¿ writes John Lukacs, ¿is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a people, justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion.¿33 Paradoxically (since patriotism is localized and practical, where nationalism claims to be more abstract and ideologized), inward-looking, seemingly narrow-minded patriotisms are in the end more universalist than are nationalist particularisms, which, again, on the surface of things, may seem to be more broadly conceived. Alain Touraine, France¿s leading sociologist, has described this selfsame tension philosophically: It does happen that [libertarian] social movements decay to such a degree as to become the reverse of what they were. They lapse into communitarian assertion, into the rejection of ¿foreignness¿ and difference, into violence against minorities or what are then labeled as heresy or schism. This change occurs when collective action begins to define itself by reference to what it is, or to what it holds, rather than by reference to what is universal. And the first precondition of a universalizing reference is that the historical agent or combatant be able to recognize in others the drive toward universalism which he feels within himself. When a drive for national liberation becomes nationalism, when a class struggle decays into the defense of corporate rights, when feminism limits itself to the suppression of inequalities between men and women, these struggles cease to be social movements and succumb to the obsessive assertion of their own identity. Or, in the words of Ian Angus, ¿particularity is not the opposite of universality but its condition, as universality is not the transcendence of particularity but its articulation.¿34 American patriotism and nationalism can be imagined in this same doubled context of practical affection for one¿s country and unthinking aggression directed toward other nations and often toward one¿s own compatriots as well: governments that are kind to their own people tend to be kinder to neighboring states also; and vice versa. But another key to understanding the history of American nationalism is that although, in America, the forces of inclusive patriotism and exclusionary nationalism are very much as Renan described them, their relation to each other has been wholly different from has been true elsewhere, especially in continental Europe. To restate, the point is that the origins of American nationalism and imperialism are also those of the opposite, namely American decency. Again, it is critical to remember that American imperialism does not as a rule start from traditions that are specific to it. The contrast is self-evident here between the United States and, let us say, Germany, where nationalism has its roots in organicist exclusion and anti-parliamentarianism; or France, where French nationalism has (or at least had) medieval Catholic and monarchic authoritarian roots, whereas French patriotism and universalism sprang from the Rights of Man as defined in 1789. We can likewise contrast here the purpose of the American Constitution of 1787, which, in the words of Gouverneur Morris, was ¿to form a more perfect union¿ for all, to the constitutions drafted in these same years by French Revolutionaries. As Lynn Hunt reminded us, the French Constitution of 1791 was differently (and, as events were to show, very divisively) understood, as was prefigured in its first paragraph: The representatives of the French people, constituted in a National Assembly, considering that ignorance, neglect or disdain for the rights of man are the only cause of public discontent and of the corruption of governments, have resolved to expose, in a solemn declaration, the natural inalienable and sacred rights of man, so that this declaration, constantly present to all members of the social body, will remind them without cease of their rights and their duties; so that the acts of legislative power and those of executive power can be at every instant compared with the goal of all political institutions.35 In brief, this meant that in the French scheme of things after 1789, some citizens were more enlightened than others; but that in the American system (after some initial complaints) all soon rallied to what was to all a self-evidently desirable federal republic respectful of local variants. Restated again, in a larger and more conceptualized perspective, the point might be that we cannot judge or even understand American nationalism if we consider the reality of American life in terms of the categories that have been developed over the centuries by European historians. In the Old World, patriotism and nationalism have been clearly distinct; the one, pacific; and the other, warlike. In the very particular case of the United States, the two strands¿which have a common origin¿have been much closer; and in consequence the temptation to move from the one to the other has been stronger in the United States than in other countries. European historical categories will not work, then, to understand America¿s sense of self at once united and diverse, but religious ones¿and especially those which apply to Judaism and Calvinist Protestantism¿will work quite well instead. In the words of Slavoj Zizek, it is a mistake to see in Judaism two divergent traditions, with ¿the ¿good¿ Levinasian Judaism of justice respect for and responsibility towards the other ... against the ¿bad¿ tradition of Jehovah, his fits of vengeance and genocidal violence against ... neighboring people.