Gore Vidal: America at Last?

"It is very easy to discuss what has gone wrong with us. It is not so easy to discuss what should be done to correct what has gone wrong. It is absolutely impossible in our public discourse to discuss why so much has gone wrong and, indeed, has been wrong with us since the very beginning of the country, and even before that when our white tribes were living elsewhere. There are two subjects that we are not permitted to discuss with any seriousness — race and religion, and how our attitudes toward the first are rooted in the second. Since these two subjects are taboo, we are never able to get to the root of our problems. We are like people born in a cage and so unable to visualise beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That Opinion which the Few create in order to control the Many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate. Now things fall apart.
I am a radical reformer. The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonised by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favourably, much less track any problem to its root. But then a ruling class that was able to demonise the word ‘liberal’ in the last ten years is a master of controlling — indeed stifling — any criticism of itself. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis which means ‘pertaining to a free man’. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon. In this, as in so much else, J. Edgar Hoover was ahead of his time — he never ceased to denounce pseudo-liberals.
Meanwhile, the word ‘isolationist’ has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the national security state that replaced our republic a half-century ago while extending the American military empire far beyond our capacity to pay for it. The word ‘isolationist’ also has very sinister overtones. In the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, many Americans — and I was one — were isolationist. We thought that, as we had gained nothing from the First World War — except an erosion of our civil liberties and the prohibition of alcohol — why should we again help England and France against Germany? There is now a myth that the isolationists were pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic. This is nonsense. Practically every socialist in the country, starting with Norman Thomas, was an isolationist, while agrarian populists, like Senators Wheeler and Nye, tended to be wary of foreign wars and entanglements. Also, the only foreign power that we were hostile to — and feared — was Hitler’s enemy, the Soviet Union, the exporter of godless and atheistic communism. America Firsters ranged from the historian Charles Beard to the young Kingman Brewster, not to mention a brilliant young football coach at Yale, Gerald R. Ford. The pro-German anti-Semites were at home in the German-American Bund, not in the America First Committee. Hitler’s infamous final solution was not known as of 1940 and did not figure into the debate. As it turned out, no American majority ever favoured American intervention in the European war. Had the Japanese not been inspired — or, perhaps, incited — to attack us, we might never have gone to war at all.
In retrospect, I suspect that we should have supported the Allies with everything except troops. But I tend to be, consistently, a non-interventionist though hardly an isolationist in the new sense.
To call someone an isolationist today is to imply that he is probably an anti-Semite and certainly a simpleton who believes in retreating behind the walls of fortress America. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to isolate ourselves from our creditors. But the word has now been trotted out this year to describe the likes of Pat Buchanan who is — or was — causing great distress to the managers of our National Security State when he says that America must abandon the empire if we are ever to repair the mess at home. Also, as a neo-isolationist, Buchanan must be made to seem an anti-Semite."