Americanism

What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations? Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right. Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment. Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism. If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square. Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement. A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.

What is Americanism? The contributors to this volume recognize Americanism in all its complexity--as an ideology, an articulation of the nation's rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style imbued with political meaning. In response to the pervasive vision of Americanism as a battle cry or a smug assumption, this collection of essays stirs up new questions and debates that challenge us to rethink the model currently being exported, too often by force, to the rest of the world. Crafted by a cast of both rising and renowned intellectuals from three continents, the twelve essays in this volume are divided into two sections. The first group of essays addresses the understanding of Americanism within the United States over the past two centuries, from the early republic to the war in Iraq. The second section provides perspectives from around the world in an effort to make sense of how the national creed and its critics have shaped diplomacy, war, and global culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Approaching a controversial ideology as both scholars and citizens, many of the essayists call for a revival of the ideals of Americanism in a new progressive politics that can bring together an increasingly polarized and fragmented citizenry. Contributors: Mia Bay, Rutgers University Jun Furuya, Hokkaido University, Japan Gary Gerstle, University of Maryland Jonathan M. Hansen, Harvard University Michael Kazin, Georgetown University Rob Kroes, University of Amsterdam Melani McAlister, The George Washington University Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University Alan McPherson, Howard University Louis Menand, Harvard University Mae M. Ngai, University of Chicago Robert Shalhope, University of Oklahoma Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University Alan Wolfe, Boston College

What is Pan-Americanism? People have been struggling with that problem for over a century. Pan-Americanism is (and has been) an amalgam of diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural projects under the umbrella of hemispheric cooperation and housed institutionally in the Pan-American Union, and later the Organization of American States. But what made Pan-Americanism exceptional? The chapters in this volume suggest that Pan-Americanism played a central and lasting role in structuring inter-American relations, because of the ways in which the movement was reinvented over time, and because the actors who shaped it often redefined and redeployed the term. Through the twentieth century, new appropriations of Pan-Americanism structured, restructured, and redefined inter-American relations. Taken together, these chapters underscore two exciting new shifts in how scholars and others have come to understand Pan-Americanism and inter-American relations. First, Pan-Americanism is increasingly understood not simply as a diplomatic, commercial, and economic forum, but a movement that has included cultural exchange. Second, researchers, political leaders, and the media in several countries have traditionally conceived of Pan-Americanism as a mechanism of US expansionism. This volume reimagines Pan-Americanism as a movement built by actors from all corners of the Americas.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and radio host Mark R. Levin comes a searing plea for a return to America’s most sacred values. In Rediscovering Americanism, Mark R. Levin revisits the founders’ warnings about the perils of overreach by the federal government and concludes that the men who created our country would be outraged and disappointed to see where we've ended up. Levin returns to the impassioned question he's explored in each of his bestselling books: How do we save our exceptional country? Because our values are in such a precarious state, he argues that a restoration to the essential truths on which our country was founded has never been more urgent. Understanding these principles, in Levin’s words, can “serve as the antidote to tyrannical regimes and governments.” Rediscovering Americanism is not an exercise in nostalgia, but an appeal to his fellow citizens to reverse course. This essential book brings Levin’s celebrated, sophisticated analysis to the troubling question of America's future, and reminds us what we must restore for the sake of our children and our children's children.

In its domestic manifestations anti-Americanism may be equated with alienation, or an embittered radical social criticism. Abroad it may take the form of nationalism, anti-capitalism, and protest against modernity. This volume examines the phenomenon within American society and aboard, especially among intellectuals.

Negative views of the United States abound, but we know too little about how such views affect politics. Drawing on careful research on post-Soviet Central Asia, Edward Schatz argues that anti-Americanism is best seen not as a rising tide that swamps or as a conflagration that overwhelms. Rather, "America" is a symbolic resource that resides quietly in the mundane but always has potential value for social and political mobilizers. Using a wide range of evidence and a novel analytic framework, Schatz considers how Islamist movements, human rights activists, and labor mobilizers across Central Asia avail themselves of this fact, thus changing their ability to pursue their respective agendas. By refocusing our analytic gaze away from high politics, he affords us a clearer view of the slower-moving, partially occluded, and socially embedded processes that ground how "America" becomes political. In turn, we gain a nuanced appreciation of the downstream effects of US foreign policy choices and a sober sense of the challenges posed by the politics of traveling images. Most treatments of anti-Americanism focus on politics in the realm of presidential elections and foreign policies. By focusing instead on symbols, Schatz lays bare how changing public attitudes shift social relations in politically significant ways, and considers how changing symbolic depictions of the United States recombine the raw material available for social mobilizers. Just like sediment traveling along waterways before reaching its final destination, the raw material that constitutes symbolic America can travel among various social groups, and can settle into place to form the basis of new social meanings. Symbolic America, Schatz shows us, matters for politics in Central Asia and beyond.

