New Peripheries
Monroe doctrine is dead, Chinese government has world's highest approval rating, no-limits in the Asia-Pacific, American identity is Christian imagination
UPDATE: As the power of the U.S., which styles itself the "world's only superpower", is draining away, the hot wind of independence is raging across the vast land of Latin America which had been called the "tranquil backyard" of the U.S. for the past two centuries.
The Chinese government maintains strong support from the populace, with approval ratings commonly well above what Western democracies could only hope to achieve. According to the Edelman Global Trust Barometer of 2020, the Chinese government enjoyed the trust of 90% of its citizens – the highest level in the world.
The power dynamic in Northeast Asia is undergoing a dramatic change against the backdrop of the “no limits” strategic partnership between China and Russia. The collapse of Kiev’s counteroffensive” and abject defeat in the war with Russia may trigger a global confrontation, and, equally, the Taiwan issue may potentially turn into a casus belli of war.
American culture and American identity arise from the Christian imagination rather than the tactile and auditory traditions, American culture is enthusiastic and apocalyptic rather than settled and stable.
Latin America Is No Longer "Tranquil Backyard" of U.S.
By Paek Kwang Myong
As the power of the U.S., which styles itself the "world's only superpower", is draining away, the hot wind of independence is raging across the vast land of Latin America which had been called the "tranquil backyard" of the U.S. for the past two centuries.
Since the Fifth U.S. president, James Monroe, raised the deceptive slogan "America for Americans" in 1823, aggression, plunder and intervention by the U.S. under the spurious veil of "peace and freedom, democracy and human rights" have ruthlessly violated the dignity and sovereignty of regional countries to make the region remain as a "tranquil backyard" of the U.S. for a long time.
Countless are such U.S. aggression and intervention as the seizure of Mexican territory in the 1840s, the colonization of Puerto Rico and Guantanamo through the first imperialist war with Spain in the 1890s, the manipulation of pro-U.S. dictatorial regimes in Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile and other countries from 1930s to 1970s, and the armed invasion of Panama and Grenada in the 1980s.
The present U.S. sanctions and blockade against Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other anti-U.S. independent countries are, in essence, nothing but attempts to revive "the Monroe Doctrine".
However, the times have changed and the aspirations and enthusiasm of the Latin-American people to live and develop independently are growing unprecedentedly strong.
In recent years, progressive governments aspiring to independent internal and external policies have emerged one after another in the region and they are working harder to put an end to the U.S. monopolistic domination and solve the regional issue by their concerted efforts.
Regional countries strongly denounce the U.S. moves for disturbing social justice and progress as a revival of "the Monroe Doctrine" and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, calling for dismantling the Organization of American States which had been reduced to a U.S. puppet organization, and for strengthening genuine regional organizations such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States which excluded the U.S.
Against this background, the seventh summit of the above-said community held in Argentina late January discussed the issues of further intensifying the activities of the organization and accelerating the political and economic integration. Regional countries were vocal in their opposition to all forms of domination and hegemonism during the summit.
Brazil returned to the Community in January this year, Brazil and Colombia restored their diplomatic relations with Venezuela and many countries are boosting their political and economic cooperation with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua maintaining the stand of independence against the U.S., expressing support and solidarity with them.
In the economic field, regional countries have buckled down to eliminating US dollars and introducing common regional currency into their trade. Furthermore, negotiations and discussions are getting brisk to establish a regional "lithium complex" capable of producing batteries and electric cars as well as lithium mining among Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, the "lithium delta" which has more than 60 percent of the world's lithium reserves, and Mexico, the tenth biggest lithium possessor in the world.
The regional countries proactively follow the trend of multipolarization, maintaining their independent and individual stand in the international relations.
In recent years, Honduras cut off its relations with Taiwan to follow the example of Panama, Dominica, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and established diplomatic relations with China. Ecuador concluded a free trade agreement with China and Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia decided to use Renminbi in the trade payment.
