Lost in America

...I am sure American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville by Bernard-Henri Ldvy (RANDOM HOUSE, 300 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by Daniel Johnson that was meant as a compliment, but ought a philosopher re ally to crave attention for everything he does...

...Well, industrial decline hits cities pretty hard everywhere...

...Can the same be said of Europe...

...Even though they chat quite amicably, this strikes Lfivy as a portent...

...and prophet: we have no equivalent in the United States...

...Unlike Europeans, however, Americans are not content to be history...

...Tobe fair to Ldvy, he is not just a posturing lightweight, but a leader of the nouveaux philosophes who, in the early 1970s, rejected the Marxist consensus and championed thinkers such as Tocqueville-then seen as a "old-fashioned, hiccupping aristocrat," a "boring, reactionary public intellectual," as Ldvy puts it...

...His book belongs to an entirely different genre from Tocqueville's:American Vertigo is a journalistic travelogue, not a serious work of political science, sociology, or philosophy...

...That is an outrageous slur on a conspicuously independent-minded thinker, who has often been highly critical of the Bush administration...

...Though he has chosen to follow Tocqueville's example by studying Americans through the unflattering prism of their prisons, he is forced to conclude that these are not really much worse than those in France...

...Americans are too rich, too poor, too greedy, too generous, too religious, too materialistic, too old, too young, too disaffected, too patriotic...

...Nothing wrong with travel books, of course, except when they claim a kinship to which they are not entitled...

...Norman Mailer condescends to receive him at his house in Cape Cod, but is evidently bored and eager to get back to his writing...

...And talking of the far right, which country chose JeanMarie Le Pen to contest the run-off for the presidency with Jacques Chirac...

...It is a question that is still pertinent, though L~vy is not quite brave enough to ask it...

...This is in part a matter of literary style...

...The trouble is that L~vy so often lives down to his national stereotype...

...But he takes as his source, not one of the legions who have actually known the President, but, of all people, Sidney Blumenthal...

...When he is ushered into the presence he likes what he sees: "a European at heart," but too nice a guy to win against Bush, the "childlike archdemagogue who happens to be president...

...they still want to make it...

...What-doesn't he ever go to the bathroom...

...L~vy rejects the demonization of the neocons in Europe, but he doesn't care for any of them except Fukuyama: both speak fluent Hegelian, and both opposed the Iraq war...

...Yet Ldvy's unquestioning equation of "European" with "civilized" leads him to draw unconsciously comical conclusions...

...L~vy knows better than most how generations of Prench intellectuals have made themselves willing tools of totalitarian tyranny, but his comparison with the deliberately counter-cultural phenomenon of American neoconservatism is entirely false...

...Tocqueville's work is deservedly a classic-the "greatest book ever written about a developing country," in the words of Paul 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Wolfowitz...

...But if one is to produce a book as substantial as Democracy in America, then you probably do have to be boring and old-fashioned sometimes...

...Take L6vy's account of"sex in America," based on a nightclub in Las Vegas and an out-of-town brothel...

...From this circumstance he advances the thesis that in America"a certain sentiment (essential to Europe's civility, consubstantial with Europe's urbanity) is perhaps on the verge of vanishing: a love of cities...

...Clinton "might well one day enter the White House" just because Americans would enjoy the spectacle of her entering the scene of her humiliation...

...And that would be unthinkable for a dandy such as BHL...

...During the presidential campaign he spends a long night with the rest of the press on John Kerry's plane, but poor L6vy nearly doesn't get his interview with the great man because the minders don't want the voters to be reminded of Kerry's French connection...

...Our author succumbs to the pathetic fallacy that the heavens have voted Republican: "It's the whole Clinton era, his 'legacy,' which suddenly seems altered by the reflected light of this gloomy, twilit, graceless day...

...He describes George W. Bush as "a provincial narcissist and a frustrated dilettante," "born to lose...

...L I~VY, RATHER, IDENTIFIES WITH the American liberal establishment...

...Would that be the same European heritage from which the United States had to save France three times in the last century...

...How recently has he visited the rust belts of post-Communist Central Europe--or the suburbs of Paris, for that matter...

...This elegy for a lost liberalism reaches its climax when L6vy attends the opening ceremony for Bill Clinton's library, and sees the ex-president surrounded by two generations of Bushes...

...It is not only a portrait of the United States at a particular moment of its history, but also an attempt to identify the "indispensable" principles "without which any republic will soon cease to exist," as he wrote in 1848, by which time Europe was convulsed in revolution...

...Well, whatever else LdW may be-philosopher, novelist, TV personality, film director, diplomat-he is no Tocqueville...

...Having assumed, like most Europeans, that the United States is a nation of ghettos, he is obliged to acknowledge the "fine American lesson" in integration of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan, and contrasts their success and eagerness to emulate the American Jews with the failure of France to integrate its own Muslims over a much longer period...

