What's So Great About America (25 page)

Of course it does. And fortunately America does command such a loyalty. The multiculturalists are simply wrong about America, and despite their best efforts to promote a politics of difference, Americans remain a united people with shared values and a common way of life. There are numerous surveys of national attitudes that confirm this,
¹⁰
but it is most easily seen when Americans are abroad. Hang out at a Parisian café, for instance, and you can easily pick out the Americans: they dress the same way, eat the same food, listen to the same music, and laugh at the same jokes. However different their personalities, Americans who run into each other in remote places always become fast friends. And
even the most jaded Americans who spend time in other countries typically return home with an intense feeling of relief and a newfound appreciation for the routine satisfactions of American life.

It is easy to forget the cohesiveness of a free people in times of peace and prosperity. New York is an extreme example of the great pandemonium that results when countless individuals and groups pursue their diverse interests in the normal course of life. In a crisis, however, the national tribe comes together, and this is exactly what happened in New York and the rest of America following the terrorist attack. Suddenly political, regional, and racial differences evaporated; suddenly Americans stood as one. This surprised many people, including many Americans, who did not realize that, despite the centrifugal forces that pull us in different directions, there is a deep national unity that holds us together.

Unity, however, is not sufficient for the challenges ahead. America also needs the moral self-confidence to meet its adversary. This is the true lesson of Vietnam: Americans cannot succeed unless they are convinced that they are fighting on behalf of the good. There are some, as we have seen, who fear that America no longer stands for what is good. They allege that American freedom produces a licentious, degenerate society that is scarcely worth defending. We return, therefore, to the question of what America is all about, and whether this country, in its dedication to the principle of freedom, subverts the higher principle of virtue.

The central themes of American life can be seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel
The Great Gatsby.
The protagonist is typically American in that he has invented his own identity: James Gatz has become Jay Gatsby. On the surface, Gatsby is a great American success story, yet Fitzgerald also portrays a darker side—
Gatsby fabricates his credentials, he hangs out with shady figures, and his wealth has probably been acquired illegally. Moreover, Gatsby is a man of questionable judgment: he loves a woman, Daisy, who is vain and callous. He foolishly thinks that his great wealth can buy her affections and somehow erase the past. These are typical American illusions, and Gatsby pays a high price for them—he ends up dead in the swimming pool.

Even so, Gatsby is Fitzgerald's hero—he is truly the “great” Gatsby—because he represents the magical self-transformation of the individual in a new kind of society. And in Fitzgerald's view he is redeemed by the magnitude of his aspirations. There is “something gorgeous about him,” “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and an “extraordinary gift for hope.” Gatsby's life is a reminder of the astonishment and wonder with which the first Dutch sailors beheld the new world, a world that signals the fulfillment of “the last and greatest of all human dreams.”
¹¹
Fitzgerald's conclusion is that America still holds out that kind of promise. He implies, and I agree with him, that there is something unexpected, turbocharged, and exhilarating about living in such a society. It is simply more fun than living elsewhere.

So what about virtue? The fundamental difference between the society that the Islamic fundamentalists want and the society that Americans have is that the Islamic activists seek a country where the life of the citizens is
directed by others,
while Americans live in a nation where the life of the citizens is largely
self-directed.
The central goal of American freedom is self-reliance: the individual is placed in the driver's seat of his own life. The Islamic fundamentalists presume the moral superiority of the externally directed life on the grounds that it is aimed at virtue.
The self-directed life, however, also seeks virtue—virtue realized not through external command but, as it were, “from within.” The real question is: which type of society is more successful in achieving the goal of virtue?

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. The millions of Americans who live decent, praiseworthy lives deserve our highest admiration because they have opted for the good when the good is not the only available option. Even amidst the temptations that a rich and free society offers, they have remained on the straight path. Their virtue has special luster because it is freely chosen. The free society does not guarantee virtue any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed: it has to be won through personal striving.

By contrast, the externally directed life that Islamic fundamentalists seek undermines the possibility of virtue. If the supply of virtue is insufficient in self-directed societies, it is almost nonexistent in externally directed societies because coerced virtues are not virtues at all. Consider the woman who is required to wear a veil. There is no modesty in this, because the woman is being compelled. Compulsion cannot produce virtue: it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue. And once the reins of coercion
are released, as they were for the terrorists who lived in the United States, the worst impulses of human nature break loose. Sure enough, the deeply religious terrorists spent their last days in gambling dens, bars, and strip clubs, sampling the licentious lifestyle they were about to strike out against.
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In this respect they were like the Spartans, who—Plutarch tells us—were abstemious in public but privately coveted wealth and luxury. In externally directed societies, the absence of freedom signals the absence of virtue. Thus the free society is not simply richer, more varied, and more fun: it is also morally superior to the externally directed society. There is no reason for anyone, least of all the cultural conservatives, to feel hesitant about rising to the defense of our free society.

