Radical Accusations Against America, and America’s Response

The following excerpt comes from Russell Kirk’s excellent little book, The American Cause.

Many revolutionary radicals seek to divert attention from their dismal caricature of Utopia by incessantly attacking, through elaborate propaganda, the alleged failings of free countries. The United States being the present chief check upon the radical ideologues’ ambition, the accusations of their propaganda are directed with special intensity against America. Some of these charges may be summarized here.

(1) America is “materialistic”: civilization in the United States is oppressed by a crass concentration upon private profit.

(2) America is “imperialistic”: the United States intends to dominate all the other nations of the world.

 (3) America is “capitalistic”: American businessmen grow rich upon the labor of the American poor.

(4) America is unjust: minorities and even majorities are repressed and bullied in the United States.

(5) America is decadent: public and private morality and culture are sinking toward utter collapse in the United States.

And there are other charges; but these five may suffice to illustrate the revolutionary methods in propaganda.

Although nearly all Americans feel that these accusations are unfounded, too often Americans have failed to reply coherently to such charges. The revolutionaries’ intention is to give Americans a bad conscience, and to give the United States a bad reputation in the rest of the world; to confuse, to obscure the revolutionary aim by a barrage of petty and reckless insults to the United States.

The radical propagandists are satisfied if, though failing to convince altogether, they succeed in establishing doubts about American society in men’s minds; for the objective is not so much to win adherents as simply to weaken loyalty to the United States and to dishearten America’s allies.

The American Answer

America is unaccustomed to world leadership. We entered both World Wars only with great reluctance, and as a nation we have not sought to profit from our victories in those conflicts. Being new to many international responsibilities, sometimes we are hesitant and overly apologetic in our policies and statements; and sometimes we blunder.

Nor is our society perfect, for no society ever has been perfect, or will be. Yet ours is a just, orderly, free, prosperous, and intelligent society. By the side of totalitarian societies, ours is a marvelous achievement. We have no need to damn ourselves with faint praise, though we ought not to fall into the opposite pit of braggadocio.

Here, then, are some answers to the radical revolutionaries’ accusations against the United States.

America and Materialism

(1) America is “materialistic” only in the sense that all men, everywhere, always have employed most of their time in getting and spending.

American industry and thrift have helped to make the United States the richest of great powers. And our material achievement renders possible a very high degree of leisure and cultural achievement among us. Honest private profit is a good thing: it produces “the wealth of nations,” public prosperity.

There are many evidences that Americans are interested in much else besides getting and spending. We spend more upon formal education, per head of population, than does any other country. We have more churchgoers, per capita, than has any other great state. We have an immense number of public libraries and museums of art. We have one of the highest rates of literacy in the world.

The intelligence and honesty of our popular newspapers is superior to that in most countries. In our brief span of national existence, we have acquired a national literature of a distinct character and universal meaning: the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Henry James, Paul Elmer More, George Santayana, and many others. We have great private endowments for the advancement of culture.

America and Imperialism

(2) America is the least imperialistic, probably, of all great powers in all history.

There is no American desire to build an empire overseas or in the Western hemisphere; nor do we attempt to secure trade monopolies abroad. We maintain garrisons in Europe and Asia to guard against the threat of foreign conquest of our allies, but we keep those forces at a minimum, and withdraw them altogether whenever practicable.

Sometimes, indeed, we may have acted with imprudence in giving up bases and positions important to our own security and that of our allies. We withdrew altogether from China after our war with Japan, for instance, even though the Communists were then engaged in overthrowing the Kuomintang government of China with which we were allied. We withdrew our troops from Korea despite Communist preparations for invading South Korea, and returned only after our small remaining forces had been attacked by the Communists. At the end of the war in Europe, we withdrew from eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other territories, allowing the Communists to occupy those areas.

These are not the actions of a nation bent upon building an empire. Our whole national history refutes the charge that Americans mean to be masters of the world. When, in 1846, we utterly defeated the Mexicans, we did not annex Mexico, though we had taken their capital. In our war with Spain, in 1898, we did not annex Cuba, where most of the war was fought. Though we acquired the Philippines, we gave those islands complete independence after we had freed them from the Japanese at the end of the Second World War.

Earlier in the twentieth century, we withdrew from Central America the Marines we had sent there to restore order. We took no part in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century partition of Africa, though we certainly had the power to do so. We maintain troops in Germany and Japan only at the request of those states. This is not the way in which an imperialistic country behaves.

Nor have we been economic imperialists. Opposed to monopolies and cartels, we have stood for commercial and industrial competition throughout the world, declining to take advantage of our military strength to secure commercial agreements favorable to the United States. To many nations, we give or lend far more than we sell to them or buy from them.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have given many billions of dollars to other countries without expectation of repayment. Surely no imperialistic state ever followed this policy.