Anti-Americanism has been the subject of much commentary but little serious research. In response, Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane have assembled a distinguished group of experts, including historians, polling-data analysts, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists, to explore anti-Americanism in depth, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The result is a book that probes deeply a central aspect of world politics that is frequently noted yet rarely understood. Katzenstein and Keohane identify several quite different anti-Americanisms-liberal, social, sovereign-nationalist, and radical. Some forms of anti-Americanism respond merely to what the United States does, and could change when U.S. policies change. Other forms are reactions to what the United States is, and involve greater bias and distrust. The complexity of anti-Americanism, they argue, reflects the cultural and political complexities of American society. The analysis in this book leads to a surprising discovery: there are as many ways to be anti-American as there are ways to be American.

Georges-Louis Buffon, an eighteenth-century French scientist, was the first to promote the widespread idea that nature in the New World was deficient; in America, which he had never visited, dogs don't bark, birds don't sing, and—by extension—humans are weaker, less intelligent, and less potent. Thomas Jefferson, infuriated by these claims, brought a seven-foot-tall carcass of a moose from America to the entry hall of his Parisian hotel, but the five-foot-tall Buffon remained unimpressed and refused to change his views on America's inferiority. Buffon, as Philippe Roger demonstrates here, was just one of the first in a long line of Frenchmen who have built a history of anti-Americanism in that country, a progressive history that is alternately ludicrous and trenchant. The American Enemy is Roger's bestselling and widely acclaimed history of French anti-Americanism, presented here in English translation for the first time. With elegance and good humor, Roger goes back 200 years to unearth the deep roots of this anti-Americanism and trace its changing nature, from the belittling, as Buffon did, of the "savage American" to France's resigned dependency on America for goods and commerce and finally to the fear of America's global domination in light of France's thwarted imperial ambitions. Roger sees French anti-Americanism as barely acquainted with actual fact; rather, anti-Americanism is a cultural pillar for the French, America an idea that the country and its culture have long defined themselves against. Sharon Bowman's fine translation of this magisterial work brings French anti-Americanism into the broad light of day, offering fascinating reading for Americans who care about our image abroad and how it came about. “Mr. Roger almost single-handedly creates a new field of study, tracing the nuances and imagery of anti-Americanism in France over 250 years. He shows that far from being a specific reaction to recent American policies, it has been knit into the very substance of French intellectual and cultural life. . . . His book stuns with its accumulated detail and analysis.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times “A brilliant and exhaustive guide to the history of French Ameriphobia.”—Simon Schama, New Yorker

In Vernacular Latin Americanisms, Fernando Degiovanni offers a long-view perspective on the intense debates that shaped Latin American studies and still inform their function in the globalized and neoliberal university of today. By doing so he provides a reevaluation of a field whose epistemological and political status has obsessed its participants up until the present. The book focuses on the emergence of Latin Americanism as a field of critical debate and scholarly inquiry between the 1890s and the 1960s. Drawing on contemporary theory, intellectual history, and extensive archival research, Degiovanni explores in particular how the discourse and realities of war and capitalism have left an indelible mark on the formation of disciplinary perspectives on Latin American cultures in both the United States and Latin America. Questioning the premise that Latin Americanism as a discipline comes out of the tradition of continental identity developed by prominent intellectuals such as José Martí, José E. Rodó or José Vasconcelos, Degiovanni proposes that the scholars who established the discipline did not set out to defend Latin America as a place of uncontaminated spiritual values opposed to a utilitarian and materialist United States. Their mission was entirely different, even the opposite: giving a place to culture in the consolidation of alternative models of regional economic cooperation at moments of international armed conflict. For scholars theorizing Latin Americanism in market terms, this meant questioning nativist and cosmopolitan narratives about identity; it also meant abandoning any Bolivarian project of continental unity or of socialist internationalism.