The America We Love
This essay was originally published in Éléments no. 116, March 2005. It was written by Alain de Benoist under the pen name “Robert de Herte.” This essay critiques America's ideological foundation, rooted in Puritanism and Enlightenment philosophy, which fosters an obsession with progress, novelty, and a messianic belief in its destiny to model an ideal society for the world. While acknowledging the cultural and intellectual richness of the America we admire—its literature, music, natural landscapes, and free-spirited communities—Benoist condemns its degeneration into materialism, uniformity, and the glorification of self-interest and conquest.
Translated by Alexander Raynor.
A debate, awkward and somewhat ridiculous, is taking place in certain circles about the question of identifying the "principal enemy." Those participating in this debate regularly make two errors.
The first is believing that the principal enemy is the one we detest the most, feel most distant from, or have the least affinity with. This is a methodological error that Mao Zedong, in his time, had already denounced. The truth is simpler: among all possible enemies, the principal enemy is simply the one with the greatest means to combat us and impose their will upon us—in other words, the most powerful. From this perspective, things are clear: the principal enemy, politically and geopolitically, is the United States of America.
The second error, even more devastating, is equating the principal enemy with an absolute enemy. This error, characteristic of totalitarian (or religious) mindsets, is clearly apolitical. In politics, there are—or rather, there should be—no absolute enemies. A political enemy is not a figure of Evil. They are a momentary adversary, someone we can fight relentlessly but with whom peace is always possible. To believe the principal enemy is an absolute enemy is to venture into metaphysical and moral territory, where the enemy becomes not just an opponent to defeat but a guilty party to punish, a representative of evil to be eradicated, an entity placed beyond humanity.
This is precisely how Americans reason: for them, war always resembles a crusade. There is no need to adopt the same approach toward them. Even if they are the principal enemy, there is no reason to demonize them.
The proof? There is also an America we love. This America is certainly not that of Capital, nor of chauvinistic “nativists,” fundamentalist televangelists, or delusional creationists. It is neither the America of the New Deal nor McCarthyism. It is not the America of “golden boys,” “winners,” and “money makers,” nor of “rednecks” and Vietnam veterans, much less that of cheerleaders, “bimbos,” and bodybuilders. Let alone the cohort of mystical fanatics, war criminals, and serial killers currently surrounding George W. Bush.
The America we love has many facets and faces. First, an immense literature: from Mark Twain and Jack London to Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and so many others. Then, of course, the great American cinema—before it degenerated into a debauchery of special effects and stereotypical trivialities.
There is also jazz, which is arguably the country’s only true cultural creation. And the America of vast natural landscapes and small human communities. The one evoked, in such diverse ways, by the names of Jefferson Davis and Scarlett O’Hara, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, Sacco and Vanzetti, the young Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, H.L. Mencken and William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, Cassius Clay and Woody Allen, E.F. Schumacher and Christopher Lasch, Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky.
Additionally, in the realm of ideas, the United States is not only the country where great universities offer working conditions that Europe can only dream of and where, despite "political correctness," freedom of expression thrives in ways unfamiliar (or no longer familiar) to us. One is also struck by the quality of intellectual debates there and, in fields like political science, by the way many authors ground their theories in foundational concepts. This stands in stark contrast to France, where political science—nearly extinct—has mostly devolved into electoral meteorology. On concepts like federalism, "populism," and community, the theoretical contributions of Americans have been considerable.
But there is a flip side. From its inception, the United States aspired to embody the notion of liberty. This is a positive concept, which they immediately understood as meaning that "every citizen is king." This notion gave rise to some of their best qualities: the enthusiasm stemming from the ability to act without constraints, creative willpower, the ideal of autonomy (self-reliance), and the creation of small, free communities resisting all forms of despotism—what Maritain called the "sense of human companionship."
However, this same notion also produced the worst, as it devolved into mere selfishness, a glorification of business dealings and the pursuit of money—the most standardized of desires—and even served as a pretext for new forms of conquest and oppression. Pragmatism, similarly, deteriorated into sheer materialism, a cult of performance and success (as William James said: "Give me something that ensures success [...] and every reasonable man will worship it"), technological optimism, adoration of comfort and convenience ("the animal ideal," as Keyserling called it), and an arrogant pride in filling the world with new objects.
Finally, the spirit of community degenerated into mental uniformity (like-mindedness), into that extraordinary vulgarity of conformity that Tocqueville had already observed.
America’s original flaw, whose history is intertwined with that of modernity, lies in having been built largely upon Puritan thought and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. From this arises its claim to have no ancestors, the ambition, proclaimed by Thomas Paine as early as 1776, to “begin the world anew” under the gaze of God, its constant obsession with novelty, and its unwavering belief in progress (the ideal of the limitless).
On the other hand, this has also produced a messianic ideocracy that views the United States as a new Promised Land and the rest of the world as an imperfect space that must be converted to the American way of life to become both comprehensible and aligned with Good. This objective of creating an ideal society—one that would serve as a model for humanity and whose universal adoption would bring history to an end—has deep roots.
“As always,” writes Francis Fukuyama, “Americans have regarded their political institutions not as mere products of their history, suited exclusively to the peoples of North America, but as the very embodiment of certain universal ideals and aspirations destined to one day extend to the rest of the world.” American values, Samuel Huntington adds, are founded on “Protestantism, individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that men have the capacity to create a paradise on earth.”
In 1863, in Life Without Principle, Thoreau wrote: “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.” One can see how far things have come.
There is another America.