This seems a fairly clear example. The post has apparently given rise to skepticism, given its anecdotal nature and the context wherein it first appeared. No doubt counter-anecdotes could easily be produced. When the author says ‘The English are not known for public displays of fury except perhaps at soccer matches, but there is something about an American accent that brings out their pent-up rage’ I can only plead blank non-recognition, and reply ‘nope, not me’. The portrait of repressed hatreds stewing silently and erupting in ugly eccentric rage seems as stereotypical a portrait of Englishness as you’ll find. But anyway, this is the nature of such material – it is unverifiable and relies upon internal consistency of tone and pre-agreement with the reader’s assumptions. But whether the anecdote is representative or unrepresentative, literally true, fanciful embellishment or pure invention, it nonetheless makes, ‘en passant’, an obvious point i.e., when the author asks “Does anyone say ‘George W Bush’ or ‘Donald Rumsfeld’ or Dick Cheney’ when they fly into these tirades?” she draws attention to the folly of conflating the actions of Bush et al with ‘America’ per se.
It is perhaps ironic that Bush himself would want to make this conflation; ironic, also, that this is precisely the conflation frequently made by those who accuse others of ‘anti-Americanism’. A colleague tells me of a video made by one of his students ostensibly about ‘Anti-Americanism’ in the U.K. The video consists of footage of anti-war protestors juxtaposed with tracking footage of acres of MacDonald’s, Burger King and other U.S. companies. It illustrates, suggests the student, British hypocrisy in simultaneously hating and loving ‘America’. Meanwhile, a protest against the Iraq war in France can be lazily referred to as an ‘anti-American’ demonstration at the consistently puerile ‘No Pasaran’ site. Elsewhere, in a discussion at Crooked Timber, criticisms of Starbucks were taken to be ‘really about’ attitudes to ‘America’. Such examples are utterly quotidian, routine, legion*.
Anyway, it seems obvious to me that enjoying burgers and protesting at what you consider to be an imperialist war are two different things, and not two ways of relating to a single abstraction called ‘America’. It seems to me that one really can object, genuinely, to inferior coffee and to the homogenization of our city-space without this 'intending' some ulterior or master referent. An American, conversely, can like fish and chips but hate cricket, hate Labour and love the Beatles. They are not entertaining tortured, contradictory attitudes towards “Englishness’. The substantial empirical thing really can be enjoyed or opposed in its own right and is not simply the bearer of some abstraction, although there are understandable and vested reasons why things are seen this way, and it is these vested reasons that need to be cleared away.
In fact the Anti-Americans and those who casually use the term ‘Anti-American’ are joined by a common error, a common inadmissible conflation. They make some particular object or attitude stand for the empty universality of ‘America’. It is noticeable that only certain things are conflated with “America’, nailed to this ‘master signifier’. Not jazz or the American novel, not the American Trade Union tradition, not New York or Abstract Expressionism and so on and so forth (see Arundhati Roy, below). You can love all these things, but be accused of ‘anti-Americanism’ if you then criticize the actions of a government who failed even to win the popular vote. I recall somebody making the above point, I forget where, but they mentioned the novels of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin; they mentioned Langston Hughes and the Beat poets and a myriad of other things that they loves even as they opposed the war. The reply, quite strikingly, was that non of the things she had mentioned were quintessentially ‘American’ – she had named fringe or oppositional phenomenon. The Republican tradition, on the other hand, was a central part of ‘American tradition’ and if you hated it then it followed that you hated America. This is transparently political of course. Ultimately, we are talking here about hegemony. It is hegemony which attempts to attach some particular content (eg The Republican tradition) to some abstraction, some ‘master signifier’ like America. It is the hegemonic operation which says if you hate x then you hate America (or whatever) or, alternatively, if you hate America you hate Freedom , which tries to make the identification between the master signifier and the particular content indissoluble, self-evident. As Zizek puts it:
Each apparently universal ideological notion [e.g. ‘America’ ‘The Left’] is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency.
In the ‘Starbucks’ discussion alluded to above, the reason that someone scrambled to defend a multi-national profit making organization as though she had something personally at stake was that for her Starbucks was a signifier of America and she was American – hey presto, successful ideological interpellation. Elsewhere, in what may or may not have been intended as a joke, I read that to be ‘anti-American’ was in fact to be ‘anti-goodness’, simple as that. This and other cases of ideological misrecognition are, as I say, utterly commonplace and pass without comment.
And in the case of ‘anti-Americanism’, the ideological twist is particularly pronounced. Nobody can seriously maintain that 'Anti-American' is typically a neutral and descriptive term. Anti-American and ‘Un-American’ have, historically, been used, often fairly self-consciously, to exclude from reasonable debate certain radical points of view. If someone’s point of view is ‘Anti-American’ then it ceases to be an argument and becomes the manifestation of a syndrome. It is therefore in accordance with obvious political interests to equate certain particular contents with master signifiers like ‘America’, precisely in order to foreclose debate. At the same time, the force of anti-American relies on numerous illegitimate conflations of ‘America’ with, variously goodness, Freedom, the actions of a particular government, the actions of certain corporations and so on. ‘America’ itself is little more than an empty signifier that gets charged with competing particular contents for competing strategic ideological reasons.
One only has to contrast ‘Anti-American’ with ostensibly comparable terms, such as Anti-French to see that it functions in a different way. It seems obvious that when someone in Texas empties a bottle of French wine into the gutter in protest at a decision taken by Chirac and his cabinet that they are being ‘anti-French’ – a term which of course has neither the currency or the resonance of ‘Anti-American’ for reasons which lie wholly outside semantics. A term like 'anti-French,' or 'Anti-English' even, has none of the weight of ‘anti-American’. It has no force, rings hollow, and lacks resonance and consolidation within the culture at large. It is this cultural and political context which is the life support system for the phrase and which cannot simply be got round or ignored.
As you might expect Chomsky has a take on the ideology of ‘Anti-American’:
"Anti-Americanism" (equivalently "the left," or "Marxists") is defined by the author [ Paul Hollander's Anti-Americanism ] as "a generally critical disposition toward existing social arrangements," the "cultural belief" that "this is a severely flawed and possibly doomed society, though still a menace to its citizens and humanity." Kondracke agrees that "the left gets more respect and attention in the news media than its ideas merit," and is "strongly influential" in colleges and the church. But all is not lost: "there is not a single Marxist or `anti-American' major daily newspaper (or even major newspaper columnist) in the country" and the dangerous "mainline churches" are losing membership. Fortunately, those with "a generally critical disposition toward existing social arrangements" are almost entirely barred, though we must keep up our guard in case the heresy finds a tiny outlet.
As with much Chomsky, this has about it more than a soupcon of strategic provocation. One only has to imagine the stuttering apoplexy, the indignant rage of a Kamm to relish the force of Chomsky’s remark. Seriously, though, is it not astonishing that ‘Anti-American' can be defined as ‘a generally critical disposition toward existing social arrangements, ” which is to say synonymous with radical questioning and thinking as such. How convenient.
*In fact, this idea that America is the object of simultaneous envy and hatred is itself little more than an 'ideologeme'. This look of envy-longing represents the gaze as fantasy object, this gaze of envy-longing is an object of desire, the gaze in which we - Americans - appear as we would like to be.
Some related thoughts can be found in this article by Arundhati Roy.