Review

Reviewed Work(s): America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by

Anatol Lieven
Review by: James Reed
Source: International Journal, Vol. 60, No. 4, Africa: Towards Durable Peace (Autumn,
2005), pp. 1186-1188
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian International Council
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40204119
Accessed: 03-11-2017 12:38 UTC

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I Reviews |

AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG

An Anatomy of American Nationalism

Anatol Lieven
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv, 274PP, $45.00 cloth (ISBN o-
19-516840-2)

"Over the past fifty years," writes Anatol Lieven in the preface to this impor-
tant and controversial book, "the United States has stumbled into one disas-
trously misconceived intervention after another, both large (Vietnam, Iraq)
and small (Lebanon, Somalia). It is time that more Americans begin to ask
themselves just what is wrong with their bloody system " (x). The question of
what is wrong with America has of course been asked before, classically by
such foreign observers as Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce, and at
home by a long train of critics and dissenters, from Puritan divines to Henry
David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Senator J. William Fulbright, and their present-
day successors. Lieven - a British journalist now resident in Washington
who has written on east European nationalism - finds what is wrong with
the American system to be its nationalism, or, more precisely, "the demons
of American radical nationalism" (217).
Part polemic, part political sociology, and part comparative history,
America Right or Wrong is the product of a particular time and place: the
period of great fear, war fever, and intellectual paralysis in George W. Bush's
Washington during the two years or so immediately following destruction of
the World Trade Center in September 2001. In his attempt to explain the
malfunctioning of the US system, Lieven argues that the ugly underside of
American nationalism, with its social sources in the embittered white mid-
dle class, the "cracker" south and frontier-minded west, and in the aggressive
religiosity of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, came to the fore in
the nation's capital in newly respectable form in that time of perceived
national emergency. This radical nationalism intimidated and silenced all
potential centres of political opposition and dangerously threatened the sec-
ular Enlightenment ideals enshrined in the founding documents of the
American republic. "America keeps a splendid and welcoming house,"
Lieven observes, but it "also keeps a family of demons in its cellar" (1).
The sudden political ascendancy in Washington of this bush-league
American nationalism, which is fundamentally different from the mild,
civic nationalism of the almost universally admired American creed, Lieven
continues, brought out the worst instincts of Washington's lingering Cold

I 1186 I International Journal | Autumn 2005

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 I Reviews |

War-era policy elites to produce a vengeful, bullying foreign policy compara-

ble to that of the Kaiser's Germany of 1914. Inevitably, this American mili-
tarism resulted in the estrangement of the United States from the interna-
tional community. The problem was exacerbated, particularly in the Islamic
world, by an unholy alliance that developed between radical American
nationalism, with its roots in evangelical religion, and radical Israeli nation-
alism, with its roots in Israeli fundamentalist religion - and its characteris-
tic intransigence on the question of Palestine.
Read closely - and America Right or Wrong is a book that demands and
richly repays close reading - the book's thesis is itself both partly right and
partly wrong. Lieverfs overall argument about the nationalist tendencies of
the Bush-era Republicans, whom the author refers to repeatedly as "the
American Nationalist Party," is, of course, unexceptionable. But his research
into that party's current religio-political and regional base serves merely to
confirm the conventional wisdom among political observers. It hardly
amounts to the "anatomy of American nationalism" promised in the book's
subtitle. There is, after all, another party in Washington, and lieven, unfor-
tunately, has chosen to given the Democrats pretty much a free pass on the
issue of nationalism. Yet on the night of 9/11, instead of holding emergency
debates on American Middle East policy, members of the house and senate,
from both parties, joined hands on the steps of the Capitol and together sang
"God Bless America," a Broadway show tune from the World War I era.
Moreover, there is a complex historical dimension to American nation-
alism, as exemplified classically in that unsouthern, unfundamentalist, and
unmiddle-dass Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt; and, for that
matter, in those culturally northeastern, lukewarmly religious, upper-class,
liberal but stoutly nationalist Democratic presidents of happy memory,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Instead of there being "two
souls of American nationalism" (4), as Lieven would have it - one basically
good and the other fundamentally bad - what the United States in fact may
have are two aspects or dimensions of the same national soul, and likely
more. American nationalism is a complicated issue, for there are deep
ambivalences in American national feeling, the energies of which can be
directed outward toward overseas engagements of one kind or another, some
good and some bad, or inward toward isolationism, sometimes in tandem
with domestic political reform (as in the New Deal of the isolationist 1930s).
If Lieverfs argument is both right and wrong - right on but also over-
simple - his book as a whole is both less and more than it might appear at

I International journal | Autumn 2005 | 1187 |

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I Reviews |

first glance. It is less than an anatomy of United States nationalism, again,

because of its focus on only one political party, its fixation on the power elites
of Washington, its neglect of freewheeling civil society in cosmopolitan
America, and its severe underestimate of the longstanding American tradi-
tion of dissent from overseas adventurism, lieven writes of America's "intol-
erance of dissent" and observes that dissent in the US has "tended to be
rather more limited than in other developed countries" (54). In fact, all of
America's wars have generated politically significant dissent, both at the elite
and popular levels. To appreciate the point it is necessary to possess a com-
prehensive grasp of the history of American foreign relations - something
Lieven, for all his erudition in European history, does not seem to have.
Finally, the real strength of this book lies not in its general argument
about American nationalism but in its many fine, sharply observed details of
the American political scene, often illuminated by wide-ranging compar-
isons with, and lessons drawn from, the unhappy history of European
nationalism. Lieven' s apergus of America's proclivities to a kind of "Jacobin
internationalism," and the inducements among its citizenry to political con-
formity along the lines of Rousseau's general will, are but two examples.
Read at one level the entire work is a subtle, elaborate commentary on the
much-disputed but little-understood question of American "exceptionalism"
from the viewpoint of a cosmopolitan European historian. Written in a dark
time, in an arrogant and philistine capital, America Right or Wrong, for all
its flaws, is a courageous, intellectually honest, and fascinating book.

James Reed/ Harvard University

ALLIES AT WAR

America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq

Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro
New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. vi, 266pp, $28.95 doth (ISBN 0-07-144

The first published accounts of a world event, though written whi

record is necessarily incomplete, are the first constructions of a cohere
narrative and are important because they can influence the way an even
viewed by later authors. Where John Kampfner's Blair's Wars or
Woodward's Bush at War offer in-depth descriptions of the decision-m
process of a single country on the road to the Iraq war, Allies at War t

I 1188 I International Journal | Autumn 2005 |

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