No one would seriously dispute that global capitalism – as polycentric as its structure might be – favours certain places, countries and populations. The United States of America is undoubtedly one of its preferred regions, not to say its main residence. It is the country in the modern that, more than any other, has given itself the constitution of a comfort sphere. One could almost say that in the case of the USA, the crystal palace presents itself as an immigration country. In keeping with this, most of its inhabitants have developed an inclination to view themselves not merely as agents of an economic system, but as carriers of a motivation that has long borne an irresistible name: the American Dream.1 Its basic definition includes the postulation that the number of its definitions is virtually as high as the number of the country's inhabitants. If one reduces all the dreams dreamt on American soil about the meaning of existence in that country to their essentials, however, one will probably be left with no more than three irreducible motifs.
The first consists in the proposition that the USA is essentially the country where, in contrast to the numerous lethargocracies in the rest of the world, anyone who wants to do something new can do something new. Among the constitutional rights of US citizens, one outstanding element is the expectation of finding at all times a space favourably disposed towards advances and initiatives. One could call this the right to the West, in a more than solely geographical sense, as ‘the West’ – as we saw in the reflections above – is a symbol of impunity in the unilateral penetration of unexplored areas. Once they may have been called Wyoming and California; today they are genetic research, nanotechnology, the colonization of Mars or artificial life.
The second characteristic is tied to the term ‘chosenness’ – a word that moves through a multi-coloured spectrum of meanings, starting with the notion that it is the most natural thing in the world to be at the top in all respects and extending to the rarely voiced, but widely palpable idea that the deep purpose of this country is to be the venue for the Protestant outdoing of the Jewish exception. Chosenness is the Anglo-American declination of the subjectivity invented in continental Europe; it means that transatlantic being-subject denotes the possibility of being called from the midst of normal, non-moved life to be the agent of an intimately felt mission. Chosenness is the American password for the disinhibition of action and appearance on the world stage. Consequently the mission statement, the project creed, constitutes America's original contribution to the list of speech acts. The linguistic side of Americanism is expressed not only in the frequently derided superlatives of which the natives make such ample use; its most binding form is in the verbal gestures with which citizens of the United States pledge their ‘commitments’. The oft-glossed religiosity of Americans, a source of bafflement to Europeans, very frequently implies the strongly pre-Christian notion – reformulated with great criminal energy by Calvin – that God is with the victors, whatever the angelic pipes of the New Testament might sing and say about the preference of the Almighty for the weak.2
The third and final attribute is connected to the psychodynamic social contract of the USA, which ensures the everlasting precedence of manias over depressions. One manifestation of this is the code of optimism that visitors from Europe find so cheering, albeit often baffling, and which constitutes the true national language (although self-critical idioms, even an indigenous version of negativism, can also be found). This gives rise to the zestful habit among ordinary Americans of formulating problems as challenges. The spontaneous consequence of this is that obstacles are met with programmes for eliminating them. Nowhere else in the world would it be conceivable that an initiative to intensify cancer research and other medical projects could take the external form of an appeal to increase the defence budget, as could be read in the New York Times of 3 May 1998: as defeat in the battle against previously unvanquished diseases is fundamentally un-American, the war against devious causes of death must be waged using the ‘whole will of our nation’. (One can assume that echoes of the ‘war on poverty’ from the New Deal era influenced this language game.) The war against the invisible after 9/11 also had a much-noted, muddled second front, for it is equally un-American to be vulnerable to untraceable terrorists. The national mobilizations against illness and hidden enemies are direct products of an implicit manic amendment stating that no citizen of the United States should be expected to accept the existence of an internal or external reason for depression. US citizens profit from an additional human right that demands a subordination of discouraging affects to high spirits, and endorses the elimination of the causes for discouragement by any means. Anyone living in the USA will always enjoy the support of their cultural environment in consistently thinking away and clearing away all impediments to exhilaration. This leads to a collective habitus of forced emotional accounting fraud, as no one wants to be in the red in the balance of high and low. When connoisseurs of the scene stated after the Enron scandal that it was merely the tip of an iceberg of monstrous proportions, this may have been true in the realm of dollar transactions; but one should not overlook how far the dollar is itself based on an emotional economy where the entire motivation system is pervaded by the concealment of reasons for depression and the sugar-coated falsification of assets.
