I heard David Gelernter interviewed on Dennis Prager’s radio show. It was a dull listen but the title of his new book intrigued me, "Americanism: The Fourth Great Religion."
I read it yesterday and it was a waste of time. There’s nothing in it that shows that America’s ideals are a fourth great religion. Instead, there’s a lot of repeating of stuff I already know — such as that America stands for freedom, liberty, hard work, and the free market.
Dr. Gelernter spends most of the book giving a tenth grader’s summary of American and world history. Who needs it?
I agree with this most of this review on Amazon.com:
Many of America’s earliest European settlers, the Massachusetts Bay Puritans in particular, viewed America as a new Israel, and the Europe they’d escaped from as a new Egypt. This sentiment lived on and was embraced by our Founders to a considerable degree. And the sentiment lives on today in our rhetoric about being an example to other nations, or as Reagan put it, echoing the Puritans, a city on a hill. All of this is so widely known that it needn’t be repeated, unless as an introduction to a deeper level of analysis, or a conflicting or competing point of view. But you’ll find none of those here.
The author just pounds away at this idea — the well-worn notion that Zionism and Puritanism are related — and insists over and over again that Zionism of a sort has persisted, and is a mainstay of the religion that Puritanism has morphed into, which the author calls Americanism: a faith that apparently has a lot to do with making war.
Americans, we are told, are naturally isolationist, but "Americanism" is NOT isolationist; it is "chivalrous" and goes to war to spread the gospel of democracy. So, World War I was an expression of Americanism. WWII was NOT an expression of Americanism because we only entered it because we were pushed in by the need to defend ourselves. The Cold War WAS an expression of Americanism because we "chose" to go into it to spread the gospel — (despite the fact that in truth we were pushed into it by the perceived need to defend ourselves from Soviet aggression). The Iraq war, Gelernter says, is also an expression of Americanism — again despite the fact that Americans supported it out of a desire to defend themselves from Saddam, who they mistakenly believed to be a possessor of WMD’s and a 9/11 conspirator.
The truth is that America goes to war when the American people feel, or have been made to feel, a desire for self-defense or for vengeance. But for Gelernter, if Bush says it’s about spreading democracy, then it’s about spreading democracy, even if we fight the war on terror by partnering up with authoritarian regimes in Uzbekistan and Pakistan, and even if Bush’s regime pushes secrecy and belligerence towards the legislature (even when it was held by his own party!) to new heights.
In addition to being an unworthy book, it’s so jumbled and repetitious that it reads like a first draft thrown together over a weekend.
For a great book on this topic, read Andrew Roberts’ A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.
Eric emails: "It’s probably a great book, but the guy capitalizes every third word. After about three pages I couldn’t read anymore. He shoulda worked for an editor like Jim Holman (SD Reader owner). Holman won’t allow anything except proper nouns to be capped. That is the way."
