The Anti-Americanism of the Left

Over the last few years there has been an increase in anti-American sentiment. This has occurred not just in the Arab world and Europe, but also among the Left in the United States. The usual argument for this increase has to do with US policy in the Middle East, and the alleged "unilateralism" of the Bush Administration. However, this argument does not hold up under examination - anti-Americanism existed before the Bush Administration and as this article argues is the result of the end of the cold war and the triumph of capitalism over communism.

This is the font and source of the Left's rage and hate. The wrong side, the wrong ideas, the wrong attitudes and the wrong people had somehow contrived to win. And then, on top of the political and economic victories heralded by end of the Cold War, unsupportable enough in themselves, there came the USA's seemingly effortless military victory over Iraq in 1991 - in a war, as we remember, that the hard Left was unanimous in opposing, despite the fact it was unarguably just. The Left's fury and frustration boiled over. Who to blame for its immense, unimaginable defeat? To its question, "Why did the right side, the right ideas, the right attitudes and the right people not win?" the Left found a single, simple, one-word answer: Amerika. The rest, as they say, is polemics: the unending regurgitation of that helpless, futile response.

Indeed, America's victory in the Cold War seems to have opened a kind of psychic wound in the collective sub-conscious of the Left, poisoning its soul. Perhaps the anti-American pandemic represents the effluxion by which the Left hopes to purge its own pain, understand its hurt, and heal it.
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The "facts" of American evil and the hatred felt for it are not argued from circumstance or evidence: they are derived from an intellectual horizon wholly indifferent to logic. The evil is pre-assumed, cosmic and all-encompassing. It impacts the very basis of our reality, evidenced by the philosophies by which we understand it. America's evil is inherent, insistent and inevitable. And it is intended, deliberate and engineered, out of a spirit of pure, unadulterated malignance towards the non-American world. To Sardar and Davies, America is not a country at all, but rather a poisonous psychic space, and an infectious effluvium.

At this point, if not before, one realises that Why Do People Hate America? is purely the invention of its own malevolence. It resembles a scene from German Expressionist cinema, with strange splashes of light and dark, foreshortened figures, distorted shadows and an eerie, sinister mise-en-scene. Its underlying psychological state is reminiscent of nothing so much as Nazi hate literature, where you will find the Jews huddled in the same livid half-light, viewed through the same pornographying prism of delusional paranoia. This is worse than superstition; it is superstitious hatred; worse yet, it is hateful superstition.

Communism was the defining cause of the Left. Once it died, through its own utter failure, the Left lost something to be for. The only way they can now define themselves is by what they are against. This seems to also be a description of the Democratic Party - the mainstream Left. As has been shown through numerous polls, the majority of Democrats are not "for" Kerry, they are simply against Bush - showing once again the lack of any new ideas on the part of the Democratic Party.