European Anti-Americanism and its Backlash

Jonathan Tepperman surveys the books dealing with this topic in today’s Sunday New York Times Book Review section.  Tepperman sees two main camps: the left-wing European anti-American camp and the right-wing anti-anti-Americans. He doesn’t have much sympathy with either group:

The problem with the anti-Americans’ complaints, however, is that they
are often undermined by bad faith. Some of the critics have never even
bothered to visit the United States. And even those who have (like
Hutton) or who live here (like Lieven) frequently sound as though they
haven’t and don’t. When Hutton fulminates that national democracy in
the United States has descended to the level of ”pre-Enlightenment
Europe,” it becomes hard to take the rest of his charges seriously.
And Lieven undermines his otherwise lucid writing when he insists that
there is little tolerance for dissent in American public discourse. Has
he not seen ”Fahrenheit 9/11” or visited a newsstand lately? The
venom and inaccuracy of such charges suggest that the anti-Americans
are motivated by something more basic than disagreements over policy or
the personality of a particular president.

Also disturbing is the way many of these writers emphasize America’s relationship with

Israel. There’s nothing wrong with complaining about Washington’s strategy in the

Middle
East; reasonable people can disagree. But one should be skeptical of a
writer like Lieven who refers to the pro-Israel lobby as having an
”iron grip” on Washington or who labels a contemporary pro-Israeli
Lebanese-American writer an ”Arab Josephus” — a comparison (to
Flavius Josephus, the Hellenized Jewish historian of the ancient world
often known for his cowardice and treachery) that manages to combine
several layers of racial condescension in two words. Such language is
not new; anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have run together at least
since the 1930’s, when French writers denounced the avaricious United
States as ”Uncle Shylock.” But the modern anti-Americans would serve
themselves better by taking care to untangle the two.

Tepperman then has a breif discussion of three anti-anti-American books: Hating America , Understanding Ant-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, and finally, Anti-Americanism, written by the French writer Jean-Francois Revel.

I haven’t read these books, but from Tepperman’s comments I’m not sure I’m in a huge hurry:

The three books are united by rage at America’s enemies — with a venom
that mirrors the anti-Americans’ own. In none of them, however, has the
excess of spleen produced clarity, fair-mindedness or nuance.