In his latest book, "American Vertigo," French author Bernard-Henri Lévy retraces Alexis de Tocqueville's journey through America. He spoke with Elise Soukup.
You're a self-titled "anti-anti-American." Is that still true?
What I was before, I am still. It is like in life when you know someone better: you know his dark side and his bad habits, but it doesn't mean that you like him less.
—Elise Soukup, "Fast Chat: Road Trip," Newsweek, January 23, 2006
A half-forgotten tradition on the English left looked to America rather than Russia as the land of the revolution and the hope of the toilers. ...
Orwell showed no sign, even given his interest in the lost world of the pamphlet and of the political eccentric, of any awareness of this tradition. The most that can be said is that he was anti-anti-American, and often criticized anti-American propaganda in London for what it was. The most celebrated example is his response to the fellow-travelling whisper that American troops in wartime Britain were really there in order to act as strikebreakers; he commented crisply that only an intellectual could believe anything so stupid.
—Christopher Hitchens, "What would they think of the 90s?," American Enterprise, November 1, 1999
Earlier this week, a small group of French intellectuals tried to counter the tide, warning against excessive anti-Americanism.
But Toubon, in a speech Wednesday, mockingly dismissed "the snobbery of anti-anti-Americanism."
—David Crary, "U.S. Blockbuster Opens in France Amid Trans-Atlantic Film War," The Associated Press, October 20, 1993
If this term is popular today, it's likely because
The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik used it in a much-cited essay not long ago:
Far more lucid and arresting, and just as likely to sell books and get attention, are the views of the anti-anti-Americans—that small but loud bunch of philosophers and journalists who share the American conviction that September 11th was an epoch-marking event, and that how open societies react to it will help determine how open they get to remain.
—Adam Gopnik, "The Anti-Anti-Americans," The New Yorker, September 1, 2003