Even if Americans possess the necessary unity and self-confidence, there is also the question of nerve. Some people, at home and abroad, are skeptical that America can endure a long war against Islamic fundamentalism because they consider Americans to be, well, a little bit soft. As one of bin Laden's lieutenants put it, “Americans love life, and we love death.” His implication was that Americans do not have the stomach for the kind of deadly, drawn-out battle that the militant Muslims are ready to fight. This was also the attitude of the Taliban. “Come and get us,” they taunted America. “We are ready for
jihad
. Come on, you bunch of weenies.” And then the Taliban was hit by a juggernaut of American firepower that caused their regime to disintegrate within a couple of weeks. Soon the Taliban leadership had headed for the caves, or for Pakistan, leaving their captured soldiers to beg for their lives. Even the call of
jihad
and the promise of martyrdom could not stop these hard men from—in the words
of Mullah Omar himself—“running like chickens with their heads cut off.” This is not to say that Americans should expect all its battles against terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism to be so short and so conclusive. But neither should America's enemies expect Americans to show any less firmness or fierceness than they themselves possess.

Although much of America is immersed in Rousseau's ethic of authenticity, there are sizable segments of the culture that have not been infiltrated by it. The firefighters and policemen who raced into the burning towers of the World Trade Center showed that their lives were dedicated to something higher than “self-fulfillment.” The same can be said of Todd Beamer and his fellow passengers who forced the terrorists to crash United Airlines Flight 93 in the woods of western Pennsylvania rather than flying on to Camp David or the White House. Authenticity, thank God, is not the operating principle of the U.S. military. America's enemies should not expect to do battle against the Starbucks guy. The military has its own culture, which is closer to that of the firefighters and policemen, and also bears an affinity with the culture of the “greatest generation.” Only now are those Americans who grew up during the 1960s coming to appreciate the virtues—indeed the indispensability—of this older, sturdier culture of courage, nobility, and sacrifice. It is this culture that will protect the liberties of all Americans, including that of the Starbucks guy.

As the American founders knew, America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being—confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future oriented—is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic, and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced,
and that Islamic societies produce now. In America, the life we are given is not as important as the life we make. Ultimately, America is worthy of our love and sacrifice because, more than any other society, it makes possible the good life, and the life that is good.

America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world. By making sacrifices for America, and by our willingness to die for her, we bind ourselves by invisible cords to those great patriots who fought at Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima, and we prove ourselves worthy of the blessings of freedom. By defeating the terrorist threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism, we can protect the American way of life while once again redeeming humanity from a global menace. History will view America as a great gift to the world, a gift that Americans today must preserve and cherish.

1
Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War
(New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 144–51.

1
“Notes Found After the Hijackings,”
New York Times,
29 September 2001, B-3.

2
John O'Sullivan, “Volatile Ideas That Bombs Can't Destroy,”
San Diego Union-Tribune,
14 October 2001, G-1.

3
Nada El Sawy, “Yes, I Follow Islam, but I'm Not a Terrorist,”
Newsweek,
15 October 2001, 12.

4
Hendrik Hertzberg and David Remnick, “The Trap,”
New Yorker,
1 October 2001, 38.

5
Joseph Lelyveld, “The Mind of a Suicide Bomber,”
New York Times Magazine,
28 October 2001, 50.

6
“Don't Count on Muslim Support,”
The American Enterprise,
December 2001, 11.

7
I understand the limitations of the term “fundamentalism,” which refers to a specifically American Protestant movement to return to biblical fundamentals. I use the term here to refer to Muslims who are seeking to return the Islamic world to a purer version of Islam unadulterated by non-Islamic ideas and influences.

8
The Koran,
trans. N. J. Dawood (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 186.

9
Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 183.

10
Bernard Lewis,
The Muslim Discovery of Europe
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 60–61; see also Bernard Lewis, “Jihad vs. Crusade,”
Wall Street Journal,
27 September 2001.

11
For readings on the meaning of
jihad,
see Rudolph Peters,
Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam
(Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996).

12
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Avon Books, 1992).

13
Samuel Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), 20.

14
Lee Kuan Yew, “America Is No Longer Asia's Model,”
New Perspectives Quarterly,
Winter 1996; Fareed Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,”
Foreign Affairs,
March–April 1994.