Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century

by Patrick Smith

Overview

Why America’s founding myths no longer apply, and why we must reconsider the facts of our history

Americans cherish their national myths, some of which predate the country’s founding. But the time for illusions, nostalgia, and grand ambition abroad has gone by, Patrick Smith observes in this original book. Americans are now faced with a choice between a mythical idea of themselves, their nation, and their global “mission,” on the one hand, and on the other an idea of America that is rooted in historical consciousness. To cling to old myths will ensure America’s decline, Smith warns. He demonstrates with deep historical insight why a fundamentally new perspective and self-image are essential if the United States is to find its place in the twenty-first century.

In four illuminating essays, Smith discusses America’s unusual (and dysfunctional) relation with history; the Spanish-American War and the roots of American imperial ambition; the Cold War years and the effects of fear and power on the American psyche; and the uneasy years from 9/11 to the present. Providing a new perspective on our nation’s current dilemmas, Smith also offers hope for change through an embrace of authentic history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300176568
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/27/2013
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Patrick Smith was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992, when he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and contributes frequently to the New York Times, Business Week, Time, and other publications. He lives in Norfolk, CT. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Between Myth and History 1

History Without Memory 17

A Culture of Representation 47

Cold War Man 91

Time and Time Again 145

Notes 217

An Acknowledgment 231

What People are Saying About This

Mark Lytle

I can think of no American historian of the current era who more powerfully captures the way myth has informed consciousness in shaping the American worldview since the founding.—Mark Lytle, Bard College 

Editorial Reviews

In this essay collection, Smith (Somebody Else's Century) examines the dissonance between our nation's history and mythical conception of itself, combing what is termed the American Century for evidence. Expressly hoping to provoke the end of exceptionalism, he adduces America's fondness for ritual reenactments to demonstrate the shortcomings of event-specific historicism in light of big-picture history. In a clear and vivid voice, he draws attention to the effusive literary style of many early historical records and shows how science, not just religion, was swept into the perpetuation of certain myths. While he cogently outlines the importance of seeing society as a construct connected to its past, he loses ground when he leaps into the realm of political philosophy. His assertion that fundamentalist beliefs regarding markets, individuality, and government go largely uncontested is difficult to substantiate. Peering through the lens of myth-worship vs. historicism, Smith maligns certain abstract political notions because they have historically coincided with a Christian vision for the country and a reverence for the rugged American prototype; insufficiently acknowledged is that willingness to face the nation's history openly does not automatically discount certain abstract ideas. A thought-provoking collection, its conclusions step beyond what is substantiated by the material. (June)

Publishers Weekly

An exceptionally insightful approach that gets well beyond the usual yes/no declinist discourse, and challenges the American exceptionalism frame, in ways that are both historically informed and geared to the challenges of this new century and the need for ‘a new idea of ourselves.’”—Bruce W. Jentleson, Duke University

Bruce W. Jentleson

I can think of no American historian of the current era who more powerfully captures the way myth has informed consciousness in shaping the American worldview since the founding.”—Mark Lytle, Bard College 

Mark Lytle

Won a Honorable Mention for the 2104 Los Angeles Book Festival in the General Non-Fiction Category.

JM Northern Media LLC - Los Angeles Book Festival

Patrick Smith’s is a brilliant and profound meditation on the relationship of modern Americans to their history and their myths, the best book anyone has written on the United States as it today exists. A work that will last.”—William Pfaff, author of The Irony of Manifest Destiny.

William Pfaff

An extremely ambitious book, Time No Longer brings together ideas about contemporary American politics and foreign policy with deep questions about the character and destiny of American society and some important ideas about how American attitudes to historical time will have to change. Patrick Smith makes a case that is bound to be controversial, but makes it bravely, thoughtfully and well. This should be an influential contribution to important national political and cultural debates.”—Godfrey Hodgson, author of The Myth of American Exceptionalism

Godfrey Hodgson

"[E]xceptionalism is a national impediment America can no longer afford," declares journalist Smith (Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post–Western World, 2010, etc.) in this challenge to Americans' view of themselves. By exceptionalism, the author means the notion that America is a nation with a destiny, a view that "holds people out of history, in the space of timeless mythologies, where there are no choices or decisions." In four conceptually challenging essays, Smith contends that America stood outside of history until 9/11, understanding its past and conducting its policies by reference to myth and story rather than to "what is." The events of 9/11 comprised such a crushing defeat of America's "fundamentalist idea of itself" that we should take the opportunity it presented to abandon our dominant myths in favor of a vision of America as just another nation among many. Smith's controversial and thought-provoking concepts, as elaborated from the arrival of Europeans in the New World through the first half of the "American Century," may indeed explain a great deal about the American character. For the period after 1945, however, the author contents himself with recounting the comfortable mythology of the left, with reflexive bashing of cardboard versions of Reagan, Bush and the tea party and praise for Jimmy Carter, who appears here as a foreign policy visionary. He ends with a call for America to "advance from a belief in destiny to a commitment to purpose," which apparently entails adopting a "culture of defeat," more central planning, the subordination of the individual to society and an Orwellian "new vocabulary…the language must be cleansed." Smith's argument is further marred by sweeping and unsupported pronouncements of dubious validity and by a tone of condescension toward Americans collectively and individually that makes one bristle even at valid criticism. A difficult, unsettling and ultimately disappointing critique of the American worldview.

Kirkus Reviews