Bookplanet: another review of BHL's American Vertigo

The America not made for you and me
The where but not the why
By Glyn Morgan

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 on a serious political mission. Democratic equality had taken hold there with results less disastrous for individual liberty than elsewhere. Tocqueville wanted to learn how Americans had managed to pull this off.

Now, more than 170 years later, Bernard-Henri Lévy has travelled in his footsteps. Unlike Tocqueville, Lévy was not on a serious political mission. He was on assignment for the magazine Atlantic Monthly . They gave him a car and a driver and helped him fill his appointment book with cartoon characters, oddballs and what passes in the US for intellectuals. Lévy ended up with a text no less rambling than that of his predecessor, but one that lacks its poetry, psychological insight and sociological sophistication ( 1).

Like everyone else in 2004 (the year of his travels), Lévy was interested in anti-Americanism. There was a lot of it about that year, both inside the country and out. The hapless president, egged on by the evil Dick Cheney, had taken the country into an unnecessary war, costing allies and contributing to the ruin of public finances. Far from being greeted in Iraq as liberators - the promise of President George Bush and his witless advisers - the US occupying army was taking heavy casualties. To make matters worse, Americans had just learned that the war on terrorism was being fought by means of torture, illegal surveillance and extraordinary renditions. What early hopes there were of ridding the nation of Bush were dashed that November, after an election campaign that plumbed new depths of lies, sleaze and misinformation.

Lévy was too polite to expose the most lurid of America’s pathologies. He inspected prisons but spared Americans the embarrassment of numbering the prison population (it hit 2,267,787 in 2004 and is still rising). Nor did he dwell on the details of the death penalty. Lévy came, in large measure, to praise America. He found its people open, welcoming and surprisingly free of the francophobia he had expected to find.

Oddly, his one significant encounter with francophobia came on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s campaign plane, when he discovered that he alone of the travelling hacks was not permitted to interview the senator. Lévy couldn’t understand why. “Do you want an explanation?” asked the journalist sitting next to him. “Yes of course I do!” said Lévy, confused and exasperated. The explanation, as any semi-informed American could have told him, was that Kerry was terrified of being seen talking to a Frenchman after Karl Rove, director of the Republican campaign, had successfully branded the senator a French-speaking sophisticate. Which is not a presidential attribute for the American people, however warm their welcome to Lévy.

The exchange with the American journalist underscores a significant difference between Tocqueville’s text and Lévy’s. Tocqueville’s text is rich, perhaps too rich, in explanations. Sometimes they are implausible. As his good friend John Stuart Mill complained, he tends to explain everything in terms of an insufficiently differentiated conception of democracy. But Tocqueville does at least provide us with explanations for the social phenomena that he encounters. Unfortunately, Lévy is no political sociologist. Description, not explanation, is his strong point.

There is certainly plenty to admire in Lévy’s rich descriptions of America. Much of this book could grace the pages of a good travel magazine: Lévy is very good on the Grand Canyon, and he has a fine eye for fittings and furniture, such as the burgundy velvet he spots in a Nevada brothel.

But the Atlantic Monthly must have expected more from Lévy’s assignment than a travelogue. To this end, they had set him up with meetings with many of the country’s most influential intellectuals. Unfortunately, these did not go that well. At a dinner with Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, Lévy was shocked at the views the iconoclastic professor expressed about Mexican immigration; doubly shocked because he’d been led to believe that Americans, particularly academics, had all been cowed by an oppressive political correctness. Lévy discovered that it was he, not Huntington, who was the more politically correct.

Nor did his meeting with William Kristol go that well. Lévy had hoped that in Kristol and other neo-conservatives he would find some intellectual comradeship. But Kristol, a loyal toady of the Bush administration, not only refused to express doubts over the Iraq war, but shocked Lévy with his earnest advocacy of the death penalty, anti-abortion laws and other elements of the Bush social agenda. Lévy advised him to read more Leo Strauss.

Politically incorrect academics and unfriendly neo-conservatives were not the least surprises. He also discovered that people weren’t as obese as he’d expected. True, he did encounter a woman in Los Angeles weighing nearly 240 kg. But she was the exception. Instead, Lévy found other forms of obesity. Social obesity. Economic obesity. Obesity of airports, churches, parking lots. Lévy clearly likes the term, if not the phenomenon. Unfortunately, he does not offer an explanation for all this obesity. The fact that America possesses a large but relatively low-density population is part of this explanation, at least for the airports, churches and parking lots. But then, Lévy is not strong on explanations.

The weakest part of the book is the concluding section, Reflections, where Lévy struggles to formulate some conclusions about the American model. Tocqueville wanted to understand America because he saw its democratic condition as Europe’s fate. Lévy, in contrast, seems to think that America will remain unique. But he cannot specify the nature of this uniqueness. Apparently, it has something to do with an unresolved tension between America the nation and “the weighty sacrality of communities” - whatever that means. Lévy does not expect America to fall apart, but he does foresee the risk of a “tyranny of minorities”.

On these points concerning the American nation, Lévy could not be more wildly off base. Far from defining a unique or new political form, America is a classic nation-state. True, America was not always like this. At the time of Tocqueville’s visit, the US appeared to be taking shape as a new type of radically decentralised, locally governed polity.

Tocqueville liked what he saw of this decentralised polity. But he also recognised a looming problem. America in this decentralised form would never be able to withstand military competition against a nation with a centralised state. Taking Tocqueville’s lesson to heart, 20th-century America became progressively more centralised, especially in the key areas of foreign and defence policy. In these, the president reigns supreme, more or less unchecked either by other arms of government or by the states.

The president’s war-fighting capacities are bolstered by a primitive patriotism that prevents domestic dissent and, a point lost on Lévy but not on Tocqueville, a powerful, highly assimilative civic religion. In one of Tocqueville’s more profound observations, he pointed out that America, despite its geographical scale, already contained something that many of Europe’s nations lacked: a common and distinctive civilisation. The difference in civilisation between Maine and Georgia, separated by a thousand miles, is less pronounced, so Tocqueville thought, than that between Normandy and Brittany, separated by a stream. The US today, despite its apparent diversity, successfully assimilates large numbers of immigrant groups and turns them into English-speaking, religiously devout Americans, who share, as the political sociologist Alan Wolfe’s recent books have shown, a surprisingly large set of overlapping moral and political values.

It is Europe, not America, that has more to worry about from a “tyranny of minorities”. For reasons yet to be explained, Europe has been much less successful than America in binding its disparate communities into a coherent national community. There is no more important political and intellectual task than to understand this relative failure. Despite Lévy’s discussions of America’s diversity, it’s easy to conclude that Americans have more to learn from Tocqueville’s work than from this book.