God Won't Save America: psychosis of a nation
George Walden Gibson Square, 302pp, £16.99
ISBN 190393379X
In 1770, a French naturalist called Cornelius de Pauw looked at the new experiments with democracy in the American colonies and was repelled. You could tell the land was cursed by its animals, said the Richard Dawkins of his day, which were "for the most part inelegantly shaped and badly deformed". America was "inundated by lizards, snakes and by reptiles and insects monstrous in their size and in the strength of their poison". Their sickness was contagious. When well-bred European animals crossed the Atlantic, "their size diminished" and they lost "a part of their instinct and capacity". Dogs stopped barking and women became infertile. "In all of America, from Cape Horn to the Hudson Bay, there has never appeared a philosopher, a scholar, an artist or a thinker whose name merits being included in the history of science." (This in 1770, when Paine, Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton were alive and getting ready to kick.)
Anti-Americanism has often been little more than a hatred of democracy and mass culture for their alleged tendencies to promote mediocrity and pull down great men. From de Pauw's defence of the natural superiority of aristocratic Europe, via Nietzsche, Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers, to Baudrillard and the postmodernists who decry America as "the desert of the real", there has been a barely disguised fear that European peoples would abandon their hierarchies if they got the chance to follow the American way.
George Walden's great virtue lies in showing that fear of America's puritanism is as potent as the fear of the impact of democracy on social, intellectual and - especially now in the Muslim world - religious elites. The argument that you can't understand America without understanding its Puritan founders is scarcely new: Walden quotes Alexis de Tocqueville as saying that "there is not an opinion, not a custom, not a law that the New England origin of American civilisation does not explain". But it is a hard one for British writers and readers to grasp. We may be an older country, but we had our own failed Puritan revolution. Much of the exceptional nature of American culture is not as obvious to us as, say, a French Catholic or Bombay Brahmin.
Like the Puritans, Walden claims, modern Americans have sex on the brain. The apparently orgiastic overturning of the Calvinist past is not as paradoxical as it seems. "Absolute freedoms are demanded in the same self-righteous spirit as the Puritans insisted on absolute repression, and the result is that sexual liberation is becoming as unsustainable as prohibition." Nor have traditional hypocrisies been lost. America and Britain are the only countries to cultivate a "culture of sexuality that has reached unprecedented levels of licence while continuing to pillory their leaders for the slightest irregularity in their private lives".
For Walden, the Puritan heritage explains why America celebrates charity, why it never experimented with socialism, why its universities are so good, why it has kept the death penalty long after everyone else dropped it, "why business is next to divinity", why its foreign policy "oscillates unnervingly between isolationism and the missionary", and why devout church goers feel it is Christian to exploit the damned poor. Indeed, for Walden, the Puritan heritage seems to explain everything. The gaping hole in God Won't Save America is his failure to look at the American constitution, which doesn't fit too comfortably into his argument that the nation is predestined to live out the virtues and repressions of its founders.
If all of the above makes him sound like a more stylish and intelligent version of Michael Moore, that would be to underrate him. He is equally scathing about the response of liberal Europe to US power - noting, quite rightly, that most Europeans want America to lose in Iraq, even though defeat would be a triumph for misogynist, homophobic and fascistic forces. Walden reinforces the point with a marvellous portrait of the over-promoted Chris Patten, a Widmerpool for our times. While governor of Hong Kong, Patten was loud in his demands for democracy. When he became European commissioner for external affairs, however, his passion deserted him. Supporting democracy in the Middle East would upset the dictatorships Europe did business with and compromise the EU's strategic ambition to be a counterweight to the US in the region.
Walden is a knowledgeable writer, but never a knowing one. Although he would hate the suggestion that he has the touch of the earnest Puritan about him, he worries too much about how bad the world could get without American power and influence to allow himself to shrug and walk away from a country that so often infuriates him.
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