The Two American Dreams

Anti-Americanism is a French disease. Like the flu, it propagates itself independently, but only every four years, on the occasion of the American presidential election.

It’s the same every time: A flood of counter-truths and approximations rains down on us. It’s attributable to an encyclopedic lack of education or to a fascination-repulsion as much as to the ridiculous ideology instilled into the French from primary school. It continues to wreak havoc long afterwards.

Our friend Jean-François Revel once said it all with what historian Jacques Julliard called the senile (or infantile) disease of socialism. A caricatured vision of America seems to be constructed based on comic books, Hollywood, TV, movies and old Marxist leaflets.

Four years ago, our dear media, prophesying based on outdated patterns, unanimously claimed to us that America was much too racist to elect a president of mixed race. We know what followed.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is presented this year by many of our colleagues as a neo-fascist who wants to lead America back to the social and societal stone-age. The more righteous among us have goosebumps, the poor things.

If the comedians had checked their records, they would know that in the state of Massachusetts, where he was Governor for four years, Mitt Romney designed a health plan very close to that which Barack Obama is putting in place at the federal level, amidst the eagle cries of the Republicans.

Undoubtedly, Romney plays the role of the lost rabbit in the middle of the Republican hen house, which is apparently populated for several years mostly by paranoid geese, turkey and little roosters with a backdrop of populist outbursts. Such are the effects of the Tea Party, which is to the Republican Party what the extreme left is to the French Socialist Party. There is a battle of meaningless cries, which the crisis has rendered hysterical and which is moving backward into the future.

Romney has certainly not neglected trying to recoup the extremists of his camp. But he is a center-right moderate who embodies, like Obama, one side of the American dream, certainly the less romantic one. It involves social success and enrichment à la Guizot. The Rousseauian myth involves believing that man is intrinsically good and [economic] liberalism is as well. With his air of a B-list actor playing the role of president, he has found in these past weeks a bit of the Reagan magic from the 1980s.

Obama is the other side of the American dream. He has the extraordinary story of the “outcast” to whom the United States opened the door to the social elevator, bound for the highest floors. It is living proof that immigration can be an accelerator of destinies and involves the Rooseveltian sense of solidarity, the conquering meritocracy and the fairy tale that will one day become a big-screen blockbuster. Leaning on a majority ethnic coalition with Latinos, the outgoing president is also endowed with charisma very above-average. He’s barely spoiled by his arrogance and his self-confidence — two character traits that the American people, adept at self-deprecation, have never held in high esteem.

On the light of recent economic torments, these two dreams, which Obama and Romney each celebrate to the extreme, sometimes seem to turn into nightmares these days. But the campaign has shown that they are still alive and well. Optimism is the oldest American tradition, which 400 years of history, noise and fury will never weaken, proving that America is always resilient.

Years after our Old Continent, it’s the New World’s turn to descend the declining slope. When you ask the Americans about the economic situation of their country, they are convinced that China has relegated them to second rank. It has become their obsession: They feel a sense of gradual displacement.

In a passionate book, “China Against America,” Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet announce that the clash between the two empires has become inevitable. According to them, the new battle of the Pacific is imminent: One ocean for two will never work. China wants to find its place there and to keep America to its own. Europe will count the points; it is getting used to it.

A presidential election is often a collective psychoanalysis. Despite the false accolades and ad hoc smiles, this one will show that America is seized by a mixture of vertigo and nostalgia from now on. As it rises from the middle of the debris left by the earthquake of the subprime [mortgages] and looks at itself in the mirror of the campaign, it cannot help but say to itself for the first time in its history: “We other civilizations, we know now that we are mortal.” (Paul Valéry)