If one brings together these three primary characteristics, one reaches the following assessment: in its psychopolitical design, the United States of America is the country of actually existing escapism.3 The home of every kind of escapee, it primarily harbours people who, faced with the hopelessness of their previous home situation, migrated to a wide space of second chances. An asylum for countless desperate and shipwrecked individuals, it took up many of the refugees who managed to save themselves from the floods of world history. An immigration country for unbound surplus drives, it offers a field of action most of all to those who believe in the precedence of initiative over inhibitions. As the Shining City on the Hill, it shows an endless crowd of emissaries from the gloomy yonder a plain wide enough to provide all enthusiasms with the right to settle and promulgate at a safe distance from one another. If one had to articulate the radiance and the paradox of the United States in a single sentence, it would be this: it allowed the forces of ‘history’ to withdraw from ‘history’. A further sentence then explains the current temptation: the forces that have escaped ‘history’ are now in the process of rediscovering ‘history’ for themselves.
America's globally radiating charm thus comes from the psychopolitical constitution of its ‘society’. From the eighteenth century to the present day, the inhabitants of the ‘States’ have succeeded in producing a non-Leibnizian version of optimism that could be repeatedly updated. Following this model, the given world can be considered the best, provided it looks sufficiently perfect from Ellis Island to be perfected infinitely in additional ways. This positioning on thoroughly positive ground is often taken for naïveté; in truth, it is a reformulation of the meaning of being from the perspective of participating in its improvement.4 This does not imply scaling optimism down to meliorism, as some America-friendly Europeans believe, but rather ramping optimism up to overoptimism. This permits the historically unprecedented combination of harsh realism and boundless irreverence towards the real – prefigured, if anywhere, from a distance in the staid religiosity of the ancient Romans, who managed to reconcile sentimental reverence towards origin with mechanical cruelty in present-day matters. The imperial Romans too were able to bow their heads before a higher power before returning seamlessly to the everyday business of repression. That is why Benedict of Nursia found the most effective instruction for the New Human Being of a post-Roman Europe when he replaced the ‘worship and kill’ of Romanism with the ‘pray and work’ of Christian monastic civility.
One understands, then, why the philosophical and psychopolitical dictates of the American way of life produce the most perfect manifestation of a post-historical mode of existence. While the Europeans (like the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians and some others along with them) only entered the world of post-historical conditions step by step over the last fifty years as new arrivals, the Americans can be considered veterans of post-history owing to their special path. For them, the news of the end of ‘history’ lost its novelty long ago. For them, the liberation from old scripts took place as soon as their country was founded. The American ‘Revolution’ took place at the same time as the Declaration of Independence, which abandoned not so much the English motherland as the entire system of Old European measurements, weights and prejudices about the burden of the world. The term ‘revolution’, when meant politically and connected to the future, thus smacks of pointless excitement to Americans – as if one expected them to wage the war they won against the British Crown two hundred years ago all over again.
The only liberation movement that still has meaning for Americans is that in which one attempts to break free from the personal relics of historical life, one's origins in one's own family: every individual can repeat the secession from history in private by liberating the inner child from the dominance of the parental world. The immeasurable expanse of the American therapy landscapes testifies to the resolute rejection by the country's population of all that was once oppressive external reality. One should not forget that the ultimate aim of the liberation of the inner American child is the victor created before all time – the victor who enters the stage today with the features of a victim. Needless to say, the countless child-selves of the therapeutic archipelago known as the USA still embody the strongest bastion of post-history. Just as the immigrants could only become true Americans at the cost of leaving behind the identities they had brought with them,5 their descendants are now also liquidating the mental rubble that was brought to the New World from the inner worlds of yesterday. American therapy consists in converting historical fracture into post-historical self-reliance.
