Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age

 by Nathan Alexander  

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In his recent book, Tomislav Sunic aims to use popular dissatisfaction with contemporary excesses on issues of race as an excuse for attacking the idea of liberal democracy itself.  A review of Homo Americanus.

Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age
by Tomislav Sunic
published by BookSurge Publishing (March 8, 2007)
Ppbk., 252 pgs.
ISBN-10: 1419659847
ISBN-13: 978-1419659843

Is there a role for race in modern politics? The far Left thinks so and has largely abandoned its economic agenda in order to selectively promote certain ethnic groups as “oppressed” and worthy of financial compensation. If Tomislav Sunic’s Homo Americanus is representative of the European far Right, both Left and Right appear to have something in common. Homo Americanus is identified on the back cover as an “attempt to explain how postmodern liberal elites justify their system and their intellectual repression against heretics.” In fact, this is of minor concern to Sunic. Homo Americanus is an all-out attack on liberal institutions and the modern political process. Drawing upon right-wing German thinkers from the 1930s and left-wing thinkers from the 1950s and 1960s, it seeks to discredit modern democratic politics. From the ruins, it seeks to carve a space for the reassertion of long discredited ideas of race and hierarchy.

Homo Americanus is written in the form of a series of short essays and generally avoids — annoyingly — making its arguments explicit. Instead it presents the ideas of others (generally intellectuals associated with the European Right, unknown to most Americans) and then liberally provides a context in which one is supposed to read their ideas. The result is a sort of pastiche which brings together claims from a great number of disciplines. All are mobilized in support of the author’s dislike of “Homo Americanus,” or more generally speaking, contemporary American society.

The book’s main assertion is that early American Puritanism (derived from English Calvinism) created a society which, in its dislike of the images associated with Catholicism, became increasingly devoid of “aesthetic or symbolic sensibilities.” The result was the creation of a modern work force which is docile, conformist and atomized — enabling the great economic productivity which distinguishes America today.  While modern America is no longer Puritan, Puritanism continues to influence American political discourse, and American politics are infused with a religious sensibility which causes their initiatives to become “crusades” and their opponents to become “heretics.” It is this “political theology” which makes Americans blind to their own persecutory activities, as manifest most recently in the phenomenon of “political correctness” and the demonization of Islam.

Sunic uses his claim about the “Puritan” nature of American politics to rewrite much of 20th century American history. America’s “crusade” against Nazi Germany was brought about not by Nazi aggression, but by American provocations of the Nazis. When America “invaded” France in 1944 the result was a “flood . . . of domestic reprisals and barbaric retributions . . .with the tacit approval of American . . . military authorities in Germany.”  America justified itself by preventing the Reich and anything associated with Germany from being seriously discussed. An “early political correctness” took root after the war, silencing any attempt to account for Germany’s war losses. American academics and Hollywood films "criticize National Socialism for its real or alleged terror," writes Sunic. "But the American way of conducting World War II — under the guise of democracy and world peace — was just as violent if not worse.” (p. 128) In a strange paragraph, Sunic then goes on to write that:

The official American hesitancy to establish the precise number of German war losses is understandable, as this is a topic that American court historians do not find compatible with the spirit of Americanism. It is only the fascist criminology of World War II, along with the rhetorical projection of the evil side of the Holocaust that modern historiographers like to repeat, with Jewish American historians and commentators at the helm of this narrative. Other victimhoods and other victimologies, notably those who suffered under communism, are rarely mentioned.
— p. 132.

Sunic finishes his chapter by discussing the lack of freedom in West Germany (presumably because of difficulties certain writers have found in discussing the second world war, and particularly, the Holocaust) and insists that the Bundesrepublic, under American “domination,” has not been sovereign since 1949.  He then blames the left-wing political “think tank,” known to posterity as the “Frankfurt School,” for creating an ideological image of any state which remains in effect to this day.  Its members, mostly Jewish (as Sunic tirelessly points out), insisted that the state (and any form of collective identity) was pathological. Those who support it (or other forms of collective identity), Sunic argues, were held to not only be Nazis, but to be thought mentally unsound. The same idea has taken root in the United States, and now the same stigmata is applied to those who oppose political correctness.

There is one more twist to Sunic’s argument. Americans only think that their nation was “anti-communist.” In fact Americans “have only given egalitarian principles a different name and veneer from Soviet Russia.” To Sunic, there is no “metaphysical” difference between America and the USSR, which is why American elites “tacitly approved” of the communist genocides. “If the USSR had not failed economically, no one would care about the millions who died in the gulags. If it wasn’t for America’s wealth, no one would support it [today].” Sunic repeatedly criticizes “American elites” because, while endlessly condemning fascism, they say little about the massacres inflicted upon East Europeans and Russians by the communists.

Most Americans (and publishers) will pay little attention to Sunic’s book, not because of a conspiracy (as he would like the reader to believe), or even because of his beliefs (however outrageous), but because his claims are not clearly presented as arguments. On the back of the book, Sunic claims his purpose is to explain how “postmodern elites” justify their system and their intellectual “repression against heretics.” In fact, his purpose is to use popular dissatisfaction with contemporary excesses on issues of race as an excuse for attacking the idea of liberal democracy.

