March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:40 PM EST I have a few more comments in response to John Steele Gordon’s latest post, unrelated to those that Joshua Zeitz has already offered. First, in response to my entry this afternoon, Mr. Gordon writes: “Mr. Burns quotes several people of the Looney Tunes religious right blaming Hurricane Katrina on God’s wrath over New Orleans’s sinful ways. . . . I don’t think such nonsense is what I and Barone were talking about. The Jerry Falwell types, finding sin in everything and ascribing everything bad that happens to the wages thereof, have been around since God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.” Taken individually, I agree with each sentence of Mr. Gordon’s comments, as quoted above. He and Mr. Barone were not talking about cultural conservatives in their blog entries, and religious radicals have, indeed, been around forever. My point is that the nominally Christian right is hardly ever lumped in with the loosely defined “blame America first” crowd, even though they seem to blame Americans for some of the twenty-first century’s worst domestic catastrophes. In a way, Jerry Falwell and Ward Churchill (of “little Eichmann” fame), have rather similar views of where 9/11 came from. Both see it as a kind of punishment for America’s past sins; they just emphasize the importance of different sins. I was not criticizing Mr. Gordon’s post but rather Mr. Barone’s, which was carelessly reasoned and underinclusive in its focus. Furthermore, Mr. Gordon has dumped Jerry Falwell and co. into the same “Looney Tunes” dustbin where he deposited Pat Buchanan a few days ago. I certainly agree with him that these miscreants belong in such an undignified category. But it’s a mistake to dismiss these men as insignificant just because they’re so far from the political center. Falwell and Buchanan still exercise influence on certain segments of the population. Witness, in the former’s case, Senator McCain’s backtracking on his 2000 campaign criticism of Falwell, Robertson, et al. In the case of Mr. Buchanan, his latest book, State of Emergency, has an Amazon.com sales rank of 6,763. In comparison, Noam Chomsky’s latest, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, is ranked at 12,783. The latter is probably a good example of the kind of academic disliked by Mr. Barone, but if Amazon is any guide, his following is rather less impressive than the supposedly marginal Buchanan’s. On a different subject, I’d add that at least one of Mr. Gordon’s examples of frivolous, America-blaming academic debates seems flawed. In the case of the “Who lost China?” discussion, I don’t think it’s entirely clear that the question is ridiculous. Mr. Gordon is right that the Communist takeover in China would have happened even with a historical all-star team in charge of the State Department. It’s not at all obvious, though, that the emerging Chinese state had to be as hostile to the United States and as close to the Soviet Union as it was. If “losing China” means losing it not just to Communism but to the Soviet sphere of influence, the debate over how that came to pass is still one worth having. With the international situation being what it is, we might end up learning something very useful.
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