¿ The two are in a dialectical situation where again and again the one emerges triumphantly from the other. The two, Zizek, goes on, ¿are identical and simultaneously absolutely incompatible.¿36 But however the themes of inclusion and exclusion are to be understood abstractly, their convergence of in American life is, on the ground, everywhere visible.. In his classic text on American foreign policy at the turn of the nineteenth century, Robert Osgood observed that Teddy Roosevelt and his influential advisor Alfred Thayer Mahan were not so very different from their internationalist antagonists: Few who embraced expansionism as a kind of nationalistic orgy comprehended the practical results of their ambition. In general, ultranationalists were not more burdened than the extreme idealists with the facts of world politics as they impinged on American security. America¿s egoistic and altruistic impulses were equally free of a sense of limitation prescribed by the realities of world politics. Accordingly, national self-assertiveness and national idealism displayed the same propensity for extravagance; and one impulse was as fickle as the other.37 In that frame of proximity, Senator John Kerry¿s (in)famous statement about George W. Bush¿s war in Iraq, ¿I voted for it before I voted against it,¿ is no more than the comic¿or even buffoonish¿restatement of a profound structural given. Americans today who dislike recourse to ¿hard power¿ are neither humanists nor isolationists: they are cultural imperialists who prefer to guarantee the assertion of America¿s imperial presence abroad through the pacific power of ¿culture,¿ sentiment, and influence. This stand is certainly preferable to the use of force, but it is not ideal. ***** In America the origins of patriotism and nationalism as well as their proximity have been very specific to that country¿s history; and, in consequence, so has been the relationship of the one to the other. In Europe, nationalism and internationalism have ordinarily been at odds, in large part, again, because they are widely removed in their inspiration. By contrast, American history shows us that Americans, as individuals and as a people, have frequently moved from nation to nationalism without real understanding. What should we make, for example, of Woodrow Wilson when he proclaimed that the message of America¿s Declaration of Independence should henceforth be applied to the world at large: was he then an American patriot, or an American imperialist and the ¿bipartisan¿ herald of the ¿American century¿? Patriotic or nationalistic? Time and again history has shown that in response to what is collectively perceived as an unjust denial of America¿s right to moral supremacy, even a peace-loving American progressive can suddenly veer toward aggressive imperialist demands: a nationalist Mr. Hyde from a patriotic Dr. Jekyll, so to speak. Half a century ago John Foster Dulles, then secretary of state, wrote that U.S. foreign policy was set around two ¿significant facts¿: ¿[The] first is that our policies have developed as a reflection of deeply ingrained national characteristics. The second is that our policies have been influenced and modified by changing world conditions.¿38 Sometimes for the good, but not always for the better! As the jocose saying goes, in America, ¿a conservative is a liberal who¿s been mugged.¿ America, wrote Randolph Bourne in his ¿Trans-National America¿ of 1916, ¿is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of the imagination not to be thrilled by the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism, belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe, is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boasting, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations.¿39 Very true, to be sure, but the imperialist drift of American policy has nonetheless often been a fact of life in American politics. A complex relationship, then, and complicated historically because American nationalism has often had its origins on the left, and especially so when America¿s national enemy has anchored itself on the right (as did Britain with its monarchic constitution in 1776; or southern particularism with slavery in 1861; or the Japanese in 1941 with dictatorial militarism). At those moments, even conservative American nationalists will momentarily rally to what were originally patriotic or even leftist causes. Universalism is after all a part of America¿s heritage, even in the eyes of those who prefer to think in terms of (a positive) ¿realism¿ and (a negative) ¿idealism¿40 and, ordinarily, to ignore the latter. To love the Constitution¿as do all ¿strict constructionists¿¿is also to accept the Bill of Rights. Lines of battle are seldom clear in America: many of the