A left-over & left-out Keynesian version of this faith exists on LBO (Dennis R., etc.): "Deflation? What deflation?" "Over-accumulation? What over-accumulation?" "Unsustainable debt? What unsustainable debt?" (Where is Angela and her immanent contradiction when we need it?) Meanwhile, on the cultural front, Christopher Hitchens (who plays a leftist on TV) is bullish on America.... Yoshie
***** Beautiful behemoth
In the mid-1800s, it was derided by Europe as an 'experiment in gross vulgarity'. Today, it bestrides the world culturally, economically, technologically and militarily. Christopher Hitchens charts the unstoppable rise of the United States
The Guardian Monday November 8, 1999
Who looks at an American book?" asked the Reverend Sydney Smith scornfully in the Edinburgh Review of the mid-Victorian epoch. He went on to enquire whether anyone would care to attend an American play, or cast a glance at an American picture, or in general take even a bar of a tune from an American melody. As one of the more muscular and quotable critics of his time, Smith was by no means alone in his contempt. Dickens, in his fictional Martin Chuzzlewit and his journalistic American Notes, did his best to ridicule and discredit the notion of the United States as the land of opportunity. Lesser writers, such as the Boy's Own Captain Marryat and Frances May Trollope (aunt of John Major's allegedly favourite author), returned from the former colonies with similar tales of condescension and disdain. Well, the Reverend Smith has now got his answer. Not only do we all look at American books, but we have scant choice about whether to view American films or American television series. Thanks in part to the universality of cable TV, and to the contingent fact that the language of the web and the internet is American English, the lifestyle of the United States middle class is the norm to which millions of immigrants and strivers now aspire. The word is out.
So far from being able to be patronising about America, some of her former rivals now fear her. Joseph Conrad saw it coming in 1904, with his impressive character Holroyd, the Yankee businessman in Nostromo who has "the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest". Holroyd looks at the world through globalising eyes and says, as he surveys the paltry efforts of lesser powers: "We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. We shall run the world's business whether the world likes it or not. The world can't help it - and neither can we, I guess."
This used to be called "manifest destiny" and became known, a little later, as "the American century". Coined by the media tycoon Henry Luce, the latter slogan was often satirised for its complacency. After all, Mr Luce thought that the defining event of the century would be the American-sponsored Christianisation of China. But even Gore Vidal, who was rightly withering at the expense of that notion, wrote an essay not many years ago entitled "The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas". This postulated the rise of Japan as the new superstate. It's brave and decent of him to reprint it still in his collections, because it is only one of the many premature obituaries for an American century that may, in fact, be opening rather than closing.
Just take stock for a moment. The United States has the Atlantic and the Pacific as its sea walls, and Mexico and Canada for its neighbours; an almost unbelievable geopolitical felicity. It has an abundance of every agricultural, mineral and human resource. It possesses an unchallengeable military superiority. It is the host country of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It regularly scoops the Nobel prize pool when it comes to medicine and physics (and doesn't do too badly at the literature award either) and has labs that are aeons ahead of any probable rival. Its university libraries bulge with the letters and manuscripts of authors from a dozen other countries. Its consultants and techniques are regnant wherever elections take place; indeed, the grammar of American Tammany politics is now the baseline of democratic or at least electoral discourse everywhere. Its model of skyline and downtown is the glass of fashion and the mould of form, everywhere from Hong Kong to Sydney to Buenos Aires. Its courtroom dramas and celebrity traumas are the staple of light conversation everywhere.
I have purposely mixed the sublime and the ghastly in the foregoing, and haven't by any means exhausted the scale and scope of the thing. Educated and sophisticated Americans, returning from travels overseas, are wont to complain that they simply cannot escape the products and practices of their native heath, however far they stray. Nobody despises the McDonald's landscape more than an upscale New Yorker or Angeleno. Nobody winces more - at some atrocity like the recent ban on Darwin in the Kansas school system - than the American who has a time-share in an apartment in Paris or London.
Currently, a version of the old argument between "isolationists" and "internationalists" is under way again, providing much facile fodder for editorialists and columnists. Actually, the United States has never been, and never will be, isolationist. Even as it was trying to put tariff and other barriers between itself and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, it was making strenuous efforts to expand in the Pacific and in Latin America. The term that people need to employ instead is "unilateralist": the combination of a provincial mentality with an imperial one. Those who voted down the test ban treaty in the Senate did so not in order to create a "Fortress America", but in order to preserve a global nuclear superiority, and to insist that America may conduct inspection of other countries while refusing it for itself. Alas, these tough-minded conservatives were confronted only by a pseudo-internationalist; a president with the soul of a governor or a mayor; perhaps the most parochial and timorous president of modern times.