As regards the Ukrainian situation, regional countries resolutely reject the U.S. and Western countries' invitation to the racket for pressurizing Russia. Many countries, including Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela and Bolivia, clarified their intention to join the BRICS and are taking proactive and practical measures to do so.
This clearly shows that Latin American countries are going to achieve the independent development of the region under the slogan of justice "Latin America for Latin Americans" by their joint efforts against the arbitrary and high-handed practices of the U.S. which has plunged the regional countries into misfortune and distress for centuries.
The deceptive "Monroe Doctrine" has come under severe criticism and rejection, and the U.S. monopolistic position in Latin America is irreversibly diminishing.
The "tranquil backyard" of the U.S. will soon become an arena of prosperity swept by the hot wind of independence.
Pyongyang (KCNA) - Paek Kwang Myong, is an international affairs analyst of the DPRK, the above article was published in the DPRK June 14.
Explaining the Popularity of the Chinese Government
By David Pehamberger
Over the past year, international media reports on Chinese politics frequently centred around the oppression of minorities, public surveillance measures, and China’s increasingly aggressive stance on the international stage. Common headline stories included forced labour in Xinjiang, the incremental removal of liberal democratic rights in Hong Kong, and increasingly frequent shows of force in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea with what is now the world’s largest navy. The non-democratic regime in Beijing has increased its grip on the Chinese population as technology has improved, making surveillance, censorship, and the notorious social credit system increasingly efficient. However, while in Western democracies such an authoritarian government would be seen as unacceptable, public support for the Chinese government’s autocratic measures remains strong.
Independent surveys and research have confirmed this trend, and so it is imperative to understand why the Chinese government maintains strong support from the populace, with approval ratings commonly well above what Western democracies could only hope to achieve. According to the Edelman Global Trust Barometer of 2020, the Chinese government enjoyed the trust of 90% of its citizens – the highest level in the world. The governments of Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. only received 45%, 39%, and 36% of trust, respectively. Another long-term Harvard study found the approval rating of the Chinese central government at 95%. To understand why the average Chinese citizen is so content with their leadership, one has to recognize the success of its domestic policies in recent decades.
经济发展 — The Economy
While most advanced economies have seen real wages stagnate for decades, in China both income and living standards have risen dramatically. The Chinese economy is now 40 times larger than what it was in 1990, which has come with real improvements in living quality for virtually all Chinese citizens. In a 2015 Pew Research Poll, 96% of Chinese respondents agreed that they were better off than their parents had been. 77% said their current living standards were better than just five years prior, and 72% felt satisfied with their financial situation. This ongoing improvement in living standards has also translated into optimism for the future. Another poll found that 85% agreed that children currently growing up will have an even better life. Meanwhile, a median of 65% of respondents in advanced economies believes their children will not have a better life in the future.
China’s global economic influence has also skyrocketed. While its share of global GDP was less than 2% in 1990, within three decades it has shot up to above 16%. According to another Pew poll that surveyed 44 countries, 89% of Chinese are satisfied with where their economy is going, compared to a median of only 34% in the developed world. There are many good reasons for this optimism. The London-based think tank Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has recently revised its prediction that China will overtake the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy as early as 2028. Given that the leadership in Beijing has such a tight grip on the Chinese economy, it is perhaps understandable that many attribute China’s successful rise to the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
爱国主义 — Patriotism
People do not only care about their living standards improving. China is also a country of patriots. There are several ways to assess patriotic sentiments in academic surveys, including measuring statements such as considering one’s country better than others, feeling pride in national achievements, or preferring to be a citizen of one’s country over other countries. Over 80% of Chinese responded positively to these questions, indicating that they are among the most patriotic citizens in the world. In a 2015 WIN/Gallup survey of 64 countries, which measured patriotism by citizens’ willingness to fight for their country, 71% of Chinese respondents answered affirmatively. This figure is higher than any other developed nation, except for Finland (with 74%). In comparison, only 44% of U.S. respondents said they would be willing to fight for their country.
