September 15, 2004
A Short Reflection on Anti-Americanism, the Prejudice
by Joey Tartakovsky
Private Papers

There is a global popularity contest going on, and we are losing. Like many Americans, I used to fret about this. Now I don't. In order to save my countrymen untold hours of anguish, I propose they stop worrying too. For what we confront has long since transmogrified into a monster called anti-Americanism. It's not going away in any near century; in fact, it will only grow worse. Blaming ourselves for the tempests of anti-Americanism is no more sensible than blaming ourselves for the tempests of Florida.

Anti-Americanism, like anti-Semitism, owes its continent-ranging prosperity to its utility: it can explain rapid and dislocating changes in a society, which many feel powerless to resist; it can shift blame, foisting personal, communal or national shortcomings onto others in an act of collective unburdening; or, most of all, it can serve as an outlet for accumulated fears, envies and resentments. It is but a short leap from observing that America is responsible for a lot to observing that America is responsible for everything. But once the leap is made, the untidy workings of a complex world become miraculously coherent, and you know: 'America did this.' The passionate anti-American crowd – the one that labels our culture a "virus," holds us accountable for Third World poverty, or, like Osama bin Laden, seeks our epic humiliation – will never change as a result of anything we do. They need anti-Americanism for the same reason people have always needed ideologies to make sense of the swirling and unpredictable tumult of life.

A sundry army of angry accusers lays siege upon the United States from beyond both seas. There are those of the Left, which revolve around the belief in the U.S. as the fountainhead of global predatory capitalism. But this should not eclipse the Right's even more ancient legacy of animus. In a new book called Occidentalism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit remind us that war on the U.S. has been declared in the name of the Russian soul, the German race, the Japanese faith and, now, revivalist Islam. From these precincts we hear of America's, and the West's, slavish devotion to mammon, our machine-society soullessness, and our degenerate racial and cultural impurity. The Left charms many in the United States because its language is the language of universal equality. The causes of the Right, alternatively, waged in the name of some national, racial or religious chauvinism, are by nature exclusive.

Anti-American tongue-lashings roar in from all sides and contain any number of reasons for detesting the United States. Any philosophy that can unite the passions of aging Ukrainian socialists, spectacled Dutch intellectuals and bearded Pakistani patriots is impressive. But such a hodgepodge cannot long last without contradiction. The right-wingers among them curse America's perceived profanation of their culture, while the left-wingers attack America's perceived exploitation of their market. Europe is frightened by our evangelical spirituality, and the Middle East is equally repulsed by our self-abandoned secularism. While European Greens lament our non-ratification of the Kyoto protocol, Brazilian, Chinese and Indian elites dismiss our efforts to reduce carbon emissions as a ploy to brake their development. In France, both the Communist-dominated Confédération Générale du Travail and Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front celebrated September 11th. We are maligned for our self-concerned aloofness (Liberia), then our arrogant warrior unilateralism (Iraq), and then again for our stubborn insistence on multilateralism (North Korea). The Jihadists think we're too decadent to fight, and the Europeans think we fight too much.

Even if we sought in good faith to address these grievances, the task is plainly impossible. Let us instead pose a solitary question to confound our massed detractors: if American values and institutions are so corrupt and inferior, then explain, without reference to said values, why the U.S. is the most brawny, inventive, self-governing and prosperous republic in history. Tell us why our fair land has never known a dictator in 228 years of existence. If not the irresistible tug of opportunity and liberty, what other force pulls the millions who each year seek entry and better lives here? None of this is to say the U.S. is faultless – the idea that a nation is always right is as ludicrous as the idea that a nation is always wrong. But it is to say that anti-Americanism is, at bottom, an obsession. In answering our questions, our determined opponents have no small feat ahead of them. For America's magnificent success lies precisely in its values, and they are worth defending.

— Joey Tartakovsky is an associate editor at Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers.