We bemoaned the Holocaust, which is to say we bemoaned the cruelties of others; we were enjoined to struggle against racism, which is to say to struggle against the racism of others. We were called to play a certain role, which was to improve other people. This was a kind of mission civilisatrice. It was taken for granted that our values were improving values, and in our defence, I think that these values – democracy, equality, freedom – were good values. The question was whether we were the right people to defend them, whether the United States, through its behaviour in the world, displayed any belief in those values. We didn’t ask. We knew Americans were better.
There was no clash between American exceptionalism and Jewish moral superiority. We did not look too closely at these assumptions, and neither did we wonder what might be lost when we abandoned our oppositional stance. For so long, the Jews’ insistence on clinging to their uniqueness made other people uncomfortable. It was a position that African-Americans never lost because they were never allowed to. America let the Jews lose it. We were happy to oblige, including because we had forgotten what made us unique in the first place.
American exceptionalism, Jewish moral superiority: maybe that was what made that building, when I saw it again many years later, look like an ambassador from another galaxy. It would have been hard for me to imagine, when I was a 13-year-old watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on CNN, how completely those beliefs would crumble. Oh, how sincerely, how naturally we believed. And oh, how touching and dumb it seems to me now that we believed it, that we – our class, our nation – were a powerful force for good! Oh, how we believed – when I write this, I am translating from wedges of Akkadian cuneiform – that all of history had tended, inexorably, toward us!
To have the mask torn off, slowly, year by year; to realise the cruelty and the vacuity of the old order: it was a maddening experience. It is cruel to have one’s belief in progress taken away: the belief in our own superiority, the belief in our own philanthropic approach to the rest of the world, the belief that one’s own ideas were the best ideas. People younger than I am, who have no recollection of that time of belief in our moral excellence, cannot know the confused outrage that came when it was stripped away. The nihilism, the desire of younger people to demolish the old order: I understood it.
At the same time, did we not know that America was a great empire? Did we not understand that what kept the roof over its head was the tremendous violence it wielded against anyone who opposed it? Imperial powers can weather even the most crushing military defeats. They can be diminished. They almost always revive eventually, but in those defeats, in that imperial retreat: what happens to the minorities who tie their fates too closely to those empires?