> age, and geography. Considering that widespread popular jingoism has been
> characteristic of dominant empires everywhere - Carrol alluded to the mass
> culture of British imperialism in its heyday - Americans, on the whole,
seem
> to be responding to their own imperialism not too badly. The jingoes and
> racists are mostly concentrated in and around the Republican party, driven
Sorry for overposting, but that really asks for a reply.
You seem to be reducing the phenomemon in question to ethnocentrism (jingoism) which exists, in various extents, in every human society. In my original posting, however, I referred not only to anti-foreign sentiments, but to vicious bashing of domestic enemies, especially liberals. I would say that liberal-bashing outweighs foreigner-bashing by the factor at least 2:1.
This is not really about imperialism, and insisting as you and Carrol do that it is really misses an important point that such attitudes exist regardless of the imperial status of the country. For example, the Russian population was far less jingoistic during the heyday of the Soviet empire that it is now, when their empire is but fading memories.
My thinking on this issue goes more along the line argued by George Lakoff in _Moral Politics_ - that people are cognitively predisposed to either ideologies of hate, fear individualism and domination, or nurturing, cooperation, and mutualism. Lakoff also claims that each these ideologies change the chemical structure of the brain, thus making self-perpetuation easier.
I have seen that at work in EE immigrant communities, which offer a rare opportunity for ceteris paribus comparison of reaction to different ideologies and power relations. Thus, ex-party apparatchiks who were nominally "communist" generally embraced the nominally "capitalist and individualistic" Repugs on the side of the pond. At the same time, the opposition figures, including the yours truly - who were nominally anti-communists on the other side of the iron curtain - frequently fell into the liberal of the left camp here.
This tells us that ideology itself is not a good predictor of party affiliation, but a cognitive attitude toward the dominant power is. The apparatchiks tended to defer to powers that be regardless of the ideology, while the dissidents defied these powers, again regardless of ideology.
I do not know for sure what, if anything, makes the US-society more cognitively predisposed to right wing ideology and attitudes than, say, European societies. Perhaps neuroscience will find that answer one day - but right now we can only speculate. My speculation is that the social structure and spatial organization of the US society (e.g. individualism, alienation, geographic isolation) tend to produce affective personality disorders - no doubt grounded in brain chemistry - that make people more prone to fear, inability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity and in response to embrace authoritarian aggression, the right wing drivel and fundamentalist religion as crutches to cope with these disorders.