From the perspective of the anti-American, America is beyond criticism; not because it is beyond reproach, but because, insofar as it is an emblem of evil, like all evils it approximates nothingness.

Just as "racism" is the charge par excellence that the Left wields against the Right, so "anti-Americanism" has been the latter's weapon of choice in its conflicts with the former. Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that there is anything along the lines of a symmetrical relationship between the respective powers of these two pejoratives, for as everyone is well aware, the allegation of "racism" alone is not infrequently sufficient to destroy lives, while the accusation of "anti-Americanism" has no such potential.

Still, while it is true that within their sacred precincts, like the University, for example, many a leftist actually derive great satisfaction from perceiving themselves and one another as "anti-American," they fear being perceived as such by others: if the charge of "anti-Americanism" can be substantiated to the satisfaction of the majority, those against whom it has been leveled are indeed likely to suffer.

Another difference between "racism" and "anti-Americanism" is that while there is hardly a day that passes that some person, group, institution, or nation isn't being accused of "racism," the charge of "anti-Americanism" is made much less frequently. Whether this is because it is much less damning than the charge of "racism," or whether it is less damning because it is relatively seldom hurled about, is a question that we need not concern ourselves with here; the point is that "anti-Americanism" isn't bandied about at a fraction of the rate as is that of "racism."

The final difference between "racism" and "anti-Americanism" is that the former, as I have argued in previous articles, precisely because of its perpetual enlistment in the service of virtually every imaginable ideological cause, is for all practical purposes meaningless. The latter, however, is not.

Anti-Americanism is a real phenomenon, and some of the most ardent anti-Americans are, disturbingly enough, Americans. Yet the question with which we shall here concern ourselves is that regarding the nature of anti-Americanism: What is anti-Americanism?

Not unlike any other term constitutive of our political vocabulary, "anti-Americanism" is a concept of which any given conception is bound to be debatable. But this by itself fails to establish that reasonable conceptions are not forthcoming, much less that the concept of "anti-Americanism" is devoid of meaning altogether. To the end of sketching some such conception, I undertake this article.

First of all, within the context of America, at any rate, "anti-Americanism," is a pejorative term. "Anti-Americanism" ostensibly references a profound flaw in the character of the American who suffers from it. Since "patriotism," in contrast, is a term of opprobrium that commends the patriot for his deep and abiding love and loyalty to his America, the anti-American must be he who is disposed to disdain his.

Now, neither the patriot's love for country nor the anti-American's hatred of it is to be understood as merely an abstract feeling. That is, both are dispositions that, as such, are simultaneously the products of habitual conduct as well as the reinforcements for that same conduct. As James, "the brother of the Lord," informs us in his epistle: "Faith without works is dead." The patriot is a patriot by virtue of his ever present disposition to act patriotically, and the anti-American is an anti-American by reason of his ever present disposition to act in ways destructive of his country.

Second, "anti-Americanism" should no more be conceived as a synonym for "anti-American government" than "(American) patriotism" should be thought a synonym for "love for American government." Far too frequently, I am afraid, this has indeed been the case, and, what is both ironic and lamentable, it has for the better part been those who should know better, that is, those on the Right, who have been responsible for perpetuating this misunderstanding. When leftists (and, in some instances, certain kinds of conservatives and libertarians) have overtly criticized the American government's engagement in specific wars, rightist proponents of those wars have condemned them, whether explicitly or implicitly, for their "anti-Americanism."

To be clear, I don't deny that some, and perhaps even most, of the leftist detractors of those engagements were contemptuous, not just of their government, but of their fellow countrymen (and women); but the mere consideration that they oppose their government's deployment of violence in any given instance does not suffice to establish their alleged anti-Americanism. The very livelihoods of these same right-leaning pundits and commentators who spare no occasion to charge as "anti-American" both left-wing critics as well as rightist critics (like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul) of what is ambiguously but commonly known as "interventionism," are vitally contingent upon articulating an inexhaustible list of grievances against the federal government. It is they who are forever (correctly) reminding us of the "inefficiency," "corruption," and "wastefulness" inherent in that behemoth.

So, if by critiquing the American government one renders oneself an "anti-American," then there is no one among us who is not an anti-American, for there is no one among us who believes that our government isn't deserving of criticism on any number of fronts.

Third, although "anti-Americanism" isn't interchangeable with "anti-American government," it is difficult to conceive of a scenario within which an "anti-American" would, or could, affirm the United States government. Thus, while "anti-Americanism" and opposition to the American government aren't one and the same thing, neither is it is possible to divorce the latter from the former.

And it is at this juncture that our sketch of the anti-American begins to assume form: the anti-American is emphatically not a critic of the American government; rather, he repudiates it in its totality. To put it another way, from the perspective of the anti-American, America is, paradoxically, beyond criticism, not because it is beyond reproach, but because, insofar as it is an emblem of evil, like all evils it approximates nothingness. Within the Christian tradition, evil has no positive being but, rather, is construed as the privation or corruption — the absence of goodness. Hence, it makes as much sense to say of the anti-American that he is a "critic" of the United States as it makes sense to say of the Christian that he is a "critic" of Satan. The Christian is commanded, not to "criticize" Satan, but to renounce him. Similarly, the anti-American can't but renounce or repudiate the American government.

