Taking back America

Anatol Lieven

What’s the Matter with America? The Resistible Rise of the American Right by Thomas Frank
Secker, 306 pp, £12.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 436 20539 4

There is no great mystery about the Republican victory in the US election. It was the product of what used to be one of the most familiar and powerful combinations in the modern history of Europe: the marriage of nationalism and conservative religion. The combination is unfamiliar to most Western Europeans today; but it was all too familiar to their ancestors, and remains so in many parts of the world. The problem is that Western Europeans think of these countries as backward. If we are shocked at what happened in the US it is because the US is in so many respects the most modern, the fastest changing society on earth. How can it also in some ways be so archaic?

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Vol. 26 No. 23 · 2 December 2004 » Anatol Lieven » Taking back America (print version)
pages 7-9 | 4080 words

Letters

From Timothy Brennan

Anatol Lieven joins Maureen Dowd, Alexander Cockburn, Lewis Lapham, Jeffrey St Clair and Thomas Frank in arguing for the need to tackle Republican hypocrites head-on and return without apology to core social democratic positions (LRB, 2 December 2004). But am I the only one who finds it eerie that none of these writers talks about Triad systems, the Diebold machines, the possible hacking of the final election count, the glaring exit poll discrepancies, as well as other factors not even in dispute: for example, arbitrary provisional ballot regulations and the strategic allocation of broken voting machines to targeted minority communities? Say what you like about the diminishing returns of conspiracy theories, but even the milquetoast Kerry campaign has finally filed court briefs challenging the Ohio count. This count, if reversed, would change the outcome of the presidential election. Why does the left, in concert with the mainstream press, treat this as non-news? If the rigging occurred, it is not a marginal factor, statistically irrelevant to the larger issue of Bush’s sway over half the electorate: it is instead an organic part of the Republican ‘revolution’ (as the Republicans loved to call it during the 1990s). The evidence that the election was stolen is too abundant to ignore. What needs to be appreciated is that Bush – despite his thuggishness towards opponents, the daily theatre of terrorist alerts, a monopoly press bent on protecting him and a Democratic campaign so cowardly and collusive that no one really wanted Kerry – lost anyway and that, having lost, he was not allowed to lose. If this is the kind of frontier justice we’re facing, then the strategy can no longer be about how to win votes, but how to storm the palace.

Timothy Brennan
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

From Peter Connolly

Anatol Lieven appears to be under the impression that until the 1960s Midwestern white Protestants were predominantly Democrats. Midwestern and Northeastern white Protestants formed the base of the Republican Party from its founding in the 1850s until recent times, when there have been defections, especially in the North-East, among the descendants of the party’s founders who tend to dislike their party’s new Southern rulers. The Midwest, however, has largely kept the faith, which dismays observers like Thomas Frank. Kansas, to choose the currently fashionable example, was admitted to the Union in 1861, following its own mini Civil War. Since 1861 the Sunflower State has sent 31 people to the US Senate, 26 of them Republicans. Only three Kansas senators have been Democrats and two were Populists. Since 1939, only Republicans have been elected to the Senate in Kansas – among them, Bob Dole and his successor Sam Brownback, a cynosure of the Christian right. If something is the matter with Kansas, it has been the matter for a long time.

Peter Connolly
Washington DC

From John Henn

Anatol Lieven is wrong to say that there was once ‘state-backed Presbyterianism’ in Massachusetts. The Puritan-founded Massachusetts colonies opposed presbyters almost as much as the pope. The Puritan religion was congregational in organisation, and ‘Congregational’ was the name the descendants of the Puritans later used for their denomination, save for those who split off to found the Unitarian movement in the early 19th century. To this day, Boston has many Congregational and Unitarian churches, but only one Presbyterian church, which wasn’t founded until 1865. Presbyterianism was brought to America primarily by the Scots and the Scots-Irish, who emigrated not to New England but to the mid-Atlantic and the South, and westward into the piedmont of the Appalachian mountains. Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia, is perhaps America’s best known Presbyterian public figure.

John Henn
Cambridge, Massachusetts