Given China’s history with its Century of Humiliation prior to the takeover by the CCP, the deep-rooted insecurity and wish for China to become a great nation again might seem reasonable. The CCP knows how to exploit this. China’s history of humiliation in the form of semi-colonialism imposed on the country by Western colonial powers is a central part of the school curriculum, in which the CCP is portrayed as China’s saviour from colonialism and cultural annihilation. This mostly works well with China’s increasingly nationalistic public. However, nationalism is a double-edged sword. While the government’s approval rating tends to improve when it takes a hard stance on foreign policy issues, Chinese citizens can easily view the failure to properly condemn Western powers when China’s sovereignty is challenged as insufficiently patriotic in light of the country’s historical humiliation by the West.
Despite a strong censorship system, there is a flourishing online community in China through social media outlets such as Weibo, where nationalistic sentiments and tendencies can be observed. Much genuine anti-regime sentiment was seen circulating on Weibo during the flaring up of the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in 2012, when many bloggers accused the Chinese government of not being tough enough on Japan. One public opinion survey found that 53% of respondents were in favour of economic sanctions against Japan, while in another poll with 1.9 million participants, 60% even supported military action to settle the matter. And there are plenty of other historical examples in which the Chinese government appears to take a hard-line stance but is actually walking a fine line between maintaining productive relations with its trade partners and fulfilling its patriotic obligations. However, when the choice is between the deterioration either of relations with a trade partner or of its own domestic approval rating, the CCP will choose to protect the latter, as it did once it became clear that public opinion favoured punishing Japan over the island dispute, rather than maintaining positive relations with one of China’s most important trade partners.
安邦定国 — Peace and Stability
Another reason for the strong support for the government’s authoritarian policies is their apparent efficiency. The 2008 earthquake in which thousands of people died and five million were displaced was a huge tragedy, but within 72 hours over 100,000 troops had been successfully deployed to help rescue survivors and bring the situation under control. The CCP’s swift actions and resolve stood in stark contrast to the failings of the U.S. government during Hurricane Katrina. Another example is the recent implementation of the social credit system, which has received much negative attention across many Western media outlets for the CCP’s attempts to control its population. Nonetheless, a majority of Chinese do support this system because it greatly enhances security and trust in a society where historically fears of being scammed by merchants, business partners, or even one’s own employer run high. China’s relatively successful response to Covid-19 has further increased trust in the government among much of the population, which can live a largely normal life while the rest of the world is in lockdown.
日新月异 – The Future is Uncertain
This level of optimism and trust in the government’s policies may start to wane once the economy stops expanding. A rapidly ageing population and the lack of a fully-developed welfare state are already taking their toll on the economy and people’s wellbeing, as is Covid’s impact on Chinese society, although the pandemic is unlikely to harm the CCP’s popularity. Despite early failures, measures taken by the government to contain Covid-19 are perceived by the Chinese public at large as highly successful and in contrast to the failure of virtually all democratic countries to stem the virus’s spread. The global pandemic may actually shield the Party from criticism for economic mismanagement. Dampened economic activity in Hong Kong, reduced primary sector production in Xinjiang, a deterioration in business and tourism relations with Taiwan, and global trade disputes may all be direct results of the government’s hard-line nationalist policies, but their negative effect on China’s economy is hard to measure, given that any decline in growth could be attributed to the pandemic. Additionally, its tough stance against foreign powers who seek to undermine China’s rise, and its determination to see through the country’s re-emergence as a great power, cement the Party’s role as the Chinese nation’s protector and saviour.
