Philip Roth's The Counterlife features a type of conflict that, however prominent in today's geopolitics, never really takes on in its distilled form the tabloid luster of certain Americans' little wars with Islam in certain parts of Manhattan. One of Roth's characters is an ethnically Jewish, non-religious American dentist from New Jersey who decides at midlife to leave his family and move to a desert settlement in Israel to take up the cause of militant Zionism. The conflict that emerges between Roth's born-again Zionist and his older brother, also American-born and non-religious, and very happy to stay that way, is profound: for the Zionist brother, it is impossible to be an authentic Jew in America, or anywhere else outside of Israel; a diaspora Jew is no Jew at all. For the older brother, the battle for Jewish consciousness and Jewish identity can be just as real in America as it is for the Zionist in war-torn Israel; and the preferred victor in both regards is the tolerant, pluralist, nonviolent American Jew, rather than the Zionist Jew who understands the very core of Jewishness as as a bloody struggle against Arabs and other Gentile forms for a specifically Jewish state. At the heart of such a conflict is the question of whether American pluralism can adequately protect historically persecuted groups like the Jews, the question of whether a tolerant and pluralist society is really possible in a balkanized and conflict-ridden world. The question can be put more succinctly: is collective identity possible?
To pretend that America's ongoing conflict with militant Islam--and the ways in which such a conflict seeps into our personal and political dealings with non-militant Islam--has nothing to do with America's geopolitical relationship with Israel, and bears no analogical relationship to militant Zionism, is a seeming impossibility. Yet this is what we do, what our politicians do, what our media do, day after day. Make no mistake about it, however: the battle that rages in the Middle East between militant Arabs and militant Jews--a battle whose residue seeps into the personal and political dealings with non-militant Arabs and non-militant Jews in the Middle East--has everything to do with the interest of Islamic militants in the destruction of America, the American wars in the Middle East, and, in no small way, the series of racial and ethnic conflicts in America that are tearing at America from all ends. Here in America, as there in the Middle East, it is pointless and outright bigoted to blame the Arabs or the Jews. If you seek a culprit for all of this material and symbolic destruction and misery, that culprit lies somewhere along the fault line of this great conflict between collective and singular identity.
For the most part, Americans may not be throwing stones from tenement buildings at each others' cars, or policing the Mason-Dixon line with loaded assault rifles. There is no missile mounted in Tempe and pre-programed for Guadalajara, and there isn't likely to be one. But two things inflame this American struggle between collective and singular identity, and have been doing so for a long time now.
From the American left we have a crude, racialized brand of identity politics that virtually ignores ethnic distinctions and places the most prominent American races (white, Hispanic, black, Asian) in opposition to one another (and to the exclusion of all others). It then places 'whites' and 'minorities' in opposition to one another. As a consequence, the meaningful ethnic values and experiences of all Americans are generally subordinated to vague racial categories that are over-vulnerable to crude stereotypical definition and racial in-fighting. While these racial categories afford high levels of solidarity and political agency in some cases, in others they force people to sacrifice important aspects of their ethnic cultural background and upbringing in exchange for political visibility.
Though 'white' political visibility is justifiably less important than minority political visibilities because of the historical, and in many senses enduring, privileges of those Americans constituted as a 'white' majority, 'whiteness' is not immune from identity crisis under such a system. While 'white' identity is largely conceived of as contemporary Anglo-Protestant identity (see the bestselling 'Stuff White People Like,' based on the blog), first-, second- and third-generation 'white' Americans hailing from the massive waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants to America in the 20th century are no more comfortable being thought of as 'the same' as would be a Korean-American presumed Japanese or an Afro-Caribbean American presumed Sudanese. As we've seen recently, a number of fearful, often under-educated 'white' Americans have lashed out against 'Muslims,' 'foreigners,' 'Mexicans,' 'illegal aliens,' 'anchor babies,' etc. in racially charged ways, prompting media commentators to consider the possibility that this tide of fear and aggression has something to do with the election of a 'black' president, a symbol of 'nonwhite' power during a time in which American racial and ethnic demographics are shifting. If there is anything to such a theory, it's quite possible that those 'whites' who are either flatly bigoted or simply ill-equipped to make sense of pluralist values and to understand racial, ethnic, and religious difference are feeling particularly embattled about their constitution as ethnically mislabled or non-labeled, blank, blanco, and are adopting a particular (and particularly xenophobic) 'American' identity in opposition to the racialized minority. To put it simply, many 'white' Americans don't know what they hell they are or are supposed to be within this prevailing system of racializing Americans, so are deciding that to be white is to be American, to be American is to be white. Now this twisted indignation wells up in anti-historical, sentimentalist rants about the 'loss of America,' the 'end of our country,' the horror of 'Obama's America,' held in opposition to 'my America,' 'my ['white'] America.' 'I'll take my guns, money, religion, and freedom, and you can keep the 'change.''
Now we begin to understand the challenge to American pluralism launched from the American right: American history is revised such that 'America' has always been a particular thing not entirely different from the Zionist Jewish utopia...only the Protestant Christian version. 'American' values therefore proceed from a narrow set of Anglo-Protestant ethnic values. An 'American' is not a Muslim or a Jew or a homosexual or even a Catholic. 'American' governance is based on the pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps Protestant ethic, hence social welfare programs are 'un-American.' 'American' governments are to be as small as possible, but may become large and sprawling to defend the 'American' interest abroad in military conflict. 'America' is a nation under [Protestant] God; and because God gave 'Americans' animals to eat and oil to burn, concerning oneself with the rights of animals that don't bark or meow or the reduction of un-clean energy use for the sake of the environment and/or the climate are also 'un-American.' This is a crude picture, yes. But each of these positions, typically taken by the American right, center on a distinct sense of 'Americanness,' a very particular understanding of what America is. And PMB didn't paint this picture; he merely copied it.
The historical record of America proves otherwise, however. As PMB has written elsewhere, the success of America stems primarily from its pluralist tradition, or its remarkable history of accepting a plurality of types into the American fold. Certainly such acceptance hasn't come at a cost, or gone over without serious periods of difficulty, exploitation, and violence. After Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants arrived, before they were all considered 'white,' they had their bloody battles and their ghetto mentalities, but eventually they learned to get along, to think of each other as equally American. After the Alien and Sedition Acts, the abject practice of slavery, Japanese internment, and the McCarthy-era inquisitions, Americans have chosen liberal democracy over theocracy, openness over insularity, pluralism over zealotry. Today, one hopes, Americans will choose Mosques in Manhattan over bigotry and fear, and ethnic difference over racial conflict. To do so will be to prolong a great tradition that stands as proof of the ability of collective identity to function with and incorporate a multitude of singular, overlapping, not unchanging or uncomplicated identities shaded and flourishing under its expansive wingspan. Roth's Zionist character ultimately has it wrong: he can't see a path to his ethnic self-realization within a pluralist society, so he chooses an exclusionary society, a society that understands difference as a war imperative rather than an opportunity for strengthening and growth.
