THE END OF POLITICS?
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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
What effect will the end of the Cold War
have on the American character? I don't think America is naturally an
imperial power, unlike Britain and France, countries that sent their peo–
ple to the far corners of the world where they lived and created new so–
cieties. We have never really been a colonizing power. Americans never
even went to countries like the Philippines and Puerto Ricoin the way
that the British went to Kenya, or the French to Algeria. We prefer
America. We do not have the colonizing instinct, and therefore such as
we had in the way of empire was never anything like the classical em–
pires. At best, it was an empire by invitation, that is, other countries in
Europe and elsewhere wishing protection against Stalinism sought
Americans out.
So it is my impression that it is with a great sense of relief that the
Cold War came to an end. Most Americans want to bring the boys
home as quickly as possible, and to concentrate on dealing with our
own questions . People like Charles Krauthammer, who say that
Americans must rule the world, evoke very little response. Americans do
not want to rule the world. However, we are never again going to be
classical isolationists in the pre-Pearl Harbor sense; we are far too tied up
in the world for that. Moreover, our economy is far more vulnerable to
world economic currents than it ever was before. There is a world mar–
ket now, and we cannot subtract ourselves from it. So we're not going
to be isolationists, but we're not going to be an imperial power, and far
from this requiring a sense of dislocation, I think Americans are respond–
ing with a sense of relief
Daphne Merkin:
I just wanted to respond to something Professor
Schlesinger said. I think the ability to be comfortable as an imperial
power - or the ability to be comfortable with the notion of class - is a
condition that separates America from Britain and France. This is not a
country that, in my experience, has ever been comfortable with the no–
tion of class; it became no more comfortable with the notion of class
during the egalitarian sixties, up on through the elitist Reagan years. It
struck me, watching the three presidential fellows debating with elabo–
rate casualness on television last night, that in the end Bush's failure to
embrace a woman from the audience, who asked a not entirely coherent
question (in which she confused the deficit with the recession), lost him
an enormous amount of what I suppose would be called populist sup–
port. In other words, his inability to descend from his own patrician
heights and demonstrate any, at least any telegenic, understanding of the
plight of the middle and lower classes is costing him votes on the sublim–
inal as well as the manifest level. Whether that is any reflection on Bush's