One can see the same irony at work in the attitude to new populations. American English is fast becoming the language in which the world does its business. It is the tongue of the internet and of the stock market, and of air-traffic control. Objectively, if not officially, it has deposed French as the language of diplomacy. Yet the parochialist-imperialists (like Pat Buchanan, who combines xenophobia with an unbroken record of support for war in Vietnam and Nicaragua and Grenada) worry ceaselessly about dilution and multiculturalism, and propose laws to make "English only" the official language, with penalties for those who can only stutter it. Meanwhile, sunrise corporations in Silicon Valley petition Congress to relax immigration restrictions, so that they can hire more science and computer-chip graduates from India, most of whom speak English rather better than the natives do.
This quarrel, between those who regard the American experiment as essentially complete and those who do not, is one that the rest of the world has to watch with breathless interest. Professor Benjamin Barber at Rutgers University has postulated a sort of reverse dialectic between "Jihad and McWorld", whereby the only resistance to the commodification and standardisation of everything is offered by traditionalists and fundamentalists. More familiar as a conflict outside American borders - the Saudis want an American alliance but they don't want their society saturated with cable-borne temptations - the fight actually replicates itself within them.
The only sizeable American constituency to have proposed a boycott of Disney, for its values of greed and hedonism, is the southern Baptist leadership. (I know a few urban sophisticates who moaned, if only in private, that it had come to something when only the rednecks were prepared to take a stand against corporate America.) For the moment, Disney is impervious to such sanctions. Though it doesn't do to forget that there is a traditional, pious America, several layers below the glitz, and that it feels itself alienated from the turbo-charge of modernism, it is likewise a mistake to overestimate it. The free-enterprise ethos crushes cultural conservatism as well as many other kinds of culture.
For part of the summer I was in Alaska, the last great "frontier" state of the union. Here, atop unimaginable riches of oil and minerals, sits a small population that could feature in no sitcom. Russian Orthodox churches minister to Inuit Indian congregations; the state capital of Juneau is inaccessible by road; prehistoric landscapes manifest the scars of the last earthquake and suggest the contours of the next one.
A pipeline snakes its way through wolves and moose. You can, if you really want to, swim to Russia from here. (During the cold war, I used to be able to win bets in Washington by asking which country was the nearest to the United States after Mexico and Canada. Nobody ever said the USSR, any more than anybody could answer the question: which country has the largest military base in Cuba?) Originally purchased from Russia for pennies by Seward, once Lincoln's Secretary of State, Alaska has recently and seriously discussed purchasing Siberia, or at least a part of it, from Russia. This almost certainly won't happen now - America's stewardship of the Russian economy has been the single most calamitous failure of the post-cold war period - but the mere fact of its being thinkable is testament to the astonishing reserve capacity, and astonishing confidence, of the system.
Over the border in Canada, the perennial question of dissolution also suggests that America's bounds might yet be set wider and wider. The Quebecois, if they attain independence, will seek recognition first from the United States. The Atlantic provinces, in response, may seek assimilation with it. (Pat Buchanan, among others, recommends accepting this proposal, at least for the white and English-speaking applicants. He's in favour of annexing Greenland while they're at it - another indication that the so-called "isolationists" are by no means the stay-at-home type.)
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the continent, the life of the Fidel Castro regime continues to move peacefully towards its close. And there are those, among the Cuban exile opposition, who would like to have Cuba become a state of the union also. It's a stretch for the imagination ("The Chair recognises the honourable senator from Havana") but it does revive an old dream from the days of the Monroe doctrine. It is, in any case, a near-actuarial certainty that the United States will soon, once again, be playing the decisive role in Cuban affairs. (The other day, the US "interest section" in Havana announced a lottery for a few thousand visas. Practically everybody on the island applied for one.)
Back in the Victorian era, when the Reverend Sydney Smith and Dickens and Marryat and the rest were sneering at America as an experiment in gross vulgarity, the great exception was Karl Marx. In his essays on the civil war - when the London Times was a cheerleader for the Confederacy - he held up the United States as an example of liberty and opportunity, and staunchly supported the Union in its attempt to become a Continental power. (That he and Engels took this view of the US, and viewed Russia as a swamp of despotism and aggression, must count as one of the ironies of history.)
The radical paper Reynolds' News, one of the most eloquent voices for the London labour movement, wrote that "anything that adds to the power and authority of the United States among the nations of the earth is to the advantage of all mankind". It called for Canada to be annexed by America, on the grounds that "all good Radicals" should "look to the Great Republic for their precedents, and not to the corrupt and snobbish Dominion".
The long cold war, and the rise of plutocracy and imperialism in America, separates us from the folk memory of the new world as the last, best hope of mankind. But it's as well to remember that, at the close of the last century, the United States was in fact viewed by millions in the naive but inspiring words of Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... " Just as the metaphysical poets would refer longingly to "my America - my new found land" when they wished to convey yearning and longing. And now, even after Vietnam and Hiroshima and Senator McCarthy and all that, the towers and turrets of Miami and Los Angeles and Chicago still act as a beacon and magnet, perhaps now more than ever, to anyone with an eye to the future. As John Steinbeck once wrote about New York, its climate and its politics may be so bad that they are used to scare disobedient children, but once you have have been gripped there is no other place.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation. *****