Good piece in the Times the other day by Michael Gove about left anti-Americanism and Blair’s problem in addressing this in the Labour Party. However I have my doubts about one element of Gove’s arguement:
Why then do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold? Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people, embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what anti-Americanism is now.
An American friend, with tongue in cheek, asks if this makes him politically Jewish, in the way that some claimed in the 1980’s that the Irish were politically black?
