No other western nation remains as religious as the United States. Much of our religiosity is exteriorized, ritualized and stereotyped, devoid of inner luminousity and passion-and certainly of moral generosity. On the other hand, much of the nation's struggle to achieve citizenship and dignity for all of its members has drawn upon a Christian social vision, reinforced by a Judaism assimilated by the American Calvinists, or articulated by Jews themselves. The American proponents of a lay and secular civic culture have often argued that its advantage was that it allowed the religions to educate not their believers alone, but make their contributions to the general welfare. The secularists have been marked by their own religious origins.

The most influential of American philosophers, the pragmatist John Dewey, took a great deal from the New England Calvinism he encountered in his youth. The American secularists were and are never alone: their politics has always to find common ground with that of the religious. Indeed, American secularism is itself religious in intensity-unrelaxed, often more than a bit desperate.

“Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God” is the title of a classic of American literature, by the 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards. That characterizes much of the American self-image-and, paradoxically, accounts for the unbounded moral imperialism of the American social ethos.

The old world was rejected by the English colonists not only on account of its sclerotic traditionalism, but because of its inexpungable sinfulness. The Puritan community in the new world was a new beginning, a truer church-and distinguished the new nation (even before separation from the Crown) as a redeemed one. Redemption, however, was perpetually at risk-and the road to it continuously fought over.

Redemption remained a central theme of American politics, energizing it with ferocious absolutism-and justifying for the sake of a higher end policies savage and sordid. The present difficulty of American politics is an old one: contending schema of redemption divide the nation.

The conquest of the continent and the subjugation of the Indians, the expulsion of the Europeans were followed by the limitless displacement of the American frontier. The extension of American moral sovereignty to the rest of the world claimed by Bush, his government's refusal to be bound by the decisions of other peoples and states, are not at all new. What is in question is whether the specific values espoused by the present regime, a definition of freedom which privileges capital, a definition of order which insists on capital’s primacy, an idea of culture which reifies tradition, will be effectively challenged by other American values. These entail the primacy of citizenship in politics, equality in society, and pluralistic experimentation in culture.

I propose to sketch the ways in which American foreign policy has been formed by these conflicts. So far from confirming the adage that politics stops at our borders, American foreign policy has been and remains the conduct of domestic policy by other means. True, the contending parties have often agreed on foreign policies intended to maximize-inevitably, at the expense of other peoples-the capacity of Americans to continue their disputes unimpeded by foreign interference. The foreign policies in question have never been completely coherent and rationalized. They have been compromise formations, consequences of changing balances of internal political forces.

Triumphal coalitions have disintegrated, key ideas have lost their compelling quality, dominant leaders have been replaced-frequently, with considerable rapidity. It is even possible to read American history as a series of histories, some succeeding one another, some co-existing.

The sense of continuity, however, is itself an historical, an ideological artefact.

It is indeed a critical or secular sense of continuity in the nation's relationship to the world that is lacking in public consciousness-and it is not very evident, either, in the accounts of foreign policy now being given by those who make it. Our historians, of course, do excellent work-but it is often confined to the academy (it does not reach the schools, since it is too complex and often seen as insufficiently respectful of those self-flattering illusions which are the nation's pieties.) The members of the foreign policy elite have for the most part studied law or the social sciences-and done so in an a historical way. The organization of knowledge, and its diffusion, are not politically neutral processes. The universities at the apex of the American system are praised, in Europe, for their closeness to the governance of society. That has a drawback: the closer academics are to the management of social conflict, the less likely they are to develop larger (much less dissenting) views of how the nation should be constituted.

They-and the citizenry, who have access to academic generalization only through its second hand or third hand crudification in the media-live in an eternal present. The limits of political possibility are set by immediate constraints. History, in other words, fades away into an unrecovered, an unrecognized, background.

The one available constant, however, is the idea of the nation as a church, as a sanctified community. Only seventy-five percent of the nation is Protestant, and of these, half again are not ecclesiastical descendants of the New England Puritans. Yet it is their conception of a nation with a mission that seems not only to have persisted, but to have been integrated in the political theologies of the other churches. Puritan thought originally interpreted the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Biblical terms, as a new Israel, in which church, people, state, were one. The later separation of church and state in the United States made possible the co-existence of several varieties of Protestantism, provided civic space later for Roman Catholics and Jews. The Puritans' sense of ecclesiastical distinctiveness was transferred to the nation. The other churches somehow managed to join their traditions, as different as they were, to acknowledgement of the primacy of the American nation. Even where ethnic loyalties were central to Irish Catholics, or German Lutherans, or Greek Orthodox, or Jews, they were viewed as rights both derived from and guaranteed by the larger nation. Its quality as a sacred home was maintained, even reinforced.

