“People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.”

In other words, the book apparently claims that freedom-loving peoples are inherently Americanists or “believers” in the religion that is America. This is simply crazy stuff. The book seems to be making the claim that you cannot love freedom without “believing” in America and that anyone who loves these political principles is inducted into the religion of America. On the contrary, there is no necessary connection between the two at all.

In Europe, the French Revolution was the far more immediate model of liberal and democratic politics, France was the source of many of the ideas embraced by 19th century liberals *and* specifically in the Greek case France was the incubator and educator of more than a few Westernised Greek intellectuals and political leaders who were important to the actual Greek War of Independence. But it would be a mistake to dub “liberte, equalite et fraternite” as “Francisme” or something of the kind and say that the Greeks were embracing “Francisme” when they rebelled against the Sultan.

These struggles are above all patriotic and local struggles. They receive a patina of Western liberal rationalisations, but they are in the end struggles of peoples to throw off those who are held to be outside oppressors. There were liberal elements to the Greek War for Independence, but there were many other participants in the war on the Greek side who were interested in Greek nationality and tradition. In the end, my greatest objection to this interpretation of Greek and Hungarian struggles for independence is that it presumes to put America at the center of other nations’ histories in a way that seems to me to violate and intrude upon these histories.

The Founders were, almost to a man, opposed to democracy. They preferred a mixed government as a way to avoid the extremes of any one of the three classic types of regime. To say that a democratic ideal was somehow present at the Founding is to read back later developments into the beginnings of the Republic and the colonial period. It’s simply not correct. You can either cheer or deplore the eventual introduction of universal suffrage and mass democracy in this country, but you cannot pretend that it existed or was fully welcome in the period before the 1820s. Equality is a bit trickier, since there is great concern to secure equal protection before the law, but egalitarianism takes on a great many forms; securing equality is, by its nature, opposed to the securing of liberty. Since men are not actually equal, egalitarianism must involve some measure of restricting the liberty of some for the benefit of others. There may even be good reasons to do this, but it comes at the expense of liberty. Gelernter’s trinity of principles as a description of actual political views of early Americans does not work. That these things later became important is more plausible, but Gelernter seems to be arguing that this trinity of principles goes back to the very beginnings. This does not really hold up. On another point, the focus on the Puritans and New England neglects a rather large part of the rest of America–this is the America that must be run down, written out and ignored if “Americanism” as Gelernter describes it can be attributed to any period before the early 20th century.

Like Gelernter, I’m respectful (though often critical) of American institutions and liberty and grateful for the opportunity they have afforded me and others like me. Turning Americanism into a religion and propagating it, sometimes by force, upon culturally alien and unpromising soil, does seem a bridge too far, and how treating American institutions as a religion as opposed to a convenient, historically contingent arrangement is consistent with Orthodoxy, Jewish or Christian, is beyond me.

I’ll save the autobiography for my own blog when the time is ripe, but I have found little fulfillment in any of the usual nostrums sought out by those with secular upbringings such as mine. Of all sinners, as the Orthodox liturgy puts it, I am chief.

1) First, I understand Daniel’s point about “esteemed Americans in our early history” not necessarily buying into the whole “liberty, democracy and equality” formula; and yet depending on how those terms are defined I don’t think it is a stretch to say those ideas animated our Founders (e.g. if you assume African slaves don’t ‘count’ as equals, then the desire for religious liberty, taxation with representation and equality before the law seem to be shared by many in the Founding generation);

2) Second, it is telling that Daniel mocks the inclusion of Greeks and Hungarians in Gelernter’s list of foreign people who “believe” in Americanism but not the Chinese. As I’m sure Daniel knows, the protesters in Tiananmen Square were at least partially inspired by certain ideas that at least in their minds are associated today with America (symbolically represented by the Statue of Liberty, which ironically was turned into the symbol of anit-Communist resistance at the new memorial in Washington, D.C.) Are these ideas exclusively American? Of course not, although it would be interesting to read whether or not this is the argument Gelernter is making. The Chinese example also makes me wonder if the Greeks and Hungarians were also similarly inspired at least partially by what America meant in the context of liberty and freedom.

3) Finally, everything I read about Israel suggests that it is a vibrant and thriving society; but perhaps Grumpy has recently returned from a trip there and has a personal horror story or two to share about his experience. I also think Gelernter is a devout Orthodox Jew, although again, perhaps Grumpy knows something I don’t.

The Bolshevik God, and its Trotskyist offshoot have failed. Israel is an unpleasant provincial backwater. Watered-down Judaism proves as empty as its watered-down Christian analogues. Freud, of course, died before Marx.

Sadly, the “anything” that the Gelernters seem to believe in after ceasing (apparently) to believe in God is messianic democratism.

The Pope’s restoration of the prayer for the conversion of the Jews is quite timely. Lord, have mercy.

The difference between Gelernter and D’Souza may be that essentially no one agrees with D’Souza’s latest book, while Sullivan’s thesis relies on the claim that D’Souza’s sorts of ideas are the essence of modern conservatism. Gelernter’s book does receive high praise from some of the usual suspects, so it is possible to see in at least certain prominent neocons real sympathy for this most outlandish of arguments. Taken one by one, you can find parallels in other writers; Gelernter has brought all of these crackpot notions together into one place and so made them all seem even more incredible as a result. Gelernter’s thesis about America does seem to me to be implicit in many of the things many neocons write and say.

Even so, it has been fairly rare to find anyone quite so bold or mad as to declare America a religion. This takes the “American creed” idea to its logical conclusion, of course, since religions, not countries, have creeds, but it struck me that many credal interpretations of American identity hinged on not taking the creed idea too far (the credal nation types tended not to be terribly fierce adherents of credal Christianity and wouldn’t want there to be too much confusion).

And yet, having said that, I should think that Mr. Larison would rather like it. “Americanism” reads like an overblown paleocon satire of neoconservatism: the Founding as universalistic, Lincoln as global democratizer, Wilson as neocon extraordinaire. Another way of putting it, I suppose, would be that Gelernter is to Larison as D’Souza is to Sullivan. In both cases, a bombastic argument provides the rope for its own hanging.