Of all the great creeds which steered Europeans into disaster in the last century (and the list only begins with Marxism and fascism), only one still survives. But it is thriving, and one does not have to listen very closely in order to hear it: anti-Americanism.

It not only thrives, but has been thriving longer than any of its comparatively short-lived rivals of the last hundred or so years. America was, after all, the place where Britain sent all its unwanted social baggage, starting with its Puritans and eventually running the gamut to include debtors, Quakers, unruly Irish and Scots, unlucky Africans, convicts, and so forth; it was conventional wisdom that no good thing could emerge from this human slag-heap. Nor did the establishment of the new federal Republic in 1787 redeem American reputations. The collapse of the French Republic into Napoleonic dictatorship, and the revulsion from the politics of Enlightenment reason which washed over Europe after Waterloo, made the United States the butt of Romantic scorn. There was no real national identity in America, complained Joseph de Maistre, only a cheap mixture of races and nationalities united solely by the hope of materialistic gain. "The American knows nothing; he seeks nothing but money; he has no ideas," raged the German poet Nichlaus Lenau. America, Heinrich Heine wrote (anticipating Marcuse and the Frankfurt School), was a "gigantic prison of freedom":

Sometimes it comes to my mind
To sail to America
To that pig-pen of Freedom
Inhabited by boors living in equality.1

Never mind that the Americans had to be summoned not once, but twice, to save Europe from self-destruction in the 20th century, and even a third time when Europe seemed unable to save itself from the Soviets. Their thanks for this was to have their role in the war of 1914-1918 dismissed as nothing more than a convenient reinforcement to those great geniuses of the Western Front, Haig and Petain (when in fact the American intervention was, in the words of John Mosier, "absolutely decisive"). Charles de Gaulle derided the Americans who redeemed Paris in 1944 for caring no more "about the liberation of France than did the Russians about liberating Poland." America, said Martin Heidegger, that paragon of Nazi academic form, was katestrophenhaft—the site of cultural catastrophe, an immolation of the mind and spirit, of poetry and thought.2

Not even 9/11 provided much more than a brief interruption to the river of contempt. Yes, France observed three minutes of silence in tribute to the victims of the Twin Towers, and Le Monde proclaimed nous sommes tous Americaines. But five days later the national secretary of the French Communist Party was booed by the convention of the Confederation Generale du Travaile when he called for observation of the three minutes' silence, and (with a perverse even-handedness) the offices of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front celebrated the fall of the towers on television with upraised glasses of champagne.

A creed this persistent and this virulent must feed on something more than our occasional displays of arrogance, cultural boorishness, and the general sense that the United States has a God-given right to tell the world what it should be doing. The British did the same thing in spades, and so have the Russians, the Germans, and even the French, and yet there is nothing in any of their misbehaviors which has provoked anything so totalizing as the relentless and consuming passions of anti-Americanism. What is it in the American itch which provokes so violent a European scratch?

Jean-Francois Revel first pondered this in 1970, while he was still reeling from the collective blows delivered to the stability of the Fifth Republic by the Prague Spring, the Parisian student riots of 1968, and the Vietnam calamity. For many years a columnist and editor of L'Express, Revel could not reconcile the free pass European intellectuals gave to evils on the Left—e.g., the brutal suppression of Alexander Dubcek and the Czech dissidents by the Soviets—with their fanatical criticism of the American war in Vietnam, much less with the eagerness with which students of the Sorbonne threw up barricades, not in praise of liberte, but of dictatorship. Through all this, America—"parasitical, murderous, and sick"—became what Pascal Bruckner remembered as "the ideal scapegoat." Human capacities for forgetting the inconvenient, or not-seeing what is as plain as day, were never on better display.3

It finally came to Revel that anti-Americanism had little to do with what Americans actually were, and much more with what Europeans were becoming. He poured his conclusions into three savage indictments of European self-righteousness: Without Marx or Jesus (1970), The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), and the almost-despairing How Democracies Perish (1983), which railed against the indulgent European willingness to excuse the outrages of the Soviets while weeping over the pecadilloes of the Americans. He wondered out loud whether democracies have some kind of natural tendency to embrace their destroyers.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet ideology gave Revel only limited cheer, just as it did to Revel's colleagues among the French ex-Marxists whose illusions about socialism had gone up in the smoke of 1968. (Bruckner, for instance, celebrated the jack-hammering of the Wall with a cautionary title, La Melancholie Democratique, in 1990.) Revel had seen how close Western Europe had come to conceding the future to the Soviets, and he was not entirely convinced that the day had been won for liberal democracy. If "the United States had not displayed a minimum of unilateralism vis-a-vis the perennial European advice-givers, the Soviet empire would have endured much longer than it did." September 11th, and the tsunami of anti-American vitriol which followed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, were proof enough for him to connect the two parts of his 30-year-long critique into one seamless argument: Europeans are not lovers of liberal democracy, and they hate the United States precisely to the degree that the United States represents the fullest expression of liberal democracy's principles and life.

L'obsession Anti-Americaine (translated here simply as Anti-Americanism by Diarmid Cammell) was originally conceived as a sort of sequel to Without Marx or Jesus before 9/11; its first edition was actually published in 2000, so Revel was not reacting merely to the comic-opera provocations of the post-9/11 Euro-Left. His real concern was in 2000 what it been in 1970, the "epic twentieth-century struggle between socialism and liberal democracy," and he remained as persuaded in 2000 as he had been in 1970 that "the principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation." In the longue durÉe, every distinctive epoch of social, political, or intellectual progress produces a "laboratory society" where that progress is tested or deployed to its fullest. In the age of ancient democracy, it was Athens; in the age of the Renaissance, it was Italy; in the age of absolute monarchies, it was France. But in the age of liberal democracy, "it was the turn of the United States." Hence hatred of the United States betrays an underlying animus not just toward the laboratory but toward the experiment itself.

