Rethinking anti-Americanism

"There are two ways to write about the history of anti-Americanism. Until now, many scholars -- the "anti-anti-Americans" -- have taken the term at face value and assembled catalogues of published statements exhibiting animosity towards the United States. These histories often convey the impression of continuity, consistency, and consensus, so that they in effect present a single, transnational tradition of anti- Americanism. From Enlightenment philosophers deriding the New World's climate, to Latin American nationalists blaming U.S. imperialism for all their countries' ills, we are invited to contemplate an apparently unbroken chain of irrational hostility, an enduring ideological mindset with a long pedigree. Anti-Americanism, in the conventional approach, is understood as an obsessive and particular hatred of the United States, expressed in exaggerated language, and traceable to a fundamental hostility toward democracy, freedom, and modernity"--