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Martin Summers
posted 6 March 2007

Bernard Henri-Levy, France's most prominent public intellectual, author of over thirty books, and a regular commentator in the US media, sets up American Vertigo: On the Road from Newport to Guantanamo, as a modern take on Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which is still widely cited in American academia and public life as one of the most insightful journeys into the nature of American society and character.

Like De Tocqueville, Henri-Levy (popularly known as 'BHL') examines America by taking the reader on a journey of his own, encountering people and places he hopes will lend new insight into a country that continues to represent, as he often suggests, a profound break with European traditions, institutions and sensibilities concerning everything from commerce and religion, to sex and politics. The last 70 of 380 pages consist of reflections, often differing considerably in tone, and conclusions from the 'on-the road' entries in BHL's journal of impressions of his travels.

The book offers itself to be appraised from two angles, then: as an insightful travelogue from a self-consciously European or, rather, French, perspective, and as an attempt to come to terms with America and all it stands for, particularly on the left, as an embodiment of hyperactive, 'liquid capitalism', with systems and people barely rooted to time, place, community, soil or history. 'America' has supplanted 'the city' as the focus of fear and loathing in the centuries-old critique, described so well by Ian Buruma as 'Occidentalism', of modernism, of soulless rationality, commerce and rootless cosmopolitanism.

American Vertigo disappoints as a modern Democracy in America, but it is fascinating and extremely valuable as a disarmingly honest and astute discussion of the left's relationship with America. As a travelogue, it is all too predictable in its comments and schedule: Las Vegas, Nevada brothels, megamalls, megachurches, New Orleans, several prisons (reflecting a traditional misplaced conviction on the left that places of incarceration give some of the truest insights into a society), gun fairs, and obesity. Nonetheless, it says a lot about Bernard Henri-Levy's careful, considered eye, present and interesting in so much of the book, that he is actually very astute about the invention of obesity, the process by which being fat was redefined as a disease, and restrains himself from the usual clichés about fat Americans.

What he does do with the concept of obesity and its potential for metaphor, however, reveals an all-too-prevalent desire to indulge in some frankly ridiculous 'intellectual' pyrotechnics and overblown generalising. In an absurd page-long paragraph, he runs amok with obesity as a constant theme or metaphor in America: the obesity of airports, SUVs, churches, even parking lots:

The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today. Large is beautiful, it repeats over and over again in a kind of hysterical reversal of the 1960s slogan. A global, total obesity that spares no realm of life, public or private. An entire society that, from the top down, from one end to the other, seems prey to this obscure derangement that slowly causes an organism to swell, overflow, explode.

There are many other such flourishes, which nonetheless do little to detract from his much more quiet and nuanced reflections on American life and politics. Some parts of the book read like the prompts or transcripts of a flamboyant lecturer and television interviewer (he is both); other, far better sections read like the long and hard reflections of a thinker of great integrity, who often checks himself after paragraphs of unsurprising critique, pausing to say, no: perhaps here I have been wrong to indulge the clichéd critiques, that this is in fact is a better way of doing things, of approaching the world.

BHL's discussion of neoconservatism is particularly telling. He meets Richard Perle, widely viewed as the 'prince of darkness' and arch-(Bond) villain of neoconservatism (think Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever). Levy's internal dialogue about his meeting is revealing about the left's problem with neoconservatism, at heart it often being less a problem of policy or indeed ideology than of sensibility, history, and the neocons coarseness and lack of reticence in articulating and advocating often harsh policies and brutal truths. Tellingly, the writing and speaking style of neocons is very different; they typically prefer short and blunt sentences to the endlessly qualified page-long paragraphs beloved of so many academics - and certainly Levy - particularly those who endlessly worry, without conclusion, in contemplating 'problematics'. One could say that the left is, far too often, paralysed by a 'problematic' world; the right, at least in its neocon guise, typically welcomes any problem as begging a (market-based) solution.

