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| Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Munich |
Martin Heidegger was the philosopher who elaborated the most enduring form of anti-Americanism in its many versions: the United States as the emblem of "catastrophic" modernity, dominated by technology, consumerism, uniformity, and an absence of historical sense (cf. James W. Ceaser, A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism, "The Public Interest," Summer 2003, pp. 3–18). These ideas, set forth by the German philosopher in the 1930s, were taken up by Nazism and, after the war, by the European left, becoming a pillar of contemporary anti-American thought.
There has always been a far-right anti-Americanism — that of those who cannot forgive the United States for having brought about the defeat of the Axis powers by entering the Second World War. This anti-Americanism has today regained vigor in certain forms of populist neo-nationalism, which re-propose fascism and national socialism as positive political models.
There has also been a left-wing anti-Americanism, which cannot forgive the United States for having been the anti-communist bulwark during the Cold War years, preventing the victory of international communism. This anti-Americanism found expression in the No-Global movement and the Pro-Palestinian movement.
Today, however, a new anti-Americanism of a Catholic-conservative character has emerged — one that rejects the United States because, owing to its Puritan and liberal-Enlightenment roots, it supposedly represents a model of thought antithetical to that of the Catholic tradition. This anti-Americanism is often accompanied by sympathy toward regimes such as Putin's Russia or even the Iran of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, regarded as a bulwark against the State of Israel — seen as the quintessential expression of the negative essence of the West.
And yet the superficiality of this narrative should be obvious. The Protestant Revolution did not originate in America but in Europe, where it reached its most radical expressions with the Anabaptists and the Levellers of the English Revolution. In America, Puritans, Mennonites, and Quakers moderated — rather than intensified — the radical positions they had adopted in Europe. The Evangelical church today constitutes one of the largest reservoirs of conservative votes for the Republican Party.
The American Revolution, which preceded the French, has little or nothing to do with that of 1789. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 affirms the existence of a natural law that precedes the governance of society, while the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 grounds rights in the pure self-determination of the will.
The French Revolution was essentially an ideological revolution, a child of the Enlightenment; the American Revolution was above all a War of Independence. The differences between them were first illustrated in 1800 by Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832), secretary and friend of Prince Clemens von Metternich and one of the principal architects of the Restoration after the fall of Napoleon (The American and French Revolutions Compared, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1955).
One of the most lucid political science scholars of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), explained that the American Revolution was not a politically gnostic event, like the French Revolution, because "it was not an ideological movement in the sense of the subsequent European revolutions. It did not intend to create a new order of being, but to restore the rights of Englishmen that were believed to have been violated" (The New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1987 reprint, p. 159).
It is Europe that has corrupted America, not the other way around. The cultural Marxism that infests American universities since 1968 was not born in America but in Germany, from where Lenin transplanted it to Russia, and Bolshevik Russia, after the Revolution of 1917, spread it throughout the world.
The Revolution of '68 started from Berkeley, but its theorist, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1959), was born and died in Germany. Woke ideology has European roots, through Marx, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and French post-structuralism.
The "Americanism" condemned by Leo XIII in the encyclical Testem benevolentiae of January 22, 1899, was more a spirituality of action than a doctrine — one that modernism went on to develop in a far broader and more articulate way, even on the theological plane. The current crisis of the Church is the child of European modernism, certainly not of Americanism. One of Cardinal Ottaviani's closest collaborators was the American anti-modernist theologian John Clifford Fenton (1906–1969), and one of the cardinals closest to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was the American Cardinal John Joseph Wright (1909–1979).
The encyclical Testem benevolentiae must also be read alongside another important encyclical of Leo XIII, Longinqua Oceani of January 6, 1895, in which the Pope acknowledged the positive aspects of the American experience: the rapid growth of Catholicism in the United States; the de facto religious freedom that allowed the Church to develop without persecution; the initiative and dynamism of American society. Leo XIII did not condemn America, nor did he consider it anti-Christian by nature. He did, however, affirm that the separation of Church and State as conceived in the USA should be regarded as a contingent fact, not as a universal normative ideal.
On the political level, furthermore, the United States of Clinton and Obama are certainly not those of Reagan and Trump. Speaking of a single America makes little sense. In the United States, as in Europe, two cultural currents confront one another: that which appeals to Marxist-Enlightenment thought, and that which — today prevailing — claims the Christian roots of society.
In his speech in Munich, Secretary of State Rubio expressed himself in these terms: "For us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be children of Europe. (…) Our story began with an Italian explorer who ventured into the great unknown to discover a new world, brought Christianity to the Americas, and became the legend that has defined the imagination of our pioneering nation. (…) It was here, in Europe, that the ideas were born that planted the seeds of freedom and changed the world. (…) And it is this place where the vaults of the Sistine Chapel and the soaring spires of the great cathedrals bear witness not only to the greatness of our past but to the God who inspired such wonders."
Among the American cathedrals inspired by European ones is Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York. The choice to build it in "pure Gothic style," according to Benedict XVI, was not accidental. Archbishop John Hughes (1797–1864) "wanted this cathedral to remind the young Church in America of the great spiritual tradition of which it was heir" (Benedict XVI, Homily at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, April 19, 2008).
At the root of anti-Americanism lies, above all, a problem of theology of history. Pope Leo XIV, the American Pope, recalled in his address to diplomats on January 9 the need to reread Saint Augustine's City of God. But if instead of using Augustine's categories we were to use those of Carl Schmitt, we would have to say that Catholic anti-Americanism springs from an inability to identify the enemy. And we might add that those who cannot identify the enemy are those who do not recognize and love their friends — because confusion does not arise from ignorance but from disordered love. Saint Augustine explains this with one of his lapidary phrases: "Disordered is every soul that loves what it ought not to love" (De Civitate Dei, XV, 22).
