Victor Davis Hanson ponders for National Review Online readers the fascination among elites for those who spout the most virulent anti-American sentiments.
For a number of years into the Cold War, American presidents were occasionally troubled by the paradox that a democratic United States was supporting right-wing anti-Communist dictatorships abroad. Either Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson — or all of them — was supposed to have scoffed, in response to objections, something like the following, “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard.”
That realist cynicism has more or less remained the same. But now the ideology has flipped. Currently, the more that authoritarian thugs abroad position themselves as anti-American, the more that we seem to glamorize them. The new presidential sarcasm is, in effect, “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s an anti-American bastard.”
One of the most peculiar pathologies of Western elites is carrying on this apparent romance with non-Westerners who dislike the West, while spurning those who admire it. The feminist pro-Western critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was recently disinvited from speaking at Brandeis University. Earlier, Columbia University had welcomed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an unhinged anti-Jewish and anti-American theocrat. Apparently hating America made Ahmadinejad the more interesting speaker; liking America made Hirsi Ali suspect and certainly less romantically revolutionary. How odd that for campus communities, being the victim of forced genital mutilation makes one less sympathetic than a man who had ordered the deaths of female supposed adulteresses.
In the spring of 2009, Iranians said to be numbering a million demonstrated against the illiberal theocracy in their country. Yet President Obama largely ignored the protesters, who were demanding free and fair elections. Dealing with the messy Green Revolution advocates of democracy apparently wasn’t as inviting an opportunity for Obama to showcase his multicultural diplomatic dexterity as would have been dealing with the previously recalcitrant Khomeinists. When Obama has gone out his way to reach out to autocratic theocrats, he seems to have believed that their anti-Americanism must be proof of the true aspirations of the Iranian people.
