In a message dated 00-01-17 19:46:51 EST, Jim O'C writes:
<< he US justifies its imperialist policies by bedrock beliefs that
Americans hold . . . about themselves as "Americans." The US projects its ideologies on to the world, then projects its power to enforce what it regards as natural law. There's no compromise with this set-up. You're in or you're out. Like the mob. . . . I have no idea how to break this down, or what might or will break it down. Problem is of course that the american ideology is the only thing keeping the country together.
Things are more complicated. There is a long-standing strain in our country of Know-Nothingism, America First, Love-It-Or-Leave-It Amerurricanism, to give it names it has gone by by variously in our history, but while deep among some segments of the working class, I would not say it is _The_ American Ideology.
If there is anything that qualifies as TAI, it is probably the vaguer liberal individualism that Hartz talks about, but that is compatible with strong strains of skepticism about America's imperial role. After all, the America Firsters were isolationists. And no ideology is so widely shared among all sectors, classes, and groups, not even liberal individualism. The social science reserach suggests that the dominant ideology is in fact the ideology of the dominant class, but not of the subordinate groups, who don't have a single coherent view. What doesn't mean that they can't be provoked into chauvinism by flagwaving and bomb dropping if the costs at home are cheap enough.
Jim also says that Americans are shameless about the awful things their government has done. Unlike, say, the French, who have erased Vichy from national memory (go the World War II section at the War Museum at Les Invalides in Paris some time and see you can find Petain--he's in the WWI section, all right). Most countries are shameless. We made the Germans feel bad about Nazism, but the Japanese have never really regretted anything about WWII except losing it, despite insincere apologies offered to the Chinese.
And the American people are better about some of this than Jim gives them credit for. We think that slavery was awful even if white people don't feel personally guilty about it. (And indeed, why should I, for one? My Jewish ancestors were being oppressed in Russia and Poland while slavery was happening here.) And polls show that most ordinary Americans agree that the Vietnam war was deeply wrong and immoral, while most elite types only think it was at worst a mistake.
>>I don't think unions are "nationalistic" unless and until they mobilize
such patriotic sentiments in the name of the American worker. Lots of what
some call nationalism is just good trade unionism. >>
Well, I have worked for the UAW and I hope to be a unionside labor lawyer when I finish my clerkships and get into practice. And let me tell you that the labor bureaucracy is stupidly nationalistic. They hand out Buy Ameriican bumper stickers at Solidarity House, the UAW International HQ in Detroit.
When they offered me the job, the person who called me said, Oh, and what kind of acr do you have. Funny you should ask, I said. I have a Didge Colt made in Japan and a Toyota bade in Lexington, Kentucky. But the Japanese Dodger is union-made by Mitsubishi and it has a great big America Works Best When We Say Union Yes! bumper sticker. She said, I'll just put down "Dodge."
Now, things have cahnged since the early '80s when ordinary unionists held Japanese car-bashing parties in to parking lot of General Motors Assembly Division in Ypsilanti, Michigan--the plant was subsequently moved to Arlington, Texas. And I think the union bureaucrats are worse on nationalism than ordinary union members. But it's there, oh yes it is.
--Justin Schwartz