isolationists who opposed U.S. entry into the First World War were genuine democrats who claimed to be aware of their country¿s democratic role in the world: in the Senate, George Norris, a progressive, opposed President Wilson¿s interventionist Mexican policy before he opposed U.S. membership in the League of Nations. The midwestern ¿progressive Republicans¿ of the 1930s were New Dealers who steadfastly refused to be concerned with the international fate of world democracy.41 American liberals and conservatives are seldom all of a piece. This shared background of Americanness¿which binds exclusionary nationalism to inclusive patriotism (or in Robert Osgood¿s terms, egoism and altruism)¿is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of American history. As Abraham Lincoln amusingly and wisely pointed out, you can not only fool some people all the time, you can also fool all the people some of the time. The second of these is the more important fact, and it is also important for us to have in mind the specific events or decisions¿the catalysts¿that have so often propelled all Americans from patriotic restraint to imperialist, brutal, and destructive adventurism. The deportation of the Cherokee people, for example, was a cruel and unnecessary brutality, but most Americans accepted it. Much the same can be said about the cruel and unnecessary decision to drop the atomic bomb on an exhausted and defeated enemy in 1945, or the generalized use of torture in Iraq today, or the bombing of Iran tomorrow. Four structuring assumptions, then, for our argument: (1) the ambiguous but persistent nature of America¿s religious and material sense of self; (2) the broad acceptance of these patriotic self-definitions; (3) the proximity in America of the two variants that have expressed this durable self-definition¿patriotism (which is an ethic of peace and inclusion) and nationalism (which pretends to be about democratic inclusion but is in fact an ethic of war and exclusion); with, most critically, (4) a concern for the ways and means that have brought America¿s silent majorities to line up on behalf of nationalist exclusion, ways and means of various kinds; incidents which, historically, have followed one another other in an often bewildering ¿nonpattern¿ of happenstance: who would have supposed under the presidency of McKinley in 1900 that in 1917 another American president would become the hope of left-wing democrats throughout the world? The first and simplest task of these pages will therefore be to trace these themes through the different phases of America¿s history, which run from a time when America¿s enfranchised citizens were in their near unanimity white and Protestant to today¿s America, which is, as Peter Schuck has remarked, ¿probably the most diverse society on earth¿certainly the most diverse industrial one.¿42 Here the essay charts the development of America¿s self-image, and chronicles its continuities as this imagined view of itself was¿inevitably¿affected by the transformations of American society. At times, the argument will emphasize the ways in which ongoing, secular inherited definitions of Americanness bore down on political choices: Why was George W. Bush elected at all? At other times, it considers the ways in which ongoing social and cultural ideas have been suddenly transformed by wars and political events, as in 1860¿1865. There is no standard rule: thus, the idea of opting for a state-directed economy has always run counter to America¿s ongoing cultural traditions, and this negative apprehension has always limited the range of possibilities available to those who have wanted to build social democracy in America. But it also matters that this ancient and permanent American suspicion of the state makes more organizational and technical sense today in our post-industrial and very complex society than it did a hundred years ago in what was still a recently industrialized America. In brief, ideological tradition matters critically, but changing circumstance cannot be ignored, if only because the inflections of America¿s sense of its place in the world have also reflected the turn of its domestic structures. Quite obviously, a small and peripheral nation of 3 million (as Americans numbered in 1776) will not have the same foreign policy goals as a hegemonic nation of 300 million (as America is today). But beyond that, in ways that are just as important if less visible, changing¿and at times unchanging¿circumstances, economic but more often social and cultural, have all inflected American policies, domestic and foreign. Thus America¿s resolve to achieve independence bore the mark of its religious past as a chosen nation; economic might enabled the North to crush the South in 1865; but it was not the industrialization of the North that caused the Civil War. Inversely, America¿s isolationism in the 1930s, and her imperial pursuits today, were and are in large measure a reflection of cultural givens whose survival has depended on tolerated and abusive social and fiscal dysfunctions. And to make matters more complex, America¿s political choices have also depended on cabals of insiders, on manipulation of the press, on the duplicity of those who are in charge, and on the biased will, especially, of revered presidents. As the leader of a chosen people, every American president is in some sense divinely ordained. Lincoln¿s hallowed fate is there to prove it. Cardinals elect their pope; and Americans elect a president who, like the head of the Roman Church, is there to preserve a doctrine. ¿I am charged with being a preacher,¿ Theodore Roosevelt once mused., ¿Well I suppose I am. I have such a bully pulpit.