The American “Creed” is positive and optimistic, even if it has a tendency towards triumphalism, but what Lieven describes as “Jacksonian Nationalism” is profoundly negative and pessimistic. It is largely a product of the bitter and defensive attitudes created in the American South after the Civil War, although its roots can be traced further back than that.
It is a central feature of American conservatism generally, but of the Christian Right most especially, that people need to “take back” the nation and restore an older, purer way of ordering society. Fundamental to this vision of the world is that the “right” people have lost control over America (conceived in varying degrees as being: white, male, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, traditionalist Christian) and the solution lies in overturning varying aspects of modernity. This is what it means to describe America as simultaneously modern and anti-modern.
This is a vision that is driven more by fear than by anything else: fear of change, fear of those who are “different,” and fear of threats both external and internal. Righteous victimhood is also a common element, victimhood driven by a sense of thwarted national destiny. When politicians or commentators use fear or national victimhood as a motivation for political action, they are typically relying upon assumptions derived from this aspect of American nationalism.
Such attitudes are not entirely contradictory to the American Creed. One might be pessimistic while the other is optimistic, but both rely heavily upon messianic notions of America being the chosen nation of God, destined to bring glory and salvation to the rest of the world. It’s simply that for the more pessimistically inclined, this won’t readily happen until the chosen people of God reclaim America from the minions of Satan.
- “[O]ne must understand that these voters belong to coherent and immensely strong religious and cultural worlds, which are genuinely under attack as a result of social, cultural, and economic changes. ...The tragicomic aspect of the situation of politically conservative American religious believers is that the laissez-faire capitalism which they support is not only undermining their economic world, but through the mass media and entertainment industries is also playing a central role in biting away at their moral universe.”
In other words, the conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who complain about how modernity is destroying their way of living are largely correct — but at the same time, they bear a great deal of responsibility for that by throwing their support behind economic and political systems that are at the root of this. Capitalism is not a force for conservatism — just the opposite, in fact.
America Right Or Wrong: An Anatomy Of American Nationalism, by Anatol Lieven
All of this is potentially very dangerous because the American nationalism of 2004 is remarkably like the European nationalism of 1914, as Lieven explains at some length in his book. The only saving grace, so far, is that commitment to the values of the American Creed (liberty and democracy) have effectively prevented the growth of authoritarianism which can so readily grow out of Jacksonian nationalism.
Where America goes from here depends largely upon what aspect of American nationalism people focus upon. If Americans are able to better understand the trends and courses of their own nationalistic impulses, they have a chance to separate the wheat from the chaff. If Americans can set aside the Jacksonian pessimism while also downplaying the messianic tendencies the Creed, they might accomplish a lot of good.
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