However, the CCP’s sky-high approval ratings and China’s increasing living standards pose a crucial question: Is this sustainable? China’s economic growth has already been slowing down before Covid-19, and people’s expectations that their children will live even better lives may end up not being met. China’s top trading partners, such as the U.S., Japan, Europe, and South Korea, are also considered adversaries in its historical narrative of humiliation. The Diaoyu/Senkaku island dispute is only one of many examples of transnational disputes the CCP is involved in and cannot back down from without failing to meet nationalists’ expectations. Additionally, the Party’s internationally contrarian stance on issues pertaining to human rights violations and territorial disputes threaten to eventually isolate the country. China’s leadership has legitimized itself vis-a-vis the general population through economic success and defending the nation, but what if living standards were to stagnate and nationalistic ambitions end up hurting the average citizen’s pockets? Would a majority of the Chinese people continue to trust the Party’s political guidance, or would they demand to have a say?
Read more here.
Asia-Pacific is where China-Russia “no limits” partnership will be put to test
by M. K. Bhadrakumar
The power dynamic in Northeast Asia is undergoing a dramatic change against the backdrop of the “no limits” strategic partnership between China and Russia. The collapse of Kiev’s counteroffensive” and abject defeat in the war with Russia may compel Biden administration to put “boots on the ground” in western Ukraine, triggering a global confrontation, and, equally, the US-China relations are at their lowest point since their normalisation in the 1970s, while Taiwan issue may potentially turn into a casus belli of war.
To be sure, the Northeast Asian theatre is going to be a crucial arena in the brewing big-power confrontation what with the Arctic hotting up and the Northern Sea Route becoming operational, which will catapult the strategic importance of the Russian Far East and Siberia as the powerhouse of the world economy in the 21st Century combining with its present status as the world’s number one nuclear power. The outcome of the Ukraine war might be the last chance for the United States to rein in Russia from keeping its tryst with destiny. That is what makes the Far East the most consequential region for the US in its global strategy.
Symptomatic of the cascading tensions, Russian foreign ministry summoned the Japanese ambassador on Friday and a protest was lodged in extraordinarily harsh language, as it came to be known that the 100 vehicles that Tokyo innocuously promised last week to Ukraine would in reality be armoured vehicles and all-terrain vehicles. Apparently, Tokyo was dissimulating, since Japan’s export rules ban its companies from selling lethal items overseas!
Tokyo is crossing a “red line” and Moscow is not amused. The foreign ministry statement on Friday “stressed that the administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida should be ready to share responsibility for the deaths of civilians, including those in Russia’s border regions… (and) driving bilateral relations even deeper into a dangerous impasse. Such actions cannot remain without serious consequences.”
Significantly, on Friday, in a video conference with General Liu Zhenli, Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff Department of China’s Central Military Commission, the Chief of the General Staff of Russian Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defence General Valery Gerasimov expressed confidence in the expansion of military cooperation between the two countries and noted, “Coordination between Russia and the People’s Republic of China in the international arena has a stabilising effect on the world situation.”
The Chinese media later reported that the two generals agreed that Russia will participate (for the second time) in the Northern/Interaction-2023 exercise organised by China, signalling a new framework of China-Russia joint strategic exercises alongside the joint air patrol over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea by their strategic bombers. By the way, the sixth such joint air petrol was conducted on Tuesday since the practice began in 2019.
The big picture is that the shift in Japanese policies through the past year — close alignment with the US regarding Ukraine; copying the West’s sanctions against Russia; supply of lethal weaponry to Ukraine, etc. — has seriously damaged the Russo-Japanese relationship. On top of it, Japan’s re-militarisation with American support and its growing ties with the NATO (which is lurching toward the Asia-Pacific) makes Tokyo a common adversary of both Moscow and Beijing.
The imperative to push back this resurgent US client is strongly felt in Moscow and Beijing, which also has a global dimension since Russia and China are convinced that Japan is acting like a surrogate of American dominance in Asia and is subserving western interests. On its part, in a turnaround, Washington now actively encourages Japan to be an assertive regional power by jettisoning its constitutional limits to rearmament. It pleases Washington that Japan pledged a long-term increase of over 60 percent in defence spending.
