What's So Great About America Read Online Free PDF

Himmelfarb’s The De-Moralization of Society.
    How, then, can we love a society where virtue loses all her loveliness, one that has promoted what Pope John Paul II has called a “culture of death”? Some conservatives say we cannot. A few years ago the journal First Things argued that America had so fundamentally departed from the principles that once commanded allegiance that it was time to ask “whether conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” 16 Pat Buchanan characteristically goes further, asserting that for millions of Americans, “the good country we grew up in” has now been replaced by “a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for.” 17
    On the political Left, anti-Americanism has been prevalent and even fashionable at least since the Vietnam War. Admittedly a direct attack on the American homeland by Islamic fundamentalists who imprison homosexuals and refuse to educate their women was a bit too much for some, like Christopher Hitchens and David Rieff, who enrolled as supporters of the U.S. war effort. Some on the Left, too embarrassed to rationalize mass murder, and too timid to provoke the public’s rage, fell prudently silent. But others could not help muttering that “America had it coming” and that “we must look at our own actions to understand the context for this attack.” Columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, said the United States was responsible for “the vast global inequalities in which terrorism is ultimately rooted.” 18 This viewpoint was applauded at a Washington, D.C., town meeting sponsored by the
Congressional Black Caucus. 19 And on the American campus, several professors went further, blaming the United States itself for the carnage of September 11. University of Massachusetts professor Jennie Traschen suggested that America deserved what it got because throughout the world it was “a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.” 20
    These strong words should not have come as a surprise. For years the left-wing opponents of globalization have carried banners in Seattle and elsewhere saying “America Must Be Stopped” and “The World Is Not For Sale.” On campuses across the country, professors have been teaching their students what Columbia University scholar Edward Said recently argued: that America is a genocidal power with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.” 21 Many intellectuals and activists have devoted a good deal of their adult lives to opposing what one termed “a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy, its gunboat diplomacy, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its marauding multinationals, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.” 22 Could bin Laden have put it better? If what these people say is true, then America should be destroyed.
    The most serious internal critique of America comes from the political movement called multiculturalism. This group is made up of minority activists as well as of sympathetic whites who agree with their agenda. The multiculturalists are a powerful, perhaps even dominant, force in American high schools and colleges. The pervasiveness of their influence is attested in
the title of a recent book by Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now. This group has become the shaper of the minds of American students. The multiculturalists are teaching our young people that Western civilization is defined by oppression. They present American history as an uninterrupted series of crimes visited on blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, and natives of the Third World. This is the