America and Capitalism

(3) America is “capitalistic,” and proudly so, in the sense that Americans believe in private property and private enterprise, and point to the fruits of that economic system. In earlier chapters of this book, we touched upon the merits of our free economy. It can stand upon its own record. It may also be emphasized that the American economy has been called a “people’s capitalism,” for ownership of property, including great industries, is very widely shared, and the profits go to the laborer as well as the owner and the manager.

Private property is one of the chief satisfactions of life, Americans know, and private economic responsibility helps to secure public freedom.

America and Justice

(4) America is unjust only to the extent that perfect justice never has been secured anywhere, at any time in history. Justice is the securing to every man of what is his own. The civil rights and the property rights of Americans are guaranteed by federal and state constitutions, by the courts, and by centuries of usage. It is improbable that a greater measure of justice ever prevailed in any nation.

There are regular means of redress for injustice: a man may appeal to the law, and to public opinion. Cases of injustice receive wide attention in America precisely because they are rare exceptions, not the rule. We take particular pains to preserve the rights of minorities; our constitutions, indeed, are intended primarily as a defense of minorities against hasty or selfish temporary majorities.

America and Decadence

(5) Decadence, according to C. E. M. Joad, is “the loss of an object.” A man is decadent who has ceased to have any aim in life; a society is decadent that no longer perceives goals and standards.

Measured by this test, the United States remains a vigorous and hopeful society. Most Americans recognize objects in life. To do their duty under God; to rear decent families; to improve their own condition, and that of their community; to educate themselves; to acquire a home and other property; to maintain the best in their civilization—these goals continue to attract many millions of Americans. Foreign observers are impressed generally with the vigor and strength of fiber in American character.

One of these, a Scot, Mr. J. M. Reid, once remarked in the quarterly Modern Age that “freedom, simplicity, and diversity” are the marks of American civilization. And he continued:

Thinking Americans are worried about many of the things that disturb us too—about the future of a civilization which seems, increasingly, to base its life and hopes on inessential gadgets, about the complications of industrialization, and technology, and the hideous threat to life itself that these things have developed, about the weakening, or absence, of traditional leadership and generally accepted standards of culture. The very form that these worries take, however, is striking and even hopeful to a European. You still feel, as we once did, that the individual should be able to do something effective about the things that trouble him, whereas most of us have come to think that what is wrong with our world is beyond our control—that our best hope is to escape disaster for ourselves, not to prevent it for the people and places we know. We feel ourselves to be already half-defeated, whereas your world still seems a manageable one, though it may be difficult to handle.

No, America is not wholly the nation of Kinsey Report subjects, inane television-viewers, and Hollywood addicts that so much anti-American propaganda describes. The inventiveness, the industry, and the confidence in the goodness of life which are the symptoms of private and social health remain vigorous among us. Americans are willing to point out their own society’s shortcomings, which is another indication that decadence is not upon us.

A decadent man and a decadent people ordinarily confess to no faults, because they have lost sight of the standards by which virtue and vice are determined.

American Promise

To save the rest of the world from this decadence, this revolutionary and collectivistic life-in-death, is a part of the American cause. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,” President Washington wrote in his Farewell Address, more than two hundred years ago, to his fellow Americans. “Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”

America is a great nation; and if she is not invariably guided by an exalted justice and benevolence, still surely she is playing her part among the nations with some courage and generosity. For two important reasons—and those of equal weight in the minds of most citizens of the United States—America has set her face against every totalist ideology, stationed her troops on foreign soil, built an immense air force and an immense fleet, poured out her national wealth in aid of the defense and the welfare of the free world.

One reason is that Americans believe in the dignity of man, made in an image more than human; and the revolutionary ideologue threatens to destroy that dignity wherever he finds weakness.

The other reason is that Americans know they themselves cannot be secure unless the civilization of which they are a part is secure. They do not hesitate to oppose by strength the armed doctrines of ideologues. Their cause, they believe, is the cause of true human nature, of enlightened order, regular justice, and liberty under law. For this cause they have made some sacrifices; they will make more.

Americans do not aspire to make the world into one vast uniform United States, for they cherish diversity at home and abroad. That our elaborate civilization and our delicate civil social order may not fall victims to the revolutionary movements at home and abroad: this is the end to which American policy is directed. And if Americans have valor in them still, theirs will not be a losing cause.

About the Author

Russell Kirk is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important men of letters, and is ranked high among the principal architects of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. Kirk’s best-known works are The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, The Roots of American Order, and The Politics of Prudence.