Paleo-conservatives are much like national conservatives in Germany. They lay claim to an American nationalism that pre-dates World War Two. It is isolationist and xenophobic, Anglo-European in its cultural foundations and Christian by default. They oppose “Globalism” as the provenance of de-racinated economic elites interested only in profit, and they regard President W.’s war on Iraq as an international adventure that betrays America’s best interests. Paleos regard the left as profoundly “anti-American,” despite their mutual condemnation of the Iraq War and the rapacious bottom line of transnational capitalism. For paleos, the “left” is the house of multi-culturalism and multi-racialism. The left’s promotion of egalitarianism has undermined tradition and authority, and allied itself with globalist elites in promoting immigration of brown-skinned Spanish-speaking low-wage workers, they contend. The charge of “anti-Americanism” by paleo-conservatives is particularly ugly—not least of all because it ignores the contributions of Africans and their descendants to the core of American national character. But it is less often heard than the indictments issued by neo-conservatives, who have larger-circulation megaphones as well as the private ear of the Bush administration.
Although neo-conservatives first emerged as a Cold War split-off from the liberal camp, they now dominate many of the mainline conservative think tanks and publications. Unlike paleos, they support free trade in capital goods and the transnational economy, and only since the September 11 attack have they curtailed their support for the free movement of labor. Since the World Trade Center debacle, however, neo-conservatives have advocated draconian “anti-terrorism” measures—including the wholesale roundup of immigrants with Arab-sounding surnames. Otherwise, they have usually supported the importation of low-wage brown-skinned labor, even as they have opposed “multi-culturalism” and bi-lingual education. At the same time, neo-cons have provided the intellectual underpinnings to President W Bush’s “unilateralist” foreign policy. And it is this camp that has most ardently advocated foreign military intervention in pursuit of “American values.” Among these thinkers, “nation” and “state” are an undifferentiated whole. The “people” and the “government” are one. If you disagree with one, you must hate the other. It is, essentially, a monist view of the political world.
(As a side note: It would be a mistake of the first order to confuse the rationale neo-conservatives have provided for the War on Terrorism with the cause of President W. Bush’s Iraq War. Neo-conservatives certainly advocated toppling Saddam Hussein. But if the industrial and financial centers of the defense and oil industries had opposed invading Iraq, can anyone seriously argue that American troops would be in Baghdad today?)
Nevertheless, it is in their role as intellectuals and foreign policy advocates that neo-conservatives have most widely employed the concept of “anti-American” as a cudgel against their enemies. Their list of “anti-Americans” usually begins abroad, beginning in the Islamic world, where neo-cons regard terrorists and fundamentalists as one angry, anti-democratic mass. It then moves to European opponents of Bush foreign policy. The neo-cons use the charge of anti-Americanism as a blunt instrument. Unlike the Nation’s reportage, they conflate two analytically distinct phenomena into one: rational opposition to government policy—either foreign or domestic—is regarded as the same as irrational hatred of all things American. And it is on these counts that neo-conservatives in particular have charged the Left with “anti-Americanism.”
At myriad times, left-wing thinkers, academics and activists have been portrayed as part of a larger “hate America” crowd. But consider a particularly revealing instance: a November 2002 column by Daniel Pipes published in the New York Post daily newspaper. Pipes, a Harvard-trained historian with a long list of publication credits and the power of his own think-tank behind him, began his argument in the Post with a re-statement of administration policy on Iraq. “Americans broadly agree on two facts about the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq: its brutality and the danger it poses to themselves, especially the danger of nuclear attack.”
Pipes correctly argued one thing: Hussein was a thug. The rest of it was made up. As later events proved, Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear program was virtually non-existent at the time of the invasion, and consisted in the main of some plans buried in the backyard of an Iraqi nuclear scientist. And six months after occupying Iraq, American troops had still not located any significant evidence of an ongoing chemical or biological warfare plant. Nevertheless, the lack of facts did not prevent Pipes from publishing a list of professors he regarded as anti-American. The whole piece smelled of Cold War-era McCarthyism, in which dissent was equated with disloyalty, and protestors were labeled as traitors. One professor taught chemistry at Swarthmore, another taught history at Yale, a third was an associate professor of business at George Washington University. Prominent on Pipe’s list (and on others of similar persuasion), were Noam Chomsky and Eric Foner.
Pipes inclusion of Foner on this list demonstrates the single-minded simplicity of equating dissent with anti-American sentiment. Foner’s entire career as a scholar has been aimed at excavating the most democratic moments in United States history. In a long list of books and articles, Foner has told the story of the quest for freedom by Americans on their native soil. His books on the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, for example, examine the democratic society that former slaves helped create in the South between 1865 and 1876. Foner is no Pollyanna. He recounts the brutal racism and effectively describes the birth of United States imperialism in the death of Reconstruction. The story he tells ends badly, not in the South’s “redemption,” as so many racists would have it—but in the crushing of democracy through cowardice and compromise. But Foner recognizes the two-sidedness of national life: a democratic impulse vying for dominance with the stranglehold of reaction. Here the state is not the same as the nation, the government does not equal the people. Foner is not alone here. He is among the many Americans that can keep two ideas in his head at the same time.
Not so with Noam Chomsky, who is representative of another trend on the left, a trend that mirrors conservatives on the right. Rather than finding the two-sidedness of American national life, they see only one aspect. The conservatives love their mono-dimensional country unconditionally and believe all others to be traitors. Those like Chomsky abjure their mono-dimensional enemy with unqualified contempt and believe all others to be morally bankrupt. It is a tendency rooted in the anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the search for revolutionary agency.
more