...The tlantic Monthly commissions Bernard-Henri L4W, _9 the leading French intellectual of our day, to follow in _9 the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville andwrite a series of articles about the condition of the United States, Random House makes a book out of them, and-hey ~ presto!--a new Democracy in America...

...62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006...

...To invite comparisons between American Vertigo and Democracy in America, as Ldvy in all seriousness does, is unfair to both books...

...But the results are disappointing...

...Finally, Vanity Fair: "Superman Daniel Johnson is a writer in London...

...The cities of Buffalo and Detroit are, he observes, "dead," by which he means that there is "not a single good restaurant to dine in...

...But prostitution is a mercenary business wherever you go, and the hygienic regulations that disgust L~vy are necessarily ubiquitous nowadays...

...Air Force is not imperialistic, or that the poor in the United States do indeed have access to social security...

...He fantasizes that Mrs...

...Ignorance in a traveler is nothing to be ashamed of, provided it is accompanied by humility, but here there is always the same tone of Old World arrogance in the presence of the unfamiliar, a petulant impatience with "this society's profound evolution toward the far right, definitively turning its back on its European heritage...

...He has more luck with Christopher Hitchens, with whom he spends an anarchic evening: first they heckle a Henry Kissinger lecture and succeed in getting themselves ejected, then Hitchens himself is subjected to hostile interrogation by students for supporting the Iraq war...

...Yet L6vy does not despair of the United States, which is really very generous of him in the light of its un-European excesses...

...Bernard-Henri LdW does nothing that goes unnoticed," declares the New York Times...

...No, thank God: the absence of intellectuals who think they are supermen is not the least of America's advantages over France...

...His attempt to make heroes out of the liberal elite is sometimes comic...

...Tocqueville's motive for writing De la Ddmocratie en Amdrique was not only curiosity about America but anxiety about what the forces unleashed by the French Revolution were doing to Europe...

...Tocqueville thought that America showed Europe the future of mankind...

...More promising than this squalid voyeurism are L6vy's encounters with policy intellectuals: Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Samuel Huntingdon, Francis Fukuyama...

...This investigation purports to demonstrate "the wretchedness of Eros in the land of the Puritans," the ultimate proof of which is that the whorehouse has an ATM and the whore has a price list...

...L6vy offers no reason to doubt that America's best days are still ahead...

...By framing every other paragraph in the form of long sequences of rhetorical questions, which he naturally does not bother to answer, L~vy likes to give an impression of omniscience...

...The French obsession with sex, for instance...

...True, he disagrees with his own countrymen about the United States, and American Vertigo is in part a response to the recent wave of anti-Americanism that has swept over continental Europe, and France in particular...

...His favorite American city, he says, is Seattle: the best-known but by no means only boomtown of the microchip revolution...

...Finding a "cartload of filth and accusation that presents itself as an article" about Bill Clinton's women in the Weekly Standard, he decides that its editor, Kristol, has compromised his integrity and betrayed the republic of letters...

...He speaks of an American "descent into Hell," by which he means the temporary marginalization of his liberal friends...

...His other masterpiece, L'Ancien Rdgime et la Bevolution, begins by asking: "Has France exercised a salutary or a fatal influence on the destiny of mankind in our day...

...And he is constantly wrong-footed by the America he thought he knew...

...But the whole thing is a nostalgic and slightly absurd self-indulgence by two prosperous, middle-aged ex-radicals...

...The liberal press anyway thinks he is something much grander, and theyvie for superlatives to describe him...

...Must they, too, join the celebrity culture...

...APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 BOOKS IN REVIEW I T IS HARD FOR LI~VY TO FORGET his patrie, though...

...Curiously, Ldvy does not ask why there are no Seattles in France...

...The Washington Post goes one better: "There is no theatrical American philosopher who manages Ldvy's blend of glamour, literacy and political engagement...

...Invited (by Tins Brown, bien sdw) to an event at which Hillary Clinton is speaking, L~vy can think of only one thing: her husband's adultery with Monica Lewinskyin the Oval Office...

...Then something far worse happens: it rains...

...And he's a sucker for clich&s himself, too...

...He is no less astonished to discover t h a t - c o n t r a r y to the received wisdom in France--the ethos of the United States Army, Navy, and He is astonished, for instance, when an American Christian he meets turns out not to be a reactionary fundamentalist, but a "European" kind of guy who rejects urban secular culture and morality in favor of home schooling...

...But L~vy makes no attempt to apply the lessons he has learned from America to Europe...

...But is theatricality and glamour what philosophers are for...

...L l~VY RARELY IF EVER MENTIONS what he's supposed to know about, philosophy, but instead pretends to possess knowledge or insight about matters of which he is almost entirely ignorant, from quail shooting to lap-dancing...

...He is astonished, for instance, when an American Christian he meets turns out not to be a reactionary fundamentalist, but a"European" kind ofguywho rejects urban secular culture and moralityin favor of home schooling...

...Americans are too rich, too poor, too greedy, too generous, too religious, too materialistic, too old, too young, too disaffected, too patriotic...