McCain-Palin and Anti-Americanism

Anti-Americanism is good politics and flourishing in most countries. It will receive fresh energy from the McCain-Palin ticket’s new definition of an anti-American as being anyone who is not Joe Six-pack living in Middle America.

This parochial narrative of Palin’s handlers, who seem to be as unaware as she of the world out there, is far from the values of most other nations. But it comforts the perception of Americans and their government as being hypocrites whose actions are far less noble than their words.

That most of the world is anti-American should not surprise Americans because it mirrors their own condescension for the world. That condescension is understandable. Almost all Americans have grown up with the belief that theirs is the world’s greatest country with a manifest responsibility, if not right, to lead the world.

These beliefs are buttressed by the fact that people from all world religions live in the US with freedom, prosperity and human rights often unknown in their countries of origin. But the McCain-Palin ticket’s contention that being a Muslim is un-American and a spur of terrorism is confirming the widely held opinion that non-Christians may live unmolested in the US only if they overtly adopt “American” values. Now the Republicans are dumbing down those values to Christian Joe Six-pack.

As Colin Powell says, Barack Obama’s election would electrify America and the world. That is true but only in the sense that foreigners will be impressed to see that America is overcoming its history of slavery, segregation and disproportionate jailing of black males.

But anti-Americanism will be unchanged because it responds not to racism but the judgmental presumption of pre-eminence inculcated into every American, whether Democrat or Republican. Because of that righteousness, successive US governments have also always placed US laws above international law. They have made most aid and American support conditional on progress towards US-style capitalism, democracy and legal systems. This are not excesses of just the George Bush regime.

There is little doubt that such things when practiced appropriately are beneficial for people everywhere. But even the US is reeling from the flaws.

Fortunately, Obama seems to be too intelligent to push either these or Joe Six-pack values on the world with Bush’s blinkered vigor. But equally as John McCain and Bush, he wants to perpetuate US leadership, including military and economic power. He will use different means but the ends are the same. He may also selectively see being American as conferring exemption from international rules that others nations must obey.

He will talk with a more open mind to America’s enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran but his bombs will be no less violent if the talking fails to bring agreement.

So, as we head towards 4 November, we should not be too naïve about diminution of anti-Americanism around the world. There may be a little bounce because Obama is black, was a child in Indonesia, has a good foreign policy advisor in Joe Biden and is not Joe Six-pack. But the underlying differences will be no less without major changes.

His election may make a watershed in American history and perhaps the racial history of the European nations that sent white emigrants to populate the US in the early centuries. But that history has no particular import for the rest of the world’s 4-5 billion people.

Many of their democratic voters, as in India, South East Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa, deride the materialist values of Americans, whether Joe Six-pack or East Coast liberals. Perhaps, that intolerance will change as their national economies become rich like America. But it is not going to happen soon.

So voting Obama into the Oval Office is not the only transformation Americans will have to make to earn a world that likes their government and values. They will also have to treat the world with more respect.