Naturally the concept of work also lost its Old European meaning in the USA: it refers not simply to the participation in transforming material into a higher-value product through invested energy – until, at the vanishing point of value creation, workers emancipate themselves from work as such. American work is a performance whose meaning is to show how the subject can proceed from the abundance of opportunities to the superabundance of success. Where else would it be conceivable for people to move to the South and slave away even more than in their previous homes? And where else could people in an officially egalitarian culture look upon the increasingly gaping chasm between rich and poor with such equanimity? The relaxed shamelessness of the American oligarchy proves how far the coronas that surround every success in that country are perceived by the great majority of Americans as emanations of their own faith. In the meritocratic climate, even the exaggeratedly remunerated achievements of others serve to prove the validity of the shared dream. Hence the absence, so enviable for Europeans, of ressentiments towards those who have made it.
In the light of all this, one can understand why the figures are always deceptive when dealing with the United States of America. According to its deep economy, the land needs no balances. It lives in a world above numbers, for it never moves from a given value to a higher one, as in trivial growth, but rather from perfection to over-perfection. It is only when viewed superficially that the United States, like every nation in the capitalist system, depends on constant economic and demographic growth. It is not the economic figures that prove its greatness; on the contrary, its greatness radiates the figures.
The thorn in the side of the great escapist nation, however, is the fact that the USA has no longer had what today's patriots call ‘energy independence’ since the end of the Second World War. Since the encounter between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy near the Suez Canal (a few days before the Yalta Conference in February 1945), the strategic alliance between the earth's two great poles of escapism has become one of the constants of recent world politics. From that moment on, the narcissistic escapism of the USA was firmly tied to the narcotic escapism of the Arab rentier states. Because of its strong dependence on petroleum imports from the regions around the Persian Gulf, the American exception thus remains at the mercy of external circumstances in humiliating fashion – the Carter Doctrine, which stated that the USA would take all steps to maintain control over the Gulf's resources, puts this entanglement in a nutshell. It is not surprising, then, that the ugliness of the historical world trickled into the interior of the American sphere of idealization through this realistic bond.6
In the light of current events, it is apparent how, at the pinnacle of the unfolding of its power, the most thoroughly post-historically constituted country in the world is seized by the temptation to intervene in ‘history’ once again – this time not only in the role of the referee, however, who steps out of his reserve for short moments to settle the undignified quarrels between historical powers. The present American incursion into world events shows the hallmarks of a comprehensive restoration: it implies the transformation of the USA back into a historical power, which is inconceivable without the reinterpretation of the world as a scene where historical events are still, or once more, taking place. ‘History’, however – as explained above – is the successful phase of the unilateral style of action.
The turbulences surrounding the Iraq War, which was intensely desired by the Bush Administration, prepared long in advance and conducted with exemplary one-sidedness, had a mental side effect that could be felt worldwide, and which by far overshadowed the immediate consequences of the fighting: suddenly the USA was perceptible as a foreign body in the moral ecosystem of the post-historical world commune, as its government was displaying, more clearly than ever before, the will to play the part of the single remaining historical power – not only this time, but also in future. To explain what job the Americans were doing in Iraq, George W. Bush had to draw, as usual, on the Old Testament, for example Isaiah 61: ‘He has sent me […] to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.’ He was even more emphatic, however, in his invocation of ‘history’, which alone can give meaning to the current drama: ‘This call of history has come to the right country.’7 ‘We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the civilized world. Part of that history was written by others; the rest will be written by us.’8 In this case, one must ascribe analytical qualities to buzzwords. Bush's America re-historicizes itself, unmistakably stepping out of its post-historical state by claiming for itself, before the whole world, the insignias of the history to be made. Five signs of sovereignty are necessary for this: the primacy of strength, nobility of motives, the privilege of one-sidedness, self-amnesia for past and future violence, and control over the words (and images) that follow the deeds. For this one-sidedly proclaimed re-historicization, America risks alienating its allies in Europe and the rest of the world, but more still breaking with its own best traditions. Moreover, it permits itself the provocation of demonstratively ignoring the choir of reasonable hinderers, including its closest friends on this side of the Atlantic – its worked-up ideologues went so far as to slur this group as a European band of cowards and adolescents, eaters of soft cheese and dubious innards. In their patriotic rage, some Americans even accused the French of being nothing but a horde of unwashed woman-sniffers. If words meant war, then numerous patriotic commentators in the USA would long have declared it upon the sceptics in the rest of the world.