The considerable mobility of American society, the constant inflow of immigrants, the thrust of settlement westward, the mid-nineteenth century transition to industrialism, made a national theology even more useful. All of this movement was accompanied by conflict, much of it profound. There had to be a justification, of course, for seizing the land from the Indians and pushing them westward-where they were not extirpated. The question of slavery, never entirely still, increased in intensity as the nineteenth century went on. Much Abolitionist energy was religious. For much of the nation, however, slavery was bound to class. The existence of slavery was a threat to the security of free labor-and therewith, to the fundaments of a nation of citizens, if male and white. Even before the Civil War, north and south began to conceive of themselves as different nations. A majority of the northeners did not believe in racial equality. They feared the spread of slavery to the west and the destruction of their own economic autonomy.

The defense of the Union was the sacred cause of the Civil War-that is, the defense of the uniqueness of the American experiment, and its expansion westward.. The north portrayed the south as part of the old world (and the conservatives and reactionaries in the old world agreed, since they supported the slave states.) The Civil War followed the Mexican War and the seizure of much of what had been Hispanic America. It followed the success of the Monroe Doctrine, the injunction to the Europeans not to return in force to the Americas, upon pain of war. It followed, too, the consolidation of an antagonistic alliance with Great Britain-which was allowed to keep its Canadian provinces and Caribbean islands at the price of agreeing to the expansion of American trade. It came after the transformation of the early agrarian republic into a commercial and industrial one-with the continuous infusion of foreign, mainly British, capital. The north, during the war, was shaped by mass democracy and political mobilization on a scale and of an intensity far greate than anything seen in Europe before the century's end. It was a second American Revolution by a population which, united to destroy the Confederacy, was in profound conflict on issues of property, tax, and redistribution.

Later, in the most famous of American self-interpretations, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner was to say that the frontier allowed restless and surplus labor to move continuously west, occupying new land, rather than remaining in the metropolis to engage in class conflict. He was wrong, on two counts. The first was that the growing industrial proletariat in the industrial east and mid-west did not move westward to become farmers. The second was that the farmers themselves were small proprietors at the mercy of banks, grain storage companies, the railroads.

Each group engaged in class warfare, sometimes using the political system, sometimes using more direct means: demonstrations, strikes, violence against property and the state. The new national self-consciousness that resulted from the Civil War also resulted in a heightened sense of entitlement by the victorious citizens of the north and west. The American elite engaged in plenty of domestic repression, but its principal device for containing class conflict was the pursuit of empire.

There was a considerable cultural sub-stratum on which it could rely. The nineteenth century was a period of intense American Protestant missionary activity in much of the rest of the world, not least in China and Japan and Latin America. To commercial empire, the American demand for freedom of trade, was added spiritual empire: the offer of authentic truths and higher morality. Militant Protestantism abroad had its domestic counterpart. Many of the new immigrants after the Civil War were from eastern and southern Europe: Catholics and later Jews. They eventually joined the American nation in every respect, but initially they retained their distinctiveness, lived in separate communities. That made unity of working class action difficult in the industrial east and midwest. The farmers, usually northern European, were reluctant to make common cause with urban immigrants whom they did not consider truly American. Still, the period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the nation's entry into the First World War in 1917 was one of recurrent social turmoil. The social reforms introduced by Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson's project of a regulated capitalism, were American equivalents of the programs of Bismarck and Lloyd George. They had similar sources: the need to avert the success of serious anti-capitalist movements, and the necessity of uniting the nation around imperial projects The new expansive American nationalism was quite purposefully intended to recruit the immigrants to the American faith-and to reinforce it in the minds of an American Protestant majority not invariably ready to join the elites exploiting it in a sacred union. Meanwhile, a socially egalitarian and modern Protestantism and a Roman Catholic Church which understood itself as the champion of an immigrant working class entered American politics in force. They rejected Darwinist notions of the superiority of white culture, and espoused a social imperialism of a distinctly universalist temper.

