Current Affairs: Enda O'Doherty asks is the bigoted soul of the modern American South linked to Scots-Irish immigrants of bygone years?
The great American cynic, H.L. Mencken, once remarked that no one had ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the plain people. So, defying that respect for the robust common sense of the ordinary man that has become the political correctness of the right, let us point out that Karl Rove, strategist of the 2004 Bush victory, has not been seen to be significantly lighter of purse since November 2nd.
Bush's electoral strategy relied on the hammering home of three main propositions: first, that when the US is at war you do not exchange the "resolute" commander-in-chief you have for an unproven, and possibly over-reflective, newcomer; second, that the US has few friends in the world and many enemies, and that these enemies must be crushed like ants; and third, that there is a significant part of the nation and the political establishment which is insufficiently Christian, moral and patriotic to be trusted with leadership.
Bush, Cheney and Rove gambled, and gambled successfully, that if the volume could be turned up loud enough on these extremely dubious propositions they could be relied on to virtually drown out any counter-arguments, particularly on the outgoing administration's economic record and proposals for a second term. And so, across the Old South and in America's empty "heartland" - that is to say in the most economically and socially depressed parts of the country - blue-collar workers and their families came out in their hundreds of thousands to vote for a president whose policies seem guaranteed to push them further into poverty and insecurity.
And what of the rich? Figures from the 2000 presidential election indicate that just 54 per cent of Americans earning more than $100,000 a year voted Republican, certainly a disappointing score for a party whose philosophy could hardly be more pro- business. Curiously, this trend is not unique to the US: in France (of all places) the presidential election results of 2002 considerably eroded popular assumptions about the correlation between voting and class, with a large proportion of more educated voters, who are also of course wealthier voters, supporting the centre-left while the poorest classes increasingly turned to right-wing nationalism and populism. Will future political outcomes in wealthy democracies be as much determined by culture as by economics? The values the US's two main parties have stood for have changed hugely over more than 200 years of history: before the (Franklin) Roosevelt era, for example, blacks voted overwhelmingly for the Republicans, the party of Lincoln. What the parties stand for now, Anatol Lieven suggests, might be more obvious were Democrats and Republicans to be renamed the Progressive Liberals and the American Nationalist Party.
The power of this nationalist party, Lieven argues, rests on two pillars of American ideology, one positive in part, the other wholly negative. The partially positive element he calls the "American Creed", that nexus of principles, institutions and beliefs which defines the nation and in the eyes of many of its citizens makes the United States the greatest society on earth. The negative element is an embittered nationalism, composed of solipsism, ignorance of the world, cultural narrowness and sour hostility to enemies both real and imaginary.
On the positive side of the American Creed is its openness: anyone (in a good year) can become an American, and, enjoying life and liberty, continue in pursuit of happiness, or at least money, its most popular surrogate. On the negative side is its dangerous "missionary" quality, that notion shared by so many Americans that they must offer the world the opportunity to become like them, an opportunity, we have now learned, not to be spurned lightly.
It may be plausible to argue that the US's gradual amassing of greater and greater power over the last century has conferred on it certain responsibilities. It is something else, however, to suggest, as its leaders now constantly do, that it is a nation chosen by God (or Destiny or History) to bring the universal values of democracy and free markets to all the lesser breeds. That is the purest irrationality.
The most fascinating chapters in Lieven's impressive and penetrating book are perhaps those on American xenophobia and religious fundamentalism. It is sometimes hard to know whether to be more amused or frightened by this fundamentalism, but on balance frightened seems more appropriate. Thirty-six per cent of Americans apparently believe that the Book of Revelations is not a work of the religious imagination but one of "true prophecy". If they believe that, what is there that they will not believe?
Lieven's most audacious argument may be his attempt to establish a filiation linking the bigoted and often violent soul of the contemporary American South to the traditions of Scots-Irish immigrants and their ethnic origins as contested settlers (frontiersmen) in 17th-century Ulster.
The thesis, though unflattering to our neighbours, is a fascinating one and much flesh is stretched across it, but it is ultimately something that is neither provable nor disprovable. Certainly many people in this state would like to believe it; it may also be worth pointing out that the author is himself half-Irish.
This densely argued yet sparkling study draws on a huge variety of sources in political science, literature, popular culture and the history of several nations and periods. Succeeding chapters marked by careful research and lucid analysis reveal the troubled soul of American nationalism, the lunacies of "revealed religion", the manipulations of right-wing ideologues and the nauseating hate-speech of the new breed of media mercenaries who have entered their service.
The book makes a cogent case against Bush's unjustified war in Iraq and both US parties' unconditional support for the most intransigent sections of Israeli opinion, two disastrous policy errors which can only increase the support base for Islamist extremism and terror.
Lieven has written a book which is not so much anti-American as a desperate, and perhaps forlorn, plea to save something of an old America which seems to be dying. If there is any hope to be extracted from his analysis it is that the direction in which the US is now heading is such as can lead only to disaster or a last-minute change of course.
More pessimistically, he argues, the further out on a limb the Republican Party goes to represent big money and inherited wealth the clearer it will become that its grip on the poorer sections of the electorate can only come from an ever more frenetic and aggressive nationalism.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism By Anatol Lieven Harper Collins, 274pp. £18.99