The politics of the United States steps up to the podium like a culture of perpetrators from Europe's most virulent historical period, ready to embark, celebrating its own noble motives in thymotic euphoria, insisting on its national capacities, sure of victory even before the action has begun, remorseless and self-absorbed after the completed operation, always revising its own records of success, monotonously and summarily asserting the rightfulness of its strikes, and willing to bury American casualties with the usual ceremonial trappings, while leaving the very numerous casualties on the other side to their own people with a formal expression of regret at a subaltern level. As if in some scene from the early Modern Age, the USA sends in its fleets to drive world-taking forward as a naval power; like a modern colonial power, it uses aerial and ethereal weapons to win out in asymmetrical warfare against hopelessly inferior opponents; like a neo-apostolic bringer power, it makes use of the right to invade that follows from the knowledge that they must bring God's gift to mankind – in the present case it is termed ‘democracy’ – to unwilling recipients, by force if necessary. Let us note that the word damakrata has recently come into modern Arabic usage, approximately meaning ‘Western assault on a country for the purpose of turning it into a market economy’.9
The historico-philosophically decisive motive of the Iraq War lay in the explicit re-establishment of unilateralism as a style of practice; only now, in the light of action theory, is it becoming clear how much this was the central characteristic of the world-historical period. From a Spinozist point of view, the only justification for European world-taking would have been the fact that the powers for it were available; as every ability has a specific sense of necessity attached to it, the imperial Europeans in their time were simply proceeding along the lines of force that were given through their ability. The Anglo-American intervention in Iraq can be read in analogous fashion: it proved spirit and strength by presenting itself as a simple imperial ‘I can’ on the geopolitical stage. Those involved did what they did – in Tony Blair's words – ‘because we could’.
Naturally all observers, even those favourably disposed towards the USA, are aware that American militarism has been condemned for some time to stand out in the post-historical world as a parasite of yesterday. By its nature and its origin, the American military is a relic of the ‘history’ in which America allowed itself to become involved like an armed moderator of sorts after 1916, without first questioning its cheerful isolation. From their own planet, the Americans placed a powerful tangent onto the historical world, where unliberated souls rolled in the dust of their wars. Subsequently, however, American armies had grown to a monstrous strength during their deployments in Europe and the Pacific; they became almost uncontrollably inflated during the arms race with the Soviet Union, which spanned almost half a century and made enormous resources available for so-called ‘defence’. Finally, they stagnated at an excessive level when ‘history’ began to show signs of ending in a nuclear stalemate.
The significance of the armament era for the post-historical learning cycle reveals itself retrospectively in the fact that here, the mutual inhibition of the highest-ranking actors had become the primary evidence of world politics. Once the generals too realized that attack had lost its priority in the history of armed violence, the historical institution of war itself seemed ripe for post-historicization. As one can discern now, however, the age of stalemate left behind an ambiguous legacy whose dark side manifests itself today in the view of the American leadership that the experience of inhibition purely concerned the military domain, and could be laid aside after the disappearance of the East–West confrontation. With a blindness reminiscent of classical heroes, American strategists and their consultants overlook, thanks to their hereditary inability to recognize elementary facts, that reciprocal inhibition is the modus operandi of the postmodern world context as such, for this inevitably rests on compaction, feedback and – to fall back on this tired word after all – interconnection.