Wilson’s comportment and doctrines reflected all of these contradictions. He thought that every people was entitled to democracy, but remained a racist Southerner with a Calvinist suspicion of his own northern Catholic political allies-and contempt for the Latin Americans. His government ruthlessly persecuted opponents of entry into World War One, destroying much of the American socialist movement in the process. He presided over a wartime condominium of capital and labor which anticipated the structures of governance under Franklin Roosevelt and Truman in World War Two. Wartime persecution of dissenters was joined to military intervention against the Russian Bolsheviks-and was continued in his Republican successors' attacks on the American labor movement, attacks all the more determined since they rejected the notion of condominium and sought full power for capital.

Theodore Roosevelt expanded the American state to encompass large regulatory and welfare functions, and Wilson consolidated that new state by adapting it to war. The wartime state, and the Progressive reforms that preceded it, provided employment directly and indirectly for an enlarged intelligentsia (economists and lawyers, publicists and scientists) working in and around a new bureaucracy. Its tasks in the period after World War One were many. The US had become a creditor nation, and international economic policy was the central sphere of an American foreign policy largely integrated with domestic politics. There was opposition to the specific involvements of the Republican governments of the 1920s in international affairs (loans to aid Germany, naval agreements with Japan) and it is mistakenly termed "isolationism." Upon examination, "isolationism" had three major components. One was a progressivist distrust of the corporate and financial elites making foreign policy. Another was ethnic: the resentment of the German and Irish Americans at the supposedly pro-British behaviour of those elites, who in fact were systematically displacing British interests. Finally, domination required a minimum of international cooperation, and even that struck the unilateralists as too much. They sought, for instance, the kind of free hand in Asia that was to make war with Japan inevitable-and they got a good deal of it.

When Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1933, his primary emphasis was domestic-relief from depression and the enlargement of the rudimentary American welfare state. His Democratic Party brought Catholics and Jews into government and so completed the task of integration begun by his earlier cousin. The New Deal was a singular composite of Catholic social doctrine, Protestant social concern, secularized Jewish millenialism-and elements drawn from the Progressive and socialist legacies of the earlier third of the century. Roosevelt himself had served in Wilson’s government before becoming Governor of New York. He was an internationalist, with strenuous attachments to economic nationalism. His wartime planning for new international economic institutions provded for unequivocal American domination of the world market. He opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union (one of the more absurd practises of American statecraft is the refusal to recognize regimes believed to be antagonistic), withdrew troops from Latin America, but was severely limited in his version of Wilsonianism by domestic constraints. He could not assist the Spanish Republic, for instance, since that would have cost him Catholic support. His European policies as the war in Europe began were frequently abuses of his constitutional authority, if abuses of a kind inherited from predecessors. (He sent the US Navy into combat against German submarines well before war between the two states, and he deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack.) Withal, with the first Roosevelt and Wilson, he modernised the American state and gave the nation an indigenous sort of social democracy.

This had its international counterpart, and not only rhetorically, in his late doctrine of the Four Freedoms-and in his support for the development of the United Nations and pronounced anti-colonialism.

The New Deal in both the popular enthusiasm it inspired and hatreds it engendered (not only from economic elites but from petty proprietors and lesser employees threatened in their claims to status) was a quasi-religious movement. Roosevelt depicted his work, repeatedly, as the culmination of American history-in other words, as redemptory. He was in fact an upper class Christian with a sense of noblesse oblige, a modest rentier contemptuous of the moral vulgarity of the merely rich. He did know, however, enough to use them, especially the more independent (and internationalist) segments of Wall Street. The New Deal was in fact the model for the nation’s post-war corporatism. Roosevelt’s government had encouraged a vast increase in the unionized component of the labour force. Unable immediately after the war to win national health insurance, employee representation on the boards of large corporations, or an extension of public ownership, the unions adopted a different strategy-the construction of contractualized welfare arrangements within large firms. Combined with increasing wages, these arrangements made possible the extraordinary post-war economic expansion----which also financed the costs of the Cold War, in the prosecution of which the unions were enthusiastic partners. The Cold War began with a profound episode of ecclesiastical excess, McCarthyism., the obsessive and systematic persecution of those who could be depicted as “Communists”-a term widened to include membership in consumer organizations or intimations of approval for extra-marital sexuality. Named after the alcoholic and corrupt Wisconsin Senator, the phenomenon was not his invention. It was a continuation of nativistic campaigns against foreigners, of the post-1917 anti-Communist frenzy, and small town and rural antagonism to modern and urban society. In its cultivation of petit bourgeois ressentiment it was fascistic, in its mobilization of newly enfranchised ethnic and religious groups (Catholics and Jews) it was a parody of democratization. It touched on other tendencies in American culture. The grotesque question, “who lost China?” was posed by the disappointed missionaries. Henry Luce, the publisher of the weekly Time and the author of the idea of "the American Century" was himself born in China as the son of a missionary-and his publications were saturated by American triumphalism. McCarthy himself was cast aside by the elite and publicly humiliated after he had served his purpose: to brand all of radical social reform as heretical, an attack on the teachings of the national church. (President Eisenhower once declared that every American should have a religion-and he did not care which religion it was.)

