U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeanne Kirkpatrick addresses the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Aug. 20, 1984.
Photo: Getty Images/Bettmann ArchiveJeane Kirkpatrick delivered one of the most electrifying political convention speeches in American history to Republicans gathered in Dallas on Aug. 20, 1984. Its theme was that the left wing of the Democratic Party had fallen into the habit of “blaming America first” for the nation’s foreign policy challenges. A Georgetown political scientist, a longtime Democrat and then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Kirkpatrick hit the point repeatedly and hard. Whether the issue was Soviet aggression, Iranian theocracy or relations with our allies, she argued, the answer from the left was always the same: more unproductive criticism of America.
The self-flagellating impulse that Kirkpatrick identified remains a political force today. But its target is no longer American foreign policy. It is instead the U.S. at large: its history, its institutions and its place in the world.
Consider the “1619 Project,” launched with tremendous fanfare a year ago this month by the New York Times. It argues that the country was conceived in slavery and that racism remains omnipresent. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz and others have objected, this rewriting of American history is elementally flawed. For starters, the “1619 Project” ignores the unique and multifaceted American antislavery movement, without which slavery might never have been abolished at all.
The “1619 Project” excludes other salient details, like the historical role of the U.S. as a beacon for immigrants of all colors, from all over the world. The race-based “income gap” can’t be understood apart from differences in family formation, but the “1619 Project” doesn’t grapple with this. Nor does it note the irony that the most integrated American institutions—churches and the military—remain perennial bêtes noirs of the left. By acknowledging nothing that might alter its portrayal of the country as a perpetually seething cauldron of racism, the “1619 Project” places itself squarely in the blame-America-first tradition.
Blaming America first is also the dominant chorus in academia. In 1987 the “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go” campaign at Stanford University jettisoned certain “dead white males” from the curriculum, thereby establishing the dictum that all cultures are equal—except for the West’s, which is worse. Then as now, multiculturalism promotes the idea that the U.S. is uniquely, fatally flawed. The very idea of “Western civilization,” multiculturalists have maintained, was a ruse, invented by the American military as a way of hoodwinking our soldiers into participating in the European theater during World War I.
As social scientist Stanley Kurtz demonstrates in “The Lost History of Western Civilization,” this influential thesis—the spark that would go on to transform higher education across the country—is utterly without merit. To the contrary, a long and robust history of teaching about “Western civilization” extends centuries before World War I, from the earliest days of Harvard and the University of Virginia onward. But such facts have been ignored by multiculturalists, determined as they have been to blame nefarious American militarism first.
A third form of blame-America-firstism has come roaring to the fore during the coronavirus pandemic. There is plenty of criticism to go around about the public-health decisions made by the president and other leaders. But why use that criticism as a springboard for celebration of American decline, real or imagined?
Consider the barely controlled schadenfreude embedded in headlines like the Atlantic’s “Trump Is Turning America Into the ‘Sh—hole Country’ He Fears” and “How the Pandemic Defeated America” or Rolling Stone’s “How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era.” Or consider the speaker lineup at the Democratic convention. Former First Lady Michelle Obama, surely one of the most blessed women in American history, emphasized on Monday night that she “loves this country with all my heart,” despite having complained in 2008 that she was proud of it “for the first time in my adult life.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes she lives under a “fascist presidency.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and found much to admire there, has also heaped praise on Fidel Castro’s Cuba, both times implicitly criticizing his home country by comparison.
Blame America first’s staying power during the decades since Kirkpatrick’s speech has had its consequences. Relentless and hypercritical harping on the country’s flaws likely helped set the stage for Donald Trump’s ascendancy—especially among the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” who tend to think that America is still a pretty good place. The tendency to blame America first may now be taking a different kind of toll on the left itself. In the latest Gallup poll, only 24% of Democrats reported themselves “extremely proud” to be Americans, as opposed to 67% of Republicans.
In an age when national introspection abounds, will the left’s ingrained habit of finding the beam in America’s eye—and only America’s—finally summon scrutiny?
Ms. Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and author of “Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.” During the Reagan administration she served as a special assistant to Ambassador Kirkpatrick and a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff.
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