Still, no one should mistake Anti-Americanism for a lover's effusions. Much as Revel undertakes to justify Americanisms that not even many Americans are enthused with (such as the Electoral College), he is much more interested in puncturing the hypocrisies of anti-American Euro-Leftists who fail to see that their own backyards are piled with the same debris they blame Americans for littering. Americans are cultural imperialists, thrusting their cheapened culture and meaningless consumer goods down the throats of the world; never mind how the French blather on about rayonnement, the cultural sunlight of France which enlightens the globe. Americans ride a triumphalist "steamroller" of globalization—as if provincialism and border-closure do not actually "diminish and sterilize cultures." Americans are boors who allow "market laws" to become "totems" of cultural power (this, according to the French minister of culture); no, says Revel, Americans are democrats who understand that "market laws are not so much totems as explanations" of cultural power. The Japanese philosopher Yujiro Nakamura attacks American "arrogance," of which the Japanese are utterly innocent, "as Koreans, Chinese and Filipinos can amply confirm." America rejects the 1997 Kyoto accords, an action which ought to deprive Americans of any claim to being civilized—an indictment which ignores how after four years, not a single European nation had ratified them either. Above all, America is a violent society; without any comparison, of course, to the epidemic waves of murder, robbery, and theft engulfing Europe. "Our intellectuals," Revel snorts, denounced Euro-Disney in 1992 as a "cultural Chernobyl," without noticing that the most famous Disney products—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Treasure Island—were European stories; a French-language journalist attacked the Broadway hit, Phantom of the Opera, as "a cultural equivalent of the Big Mac," while forgetting that Le Fantome de l'Opera was a French novel, and the musical version was written by an Englishman.

None of Revel's sarcasms bites as deeply as the axe he reserves for the anti-globalism activists. Ask the developing countries what they want, and they will tell you: "freer access to the world's markets for their products, especially agricultural products." They want, in other words, "more globalization, not less." But listen to the street demonstrators in Seattle and Genoa, and what you hear is the yawp of the over-fed and well-to-do. Worse, what you hear is indistinguishable from terrorism. "In Genoa we saw the reappearance of red flags adorned with hammer and sickle … effigies of Che Guevara and the acronym of the Red Brigades," writes Revel, whose stomach wrenches at the remembrance of the soixante-huitards. So he suspects that the anti-globalist program is not really about anti-globalism at all, since in fact the Euro-Left "has always hoped for globalization, but without the market—in other words, an ideologically correct world government." They are supremely "indifferent to the fate of the underdeveloped countries; what they really want is to destroy the economies of the developed countries, inasmuch as development and capitalism are, in their eyes, one and the same." And to the extent that, in their minds, capitalism is "absolute evil," it is "incarnated and directed by the United States."

Anti-Americanism is a great rant, and as rants go, a rollicking one. Whether it will persuade is another matter. After three decades of trying to help democracy help itself, and to little avail, Revel

hasn't much faith in reasoning Europeans out of a prejudice they never reasoned themselves into in the first place. Anti-Americanism is "a parti pris of the political, cultural and religious èlites," and it is evident that his principal hope is to expose and embarrass it, rather than convince European èlites of its folly. Anti-Americanism has served the same purposes, and for much the same reasons, in France over the last half-century as anti-Semitism before World War II, and the best way to read Anti-Americanism is to see it as Revel's J'Accuse.

What Revel does not seem to recognize is how much a first principle anti-Americanism has become for America's own Élites. Like the French, we suffer from our own domestic brands of anti-Americanism, in the form of both the infantile Left and the Calhounite Right, who belabor themselves with self-torture over whether commercial culture and popular democracy have sucked the juice out of our lives. (Nor is this new: our Romantics, from Emerson onwards, have been posing this question for almost as long as the European Romantics, and our postmoderns happily take up the chorus from them.) And we yearn for the applause and approval of the Europeans in a way that Revel would surely characterize as little better than pathetic, since such approval will be forthcoming only to the degree we abjure the very things which make us Americans, and which twice sent us into world war to save the Europeans.

The enemies of reason do not like us, and they dislike us primarily because the American project was built upon the Enlightenment foundations of civil society, political freedom, and socially mobile capitalism. Discovering that Europe, sated with a hatred of "logocentrism" (a term popularized by the postmodernists, but coined by German anti-Semites in the 1930s), now finds us unspeakable is no surprise. To find our own Élites besotted with the same anti-rationalism is much more unnerving. And for that, Revel has no word of hope.

Allen C. Guelzo is dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University; in September, he will become Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettsyburg College, as well as Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era.

1. Joseph de Maistre, "Considerations on France," in The Works of Joseph de Maistre, ed. Jack Lively (Schocken, 1971), pp. 67, 84; James W. Caesar, "A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism," Policy Review (Summer 2003), pp. 4-5; Richard Wolin, "The Anti-American Revolution," The New Republic (August 17, 1998), p. 38.

2. John Mosier, The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I (HarperCollins, 2001), p. 336.

3. Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), p. 17.

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