The church-nation prosecuted sin in the form of the Communist states, national liberation movements, and neutralists. From the beginning, a major schism was apparent. A latitudinarian church party agreed that freedom had to be defended, but was sceptical that “Communism” was a monolithic and omnipresent enemy. The latitudinarians were open to historical, national, regional and social analyses of the conditions which accounted for the success of Communist movements. They thought that the danger of nuclear war was greater than that of the universal triumph of Communism and espoused arms control agreements and the construction of a structure of co-existence. They were critical of the Viet-Nam war and critical, too, of Cold War alliances with regimes decidedly not attached to the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (like that of Franco.) Domestically, they preferred mobilization against the nation's persistent ills: inequality and racism. (The electoral slogan of George McGovern in 1972 was “Come home again, America.”) The rigourists (or sectarians) held that what was at stake was not to be relativized by reference to historical context: it was a struggle of absolute good against absolute evil. Since Communism was monolithic, its regimes would respond only to force-and any and all means to combat or undermine it were morally justified. A decade before the end of Soviet Communism, their ideologues announced that it was incapable of change, and that alliances with authoritarian regimes could be justified since these could at some point be transformed.

American politics, in this framework, exhibited considerable volatility. The Catholic Church entered the Cold War as hyper-patriotic and totally Manichean in its view of Communism, but under the influence of Vatican II its position changed. Indeed, the American Catholic Bishops enraged Ronald Reagan by criticising the morality of nuclear weaponry. The Protestants supplied the most intelligent and complex of Cold War thinkers, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr-as well as the most fanatical and rigid of anti-Communist preachers. Proponents of the New Deal and internationalism, the American Jewish electorate on account of its social ascent and attachment to Israel came to make common cause with the right. Kennedy prepared a nuclear first strike, Eisenhower reviled the apocalyptic fantasies of the Air Force generals and their academic fellow travellers. Withal, a Cold War bureaucracy and the centralization of power in the Executive Branch, the Imperial Presidency, distorted American democracy. The Viet-Nam war ended when the elites decided upon withdrawal--- but it required mass protests and mutiny in the army to induce them to behave rationally. Reagan propounded a primitive anti-Communism, but when he dropped it, public opinion followed suit at once. The sphere of public discussion had shrunk.

The once expanding economy had by the seventies begun to slow. Just as former followers of Trotsky proclaimed their fidelity to a new master, Von Hayek, American living standards ceased to increase. Punitively high interest rates imposed by the market dogmatists and the beginnings of the new wave of globalization did their work: the de-industrialization of the United States. The unions, which under under Lyndon Johnson still had a third of the labour force, in the end had but thirteen percent-a large factor in the decline of the welfarist and New Deal segment of the Democratic Party. It is true that standards rose again in the technology investment cycle of the nineties (the Treasury was in the hands of a more expansionist Democratic banker), but inequality increased as social investment by government declined relative to gross national product.

Without European provision of education, health care, transport and income security generally, the average American family had to run twice as hard to stay in the same place. In this setting, foreign policy took a distinctly economic cast. The war with Iraq was fought to guarantee access to oil, a Democratic President (Clinton) cast himself as an unqualified advocate of American economic penetration everywhere, and the American standard of living was increasingly financed by foreign investment and above all, loans. An ideological fraud dominated discussion between the United States, Europe and much of the rest of the world. The Americans (and their compradores everywhere) urged that a higher standard of living was possible only with deregulation, labour mobility and privatisation----and pointed to high unemployment in the European welfare states as proof. What they did not say was that precisely the inability of the labour force in the US and elsewhere to defend itself attracted capital away from the nations with the strongest welfare states.

