ABSTRACT
The middle-class, middle-aged, are not pro-American. What tends to distinguish the generations is not so much their feeling about America as their feeling about feeling and what people should do about their feelings. Only extremists would seek victory in Vietnam; but its destruction ought to be accepted without moral indignation as an unintended but now probably inevitable consequence of the interplay of American social and political interests and ambitions. "The anti-American generation", like its French and other counterparts, might do well to abandon its heartbreaking efforts to make common cause with a working class that applauds the police who beat the shit out of it, and wear its "effete snob" buttons more proudly. This chapter argues that the feelings of the "the anti-American generation" and the disaffected young nationals of other egalitarian industrial states may largely be attributed to displaced and repressed interclass hostility; their anti-Americanism is and suggests in part a kind of neurosis of liberalism.
