American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (review)

This book is a sequel to America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (1999). That book established that the contemporary image of America is a bifurcated figure split between the fantastic dream of empire and the ghost of authentic potential lost or ruined in pursuit of this ultimate nightmare vision. My last book, Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America (2003), made use of this idea for its argumentative purposes, so I come to this new book favorably disposed.

Spanos argues here that after 9/11 the irrational exuberance of the neoconservative visions of a Pax Americana from the 1990s has been replaced by a more sober attitude that nonetheless argues for the creation and imposition upon the world of this enforced peace, beginning with the pacification of the Middle East through the erection there of a model Arab liberal democracy, American-style. Rather than give up the visions of the 1990s, then, contemporary American government policy-makers and their allies in the media have become more hard-bitten in their resolve to achieve their willful design, no matter how tragic the price. What Spanos’ new book provides is detailed insights into how this post-9/11 imperial American project must disavow the experience of Vietnam so as to forge ahead with this latest irrational national design.

After two chapters that provide the theoretical justification for Spanos’ argument, the core of the book consists in three chapters reading Graham Greene’s prophetic novel The Quiet American, Philip Caputo’s famous Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, and Tim O’Brien’s wide-acclaimed novel Going After Cacciato. The book closes with two chapters that draw the lesson from these readings done in light of the opening theoretical framework. As a model for mounting and achieving a successful argument, this book has no equal in recent criticism anywhere. I admire its careful dialogic use of theory, its scrupulous attention to literary texts, and its polemical lucidity.

Chapter 6, “American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier, before and after 9/11: From the Puritans to the Neo-Con Men,” originally published in boundary 2, the journal Spanos originally founded over thirty-five years ago and of which he is editor emeritus, is particularly powerful as a political critique of neoconservatism, and especially of Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005). Spanos demonstrates convincingly that Huntingon’s thesis, a corollary to that of his controversial book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1998), is not only racist and imperialistic, but totally insane. That the Anglo-Protestant strain in America’s national origins and history either was or still is the “core” of American identity is so far from the historical truth of the past or the present moment we can only wonder how Huntington has any influence at all—except for the obvious fact that there are many candidates for the asylum who believe that America is an exceptional nation in the history of the world because of its divine, Anglo-Protestant mission to establish “a shining city on the hill” as a result of its “errand in the wilderness,” that endlessly mythic frontier for which most of the North American continent became the original material basis, and now, the rest of the world would become the future fantasized homeland.

Spanos shows further that Huntington uses the genre of the Jeremiad that was so effectively analyzed and critiqued by Scarcan Berovitich, even as he simply ignores the critique. Spanos argues persuasively that Huntingon derives from a long line of American conmen figures that Melville prophetically and satirically portrayed in The Confidence Man (1857) a century and a half ago. As Spanos puts it so conclusively, “We might say, invoking Melville’s proleptic disclosure [in that novel] of the pervasive abuse to which the optimism of American exceptionalism lent itself . . . that Huntington masquerades as an...