When the attack of 11 September occurred, the American economy had begun to contract- as investment which had moved from the unionized American north and midwest to the non-unionized south moved to Mexico and beyond. In a situation of increasing economic anxiety, the attack disoriented a nation which had come to believe in its own invulnerability. The ensuing shock, the moral brutality and intellectual vulgarity of the Bush government's response, and above all the historical narcissism of elites and public alike, drove American rationality and reflectiveness underground. The American church comported itself like a beleagured sect. Is there any chance for national redemption-and whence will it come?

It has to be said that the post-war record of the United States includes some huge achievements: the most successful anti-imperial protest of the modern age (the opposition to the Viet-Nam war), the completion by the Civil Rights movement of the Reconstruction of racial relations which had failed after the Civil War, and enormously expanded economic and social freedoms for women.

It is difficult to believe that the critical resources of the nation have been entirely suppressed.

The extreme anxiety of the government and its ideological servants in the academy and the media to delegitimate dissent before it spreads betrays a large amount of insecurity. That insecurity is evident, as well, in the systematic defamation of those Europeans who dare to question the bona fides and the intelligence of the anti-terror campaign.(The two most conspicuous traits of our foreign policy elite are its aversion to military service and its disdain for Europe.) The campaign, nonetheless, is an entirely convincing failure. The Taliban government the United States was so responsible for installing has disappeared, and a miscellany of fundamentalist gangsters have reduced the writ of the successor regime to those streets of Kabul regularly policed by foreign troops. Bin Laden has not been captured, even if the world has been burdened with a steady stream of documents allegedly found in his caves. The turn to Iraq is in part a familial obsession of the Bushes, in part a diversionary manouver: a victory over visible enemies has to be attained, if possible before the mid-term elections of 2002, certainly before the Presidential campaign of 2004. Suppose, however, that the rest of the world-or a sizeable part of it-decides to reject the unilateralism of the sectarians who now rule Washington. Can the latitudinarians return in force?

Silenced, or extremely discreet-for obvious reasons-there are any number of senior officials in the Department of State ( some in the Central Intelligence Agency and amongst the senior admirals and generals of the armed forces) who think the fanatical unilateralism of the Bush government a catastrophic mistake. They do not require an alternative government to emerge and influence policy; they do require the active critical intervention of the Congress. The Congress, in turn, is waiting on public opinion. For the moment, it is mostly passive-in an intellectual coma induced by the media’s energetic acceptance of the functions of a propaganda ministry for the government.

There is, however, in American Protestantism a persistent theme: the notion of the “Saving Remnant,” the small contingent of the faithful who adhere to belief in redemption despite the forgetfulness, laxity and corruption of the larger church. As I write, a lawyers’ group has published an exacting condemnation of the present government’s attack on the very idea of international law. Scientists have articulated systematic critiques of the government's rejection of the Kyoto Treaty. Scientists and strategists have joined to articulate the dangers in the Pentagon's new nuclear doctrines. The Churches have warned for some time of the lack of proportionality in the response to terror. Custodians of civil liberties have gone to the courts to oppose the government's violation of the Constitution in its policies toward aliens-and the prisoners held in Guantanamo. It remains to be seen whether these voices can find a common denominator with, for instance, the trade unions, deeply opposed to the savagery of unregulated economic globalization. (The unions, indeed, are the one group which has recently forced Bush to retreat-in the dispute over steel imports, they compelled the President to listen to Republican Congressmen threatened with defeat had the steel industry been allowed to expire.) What is lacking is a convincing renewal of an internationalist project for the United States in the face of famine, poverty, war and tyranny. Its conceptual elements are in place: any number of academic centers of research are accumulating large amounts of materials for its use.

A moral revulsion for the pubescent rhetoric of the President (“You are either with us or against us”) is evident amongst some of the educated. Perhaps a new politics of moral revival, drawing strength from the abolitionist movement, a century of struggle for social reform, and the campaign against the Viet-Nam war, will appeal to a broader part of the nation. Until then, the present alliance of cynical politicians, fanatical Fundamentalists and soulless technocrats will seek to impose its will on the world.

Norman Birnbaum is University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington DC, member of the Editorial Board of the weekly, The Nation, and advisor to several members of Congress.