Since then, an unparalleled temptation has been afoot in the disunited West: the temptation to write new scripts for the disinhibition of the ‘only world power’. Does this mean that the hour of the intellectuals will strike again? Will we once more witness thinkers hurrying to stand by those willing to attack in the transition from illusion to practice? Must we brace ourselves for consultant analysts and publicists like Brzezinski, Kagan, Kaplan, Luttwak, Wolfowitz, Podhoretz, Fukuyama, Rice and many others delivering their onslaught on the corridors of power even more successfully than in previously known episodes of great politics? Are not the speechwriters of imperialism jostling one another everywhere to occupy key positions on the new semantic market?
The re-ideologization of the public space is indeed in full swing, with golden times ahead for self-appointed violence experts and for the realists who propagate a new harshness, or a return to the rules of old realpolitik. For the moment, admittedly, it seems that it is less the turn of the academic advisers than of the Islamist activists – and their Western exegetes, who wish to make themselves useful as dream-interpreters of the coming violence.10 The significance of the Islamists for the re-historicization of the USA cannot be overestimated. They seem to be the men of the moment, addressing the ‘call of history’ to keen presidential ears – ears that are unexpectedly open to enemy advice. It is the criminal neo-unilaterals from the Middle East who, more clearly than all domestic consultants, call out the keywords to the actors in the Western centres of power for the disinhibition of their unilateral strikes.
We can now see how the foreign policy of the USA has unfolded the paradox of the American exception step by step. This paradox can be articulated in several synonymous turns of phrase: to save the American Dream, its defining actors are hurrying to wake up from it; to retain the privilege of having escaped from history, the political dramaturges are leading their country firmly back into history; to secure their splendid lightness of being, the leadership teams of the United States are steering towards severe overloads; to preserve their country's sources of optimism, its intellectual climate controllers are plunging it into the blackest realism.
The final paradox is shown most clearly in the astute violence handbooks of the war correspondent and polemologist Robert D. Kaplan: Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2002) and The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2001), two books whose sole purpose is to get the country beneath the stars and stripes in shape for a Hobbesian world that is supposedly not subject to the law of civilized compaction, but rather at the mercy of a generalized hewing and stabbing in almost stateless spaces. Kaplan permits no doubt as to the only possible choice for the role of the planetary Leviathan in this scenario.
The translatio historiae into the USA is currently being undertaken with all the pomp and circumstance that befits an investiture. The ritual is opened with the transfer of the territorial zero point from which all mandates for neo-historical action will henceforth emanate: since the autumn of 2001 there has been an American Holy Sepulchre, ‘Ground Zero’, that gift of militant Islamism to the newly self-historicizing power, a gift that, moreover, gives new proof of the Adamitic power of all things American to imprint self-exclaiming names on the real. It continues with the transfer of innocence, the central figure of postmodern and victimological morality, without which, even in the scripts of neo-history, no lashing out is any longer conceivable; in future, the attack must take place in the victim's name. The ceremony is rounded off by the transfer of authorization to declare a state of emergency – not only with the voice of the political sovereign, who calls their opponent their enemy for the duration of the conflict, but also with that of the ontological sovereign, who establishes the fact of adversity in the world and declares eternal war upon it.
This would seem to initiate a complete remake of ‘history’. The translatio actionis into the USA – starting with the demission of Europe before a fait accompli after 1945 – is joined by the translatio passionis that has constituted a new colour on the American flag since ‘9/11’. Since the potential super-perpetrator also proved able to pass itself off as the super-victim, there are no longer any obstacles to the country's mobilization for the new ‘making of world history’ – except for its own democratic-escapist tradition.