Sometimes, I say to myself, of course he's right. How can one be against the overthrow of such a tyrant? How can one spend a lifetime, as I have done, deploring the inaction of rich countries, their pusillanimity, their recurrent Munichism, when faced with enemies bent on destroying them, and willing to try anything to acquire the means of doing so, and not be delighted when in the most powerful democracy in the world there finally appears a generation of intellectuals who arrive close to the top and can concretely work for the universalisation of human rights and freedom?

But then, at other times, I catch a word, an intonation, an off-hand phrase, implying that the actual presence or absence in Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction isn't so important after all. Or I hear a dismissal of people who, like me, recoil from the idea of a preventive war. I hear them bluntly compared to a man who 'waits till he's sick to sign up for health insurance'. He goes on in a similar vein, even managing to mention Althusser's strangulation of his wife, before his portentous final words of defiance and exhalation: 'So I swing to the other side; I rear back internally; I tell myself that this man and I surely don't belong to the same family.
This is where I stand.

BHL displays great respect, even affinity for Perle, and admiration for Francis Fukayama, engaging with both seriously and considering them worthy of engagement by a fellow serious intellectual like himself. He is, however, curtly dismissive of Bill Kristol, editor of the influential neocon magazine The Weekly Standard, as one would imagine Melvyn Bragg - similar in gaze and air to Levy - to be, compelled to interview an irritating minor author. He ends his account of his meeting with Kristol with a wonderful piece of self-flattering pomposity, describing the man as, 'An antitotalitarian who, at bottom, and whatever he may say, hasn't read enough Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Julien Benda - and who, not having done so, deprives himself of the necessary freedom that the status of intellectual induces in France.'

Vertigo ultimately works best as a thought-provoking companion piece to Nick Cohen's What's Left? How Liberals Lost their Way and Paul Berman's more academic Power and the Idealists, both of which look at how the left addresses its own recent history and relationship to power, and both of which (like the Euston Manifesto) try to rearticulate a tradition of anti-totalitarianism, in its broadest sense, as the best basis for giving the left a positive agenda and policy programme for change, rescuing it from a culture dominated by protest and opposition. (Levy is saddened that he can't recall one person on his journey who represents, 'the idea we might have of an enlightened, anti-totalitarian, modern left.')

BHL's uneasiness with the neocons reflects Berman's contrast between key people on the left (the 1968 generation of streetfighters and protestors) who were willing to accept the compromises of power and politics in order to achieve their ideals in reality, and those who were not. (As has often been remarked, most neocons and supporters of the war on the left in Europe were and are idealists, however mistaken.) Rather charitably, he concludes:

The problem with neoconservatives is not, as Europeans think, their lack of moral centre or cynicism. On the contrary, it's the victory of mysticism over politics. They're noble spirits who don't do enough politics.

BHL is also surprisingly good on religion in America; at least appreciating that the journey to secularism there - understood as the separation of church and state - did not need Americans to 'separate from anything. The wall of separation, to speak like Jefferson, was raised from the beginning. They were born secular, whereas we French had to become it.'

It is in the final pages that he seems to put much of his distaste (rarely loathing) for much of what he finds in America to one side, to deliver some fierce punches to anyone on the European left reading this book for comfort, hoping it might be another, albeit occasionally more sympathetic, damning critique of America. He is relentless and remarkably blunt in attacking, over several pages, some of the prejudices of a left whose anti-imperialism only focuses on the US as an imperialist power.

Fact: The Americans, in the course of their history, have been infinitely less colonial than the English, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, of course, the Russians.
Fact: America's power, that notorious and satanic superpower that we in Europe tend to perceive as the result of a shady scheme, is, always or almost always, the fruit of our European shortcomings, the price of our renunciations, our failures.

BHL concludes thus:

you can no longer say either that it [America] is the malignant nucleus of empire or that it is the empire of evil; or else, yes, you may well say so, but if you do, then you'll need to resign yourself to nothing whatsoever about empire, evil and America.

In the end, one cannot help but conclude gratefully that Levy's project here is less about exposing America than interrogating a left that, for the most part, still has not come to terms with America, and remains reluctant to accept and indeed embrace some of its most noble and successful elements, in an attempt to develop a new, more positive agenda that remains distinctly European in outlook and sensibility.

Martin Summers organised last autumn's Battle of Ideas debate on religion.