The point is that genuine criticism — reasonable (even if misplaced), worthwhile, criticism — is self-limiting inasmuch as it presupposes an area with respect to which there must be, if not explicit congruence between the critic and his object, at least some measure of impropriety where criticism is concerned. Intercourse must be possible between the critic and his target, each must be capable of accommodating, to some extent, the voice of the other. Without some degree of understanding, appreciation, and even respect, intelligent criticism readily collapses into a hate-filled tirade.

The anti-American repudiates the American government. But misunderstanding would abound if we left this assertion without mention of two considerations that crucially qualify it.

The anti-American is not an anarchist. That is, he does not oppose all conceivable forms of government, but only the American government. Because anarchists constitute a negligible minority of Americans, we need not spend much time attempting to determine their relationship to anti-Americanism. Yet suffice it to say that it would seem to be inaccurate to describe an anarchist as an "anti-American," for his antipathy toward the American government has nothing at all to do with its distinctive features; his antipathy toward the American government, rather, is rooted in the sole fact that it is a government. It would seem to make as much sense to say of the anarchist that he is an anti-American as it would make sense to describe the misanthrope as a "racist." The misanthrope, in fact, may not be any sort of "racist" at all: it is not races of human beings that he hates, but the human race. And similarly, it is not only a possibility, but an actuality, that there are some theoretical anarchists, like the late Murray Rothbard, who nevertheless believe that among the world's governments, that of the United States is the least evil. Such anarchists cannot under any circumstances be honestly depicted as "anti-American."

The second consideration for us to here bear in mind is that anti-Americanism cannot consist solely in antipathy toward the American government precisely because it is possible to simultaneously reject a government while praising its subjects or citizens. This, in fact, is a phenomenon that manifests itself not infrequently in connection to various places throughout the world. To identify but two instances, Westerners and non-Westerners alike renounced the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, while affirming the dignity and worth of the citizens upon whom those regimes placed an immeasurable burden.

In addition to repudiating the government, the anti-American must as well hold his fellow Americans — from both past and present generations — in contempt. Since a country is more than its government, the traditions and customs of its people, and the always partially ambiguous but nevertheless loosely identifiable gestalt and temperament that is the distillation of those habits, must also be the object of the anti-American's disdain. In short, the anti-American despises, not what America has allegedly become, but what she has always been.

For the classical conservative model of society as a "contract," "covenant," or "conversation" between the past, the present, and the future — a notion famously and brilliantly articulated by Burke in his scathing critique of the revolutionary spirit that had overtaken France and was threatening to consume England — the anti-American has only repulsion, for his vision is almost wholly preoccupied with the future. If either the present or the past can be said to have any value for him at all, it derives solely from the extent to which they can be manipulated in the service of realizing the future of his imaginings. Thus, calls on the part of many among the Left, led most recently by, of all people, our current president, to "fundamentally transform" America, glaringly betray this exclusive focus on a not yet actualized state of affairs, an America that has never been.

The desire to "transform" anything is nothing more or less than a desire to destroy it. The idea of change, much less transformative change, is a philosophical problem with which some of the Western tradition's brightest minds have wrestled for millennia since the inception of Western philosophy. To delve into it too deeply here would be to run the risk of deviating from the main topic at hand. But a few comments are not out of order.

The problem of change is inseparable from the problem of identity. The idea is this: if something changes, in what sense can it be said to be the same thing after the change as it was before the change? From before the time of Socrates, the earliest Greek philosophers assumed rival positions on this issue of change. Parmenides, for example, thought that change must be an illusion, for change is identity-extinguishing. Whatever changes tends to "non-being," change signifies what is not. As Parmenides said: "Being is, nonbeing is not." Thus, permanence is the only reality. Heraclitus, in contrast, claimed that it is permanence that is illusory, change being the only constant: "You cannot step in the same river twice!" Cratylus took the logic of this reasoning to its extreme conclusion to point out that if change really is the only reality, then one couldn't step in the same river even once, for nothing would remain the same from one moment to the next. But if the world is a state of constant flux, then knowledge must be unattainable, for the object of knowledge, whatever it is, must possess some measure of stability.

Change in itself, many subsequent philosophers have persuasively argued, does not undermine identity. However, transformative change does. Indeed, while it is not insensible to speak of any given entity undergoing significant, dramatic change, it makes no sense to speak of an entity being the subject of transformative change: once a subject is "transformed," it ceases to be. There is a very real sense in which the very notion of a "transformation" is incoherent, a contradiction in terms. "Transformation" is a euphemism for death. Any husband desirous of "transforming" the person of his wife is a man desirous of killing the person who is his wife in exchange for some other person entirely.

