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Jean-Francois Revel first pondered this in 1970, while he was still reeling from the collective blows delivered to the stability of the Fifth Republic by the Prague Spring, the Parisian student riots of 1968, and the Vietnam calamity. For many years a columnist and editor of L'Express, Revel could not reconcile the free pass European intellectuals gave to evils on the Left—e.g., the brutal suppression of Alexander Dubcek and the Czech dissidents by the Soviets—with their fanatical criticism of the American war in Vietnam, much less with the eagerness with which students of the Sorbonne threw up barricades, not in praise of liberte, but of dictatorship. Through all this, America—"parasitical, murderous, and sick"—became what Pascal Bruckner remembered as "the ideal scapegoat." Human capacities for forgetting the inconvenient, or not-seeing what is as plain as day, were never on better display.3
It finally came to Revel that anti-Americanism had little to do with what Americans actually were, and much more with what Europeans were becoming. He poured his conclusions into three savage indictments of European self-righteousness: Without Marx or Jesus (1970), The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), and the almost-despairing How Democracies Perish (1983), which railed against the indulgent European willingness to excuse the outrages of the Soviets while weeping over the pecadilloes of the Americans. He wondered out loud whether democracies have some kind of natural tendency to embrace their destroyers.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet ideology gave Revel only limited cheer, just as it did to Revel's colleagues among the French ex-Marxists whose illusions about socialism had gone up in the smoke of 1968. (Bruckner, for instance, celebrated the jack-hammering of the Wall with a cautionary title, La Melancholie Democratique, in 1990.) Revel had seen how close Western Europe had come to conceding the future to the Soviets, and he was not entirely convinced that the day had been won for liberal democracy. If "the United States had not displayed a minimum of unilateralism vis-a-vis the perennial European advice-givers, the Soviet empire would have endured much longer than it did." September 11th, and the tsunami of anti-American vitriol which followed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, were proof enough for him to connect the two parts of his 30-year-long critique into one seamless argument: Europeans are not lovers of liberal democracy, and they hate the United States precisely to the degree that the United States represents the fullest expression of liberal democracy's principles and life.
L'obsession Anti-Americaine (translated here simply as Anti-Americanism by Diarmid Cammell) was originally conceived as a sort of sequel to Without Marx or Jesus before 9/11; its first edition was actually published in 2000, so Revel was not reacting merely to the comic-opera provocations of the post-9/11 Euro-Left. His real concern was in 2000 what it been in 1970, the "epic twentieth-century struggle between socialism and liberal democracy," and he remained as persuaded in 2000 as he had been in 1970 that "the principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation." In the longue durÉe, every distinctive epoch of social, political, or intellectual progress produces a "laboratory society" where that progress is tested or deployed to its fullest. In the age of ancient democracy, it was Athens; in the age of the Renaissance, it was Italy; in the age of absolute monarchies, it was France. But in the age of liberal democracy, "it was the turn of the United States." Hence hatred of the United States betrays an underlying animus not just toward the laboratory but toward the experiment itself.
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