¿43 Much depends on what these leaders do and say. Presidents matter immensely, and it is not surprising that much of America¿s political history has often been recounted by its most gifted historians as a succession of presidential moments: by instinct, we often feel when we read about Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln, and perhaps also, alas, when we read about George W. Bush, that the lives and sensibilities of American presidents matter more than does the nature of their times. In that quasi-religious context, sadly reminiscent of Europe¿s Middle Ages (in which many French political leaders¿among them Charlemagne, Saint-Louis, Joan of Arc¿were canonized by the Church), we can easily see that those choices (patriotic or nationalistic) which Americans have been led to accept have often critically depended on the decisions and mind-sets of their presidents. In 1834, for example, nationalism prevailed because President Jackson was in his own way a war criminal, sadistically intent on destroying Native Americans, one of whom, incidentally, had saved his life. Polk did not have to declare war on Mexico in 1847. McKinley did not have to declare war on Spain in 1898. Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s was not compelled to involve America in the war in Vietnam. George W. Bush need not have invaded Iraq and did so illegally, without a United Nations mandate and without the morally binding approval of most democracies. His was instead a deliberate, inhumane, unprovoked, violent choice which, in our view, also makes him a war criminal, albeit as had been said, in a minor register: for good or for evil, there is nothing grand about this C-student. After 9/11, George W. Bush did have a choice: to militarize America through a war without end in order to rule through fear, as he chose to do; or, as Kofi Annan immediately suggested, to take the lead in a U.N.-sponsored international police action aimed to destroy an international and criminal conspiracy. Americans would have followed their president in that decision also. In his office, in his times, a man of good will could have become a great and patriotic president. But as Goethe reminded us, character is fate: and in this moment of crisis, George W. Bush was bound to fail as a statesman, just as he had failed everywhere and always, as a (failing) student, a (truant) soldier, and a (bankrupt) businessman. To paraphrase the Scriptures, never has America had a president so unworthy of its republican greatness, its extraordinary power, and its democratic glory. ***** Religious and economic individualism combined with the sense of being God¿s chosen people: these are at the heart of a persistent central core of values, of America¿s ¿civil religion,¿44 that has grown through emendation and ¿amendation¿ but has never been rejected. And with this, a divided and including impulse either to turn inward toward ¿benevolent¿ (patriotic, inclusive, and comprehensive) self-improvement; or, inversely, brutally to aggress against neighbors close and far in the exclusionary name of America¿s core principles, but oftentimes for shameless profit. These are the basic ¿problematics¿ of America¿s historical becoming. They are the ones we shall follow in this essay as the constituent parts of an American ideal, at once steadfast and changing. And strikingly, we find many of these themes present at America¿s creation in the early seventeenth century: it would seem that in both private and public life trajectories, the first act is often the most important. Here, in the 1620s and 1630s, typically, it matters that Anglo-America¿s first New England Protestants were not just conquerors but also universalist preachers of a welcoming and ingathering Christian creed. Indeed, seventeenth-century Boston imagined itself to be, first, a universalizing model for Europe as a whole, and second, the agent of the natives¿ religious rebirth: some of these autochthonous people¿the ¿praying Indians¿¿were even enrolled in the newly created Harvard College, then a seminary for local preachers. The contrast is striking between the approach of the Puritans and that of the Spaniards, who also converted Native Americans, but did so the better to enslave them as mineworkers, or even to exterminate them as happened in the Caribbean islands. The new Bostonians¿ first project was to create some kind of theocracy that would be open to all believers. In that important sense, theirs was a universalist theodicy. Limpieza de sangue (purity of blood) was not their first concern. But soon afterwards, and perhaps