What now follows can, to the extent that it has so far become discernible, be summarized under the heading ‘The Revenge of Post-History’. For, far from allowing themselves to be infected with the élan of the self-proclaimed historical power, a significant part of the remaining democratically committed world seems to have conspired to make life difficult for the last radiant perpetrator on earth. While the American army in Iraq swept Saddam Hussein's demoralized troops aside within a few days, marginally supported by Britons, Poles, Italians and other contenders for tips granted to waiters at the table of newly served ‘history’, the vast remainder of the unwarlike lined up all over the world with new self-confidence, as if they had only become fully aware of their own values when faced with this spectacle. The values are, of course, the same as those purveyed by the post-historical America of yesterday, values approached from all sides since 1945 on both straight and crooked paths. These critics of the Iraq War do not speak out against the USA's leaders with the voice of ‘anti-Americanism’ – a word that some agitators like to view as a secondary term for ‘anti-Semitism’ in order to reinforce the unseemliness of the objection all the more. They say what they see fit to say not out of immature contrariness but in unison with post-historical logic, which views the unilateral behaviour of the world power as a quotation from the golden days of Europeid inconsideration. What is expressed in the many-voiced reservations about the foreign-policy habitus of the USA is no more or less than a clarified anti-unilateralism. In a field of highly fed-back political practice, this has long constituted a natural mode of co-operative culture – which also includes presenting the necessary distinctions discreetly and indulgently as ‘criticism among friends’. It is also clear why Israel, America's co-exceptional ally and co-defier of international opinion, is made to feel its share of the clarified anti-unilateral spirit. Those interested are free to misinterpret this as ‘new anti-Semitism’ – which, to complicate matters, does actually exist, although the term ‘anti-Semitism’, which referred to political racism and thus to a historically overcome intra-European matter, has long ceased to be appropriate in the old and new frictions between Israel and its Arab and Muslim haters.11
But why do a great many Americans, even those who cannot be suspected of Bushism, have so much difficulty rediscovering the authentic voice of America in the voices of the war-sceptical others from the Seine to the Ganges? Should the veterans of post-historical life not get on superbly with the recruits from other countries? Would it not be the most natural reaction for all self-aware Americans to welcome all latecomers who disavow the Old European vice of making history? How is it that, at the political level, the most mature culture of post-historicity withdraws with such aversion and contempt from the primary signs of the post-historical world – the laws of reciprocity, the return of deeds to their doer and the systemic feedback of operations? This contempt is expressed most brazenly in the USA's dealings with the United Nations, which it has meanwhile come to view merely as a machine for producing simultaneously translated paralysis and a breeding ground of mediocre diplomatic bohemianism. Yet even if these judgements were correct, one would still have to ask: why do those Americans on political duty show such a spectacular disinterest in becoming a member of a club that would immediately admit people like them?
The moral answer to these questions is that the USA identifies itself with its role as the key power in the maintenance of political order out of a sense of responsibility: this great country must therefore cultivate its benign unilateralism so that it can neutralize malign or incorrigible countries (which are given the ‘rogue’ label). A pragmatic answer, however, would state that the USA is condemned to an aggressive geopolitical calculation of interests in order to occupy as many key positions on the geopolitical chessboard as possible before new global players such as China and Europe gain strength – hence the checkmating of Europe through the integration of Turkey into the EU, which Washington desires. The noopolitical answer, which was recently suggested by the cyberwar experts Arquilla and Ronfeldt, is that the USA is rallying its ideational and communicative resources in the face of the unstoppable information revolution in order to assert its leadership in the noosphere of the twenty-first century to the fullest extent.12 The mythodynamic answer, finally, can be recognized in the general motifs of the American Dream: anyone who defines themselves as its active carrier is unwilling to become involved in situations where everyone who wants to do something does not retain enough leeway to do what they envisage; they are, and will remain, unwilling to relinquish the seal of chosenness inextinguishably inscribed on the bodies and souls of those receptive to it; they are, and will remain, unwilling to give precedence to the objective reasons for being depressed over the special right to exhilaration.