And similarly, the person who openly expresses a desire to "fundamentally transform" America notifies us of his desire to abolish his country in favor of an entirely new one.

In light of this analysis of anti-Americanism, the question to which I urge the reader's attention is this: can President Obama and those of his supporters who shared his aspiration to "fundamentally transform" America legitimately be described as anti-American?

It is conceivable that the President and his apologists could meet the charge of anti-Americanism with the reply that the only America that they wish to subject to a fundamental transformation is the America of the last decade or so — "Bush's America." It is Bush, they could say, who is the truly "transformative" President, for Bush essentially destroyed the America that Obama and his cohorts want to resurrect.

Any such counter-objection must fail for the following three reasons.

First, the concepts of "restoration" or "resurrection" are not only distinct from that of a "transformation," the former differ in kind from that of the latter.

Second, it is nothing short of a lie that leftists, much less Obama, for even a moment think that the United States of America was a better place in the more distant past than in the more recent past — even when it was being presided over by George W. Bush and a Republican Congress. I expect that anyone even remotely familiar with Obama's mindset — a mindset that he shares with, among others of his ideological brethren, his pastor of over twenty years, Jeremiah Wright; "the unrepentant terrorist," William Ayers; his "friend," the Harvard professor who screamed foul when the Cambridge police responded to a call regarding a burglary in process at his home, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Malcolm X, with whose wish to purge the Caucasian "blood" from his body Obama admits to having had some affinity — needs no convincing that he and everyone else to whom that mindset belongs find the America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, say, abhorrent.

We must understand that this is not conjecture on my part. Within the Marxian worldview of the ideological Left, the most egregious of moral offenses for which an individual or culture can be implicated are those of "racism," "sexism," and "classism." These are the scourges of the world. And that Western civilization and its emblem, the United States of America, is the sole focus of the Left's unrelenting condemnation, it would appear that from this perspective, it is the West and America that are exclusively responsible for the purveyance of these mortal sins. This explains why terms like "White Supremacy," "patriarchy," "White Power structure," "gendered discourses," "hetero-sexism," "consumer capitalism," "exploitative capitalism," "oppressive class structures," and the like pervade the literature produced by America's "cultural critics" in the humanities and "social sciences."

And since, even by the standards of most on the Left, America has become less "racist," "sexist," and "classist," over the span of her life, the America of the distant past, in spite of the rhetorical tribute to "the Founders" that Obama and company selectively pay when it suits their political purposes, can't but be an object of disdain.

So it is just nonsense that Obama and his minions want to "restore" or "resurrect" America's greatness. They want to replace the dialogue between the voices of the past, the present, and the future with a monologue that would be the prerogative of the voice of the future alone, a future America bearing little if any resemblance to the America to which generations of citizens have developed attachments.

There is another move that Obama and his supporters could make to deflect my allegation that they are anti-American. They could deny that it is a hatred or contempt of America from which their wish to fundamentally transform it is begotten. They could insist that it is not antipathy but, rather, love that animates their revolutionary designs. It is true, they might readily concede, that the America that has always existed in fact is a relic of a bygone era, a dark age, as it were, that, as such, deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history; however, America has a potentiality for change that can't be overestimated, and it is this that warrants their love for her.

But I am afraid that this line of defense promises to be just as unsatisfactory as the last. There are two reasons for this.

First, potentiality is virtual nothingness. That which is merely potential is nothing until that potentiality is actualized, but every potentiality depends for its actualization upon something entirely outside of itself. A piece of steel that has been lying in the snow for hours has the potential to become hot, but only if something that already is actually hot realizes that potential.

And when it comes to nations and people, potentiality is only very imperfectly legible, when it is decipherable at all. Did Adolf Hitler have the potential to be canonized a Roman Catholic saint? Does Osama Bin Laden have the potential to become an ally of America and maybe even a Christian? That both of these queries could be answered in the affirmative is a possibility, but the more important point is that no one knows or could know until such time as the potentialities were actualized, that is, until they ceased being potentialities.

Potentiality for anything can never be an object of love.

Secondly, since the "fundamental transformation" of any being is nothing more or less than its annihilation, the love for its potential to be "fundamentally transformed" is none other than a love for the prospect of its demise. Yet this is no love at all. As C.S. Lewis once memorably wrote, God is love but when love becomes a god, it is reduced to a demon. That is, it ceases to be love.

In other words, and as much as it pains us to admit this, those who want to "fundamentally transform" America are indeed anti-American. I don't see how this conclusion can be escaped. If their "love" has as its object America's potentiality for change, then, whether it is because mere potentiality for anything, by reason of being virtual nothingness, can never be an object of love, or whether a "love" for America's potential for a "fundamental transformation" is in reality a "love" for her death which, because it is life-denying, is, in reality, the antithesis of love, the anti-American's love for America is, at bottom, impossible.