What's So Great About America (10 page)

One by one the nations of South America, Asia, and Africa won their freedom. Indeed, anticolonialism was the dominant political trajectory of much of the twentieth century. By the middle of the century, so rapid was the momentum of anticolonialism that it seemed to imperil the confidence, perhaps even the identity, of Western civilization. A deep pessimism descended on many in the West. The mood is conveyed by James Burnham's
Suicide of the West
, published in 1964. Burnham began his book by noting that, in 1914, nearly the whole world fell under the domain of the West. Now, he said, the West has lost virtually all its colonial possessions. Moreover, Burnham fretted, the Soviet Union has become a world power and has conquered all of Eastern Europe, in the very heart of Western civilization. These are stunning losses for the West, Burnham said, and since history shows that defeats of this magnitude are seldom reversed, “It is probable that the West, in shrinking, is also dying.” At the current rate of dissolution, Burnham concluded, in a few decades “the West will be finished.”
¹

Oddly enough, some leading thinkers in the West argued that the decline and even destruction of the West was a good thing. These figures can be seen as the forerunners of today's multiculturalists; for them, a defeat for the West inevitably counted as a gain for humanity. “Europe is at death's door,” exulted philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. “Europe is springing leaks everywhere. In the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun.”
²

As Burnham and Sartre recognized, many of the newly free nations defined themselves in opposition to the West. Some allied themselves openly with the Soviet Union. Others, seeking a “third way” that eschewed both Soviet communism and Western capitalism, assembled in 1955 at the Bandung Conference, where they proclaimed themselves Non-Aligned Nations. From the outset the rhetoric of nonalignment was a bit of a sham. Despite the posture of neutrality, the policies of most of these “nonaligned” nations, such as India and Cuba, were in practice pro-socialist and anti-Western. An objective observer who witnessed these developments would be justified in concluding that the prospects for the West were bleak.

Then, at the end of the century, a surprise! In 1989 the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and soon Eastern Europe was free. Eventually the Soviet Union itself imploded, and with the end of the Cold War the United States found itself the only remaining superpower. The West was back in the saddle, but this time it wasn't Europe but a former English colony, the United States, that was the dominant nation. America's power had been awesomely displayed as early as World War II, but not until the early 1990s did America begin to enjoy an unrivaled supremacy over the globe that was unprecedented in history.

Previous empires have controlled only regions of the world. The Roman Empire, the Islamic empire, and the British Empire, each had an awesome reach, but they left out large parts of humanity. American hegemony is unique in that it extends virtually over the total space of the inhabited earth. Also, previous empires have dominated their subjects through force. Once again America is different in that its influence is not primarily sustained
by force. This is not to say that America never projects its military power abroad. But these projections of power cannot possibly explain the enormous appeal of the American idea around the globe.

Drop in at a hotel in Buenos Aires or Bombay, and the bellhop is whistling the theme song from
Titanic
. Take a train through a village in Africa or the Middle East, and you will see a young boy, seemingly untouched by Western civilization. When you look closer, however, you see that he is wearing an Orioles baseball cap. Moreover, he has the cap worn back-to-front, to show the adjusto-strap to advantage. The boy also has a sauntering walk that seems uncharacteristic and vaguely familiar. Then it hits you: The little fellow wants to be Chris Rock! He wants to be an American! I don't just mean that he wants American technology; everyone has wanted that for a long time. (Even the terrorists who proclaim “Death to America” like American technology.) Nor do I mean that he wants Western institutions, such as democracy or freedom of speech. No, he wants more than that: He wants the American way of life. He wants to “become an American.”

Now that's superiority. This is not to suggest that the boy in the example is typical of boys his age, or that everybody in the world wants to put on a baseball cap. But it dramatizes the way in which many people are magnetically attracted to what America represents, whether it is American restaurants or Levi's jeans or Madonna or Mike Tyson or MTV. In China, we read, teenagers are adopting American styles and one of them tells
Forbes
that her American attire will make her “the coolest person in China.”
³
India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, recently confessed that his favorite movie is
The Lion King
.
⁴
In the Middle East,
American dolls have become so popular that an official of the Arab League frets that Barbie—with her miniskirts and career aspirations—is not a suitable role model for Muslim children.
⁵
Even in the Iranian holy city of Qom, right down the street from the mosque, the vendors are selling American CDs and videos.
⁶
Some Americans will scoff at these American exports, regarding them as foolish, trivial, or vulgar, but even if they are all those things, their universal appeal still has to be explained.

The advocates of multiculturalism seem chronically unable to do this. The ideologues who proclaim the equality of all cultures simply cannot account for why so many people around the world seem perfectly willing to dump their ancient cultures and adopt new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that they associate with America. Nor can they account for the millions of people who have come as immigrants in search of the American dream. If all cultures are equal, why aren't people breaking down doors to get into Cuba or Iraq or Somalia?