What worries Moscow and Beijing is also the ascendance of revanchist elements — vestiges of Japan’s imperial era — in the top echelons of power in the recent period. Of course, Japan continues to be in denial mode as regards its atrocities during the period of its brutal colonisation of China and Korea and the horrific war crimes during World War 2.
This trend bears striking similarity to what is happening in Germany, where too the pro-Nazi elements are reclaiming habitation and a name. Curiously, a German-Japanese axis is present at the core of Washington’s strategies against Russia and China in Eurasia and Northeast Asia.
The German Bundeswehr is expanding its combat exercises in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and will deploy more naval and air force units to the Asia-Pacific region next year. A recent German report noted, “The intensification of German participation in Asian-Pacific regional manoeuvres is taking place at a time when the United States is carrying out record-breaking manoeuvres in Southeast Asia, in its attempts to intensify its control over the region and displace China as much as possible.”
Japan’s motivations are easy to fathom. Apart from Japanese revanchism which fuels the nationalist sentiments, Tokyo is convinced that a settlement with Russia over Kuril Islands is not to be expected now, or possibly ever, which means that a peace treaty will not be possible to bring the World War 2 hostilities to an end formally. Second, Japan no longer visualises Russia to be a “balancer” in its troubled relationship with China.
Third, most important, as Japan sees the rise of China as a political and economic threat, it is rapidly militarising, which in turn creates its own dynamic in terms of both upending its power position in Asia as also integrating itself with the West (“globalising”). Inevitably, this translates as promoting NATO in the Asian power dynamic, something that cuts deep into Russia’s core national security and defence strategies. Consequently, whatever hopes the strategists in Moscow had nurtured in the past that Japan could be weaned away from the US orbit and encouraged to exercise its strategic autonomy have evaporated into thin air.
Arguably, in his zest to integrate Japan into the US-led “collective West”, Prime Minister Kishida overreached himself. He behaves as if he is obliged to be more loyal than the king himself. Thus, on the same day that President Xi Jinping visited Moscow in March, Kishida landed in Kiev from where he went to attend a NATO Summit and openly began lobbying for establishment of a NATO office in Tokyo.
Kishida followed up by hosting NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Tokyo and giving him a platform to berate China publicly from its doorstep. There is no easy explanation for such excessive behaviour. Is it a matter of impetuous behaviour alone or is it a calculated strategy to gain legitimacy for the ascendance of revanchist elements whom Kishida represents in the Japanese power structure?
To be sure, Northeast Asia is a priority now for China and Russia, given their overlapping interests in the region. NATO expansion to Asia and the sharp rise in the US force projection bring home to the defence strategists in Beijing and Moscow that the Sea of Japan is a “communal backyard” for the two countries where their “no limits” strategic partnership ought to be optimal. The Chinese commentators no longer downplay that the Russian-Chinese military ties “serve as a powerful counterbalance to the US’ hegemonic actions.”
It is entirely conceivable that at some point in a near future, China and Russia may begin to view North Korea as a protagonist in their regional alignment. They may no longer feel committed to observe the US-led sanctions against North Korea. Indeed, if that were to happen, a host of possibilities will arise. The Russian-Iranian military ties set the precedent.
Read more here.
Americans, the Almost-Chosen People
By David P. Goldman (excerpts)
When we speak of culture in general, we typically think of fixed roots in the form of memory, custom, and habit. Yet the salient characteristic of the American character is restlessness, as Tocqueville observed. We are journeyers rather than settlers. We are risk-takers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. How then should we think about our culture?
One approach is to steer clear of the problem and define America as a “propositional nation,” as John Courtney Murray contended. A proposition is something one assents to rationally. Culture, by contrast, is the context in which we perceive things, which we receive from our ancestors and pass down to our descendants. It is pre-rational, instinctive rather than intellectual, a manifestation of who we are rather than what we think. It is the way in which we cannot help but understand the world.