Sunic doesn’t believe in liberal politics and pronounces its end by simply declaring that American democracy is not a political system, but is taken up by a “political theology.” Hence he declares America must treat its opponents as “heretics” instead of opponents of democracy. This lets him account for the hysteria of political correctness as a sort of modern witch hunt. However, this is only an hors d’oeuvre, so to speak, for America’s real excesses. The real witch hunt, Sunic believes, is to be found in America’s war against Nazi Germany and its attempt to mold a post-war ideology around its defeat. All America’s actions can be reduced (and can be nothing other), in Sunic’s view, to some form of religious crusade.

Having dispensed with politics, Sunic is then free to mix and match radically different political systems, such as those of the USSR and the United States. If politics doesn’t define a society, then what should? Sunic declares it is the belief in the principle of equality, and with a sentence dismisses the differences not merely between the US and the USSR, but between the modern world and the medieval.

Sunic spends an inordinate amount of time denouncing Jews — but indirectly. Since he insists America is a Puritan theocracy, and since he believes Protestantism and Judaism are both “monotheisms,” he can then reduce the latter to the former (or vice versa), and claim he is thereby not singling out Jews for opprobrium. As he puts it, the “Jewish spirit and Puritanism has introduced into the American mindset an alien anthropology . . . which is directly responsible for the spread of an egalitarian mass society . . ..” Presumably Sunic would claim to be against both religions equally.

The biggest problem with Homo Americanus is that it shows little knowledge of (or interest in) America, let alone Americans. Sunic writes (presumably without irony) that “American elites” envy East Europeans for their racial purity. It is inconceivable to him that Americans of all races and ethnicities might enjoy one another’s company, or at least see that prospect as something to be worked towards. His belief that America is somehow a “postmodern country” comes from French “postmodern” thinkers, who had little interest in this country other than to denounce it for being “capitalist.”¹  In fact, to the degree Americans adopted “postmodern ideas”, it was to facilitate ideas on race — ideas at times specious and at times sensible. To Sunic the recent debates in America about race means that “whites” no longer have a say, and are subjected to communist-style censorship. Having overlooked or dismissed America’s liberal tradition, Sunic has mistaken debate (one which evidently has not gone the way he would like for it to go) for tyranny.

Sunic’s ideas are largely taken from German thinkers hostile to the Weimar democracy in the 1920s and 1930s. From the German Jurist associated with the Nazi movement, Carl Schmitt, he takes the idea of “political theology.” It is from Schmitt that Sunic takes the characterization of one’s political opponent as an “enemy” or “heretic.”²  His equation (and dismissal) of Judaism and Christianity is taken from the French thinker Alain de Benoist, who took the idea from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, whose brief affiliation with fascism has been well documented, in his later years developed the idea of “Seinsgeschichte,” which might loosely be understood to be the history of truth in the western world. Heidegger argued that since the pre-Socratic philosophers, the western intellectual tradition had suppressed the history of truth or “Being.” Both Schmitt and Heidegger developed radically hostile stances towards western civilization, seeing its overthrow as both inevitable and desirable. They are often identified with “Revolutionary Conservatism,” a tradition with which Sunic seems to associate himself.

As Sunic does not argue his points, his book is composed of assertions which may be taken for his beliefs. To the degree his book is of interest to Americans, it will be because it reveals the depths to which European cynicism has fallen — and its hostility towards modern liberalism. Since 1945, there has been no coherent philosophy on the political Right. Racial and theocratic ideas of nationhood were no longer acceptable after the fall of the Nazi Reich. Charles de Gaulle portrayed himself as being outside of politics. Konrad Adenhauer was able to build a coalition of “Christian Democrats” only by adopting most of the Social Democrats' ideas on political reform and by downplaying his Catholicism. Today in France, Jean Marie Le Pen, at best, can only serve as a radical protest for “ethnic Frenchmen” against their alleged abuse from the status quo. He offers nothing to the Right by way of rational ideology that would enable France to reconceptualize itself outside of liberal ideology.

Today, racial mythology remains outside of European political discourse — not because of some conspiracy, but because it makes no sense. Whatever the origins of the racial myth, its rationale has long past. Today global travel and the international job market are swiftly dismantling the last barriers of distance between peoples.

Sunic’s book reveals less his hostility to Jews or ethnic minorities, than the degree to which many Europeans, since the demise of the Soviet Union, would prefer myths to liberal democracy. This should hardly be surprising. In countries such as France and Germany, the liberal tradition had never been especially strong before the fall of communism. And here Sunic is quite right to point out that many former communists are now race mongers and politically correct Stalinists.

What is particularly unnerving about Homo Americanus is that in its hostility towards the hyper-moralism of elements of the American political Left, it is quick to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. Sunic attempts to position himself as standing at the edge of western civilization, which is about to collapse, he believes, into “race wars.” In fact, his idea that somehow society is about to be radically altered in one dramatic moment (witness the French and Russian Revolutions) could only be too European. Americans, on the other side of the Atlantic, are well aware of this, and relieved.

Homo Americanus is available on Amazon.com.

Endnotes

1. Philippe Roger’s fine book The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism tr. Sharon Bowman (Chicago, 2006) argues that the image of America among French left-wing elites was usually a foil to attack existing miseries in France itself.

2. It should be noted that Schmitt’s relation to fascism was hardly unproblematic and that his attempt to recast the idea of sovereignty in political terms of “the enemy” was related to the impasse that the Weimar Republic found itself in the 1920s. Torn between the far Left and Right, the government increasingly was unable to function.  See Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (Verso, 2002).

Book Reviews, Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo, Race & Ethnicity, Multiculturalism

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