Review: America Right or Wrong
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000431 |
| Author | James Reed |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 1186 | International Journal | Autumn 2005 |
AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG
An Anatomy of American Nationalism
Anatol Lieven
New York:Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv, 274pp, $45.00 cloth (ISBN 0-
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 observer s as Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bry ce, 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
America n nationalism, which is funda mentally diff erent from the mi ld,
civic nationalism of the almost universally-admired American creed, Lieven
continues, brought out the worst instincts of Washington’s lingering Cold
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