inevitably, relations between the settlers and the locals hardened. In 1675, exasperated by what they took to be the threats of the Wampanoag people, the Puritans decided to do away with this Indian nation, which in 1630 numbered one hundred thousand people. After this final round¿which was a final solution also¿only ten thousand of the Puritans¿ enemies survived. In the later seventeenth century the Puritans¿who had already become Yankees¿changed their ways. Simultaneously religious and brutally aggressive, communitarian and economically individuated (where religious togetherness made up for the increasingly capitalist organization of their colony), these second- and third-generation New Englanders now moved into another phase of collective consciousness, a phase we might call ¿pre-Americanness.¿ Between 1688 and 1765 these Anglo-Americans¿not yet Americans but no longer properly English¿became fierce British patriots, and now imagined their Anglo-American sense of self to be completely compatible with nascent English nationalism. They were deeply hostile to Roman Catholicism, which they took to be a tyrannous ideology that served the tyrannous politics of their primary enemies, the French in Canada. Servility was the first characteristic of these foes; but they, the children of the Puritans, were freeborn Englishmen, and as such, carriers of political liberty, a universalist value that was admired the world over. The heart of this new American sensibility was in the individuating message of Locke, but also in the political world view that was known in Britain as that of the ¿Country Whigs,¿ who imagined themselves to be yeomen forever threatened in their rights by the court, the king, and the rampant corruption of urban life. Ideologically, these pro-British, Anglo-American patriots gradually drifted to the notion that politics, in England and in their own part of the British Empire, opposed the king of England, backed by corrupt and detested satraps, to their own rural and libertarian innocence. (Looking forward, we can add that the most famous spokesman of this composite ethic would soon be¿in the next phase of American life¿Thomas Paine, an English-born corset maker and former customs official who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 and became instantly famous in January 1776 as the author of a pamphlet, Common Sense, which sold 120,000 copies in a nation of three million.) A broad vision, then, but, this new ¿pre-American¿ national feeling also found expression in the nationalistic domination, destitution, and gradual elimination of Native Americans in the Northeast, as well as the destruction of the French colonial empire during the French and Indian War of 1756¿1763. The expulsion of the Acadians (Longfellow¿s Evangeline among them) is the best-known incident of that Canadian saga. After these two early moments of America¿s history came the creation of an American republic. In 1760 Americans were immensely proud of being British. A mere fifteen years later they had become a nation whose first enemy was Britain. True, in 1775¿1776, America¿s patriotic rebels were for the most part still caught up in progressive Protestantism and in their American legacies of individualism and self-rule. But with this older pre-national image they now blended Enlightenment themes and values, such as citizenship and an American republic. Montesquieu and Beccaria were their most favored authors. (In the margin of his copy of Rousseau's Discourse on Equality, where the Genevan apologist for primitive communitarianism praised ¿savages¿ for the ¿calmness of their passions and their ignorance of vice,¿ an indignant John Adams scribbled: ¿Calmness of the passions of savages! ha! ha! ha!¿)45 At the same time, however, and on another shore, they also availed themselves of their newly found independence to destroy what remained of the Indian nations to the east of the Mississippi River and to the north of the Ohio. For Native Americans, the War of American Independence, hailed by much of the world as a critical step in the emancipation of western man, was an irremediable catastrophe. Did the new American state turn against Native Americans as mere a side effect of its war against the allies of its British enemies? Or was it that the libertarian principles of the new republic, in this new world order (¿novus ordo seculorum,¿ as it is to this day inscribed on American one-dollar bills), served to legitimize a deep yearning to dispossess and even exterminate Native Americans? This first period of a specifically American national consciousness also includes the acquisition of the Louisiana territory in 1803. With this move, the expansion of the United States took on an air of nationalist and continental inevitability. Many of Jefferson¿s contemporaries had assumed that North America would indeed, some day, be completely settled by Europeans, mainly of British extraction. But they had likewise assumed that this might result in the creation of many distinct American republics. Henceforth, however, it would seem obvious to all that there could only be one such American state, and a powerful