But now the Soviet Union is gone. Europe is almost entirely part of the American orbit. Nearly no one believes anymore that America is in some sort of covenant with God that sets it apart from every other nation. The United States is now the most powerful country in the world. In other words, it’s Goliath.
It’s harder to create a positive vision of what you stand for than it is to simply point elsewhere and say you’re against that. As A. E. Housman, the classicist and poet, once observed, poets never write poems about liberty; instead, “they substitute images … and in the last resort, they fall back on denunciation of tyranny, an abominable institution, no doubt, but at any rate less featureless than Liberty, and a godsend to people who have to pretend to write about her.”
It’s also much easier to unify people when you have an opposing force you can rally against. Past American self-conceptions have always relied on the U.S. being a new idea, an experiment, an underdog. They break down when America is the global hegemon and when American culture and ways of thinking saturate almost everywhere.
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