March 19, 2007
Blame America First Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Michael Barone has an interesting entry on his blog today called “The Blame-America-First Crowd.” “In their assessment of what is going on in the world,” he writes, “they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The ‘we’ can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America—or the parts of America they don’t like—first.” Barone wonders why so many of the educated, affluent parts of society in particular hold to this paradigm so firmly when the evidence for it is so weak and the evidence against it so strong. He notes that the very well reviewed new book by Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, makes an overwhelming case that these peoples did far, far more that was good in the twentieth century than that was bad. The same can be said for the eighteenth and the nineteenth. As Barone writes, “The default assumption portrays American slavery as uniquely evil (which it wasn’t) and ignores the fact the first campaign to abolish slavery was worded in English.” He blames it on the “tenured radicals” who have so infested, and infected, the academy in recent decades. It is hard, after all, for even the most sensible college students to resist the daily drumbeat of anti-Americanism from so many professors who are, of course, supposed to be experts in their fields. I don’t doubt that that is part of the answer, but hardly all of it. The paradigm, in fact, has a long history. As far back as 1884, Gilbert and Sullivan put on the Lord High Executioner’s list of people who “never would be missed” if executed, “The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,/All centuries but this one, every country but his own.” I’m not a psychologist by a long shot, but I suspect the answer lies in that field. All adolescents go through a phase of blaming their parents for everything, and one’s own society is, in a sense, a parent. The richer and more powerful the parent, the less excuse there is for things not being perfect. It would be an interesting exercise in historical psychology to see if the tendency to blame one’s own country for all the world’s troubles is most strongly found in the richest and most powerful country of the time.
|