It is one thing to assert that a proposition is true and quite another thing to pledge one’s life, fortune, and sacred honor. The American Revolution is in some ways the strangest conflict in history: There is no other example of prosperous, property-owning people who were free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion taking up arms against the world’s most powerful empire. Four generations later, half a million Northerners died to end slavery.
If America is merely a propositional nation, moreover, then this proposition can be taught to any other nation, like a proof in logic. From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, our attempts to instruct the rest of the world in the American proposition have had baleful consequences, and it behooves us to consider the side of being American that cannot be learned but rather must be lived—what we call culture.
Not merely the journey as such but a radically different kind of journey pervades American fiction, because America is a radically different kind of nation: It is uniquely Christian and peculiarly Protestant in character. What Heidegger calls “heritage” and Eliot calls “tradition,” whose origins lurk in the mists of time, have a different meaning in America. America’s Dasein has its “place,” but it is a different sort of place than Heidegger could have imagined: America’s “place” is Canaan. But it is the Canaan of Christian belief rather than the actual Israel of Jewish practice. It is always a vanishing point in the distance.
Heidegger insisted that the heritage we learn by repetition must come from our primal origins. But in America, by contrast, Christian memory created itself. It is the most extreme example of what the politically correct now call “cultural appropriation,” the appropriation of the history of Israel as America’s heritage. The Mission in the Wilderness was prelude to a new covenant and a new revelation. That is the foundation of our national culture, what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone.”
The peoples of the Old World, by contrast, recall a time before Christianity, when their woods and fields still were infested with the minor gods of the pagan world. That is Max Weber’s “enchanted world,” teeming with magical creature, remnants of the old folk-religions that survived the advent of Christianity. It is a world that knows only archetypes, but no characters. The Old World cultures are fixed in the past; their time is “once upon a time,” the amorphous time of legend. A day, a year and a life are indistinguishable: A traveler chances into a feast at an enchanted castle, and the seven days of his sojourn turn out to be seven years. Washington Irving repurposed the ancient tale: with an ironic masterstroke, he put Rip van Winkle to sleep in the Old World of legend and woke him up in the new time of the American Revolution. With this story, our first national writer declared independence from the literary sources of the Old World, and banished the enchanted world with the clear light of the new era.
America has no ethnicity and therefore has no fear of extinction. We look forward to the journey rather than backward to our roots. Our journey is the Christian journey to the Promised Land, which is bound up with the journey to America: the Pilgrims’ journey to New England, the flight of slaves to the free North, the westward migration of the landless.
Because American culture and American identity arise from the Christian imagination rather than the tactile and auditory traditions, American culture is enthusiastic and apocalyptic rather than settled and stable. It dwells not in the routine of quotidian life but in memory and hope. It is protean like American Christianity itself, which surges in Great Awakenings, recedes, lies dormant, and arises again—in the Presbyterianism of the First Great Awakening and the Baptists and Methodists of the Second Great Awakening. It is a common observation, and I think a correct one, that the American Revolution arose from the first awakening and the Civil War from the second.
Lincoln’s Calvinism weakened with the Civil War: Americans decided that they would rather not have a God who demanded sacrifice from them on this scale—10 percent of military-age Northern men and 30 percent of military-age Southern men. They did not want to be a Chosen People held accountable for their transgressions. They wanted instead a reticent God who withheld his wrath while they set out to make the world amenable to their own purposes. The New England elite went to war as convinced Abolitionists in service of Isaiah’s God of vengeance and redemption, singing, “Be swift my soul to welcome Him, be jubilant my feet.” As Louis Menand observes, they came back pragmatists, convinced that no idea could be so righteous or so certain as to merit the terrible sacrifices of their generation.
In place of the demanding God of the “Battle Hymn,” Americans got the avuncular God of Social Gospel and Wilsonian “Idealism.” The conceit that social engineering can remake the world according to our preferences became the reigning idea of mainline Protestantism. It implies that there is nothing really exceptional about America. From this muddy well came the naïve universalism of Jimmy Carter and the Wilsonian optimism of George W. Bush.
