Explaining American Hypocrisy

Abstract

America’s power position in the world – although less unchallenged than it once was, or perhaps because of that – has made it especially susceptible to hypocrisy and collective self-delusion, to what the Greeks called hubris; this continues to lead its foreign policy into unanticipated disasters. The syndrome is discussed with special reference to the Ukraine crisis of 2014, although the morass of American policy in the Middle East would yield even more dramatic examples. Norbert Elias’s theory of established–outsider relationships is deployed in understanding how the USA relates to the rest of the world, together with Elias’ idea of the duality of normative codes in nation states. The formation of we-images and associated we-feelings, based on a highly selective ‘minority of the best’, feeds into a collective self-stereotype of unquestioned virtue and self-righteousness on the part of the more powerful party to a conflict. The formation of exaggerated they-images of other players, based on a ‘minority of the worst’, is a complementary part of the process. But the process also leads to a neglect of the corresponding negative they-images of the USA (and its allies) that are formed on the side of the weaker outsider groups – and this neglect becomes especially dangerous as the outsiders gradually become relatively more powerful