Victor Davis Hanson: Americans Vs. America

Victor Davis Hanson, in the Rocky Mtn. News (3-17-05):

Sometime in the 1960s there arose a new home-grown distrust of the United States, followed by an erosion of faith in the values of the West. Perhaps the culprit was the fiasco in Vietnam or the rise of a trendy multiculturalism that followed from it.

Our schools often insisted that all cultures were to be roughly the same. History devolved more into melodrama than tragedy. America was no longer exceptional - and thus in no position to criticize a Cuba as undemocratic or condemn the Iranian mullahs as murderously theocratic.

The enormous wealth and leisure that followed from global capitalism and democracy insulated us - creating an unreality about the sources for our privilege and naivete about why life was so bad outside our shores.

Consequently, some utopian elites forgot the free-market origins of their own riches and why they had the freedom and leisure to be so censorious of their own culture. Maybe they were guilty over our bounty. One way of enjoying an upscale American lifestyle, while simultaneously feeling pretty terrible about it, is to castigate the history and global conduct of the United States in the abstract - without ever giving up much in the concrete.

How else could the currency speculator George Soros - whose 1992 financial manipulations almost destroyed the Bank of England and thousands of its small depositors - win praise from leftists for comparing President Bush's conduct to Nazism? The angry architects of Moveon.org were neither poor nor oppressed. Nor were they bothered that their Soros millions originated from the financial losses of others. But they did reflect that the most strident anti-Americanism is largely found among our unhappy upper-middle classes....

Bill Clinton also seemed fuzzy about the true nature of tyranny, and thus was clueless about murderous theocratic Iran. Recently he cooed, "Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency" - as if theocrats there allow truly popular government.

Other elites wished outright that we would fail in the Middle East. Perhaps our defeat would prove that in a post-modern world American force can only be counterproductive or destabilizing to multilateral protocols.

Thus it was not the slur of a Joe McCarthy clone, but President Clinton's own National Security Council member Nancy Soderberg, who recently lamented on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart of George Bush's developing success in the Middle East: "It's scary for Democrats, I have to say. . . . Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's still hope for the rest of us. . . . There's always hope that this might not work."

"Not work"? How sad that our most educated and sophisticated cannot fathom that an Iraqi Kurd, an Afghan woman or a Lebanese shopkeeper simply wants the same freedom and opportunity for their children that so many of the most blessed - but bitter - in America either take for granted, feel guilty about or so cynically dismiss.