The American secession from history thus came at a price that is gradually becoming estimable: in order to exit from history into post-history over two hundred years ago, the secessionists had to export and retain an Old European subject formation that now makes them immune to learning for generalized post-historicity. The combination of a post-historical exceptional situation and a strong perpetrator position was waiting to disintegrate explosively sooner or later – at the latest when the motivation surpluses of American potential could no longer be acted out in national projects (and in the hero cult of Hollywood scripts).13 From that point on, it was in the air that actual ‘history’ would be demanded back by perpetrators ready to act – all the more so because the American psyche proved completely unable to contain the spirit of revenge after the attack of 9/11. Certainly numerous citizens of the United States had begun to suspect, since the Vietnam debacle at the latest, how much their dream was in jeopardy, as much through the internal course of the American experiment as through the external course of the world; but only a few still want to continue along the path that led the country into a phase of self-doubt and reconsideration after the lost and unjust war in East Asia.
The first re-historicization of America after 1968 was characterized by disappointment, narcissistic depression and self-reproach after the war crimes carried out in East Asia on Vietnamese soil; at that time, the task was to deal with the evidence that the country had lost its privileged status of being good. The first return to history (which was simultaneously a return to ugliness) was assisted by models of excessive cultural criticism from Germany and France, and led to a cult of ethnic and victimist particularity presented as ‘history from below’. ‘Critical theory’ played an outstanding part in this as a ready-made of social criticism: it provided a demonstration of how easily criticism can be turned into kitsch; for just as kitsch functions in the art system as a short cut to grand emotions, critical kitsch acts as a short cut to outrage. It transforms the elevation of noble sentiment over ignoble facts into a mass-produced item. One need hardly explain why there had to be a market for this in the USA.
This market has now become saturated to such a degree that neither a further twist of the masochism spiral nor an additional radicalization of the already excessive suspicion towards the ‘system’ could offer any moral gains.14 The second re-historicization, by contrast, was staged very much in the style of a manic restoration from the time of George H. W. Bush onwards. It seemed self-evident that it would deal once more with ‘history’ from above – or rather, from the very top. Where current ‘history’ is meant to flow directly from the highest sources, it must proceed as the present action of God through a chosen nation whose leaders, not unlike Protestant Jesuits, have found the most effective strategy for self-disinhibition. This return into history also installed a variety of kitsch, this time as a ready-made of political theology.
In 1993, Edward N. Luttwak published a book with the programmatic title The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third-World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy – a book that was welcomed by a sedate patriotic-masochistic press as shock therapy at the right time for their relegation-threatened nation. Luttwak had already made a name for himself as one of the leading exponents of contemporary strategic studies; since then he has also been considered an intelligent exegete of his country's latent political theology, in that he reformulated America's elitist imperative with the help of a secular sociology of competition. As an observer of global trends, Luttwak had naturally understood that the exceptional situation of America was unsustainable in the long term; as a declared exceptionalist, however, he showed clearly that for him, as for the great majority of his compatriots, accepting this fact without resistance was out of the question. His intervention combines these two aspects to arrive at a ‘visionary’ perspective. In the first phase, Luttwak brings up the warning signs of American ‘decadence’: the economies of Japan and Europe have largely caught up on the American post-war lead; the publicly funded school system has been stagnating for years; the middle classes have been economically and culturally depleted since the Reagan era; capitalism is lacking the money after which it is named; drug dealers do their business in broad daylight, even near the government district of Washington – not forgetting that for some time, American prostitutes working in Japan have no longer been able to demand a ‘US girl bonus’, for when a country's star falls, the price of its people's flesh on the international market does the same.
For Luttwak, these are no less than indications of the USA's free fall into insignificance. What others would consider a return of America to the relative normality of a still enormously rich, yet also problem-ridden civilization is interpreted by the author as the descent of his country into near-nothingness; for his readers, the term ‘third-world country’ sounds sufficiently apocalyptic to make it clear what the USA must never become. For the chosen, mediocrity is forbidden. Consequently, in a second step, the author recommends a programme of mobilization for the imminent geo-economic world war, from which his country is meant to emerge once again as number one – before later, at the pinnacle of its success, initiating a disarmament on its own terms.