All sensible people know the answer: those are terrible places to live. A much tougher question is what explains the enormous appeal of the United States to immigrants and to people around the world? This is a hard question because, as we will see, the obvious answers do not prove satisfactory. Moreover, there are lots of people who detest America. Bin Laden and his friends were willing to kill people from many countries but their specific target wasn't “Western civilization”: it was the United States. The enemies of America—and what it stands for—don't all live abroad; quite a few are American citizens. And some of the local critics are no less venomous than their foreign counterparts. So any explanation of the appeal of America must also account for this
resistance. Why is the American idea simultaneously attractive and yet controversial?

C
ritics of America, both at home and abroad, have an easy explanation for why the American idea is so captivating, and why immigrants want to come here. The reason, they say, is money. America represents “the bitch goddess of success.” That is why poor people reach out for the American idea: they want to touch some of that lucre. As for immigrants, they allegedly flock to the United States for the sole purpose of getting rich. This view, which represents the appeal of America as the appeal of the almighty dollar, is disseminated on Arab streets and in multicultural textbooks taught in U.S. schools. It is a way of demeaning the United States by associating it with what is selfish, base, and crass: an unquenchable appetite for gain.

It is not hard to see why this view of America has gained a wide currency. When people in foreign countries turn on American TV shows, they are stupefied by the lavish displays of affluence: the sumptuous homes, the bejeweled women, the fountains and pools, and so on. Whether reruns of
Dallas
and
Dynasty
are true to the American experience is irrelevant here; the point is that this is how the United States appears to outsiders who have not had the chance to come here. And even for those who do, it is hard to deny that America represents the chance to live better, even to become fantastically wealthy. For instance, there are several people of Indian descent on the
Forbes
400 list. And over the years I have heard many Indians now living in the United States
say, “We want to live an Indian lifestyle, but at an American standard of living.”

If this seems like a crass motive for immigration, it must be evaluated in the context of the harsh fate that poor people endure in much of the Third World. The lives of many of these people are defined by an ongoing struggle to exist. It is not that they don't work hard. On the contrary, they labor incessantly and endure hardships that are almost unimaginable to people in the West. In the villages of Asia and Africa, for example, a common sight is a farmer beating a pickax into the ground, women wobbling under heavy loads, children carrying stones. These people are performing very hard labor, but they are getting nowhere. The best they can hope for is to survive for another day. Their clothes are tattered, their teeth are rotted, and disease and death constantly loom over their horizon. For the poor of the Third World, life is characterized by squalor, indignity, and brevity.

I emphasize the plight of the poor, but I recognize, of course, that there are substantial middle classes even in the underdeveloped world. For these people basic survival may not be an issue, but still, they endure hardships that make everyday life a strain. One problem is that the basic infrastructure of the Third World is abysmal: the roads are not properly paved, the water is not safe to drink, pollution in the cities has reached hazardous levels, public transportation is overcrowded and unreliable, and there is a two-year waiting period to get a telephone. Government officials, who are very poorly paid, are inevitably corrupt, which means that you must pay bribes on a regular basis to get things done. Most important, there are limited prospects for the children's future.

In America, the immigrant immediately recognizes, things are different. The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically
experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where
everything works
: the roads are clean and paper smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone, you can even buy things from the store and then take them back. For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, fifty different types of cereal, multiple flavors of ice cream. The place is full of countless unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless telephones, disposable diapers, roll-on luggage, deodorant. Most countries even today do not have these benefits: deodorant, for example, is unavailable in much of the Third World and unused in much of Europe.

What the immigrant cannot help noticing is that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have television sets and microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception of America that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States for nearly a decade. Finally I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

The point is that the United States is a country where the ordinary guy has a good life. This is what distinguishes America from
so many other countries. Everywhere in the world, the rich person lives well. Indeed, a good case can be made that if you are rich, you live better in countries other than America. The reason is that you enjoy the pleasures of aristocracy. This is the pleasure of being treated as a superior person. Its gratification derives from subservience: in India, for example, the wealthy enjoy the satisfaction of seeing innumerable servants and toadies grovel before them and attend to their every need.

In the United States the social ethic is egalitarian, and this is unaffected by the inequalities of wealth in the country. Tocqueville noticed this egalitarianism a century and a half ago, but it is, if anything, more prevalent today. For all his riches, Bill Gates could not approach a homeless person and say, “Here's a $100 bill. I'll give it to you if you kiss my feet.” Most likely the homeless guy would tell Gates to go to hell! The American view is that the rich guy may have more money, but he isn't in any fundamental sense better than you are. The American janitor or waiter sees himself as performing a service, but he doesn't see himself as inferior to those he serves. And neither do the customers see him that way: they are generally happy to show him respect and appreciation on a plane of equality. America is the only country in the world where we call the waiter “Sir,” as if he were a knight.