Waspophobes

What is a Waspophoe, you might ask? Recently I've been reading Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. Waspophobe is a term Mead uses to describe disdain for the Anglo-Saxon world shared across the planet during at least the last three centuries. Mead explains that most non-U.K. and non-U.S.A. world sees these two societies as virtually one Anglo-Saxon (Wasp) entity in a way few Americans would appreciate.

The Roman Empire, which valued a landed aristocracy, conquered the decadent and barbarian merchant society of Carthage, thus bringing them into the civilized world. This imagery was frequently used by the continental powers of Europe (Rome) versus the English (Carthage) from at least as far back as the eighteenth century and up into the twentieth century. Napoleon's (disparaging) characterization of England as "a nation of shopkeepers" is one of the most notable instances. With the British Empire's waning and America's rise in the twentieth century, much of the antipathy has shifted accordingly.

A waspophobe may be of continental Europe, but there are also Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American versions. There are even Anglo-Saxon waspophoes living in the U.K and U.S.A. What I found interesting was Mead's description of the waspophobe worldview. Have you met one before?

The true Waspophobe hates America because it is an insolent sea of vulgarity in which a triumphant and unrestrained rabble heedlessly treads underfoot the complex and subtle achievement that only the cultivated minority can support; he also hates America because it is a land of hideous inequality where the all-powerful plutocrats trample the silently suffering  and impoverished masses into the dust. He hates America because it hates pleasure and sex like the Puritans of old; he hates America because its decadent hedonism has commodified sex. The Waspophobe at one and the same time can hate American militarism and brutal use of force while despising the cowardice of the American people and their unwillingness to fight and die for what they believe in. The American must be hated because he is indifferent to the world, wrapped up in his own concerns to the exclusion of all else; he must be resisted because he is inflexibly and permanently determined to impose his value on the rest of the world. One despises America as a contemptible, exhausted, decadent society; one resists it because it is voraciously dynamic and expansive. The American is naïve and unworldly; the American is insinuating and sly. The American is a God-besotted Holy Roller; the American is the cynical Jewish manipulator with no values either religious or secular. The American is a fat and lazy couch potato like Homer Simpson; the American is the shrewd and relentless businessman who ruthlessly strips his opponents of their assets by a superintelligence both icy and malign. The American male is a reckless, quick-drawing cowboy trampling over all restraints and civilized norms; the American male is a feminized weakling under the thumb of his domineering wife. The American woman is a slut and seducer who sleeps with any man she can find; the American woman is a hatchet-faced, ice-cold Amazonian man-killer with no trace of femininity left. America is a soft and pathetic land of whiners and twelve-steppers, narcissistically preoccupied with its emotional problems; it is a brutal land of machines where winners eat losers and solidarity and sympathy are crushed underfoot. America oppresses and suppresses its noble black minority; America is a degraded and mongrelized society whose popular culture spews African filth over the world’s vulnerable youth. America endangers the peace of the world by an unworldly idealism that fecklessly threatens the stability of the international system; America foments war by policies so ruthless and inhuman that they generate mass outrage and resistance all over the world. American is evil because it is fundamentalist and Christian; it is evil because it is ruled by the Jew.

Anti-Americanism in this mode is more than a sentiment; it is an all encompassing if not always coherent worldview. … (72-73)