The New Road to Serfdom (3 page)

The same argument applies with regard to slavery. This needs to be said because, of all the weapons in the
anti-American arsenal, the history of slavery is the one most worn with use. Make the argument that the American Constitution is a uniquely benign document that has served to keep an entire nation prosperous and free, and you will sooner or later be told that it was a slaveowners’ charter that valued some human beings at three fifths of the worth of others.

There is, of course, some truth in this accusation, which was leveled at the time both by abolitionists in the United States and by British and American Tories who opposed the project of independence. “How is it that we hear the greatest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” demanded the most eloquent British Tory of his generation, Dr. Johnson, in 1775.

Once again, though, it needs to be remembered that Man is fallen. There isn’t a country on Earth that hasn’t done things in the past that, viewed from the vantage of the present, are shameful. The fact that a nation doesn’t always live up to its ideals, or justify its self-image, doesn’t mock those ideals or invalidate that self-image. On the contrary, it can spur the nation to greater effort. And, in the case of slavery, this is more or less what happened.

It is perfectly legitimate, when discussing the U.S. Constitution and the vision of its authors, to draw attention to the persistence, first of slavery, then of codified racial segregation, and then of unofficial discrimination. Well into the 1950s, supporters of segregation, led by the veteran Georgia senator Richard
Russell, cited the Constitution and repeated Supreme Court decisions in support of their position. But it is only fair to give the full picture. If we want to bring up slavery, we must refer, also, to the anti-slavery campaign, and to the huge price its adherents were prepared to pay in pursuit of their objectives, including death on the battlefield. If we are determined to remember segregation, we should likewise recall the civil rights campaigners. If we want to discuss racism, we can hardly ignore the fact that, in 2008, Americans elected a mixed-race president.

American patriots, including those who didn’t vote for Barack Obama, should nonetheless take pride in the fact that his victory in some measure wiped away the stain of slavery and segregation. Those who believe in collective sin must also accept the logic of collective redemption. If all Americans, including those who never owned slaves, were diminished by the fact that the institution survived for as long as it did, then all Americans, including those who voted for McCain, are elevated by the fact that they live in a country that has moved in the space of forty years from the formalized exclusion of black voters to the election of a black head of state.

Indeed, the worst losers in the 2008 presidential electorate were arguably the dinosaurs of the black power movement, who found that their narrative of race relations in America had been falsified overnight. It is no surprise that Jeremiah Wright and Jesse “I
wanna cut his nuts off” Jackson seemed so determined to sabotage Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They understood that his election would put them out of business, spectacularly belying their main contention, namely that American democracy is closed to minorities, and that there are limits to how high an African American can rise.

__________

The election of Barack Obama gave America’s external critics, too, a moment’s pause. For the first year of his administration, some anti-Americans reexamined their prejudices. If a mixed race candidate who had opposed the Iraq war could be elected in Washington, perhaps America was not quite the sinister plutocracy they had imagined.

President Obama immediately set about reinforcing the idea that he was different from his forty-three predecessors, withdrawing foreign garrisons, signing up to a number of international conventions, committing America to climate change targets, and attempting a series of domestic reforms, above all in health care, aimed at making America more like Europe. We shall look at these policies in detail later on. For now it is enough to note that it didn’t take long before the anti-Americans were playing their old tunes again.

“There isn’t an American president since Eisenhower who hasn’t ended up, at some point or other, being depicted
by the world’s cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile,” prophesied David Aaronovitch in the London
Times
shortly before the 2008 election. “It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr. Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taliban and al-Qaeda.” It didn’t take long for this prediction to be fulfilled. Before President Obama’s first year was out, crowds in Afghanistan
and
Pakistan were chanting “Death to Obama!” in response to NATO military actions.

Nor were other anti-Americans appeased for very long. At the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez raged: “President Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize almost the same day as he sent 30,000 soldiers to kill innocent people in Afghanistan!”

A survey of international attitudes by World Public Opinion in July 2009 suggested that, while Barack Obama was personally popular with foreigners, attitudes to the United States had barely been impacted by his victory. The United States was still liked by her traditional friends, still loathed by her old foes. A majority of respondents in fifteen of the nineteen nations surveyed believed that the United States was coercing other states through superior force, and a majority in seventeen of the nineteen nations complained that the United States flouted international law.

There are certain positions that any U.S. president, if he is sensitive to public opinion and to congressional majorities, must take; and these tend to be the positions that make anti-Americans detest him. The fact that the facilities at Guantánamo are still open, for example, has prompted rage, not only in the Muslim world, but in Europe. Likewise, the refusal to publish photographs from Abu Ghraib. And, come to that, the fact that there still are American soldiers in Afghanistan.

“World’s Hopes Dashed by George W. Obama,” was the headline in the
Financial Times Deutschland
when the closure of Guantánamo was deferred. The Munich-based
Süddeutsche Zeitung,
in an editorial titled “Obama’s Great Mistake,” commented: “Obama’s people certainly imagined things differently, but reality has caught up with them. … Bush light, so to speak: Obama is discrediting both himself and the United States.”

