Americans are people too

This brings me to anti-Americanism, a topic I have been researching and writing on since the 2000 US presidential election. Anti-Americanism is a peculiar word: we have no equivalent for any other nation. Anti-Finlandism is incomprehensible and even anti-Frenchism is unknown in the English language. It is tempting to declare anti-Americanism oxymoronic, as it is surely impossible to hate a whole nation and all of its people. Some have suggested the word is merely moronic: a boo word crudely employed to silence criticism. In a searching essay in 1990, the French scholar Marie-France Toinet asked "Does Anti-Americanism Exist?" and according to Josef Joffe "most Europeans will argue that anti-Americanism does not exist". Sartre foretold these responses with his riposte in 1948 that "I am not anti-American. I don't even know what the word means." However, many political words lack a certain basic logic, neo-conservatism being an obvious example. Nonetheless regular use and circulation gives them meaning and importance. The word anti-Americanism cannot be waved away like a naughty child. It is here to stay and thus requires discussion and analysis.

I believe the best way to understand anti-Americanism is as a collective prejudice, hence the point of the "ism" at the end of this unusual word. Although admittedly anti-Americanism is a prejudice that is, in most cases, far less pernicious than many other prejudices. There is a long tradition of stereotyping the worst or most gauche aspects of America as the norm. In a reflective moment, Oscar Wilde commented that the "English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization". The origins of anti-Americanism are most sensibly traced to the Jacksonian period (the 1820s and 1830s) in American history. Just as expressions of anti-globalisation existed before the late 20^th century, forms of anti-Americanism existed before the 1820s. However both anti-Americanism and anti-globalism have a key period that was crucial in shaping their tropes and language. In the case of anti-Americanism, it was the Jacksonian period when the American frontier dramatically expanded (often in rough and ready circumstances) and Europe experienced an equally dramatic surge of interest in America. As a result there emerged a greatly increased volume of travel writing about the new nation. This literature and commentary, widely read at the time by a public looking for ways to understand this new force in the world, gives a great insight into perceptions of America. In this key period, Europeans were forming their views about the nature of America and Americans. The results were often not pleasing. Most of the commentators of the day painted Americans as unsophisticated, boastful and financially untrustworthy. It is my contention that this anti-American outlook – with its focus on America as an uncouth nation - reached its apex in terms of influence in the Jacksonian era. Negative commentary in the years following tended to play off the tropes and stereotypes about Americans that were established in this era.

One of the most widely read travel books of the Jacksonian era was Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) which lampoons the rough and ready eating habits of Americans on the frontier, decrying the "total and universal want of manners, both in males and females". A decade later Dickens, in American Notes and The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit added to the existing picture of the ugly American by satirizing Americans for their "worship of the almighty dollar" (a phrase he coined), for being swindlers and for their love of national and personal puffery. Dickens' America books regularly highlighted how every other American seemed to have some trumped up title as General this or Professor that; and how people constantly told you how great a man such and such was and how wonderful America was. Proclaiming the US to be "the greatest country in the history of the world" is of course a long standing favourite line of American politicians. At her best Trollope offered a searing critique of American hypocrisy over slavery and Dickens very effectively pinpointed the contradictions in America's claims that it was an egalitarian society. However, both helped create and perpetuate anti-American stereotypes by portraying behaviour in the backwoods and frontier as typical of the whole. Further, their commentary was as often snobbish as it was insightful.

America is frequently a nation of opposites: the home of much of the global pornography industry and of the most prominent anti-pornography movements; the Mecca of fatty food diners and the birth place of the raw food movement, and the home of a tradition in many ways diametrically opposed to that of Jacksonianism. Wilsonian America stands against the inward looking populist tendencies of the Jacksonian tradition. Named after Woodrow Wilson, (president of both Princeton University and the United States), this tradition champions the promotion of human rights, international laws and institutions, and world peace. However, it can also be viewed as naïve, preachy, and culturally tone deaf. French Prime Minister Clemenceau at the Versailles Peace conference said talking to Wilson felt like "talking with Jesus Christ". Elsewhere he said "God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us…of the most empty theory." Graham Greene's Quiet American offers in many ways a Wilsonian archetype in its protaganist Alden Pyle (at least as often seen by foreigners). Quoting book knowledge and proclaiming his wish to bring democracy to Vietnam, Pyle is introduced as a naïve American abroad; however, his idealism is soon shown to be stained by a deadly imperialism that involves the secret importing of military equipment and the bombing of civilians to create pro-American ferment in Vietnam. The most quoted line of the novel about Pyle (and implicitly about the US) is: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." In a case of life imitating art, George W. Bush quoted this line in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in 2007. Bush went on to question Greene's thesis that Indochina would really have been better off without American intervention given what Bush said we know about "'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'" This is a fallacious argument as violent American intervention was in part responsible for the rise of Pol Pot and the refugee crisis at the end of the Vietnam war. What Bush typifies here is a general unwillingness by recent American politicians (and much of the American media) to admit any foreign policy mistakes by America in the present or in fact at anytime in the past. Whenever Obama has made mild references to possible errors of judgement, or has reflected on how American policies may have stirred up foreign resentment, he has been repetitively attacked as unpatriotic. From the outside, this inability to admit mistakes and apologise looks suspiciously like the continuation of what Senator Fulbright called the "arrogance of American power."

