Nobody should be surprised by the discord breaking out in the open all over America. It has always been a country engaged in a Cold War with itself but whose size and resources nevertheless permitted it to grow and prosper and conquer others throughout the world. Now that there are fewer amenable others on the outside, Americans have set about doing what they do best – hunting them down at home, in the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is classic nationalism. It is, as perfectly defined by Ernest Renan, based on a set of collective beliefs and myths as united by force, and setting itself off by what it is not, what it hates, and what it must fight and defeat in defence of its own moral and ‘spiritual’ existence. The one remarkable aspect of American nationalism is its multiplicity. ‘Trans-national America’, as one of its best writers called it, made a new world ‘ism for export in which the ‘nation’ is and would forever be defined by its many adherents separately and in unison. Thus its nationalism has relied not upon a tyranny of the majority but rather upon an organic, widespread, and diverse system of petty tyrannies, defended and given licence to act by a tyrannical minority. America has become in its short history a nation of inquisitors on auto-pilot. Like most inquisitors, Americans have little interest in genuine inquiry. They judge their public policy, their journalism, their scholarship, and even their science by superficial certainties. Where certainty is lacking, the passionate repetition of slogans was and remains the habitual substitute. America’s empire once placed constraints on that system. The country had to, or had to appear to, behave itself. So too its understanding of ‘rights’ – civic and human at home and abroad – may once have emphasised liberation, amelioration, honour, and decency, but has, for at least the last thirty years, grown obsessed with castigation, persecution, detestation, and degradation. An angry, jealous, resentful, repressed nation wags its finger at the world. This is America’s indelible public face. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison did not invent this condition or this curse. Neither did Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Rupert Murdoch, or Mark Zuckerberg. They and others have contributed to the ways and means of understanding American nationalism as it has devolved in America. But its genesis happened elsewhere. Europeans invented America in a fit of optimism about themselves. By the twentieth century, that idea had spread to every part of the world. America – and its image of permanent perfectibility – became the world’s refuge of first and last resort. America and the world have, at long last, had enough of that image and role. The inquisitions continue but the world shrugs. This is a mistake. |