one at that, far removed¿ostensibly at least¿from the ideals of the Country Whigs that had been broadly assumed a generation before. The history of Americanness in the following epoch, which runs from 1830 to 1865, centers on the democratization of national mores and institutions. The country¿s older principles were not forgotten: the theme of American innocence remained very strong, as did the Country Whigs¿ suspicion of the state, and the founders¿ noble dedication to republican and libertarian ideals. Nor was the seventeenth-century idea of divine election set aside: Herman Melville, the author of the archetypal American novel Moby Dick of 1851, put it nicely in his White Jacket of 1850: ¿We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people¿the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world ... God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear ... Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us.¿46 (In all likelihood, George W. Bush has not read Melville¿s novels, but we can assume that this passage would seem to him to be very apt, should someone choose to call it to his attention.) Moreover, mid-nineteenth-century America went beyond these memories and now became a nobler, grander, democratic project. As a sign of the times, it was in these years that the men who had been known as either fathers or forefathers of the republic¿and whom Jefferson, who was one of them, had immodestly called ¿an assembly of demigods¿¿were now ennobled as the ¿Founding Fathers¿ of the American system.)47 Newly aware of their democratic nature, Americans¿before 1860, but especially after the Civil War¿now understood their nation¿s purpose in a more noble way. Of this new-found pride, antislavery was surely Exhibit A. And hand in hand with their new sense of self also came a greater disdain for ¿Old Europe,¿ and an even more strongly stated disdain for those inside or outside their territory (Native Americans at home and Mexicans abroad) whom they saw as unproductive, incapable of self-government, and in any case, hostile to America¿s cherished institutions. To love a democratic and universalist America meant having to pay a frightful price to destroy southern particularism and its ¿peculiar institution.¿ But it also meant carving up Mexico, whose inhabitants, after all, had done nothing useful with their northern territories. And it also meant destroying the even more unproductive Native Americans: the West for Lincoln¿s contemporaries had become a land without a people for a people who needed ever more land to till. So many legacies and innovations, of which America¿s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, became the classic embodiment. From his earliest years, this young man was desperately eager to discover, learn and understand the many values that were treasured by his fellow citizens. As a Whig, Lincoln could claim descent from Hamilton¿s belief in moneyed progress. (Sean Wilentz has described his early years as those of a ¿Whig party hack.¿)48 His ruthlessness in the management of the Civil War likewise reminds us of Jackson¿s nationalistic pride. But these particularistic twists did not preclude his wholly sincere and existential endorsement of the universalist principles that had been so eloquently stated in America¿s and Jefferson¿s Declaration of Independence. In 1860 the dissolution of the Union and of the Constitution of 1787 seemed to Lincoln utterly unthinkable: that is why he accepted the possibility of civil war. But he also looked to the future extension of America¿s early libertarian promise, which had been so clearly stated in 1776: ¿I am exceedingly anxious,¿ he wrote, ¿that that thing which they struggled for, that something even more than National Independence, that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come¿I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, this Constitution, and the liberty of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made.¿49 Universalist and democratic inclusion, then, with the rebirth of an American democracy now made responsive to all white, Protestant men; but nationalistic and imperialist exclusion also. Not all American democrats were intent on conquest: Thoreau¿s name comes to mind here. On balance, however, for Jacksonians in 1828 and for Lincoln¿s electorate in 1865, American idealism and imperialism did somehow travel hand in hand. With 1877 as one of the most damaging turning points in American history. In that year, northern abolitionists gave up on their newly freed black compatriots and handed over the conquered southern states to the South¿s old planter elite. In 1865 a victorious and democratic Union could have brought into being a southern black peasantry who would for a century have dominated southern politics. The reverse happened instead: African Americans were excluded from the national consensus, a step that was to hobble American democracy for a century, and even, perhaps, forever. And unsurprisingly, it was at that very moment also that America¿s nationalistic overseas imperialism began to take shape: from 1607 in Virginia to 1865, America¿s imperial