I've kown anti-Americanism all my life. I've grown up with it.
A slew of articles have been coming out this topic, this is one I found particularly striking today:
Anti-ism is also a response to seduction. After all, why would people freely flock into McDonald's, wear Levi's, drive SUVs and watch Hollywood shlock? The problem with America's enormous "soft power" is that we hate the seducer as we hate ourselves for yielding to temptation. From there it is but a short step to the unconscious remedy of projection and displacement: Blame the source of all these attractions that demote your own time-honored achievements. Hence, any anti-ism comes with the demonization of the "Other" as a way of revalidating oneself.Adn so I have told my friends overseas: "We are family in our modern world together. The differences are not as great as it seems. Posted by Dennis at February 15, 2007 12:17 PMPower, be it soft or hard, makes enemies?that is the long and the short, but not the end of it. For America was a target of resentment long before George W. Bush?even as far back as the early days of the Republic when it was still weak, as were the Jews in Europe throughout (and the Indians in Africa or the overseas Chinese in Asia). What, then, might be the common denominator of all these anti-isms?
Jews, Indians and Chinese have always embodied the wrenching economic transformation that threatened old habits and dispensations?and Jews suffered twice because they were agents of intellectual and cultural upheaval, to boot. Unlike such high-achieving but highly vulnerable minorities, America has always presented an XXL version of this threat to the rest of the world?as the very steamroller of modernity. And at no time has it flattened as many old ways (and profits and privileges that go with them) as it has at the turn of the 21st century, when it was at the height of its power, hard and soft. Such Behemoths are sometimes respected, always feared, but never loved?especially not by those who once were giants in their own right.
Some anti-Americanism will surely be muted by wiser American policies that reduce the (rational) fear of American power unbound. But au fond, anti-Americanism is not about America. At heart, any anti-ism is a crisis of collective self-esteem that cries out for compensation, be it by extolling one's own culture or by denigrating the Other's. Hence the vexing limits of a rational-empirical debate. For if such a discourse were indeed constructive, it would soon turn to the real causes of misery?those the anti-ist seeks to conceal from himself as he projects them onto the Other.
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