A broad anti-Americanism seems on the rise among Australians, possibly due to the resentment many feel about US power and the policies of the Bush administration. Brendon O'Connor discusses anti-Americanism in Australia.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

O'Connor, Brendon

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A U S T R A L I A N  B O O K  R E V I E W  O C T O B E R  2 0 0 3     2 1The Last Respectable Prejudice?Brendon O’ConnorIS ANTI-AMERICANISM one of the last respectable prej-udices in Australia, or are cries of anti-Americanism a wayof silencing reasonable criticism? At the risk of beinginjured while straddling the fence, I will argue that, althoughthe Bush administration has often behaved like an imperialbully-boy, the US has become the whipping boy for theanxieties of many nations and people. A broad anti-American-ism seems on the rise among Australians, possibly due tothe resentment many feel about US power and the policiesof this administration. Although I sympathise withmany of its critics, the associated slide of many Australiansinto anti-Americanism is unfortunate. Presidents come andgo, but America’s importance in our world and imaginationsis much greater. Besides, the US is far too diverse to hate.Salman Rushdie re-cently wrote that,whereas Muslim coun-tries seem to resent USpower and arrogance,Westerners outside theUS seem more vexed byAmericans themselves —their emotionality, patri-otism and obesity. Butwhich Americans are theyreferring to? Thereare 290 million of them.‘America feels itself to behumanity in miniature,’said the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. This assess-ment reflects  the self-centred view of many in the new middlekingdom. Yet, the US has a strong claim to being the mostmulticultural society on earth.Hating Americans is surely misanthropic and hysterical:individually, they are no worse or better than Indonesians,New Zealanders or Iraqis. Most anti-Americanism in Aus-tralia is not based on pathological hatred of the US but ratheron a pseudo-anti-Americanism, which tends to recycle a se-ries of tired stereotypes. ‘Americans are people too,’ wrote adisgruntled Washington Post columnist recently. But for manynon-Americans, they are a particular type of people. The falsefamiliarity that most non-Americans have with Americans viatelevision and cinema creates a strong set of stereotypes.Our love/hate relationship with American culture is possi-bly the most contradictory aspect of Australian identitytoday. We consume vast amounts of American popular cul-ture in an addictive manner, but, as with the Coke or ciga-rettes, this consumption comes with a guilty aftertaste formany. Recent surveys show Australians to be among themost enthusiastic consumers of US culture and one ofthe nations most worried about the Americanisation of oursociety. This paradox goes some way to explaining whyAustralian anti-Americanism is often inarticulate and notclassifiable as pathological anti-Americanism.Undoubtedly, US society and culture produces undesir-able ideas and outcomes deserving of criticism and scepti-cism. However, there is a tendency in the Australian media tofocus on the weird and bizarre, or on the worst aspects ofAmerican society. The 2003 Californian Recall election cer-tainly has its strange elements, but little is gained by con-stantly depicting such events as freak shows. The 2000 presi-dential election suffered a similar fate, with its delayed resultsdescribed in one headline in The Australian as ‘anarchy’ inthe US. In truth, it wasestablishment politics asusual. Worse than thatnewspaper’s coverageof the 2000 election wasits tabloid coverage ofthe recent Iraq war.Objectivity was castaside as it gave way tojingoistic pro-war head-lines, accompanied bya boy’s own collectionof war photographs.The coverage of the kill-ing of Iraqi soldiers(as opposed to Iraqi civilians) was handled particularlypoorly. The stable dissident, Phillip Adams, seemeddrawn in his op-ed pieces towards the opposite exaggera-tions, often based on little more than conspiracy theories.The Australian’s coverage reflects a tabloid culturein which clichés and knee-jerk reactions to the US flourishamongst both pro- and anti-Americans.There are many reasons to be critical of the current admin-istration. Bush is, in my assessment, the worst US president inliving memory. The political rhetoric of Bush and his Secre-tary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has been a public relationsnightmare for the US’s image in every country I know. Worsestill, the administration has managed to turn legitimate con-cerns about terrorism, rogue states and the proliferation ofweapons of mass destruction  into terms of mockery in thetwo years since September 11. That said, US foreign policy ismore complicated than the designs of Bush and the so-calledneocons. Despite this, there is a curious need for simplicityamong many critics of US foreign policy, often among thesame critics who argue for a more complex analysis of non-C O M M E N T A R YArchived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 2 2     A U S T R A L I A N  B O O K  R E V I E W  O C T O B E R  2 0 0 3C O M M E N T A R YWesterners. A case in point is one recent visitor, Tariq Ali,who was a crowd favourite at the recent Melbourne Writers’Festival and Brisbane’s Ideas at the Powerhouse. His bookThe Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002),with George W. Bushdepicted as a mullah on the front cover, has outsold otherbooks on international politics. Ali rightly counsels a morecomplicated view of the Islamic world. However, when hediscusses the US, he presents a distorted and caricaturalpicture. In a chapter entitled ‘A Short-course History of USImperialism’, which is short on evidence and conspiratorialrather than historical, he sets out a beginner’s guide toblaming the problems of the world on US foreign policy.Ali’s account of World War II and of the beginnings ofthe Cold War is revealing. He ignores the brutality of theSoviets in Europe or the altruism that partly motivated theMarshall Plan. Instead, Ali writes: ‘The Marshall Plan andNATO were the Siamese twins designed to fight a protractedwar against the old enemy.’ This suggestion of a constructedSoviet enemy is part of Ali’s unwillingness to point out thatthe Soviet Union was a real threat. Add to this his Trotskyistversion of events and one is presented with the history of thetwentieth century as a tale of the US’s desire for war and otheropportunities to further its imperialistic desires. There is nomention that for much of US history it has been reluctant toinvolve its armed forces in the affairs of foreign nations. Evenits recent military involvement in the former Yugoslavia wasthe source of considerable domestic reluctance and was largelyurged on by its European allies. Tariq Ali, like John Pilger, isa hero of the blame game, charging that the world has beenmade wicked by the imperialistic US and its client rulers. Thiscritique is not without certain insights, but in its totality it isthe flipside of Bush’s post-September 11 comment that hewas ‘amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what ourcountry is about that people would hate us … I just can’tbelieve it because I know how good we are.’ The US’s behav-iour and motives are good and bad, as well as a variety ofshades of grey. The inability to grasp this reveals a certainblindness of habit or a distortion of the historical record.Tariq Ali’s writings are of little help to those seekinga real understanding of the US’s complex and contradic-tory motivations and actions. Walter Russell Mead’sSpecial Providence: American Foreign Policy and How ItChanged the World (2001) offers readers a way of seeing theUS in a less binary fashion. Instead of painting the US in theusual good/bad, internationalist/isolationist, imperialist/liberational modes, Mead posits that US foreign policy hasbeen guided by four competing traditions: the Hamiltonian,Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian traditions. The formeris principally interested in commerce and the success of USenterprise. This tradition provides the US with the centralunderstanding that what is good for corporate America isgood for America as a whole. Hamiltonians believe that beinginvolved in foreign wars is generally too costly and distract-ing from the more sensible goal of making money.The Wilsonian tradition is a missionary tradition thatseeks the dissemination of American ideals and values abroad.The Wilsonian tradition is a double-edged sword. On oneside, it was central to providing the initiative behind theestablishment of international organisations such as theLeague of Nations and the UN. However, it is also the sourceof much righteousness and moralising towards the rest of theworld. Clinton’s actions in the former Yugoslavia are oftendescribed as Wilsonian; more controversially, the toppling ofthe Taliban and of Saddam Hussein can be said to haveWilsonian elements to them.The Jeffersonian tradition emphasises the need for the USlargely to avoid foreign entanglements and instead to focuson the preservation of democracy within the US. It is notentirely an isolationist tradition, but wants American engage-ment with the world to involve the least cost and danger. Thiscan be the most radical tradition, particularly in the handsof dissidents such as Gore Vidal and Ralph Nader, but it ishard for the European left to see it as radical because of itsrelatively libertarian character.Finally, there is the Jacksonian tradition, the most milita-ristic tradition, with its celebration of military service (oftenassociated with Southern communities) and its belief that theUS should only fight wars to a victorious end. There isa brutal edge to this tradition that helps to explain the atomicstrikes on Japan, US tactics in the Vietnam War and thecowboy rhetoric of the current president. This tradition hasunderpinned the development of the most dangerous militarypower ever and the search for new technologies such asa missile defence shield. There is an isolationist side tothis tradition that was evident in the Bush administration’sapproach to the world before September 11. The behaviourof the current administration has often been Jacksonian incharacter. In Mead’s view, this needs to be moderated bya revival of the Jeffersonian tradition. Mead is able to seepositive and negative aspects in all four traditions, includingthe Jacksonian tradition. He praises the former because of itspopulist attributes, which he sees as offering an importantcorrective to the current élitism in American political life.Mead’s traditions permit a nuanced discussion about USforeign policy, and help us to deal with the contradictionsbetween the rhetoric and reality of US foreign policy. Broaderacknowledgment of the impact and currency of these tradi-tions would help us to regard US foreign policy in a lessmonolithic manner, mindful of the various historical patternsand internal conflicts.More importantly, the US itself needs all these traditionsto be strong to ensure more open political debate and tochallenge Bush’s nativism. Even in the absence of robustdebate within the US, I believe that its critics would do wellto acknowledge the contradictory strands within the Ameri-can tradition. The measured analysis of Mead’s critical andcomplex book provides a lucid example of how reflex anti-Americanism can be avoided. Knee-jerk reactions should besuppressed, not just to avoid prejudice but also to permitan articulate engagement with the US, and also, wherenecessary, a reasoned reality check.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 

The Last Respectable Prejudice?

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The Last Respectable Prejudice?

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