Lee Harris: The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing
Part 7 – The Temptation of Fantasy Ideology (Policy Review, 2002)
Lee Harris concludes his series by arguing that contemporary anti-Americanism has largely abandoned the hard-headed realism of classical Marxism and descended into what he terms “fantasy ideology”—a worldview sustained not by empirical evidence or strategic calculation, but by the emotional satisfaction of believing oneself morally superior and historically destined.
Marx himself insisted that revolutionary change required objective conditions: deep internal crisis within capitalist society and a working class driven by genuine misery. Modern critics who cast the United States as the root of global evil while celebrating events like 9/11 as revolutionary acts are, Harris contends, engaging in pure wish-fulfillment rather than serious political analysis.
Such thinking, he warns, not only misreads reality but risks justifying a return to barbarism under the guise of progressive idealism. For Marx, capitalism’s historical role was to create the material and social preconditions for a higher order; any attempt to destroy it prematurely was reactionary utopianism.
Thus, Harris asserts, a genuinely Marxist perspective would recognize the United States—not as the final enemy—but as the most advanced expression of the capitalist stage whose continued existence remains dialectically necessary for any future progress mankind might achieve.
End of series.