progress had taken place locally, as it were, moving westward from one community to the next, but never far from home. Now, however, the United States began its imperial march to the world domination it enjoys today. Once more, as often before, particularistic Hamiltonians who believed in wealth joined forces with nationalist Jacksonians who believed in force. But now, aligned against them was a renewed, neo-Jeffersonian current of thought, which for want of a better term, we will call universalizing social democracy. Of course, ideological quarrels were nothing new in America. Every universalist message has had to face at every step a particularist response, and vice versa. Though in broad accord on what their country was basically about, Americans have forever quarreled as regarded the form they should give to their intuition. Even in colonial times, bitter rivalries opposed Appalachia to Tidewater, with the former favoring debt and easy paper money while the latter yearned for fiscal and military prudence. Likewise, in the 1770s, tens of thousands of Loyalists preferred exile to independence, which, in John Adams¿s famous formulation, was favored by one American in three while another third opposed it,50 leaving one last third to line up in the end on the victor¿s side: in proportion to overall population, more people fled the American Revolution than the French one. And of course, the Civil War, in proportion to overall population again, was the bloodiest of all American wars, with 620,000 dead in a nation of 30 million. What distinguished American politics in the twentieth century from what had happened before, then, was not the existence or the intensity of political rivalry but the duration of the rivalry that opposed inclusion to exclusion. On one side were the inclusive Wilsonianism (Progressivism having been its prolegomenon) with, after Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Carter, as well as Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, and so, on balance, an ¿including¿ rather than ¿excluding¿ figure. Aligned against these were McKinley in 1898, followed by Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, père et fils. (From this perspective Bill and Hillary Clinton would be transitional figures whose purpose was in the main to abandon social democrats on their left, in order to recenter the Democratic party toward the right.) And the historical significance in 2004 of George W. Bush¿s re-election (or as his foes have it, his first legitimate election) would be to close a very long parenthesis: only half a century runs from the first equilibrium in 1825 of the new republic, to the settlement of 1877. The rise, agony, and fall of inclusive American social democracy, by contrast, lasted nearly a century. ***** It will, I hope, be clear by now that this essay does not aim to be a chronological or overall account of America¿s historical experience. Its first dynamic is to describe the shuttling back and forth from patriotism, and national inclusion, to nationalism and nationalistic exclusion, as regards both domestic and international affairs. (In the American scheme of things, the distinction between domestic and foreign concerns is quite hard to define: so it is, for example, that the relations between the federal government and Native Americans have been set by the contents of ¿treaties¿ between the United States and ¿Indian nations.¿ Likewise, the American Civil War did not merely oppose two factions of a single country¿as did, say, the French Vendéan rebellion in 1793¿1794, or the Russian Civil War in 1919¿1920. It was also, inter alia, a war between two continental states.) These pages are therefore intended to be a work of historical analysis, but mine also is a presentist agenda, which is the second dynamic of this essay. Once the conflicting but neighboring strands of American passions have been described and their genesis explained, it will then perhaps be easier to show why some malevolent American presidents have been able to push their country away from its republican and universalist mission toward exclusion, aggression, and conquest. Although George W. Bush¿as has been said¿may well go down in history as the worst president of the United States, he is not, alas, the first to have chosen war over peace, or lies over truth, or exclusion over inclusion. We can understand him better if we understand what came before him. Some traditions brought him forward. Hitler was a madman, but he did not become chancellor of the German Reich just because he was a madman. The cost of this approach, as has been said, is that, in some ways, this book starts from a chronicle of America¿s misdeeds. And yet, it is also written from a deep admiration of America¿s libertarian genius. Part I 1630¿1825
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
United States -- Civilization.
National characteristics, American.
Nationalism -- United States -- History.
Nationalism -- Religious aspects -- Christianity.
United States -- History -- Religious aspects -- Christianity.
Messianism, Political -- United States.
Political culture -- United States.