Luttwak's deeply symptomatic book shows that the American ideologues want to save their country's dream rather than interpret it, but cannot save it without turning it on its head. Here the performative constitution of the American project, the eternally vital battle for the soul of the country, changes into a dangerous auto-hypnotic programming towards neo-nationalist and ultra-narcissistic aims. On the American Raft of the Medusa, the existence of the depression group is for the most part simply denied. According to the puritanical code there are no losers in this country, only people who wallow in self-pity. Luttwak does, at least, manage a few references to the USA's explosively growing drug problem in his review of the ‘endangered American Dream’ – in the capital alone, 25,000 people are reportedly earning a living as professional or amateur drug dealers. Their clients are certainly not the children of the Woodstock generation, however, which was hungry for illuminating excursions to the archetypal realm; they are armies of frustrated individuals who have committed themselves to chemical salvation from American reality.
The psychopolitical accounting fraud that carries the system as a whole is primarily meant to render invisible the gigantic number of losers who had to stay behind in the gambling hall of the pursuit of happiness. Nonetheless, the data is in such plain sight that even admirers of the American model find it difficult to ignore. The number of hopelessly impoverished people in the USA is greater than the population of Iraq, there are more chronic consumers of psychopharmacological drugs than in any other country in the world, there is a higher rate of extreme obesity than anywhere else,15 there are more politically unrepresented groups and non-voters than in any other democratic state, there are ten times as many prisoners per capita as in Europe and six to eight times more than in most other countries in the world. And yet all these problem collectives remain true to the American way of life by staying above water through an elaborated system of depression concealment and inner accounting fraud. They avert their eyes from the abyss that yawns beneath every hapless fortune-seeker in the country. One hears a melody drifting upwards from it, a well-known melody whose words one can only make out when listening closely. Once understood, they make the listener shudder: ‘If I can't make it there, I won't make it anywhere.’
Nonetheless, it would mean doing an injustice to the American exception if one did not take into account the role of the USA in world politics after 1918. In the present context, it has become evident that the term ‘world politics’ does not simply refer to a dimension of what we call international relations; it stands for the totality of political regulation tasks involved in the management of the great hothouse. Thus world politics is nothing other than the administration of the crystal palace – policing measures, security services and disposal methods included. If the United States is so often termed a form of world police on account of its foreign policy function, this is for the simple reason that the duty of the modern hegemon has undeniably fallen to US Americans: they have accepted the role of guaranteeing the political and military conditions for the running of the great comfort system. The moral premises of this commitment could be viewed as a self-transcending egotism: it is based on the assumption (confirmed on more than a few occasions) that what is good for the USA also holds advantages for both its Atlantic and its non-Atlantic partners. This is the objective reason for the reliable constant of Western European Americanophilia after 1945. It is, after all, a proven fact that the current world system – which, as we have seen, is by no means a sphere without an outside – is a patchwork of varyingly free market economies on the basis of nation-states whose outer borders are marked almost everywhere by the presence of American troops.
If one acknowledges these conditions, the liberal notion of the primacy of the economy appears in a new light: one must indeed assume the priority of economic facts within the capitalist world interior – but these facts have always had a world-political, or more precisely a geopolitical character, because the great hothouse cannot be run successfully without the securing of resources and management of its shell. In the militaristic style of US foreign policy (especially the increasing militarization of energy policy), then, we should see the regulatory component of Western consumption structures as a whole. From this perspective, the division in the Atlantic community provoked by Bushism takes on great civilization-political significance, for it must now be seen whether Europeans are capable of emancipating themselves from the status of a silent partner in the American politics of violence, without themselves re-militarizing their relations with the suppliers of energy and natural resources.