What frequently most bewilders and annoys foreigners is when Jacksonian brutality and Wilsonian pronouncements are employed simultaneously. The Jacksonian tradition is inward looking by inclination; however, if drawn into a conflict as in 1941 or 2001 this tradition unleashed a strong belief in crushing America's opponents. Bush drew on both Jacksonian and Wilsonian traditions to create a toxic cocktail of policies that were rightly criticised as self-righteous, delusional and deadly. We can see this bewildering combination of ideas in his promise to "ride herd" on the Middle Eastern peace process, or his claim in his second inaugural address in 2005 that the ultimate goal of US foreign policy was "ending tyranny in our world", or in his government's assertion that it was bringing democracy to Iraq. However, as much as Bush deserves forceful criticism, much commentary on him and his government misfired because, rather than examining the details, commentators and media treated Bush as a half-wit and wrote off all of his government's pronouncements as being insincere. Further, as evidenced by the Daily Mirror headline in 2004, the American people were often dismissed as just plain "dumb" in the Bush era. Admittedly it was hard not to be very angry at the policies of Bush and Cheney. Bush's election and re-election were tragedies as far as I was concerned. However, name calling, abuse and anti-Americanism seldom wins a political argument. A case in point is the Guardian newspaper's ill fated 2004 "Operation Clark County" letter writing campaign. Guardian readers were encouraged to send a letter to a voter in Clark County, Ohio trying to convince them to vote for Kerry not Bush. The three sample letters the paper published – from Richard Dawkins, John Le Carré, and Antonia Fraser – could all be described as abusive. The operation's lack of success became apparent as soon as the Guardian website began posting responses from Clark County. Arranged under the headline of "Dear Limey assholes", the responses ranged from "Real Americans aren't interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions" to regular references to 1776 and Britons as "yellow-toothed snobs". The ultimate results of course were not in the tea-leaves but in the voting records on November 2, 2004. Al Gore won Clark County in 2000 by 324 votes; Ralph Nader garnered 1,347 votes. In 2004, Bush won the county by 1,620 votes. Of the 15 Ohio counties Gore won, Clark was the only one Kerry lost.

National stereotypes are hard to avoid, and have some utility. However, when they become overused touchstones for analysis, they can easily reflect certain prejudices about foreigners. Americans have a unique word to describe this negative outlook towards them and their nation: anti-Americanism. It is a word that partly exists because foreigners have been so drawn to America and had so much to say about it (with much commentary being extremely negative). At the same time Americans themselves frequently overreact to criticism, showing a tendency toward "annoying patriotism" as de Tocqueville called it. This attitude leads to much commentary on America being falsely called anti-Americanism. Smug foreigners and self-righteous Americans have often shed more heat than light on the question of what makes the United States and its people tick. The reactions to September 11, 2001 were yet another chapter in this three-centuries-old story of fascination with the US. The rights and wrongs of the US were debated widely. Given the unexpected and dramatic nature of the attacks, and the emotional responses to them, it is no surprise that many of the books written in their immediate aftermath have dated badly. At the time, and since, there was much hyperbole about the epoch-changing potential of the attacks. Distance from these events gives us the opportunity to reflect on them more soberly. Ten years on from 9/11, I am struck by the fact that these events did not "change everything" as some claimed. Rather they amplified certain existing tendencies. Finally, the Bush administration's use of these attacks to justify an ill-planned war in Iraq severely dented the credibility of the US in the world. However, the global enthusiasm generated by the election of Barack Obama shows that, despite America's many failings, the world holds a great reservoir of hope for the US to be true to its much pronounced ideals.