To get a sense of what Europeans don’t like about the United States, glance through some of the headlines that have appeared in
Der Spiegel
since Barack Obama’s inauguration: “From Mania to Distrust: Europe’s Obama Euphoria Wanes,” “Torturing for America,” “American Gays and Lesbians Feel Betrayed by Obama,” “GM Insolvency Proves America’s Global Power Is Waning,” “American Recession Food: The Fat Crisis.” (This last, if you’re wondering, was all about how low-paid Americans had been driven by the downturn
to subsist on McDonald’s, which was making the country even more obese and diabetic.)

Here is the veteran British commentator John Pilger, writing in the
New Statesman
in December 2009:

Presidents come and go. But the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy do not. The things that anti-Americans dislike cannot be expunged by executive decree.

Critics of the United States are not, as a rule, actuated by opposition to a particular policy or a particular administration. It is the entire package that they reject: free elections, small government, private property, open competition, inequality of outcome. They will not be appeased by the cap-and-trade rules, or by state health care, or by higher taxes, or by the abolition of the death penalty. Their hostility is existential.

This book is not aimed at convinced anti-Americans. It is aimed, rather, at those within the United States who have become blasé about their transcendent political inheritance. As Edmund Burke observed, constitutions that grow up over centuries can be torn down in weeks. The freedoms enjoyed by Americans today are the fruit of seeds transported across the Atlantic centuries ago and scattered in the rich humus of the New World. It is not accidental that the United States enjoys dispersed jurisdiction, limited government, strong local democracy, low taxes, and personal freedom. These things came about through design: the brilliant design of extraordinary men.

It follows that fundamentally altering that design will make America less American. This generation, like any generation, is entitled to opt for a different model: to embrace state intervention, higher taxes, federal czars, government regulation. But have no doubt about the consequences. Changing America into a different country will mean forsaking the most successful constitutional model in the world. It will mean abandoning the vision of your founders—a vision that has served to make your country rich and strong and free. It will mean betraying your ancestors and disinheriting your posterity. It is, in the narrowest and most literal sense, un-American. Before taking such a step, it is worth pausing to consider what you would lose.

A
few months ago, I found myself addressing the Republican committee of a rural county in a southern state. Its members looked much as I had expected members of the Republican committee of a rural county in a southern state to look: rugged and sunburned. During
the question and answer session, I was asked why the GOP, having dominated late twentieth-century politics, was faring so badly.

I replied that, as far as I could see, one of the party’s most serious mistakes had been its retreat from localism. The Republicans started winning in the 1960s when they embraced states’ rights and the devolution of power. They started losing forty years later when they abandoned these principles. The audience growled its approval and so, perhaps incautiously, I began to list the areas where the Bush administration had wrongly extended central power, ranging from the rise in federal spending to the attempt to strike down state laws on same-sex unions. When I mentioned same-sex unions, a rustle went through the room, and I winced inwardly: This, I thought, was perhaps not the wisest example to have offered the Republican committee of a rural county in a southern state.

Sure enough, after I had finished, a man with a beard and a red baseball cap sauntered up to me.

“Son,” he said, “Ah ’preciate you comin’, an’ Ah ‘greed with most of wut you said. But Ah must disagree with your position on so-called homosexual marriage.”

He paused to hitch his jeans up his great belly, looking into the middle distance.

“Far as Ah kin see, not bein’ under any pressure to git married is one of the main advantages Ah enjoy as a gay man.”

Truly, I thought, America is an extraordinary country.
Every time you think you’ve got it sussed, it surprises you. It is the sheer diversity of the United States that makes anti-Americanism so perverse. All humanity is represented in one nation, rendering the dislike of that nation an act of misanthropy.

While researching this book, I experienced a measure of that diversity. I visited California and Colorado, Florida and Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Washington state. I met industrialists and financiers, conservatives and liberals, town councilors and state legislators, journalists and think-tankers. I spoke to the most distinguished audience I expect ever to address: a closed meeting of the forty Republican senators. At the end of it all, one conclusion towered over the rest: Most Americans don’t realize how lucky they are.

It is human nature to take familiar things for granted. So let me, in this chapter, set out some of the things that strike an outside observer about the U.S. political system.

The first observation is that, for all the grumbles and the scornful jokes, most people have faith in the system. This might seem a strange thing to say: Elected representatives are the target of as many cynical remarks in the United States as elsewhere, and first-time candidates often make a big deal out of not being politicians. One of my little girls has a book called
Vote for Duck,
given to her by a kind American friend: Its conceit is that a farmyard duck rises, first to run the farm, then to become a governor, and finally to win the presidency
by repeatedly running under the slogan “Vote for a duck, not a politician!”

Behind the sarcasm, though, there is an underlying confidence. Think of the television series
The West Wing.
Its premise is that most politicians, including the ones you disagree with, are patriots who are doing their best. While it makes criticisms of Washington, its essential tone is laudatory. Even the right-wing Republicans who are presented least sympathetically, such as the John Goodman character who, in a bizarre twist, moves from being speaker of the House of Representatives to temporarily occupying the White House under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, are shown, when the chips are down, placing their country before their personal ambitions.