American culture persists nonetheless. The great wave of migration to the West ended more than a century ago, but the restlessness remains. Americans will always seek frontiers to conquer. That is why we are a nation of entrepreneurs, tinkerers, experimenters, and innovators. It is possible to be a European conservative and consider technology a threat to culture, as did Tolkien, that most Catholic of 20th-century writers. American conservatives embrace entrepreneurship and technological innovation. Edmund S. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in economics, argues convincingly that the moral foundation of the free enterprise system is the human impulse to innovate:
American culture eschews timidity and celebrates the disruptive outsider. When innovation is grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics, the Augustinian restlessness of American culture serves a profound moral purpose. But there is also a dark side to the radical individualism bequeathed to us by our Protestant forebears. At its best American Protestantism is antinomian, prone to sectarianism, and vulnerable to the hucksters like Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. At its worst, the radical individualist can turn into a sociopath. We lack natural defenses against the predatory innovator.
Between Mark Twain and Dashiell Hammett, the American journey turns from pilgrimage to nightmare. Only an outsider, an exterminating angel, can purge the Satanic City. That is a side of American culture that makes us cringe. Hollywood has pillaged Hammett’s plots without ever quite depicting his exterminating angel on the screen. We are more comfortable with the Western avenger who kills the outlaws and rides into the sunset. But the Western hero is merely a knight errant with six-guns; Hammett’s Continental Op is a real American.
What is the future of American culture? The good news is that we still are able to ask the question. In the case of the traditional cultures of the Old World, we already know the sad answer. The hope of European conservatives as diverse as Eliot, Heidegger, and Tolkien has been disappointed. Europe no longer cares enough about its own future to produce a new generation. The European nations where traditional society was strongest until the 1960s—Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Poland—have suffered the fastest decline in fertility. European culture will live on wraith-like in the museum and the concert hall, but it already has lost its living power. American culture is hardier. Its roots lie not in places and habits, but in the restlessness of our hearts. It lacks consistency and continuity but shows itself in bursts of enthusiasm followed by periods of torpor.
Without faith, American culture becomes a parody of itself. There is no secular substitute, no “civic religion,” no next-best-thing. The condition of being American is a leap of faith. Faith enables a new nation to create its own roots by an act of adoption; without faith, we are deracinated.
The dark side of American culture, meanwhile, has grown darker. We have lost faith in eternal life and instead are fascinated by living death. Our most-watched TV series depicts a zombie apocalypse whose characters are unmistakably American: Even in a nightmare world they evince the initiative and grit that have always informed our national character. The zombie apocalypse is another incarnation of the American journey, to be sure, but one in which God is absent and satanic forces run wild. That is a disturbing evolution in American culture. For the first time in our history, we have raised up a pseudo-religion that preserves our old restlessness and awe of mortality, but without the Christian hope of redemption.
We have had dark days before. The Israel that dwells in America’s heart may return from exile again, and when we least expect it. From our nadir of the 1850s, no one could have predicted the appearance of a Lincoln—not even Lincoln himself, who underwent a religious conversion while in the White House.
It was only 36 years ago that President Jimmy Carter qualified America’s condition as “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” The dollar was crashing after a decade of stagflation, Soviet aggression was at its peak, and the world’s elites thought that America would lose the Cold War. But America arose from its torpor and rallied its moral energy.
The Reagan Revolution could not have happened without another Great Awakening. Between mid-1960s and the mid-2000s, a great migration away from mainline churches toward conservative Christian denominations transformed America’s religious landscape. There were many reasons for the resurgence of evangelical Christianity, but one of them surely is the example of the real, living people of Israel. If the idea of Israel was powerful enough to motivate the American journey at our founding, a fortiori the restoration of the living Israel to its ancient homeland resonated powerfully among American Christians. The fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jewish people after 2,000 years of exile was marvelous in the eyes of American Christians. The question never was whether America would save Israel, but whether Israel would save America.
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