Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

BOOK REVIEWS - András Tamóc: Robert Hughes: Culture of Complaint. Oxford University Press, 1993. 203 pp

inner stability and global domination is on the decline. The nation's crisis is caused by two culprits; political fragmentation and cultural separatism. Political fragmentation is brought about by the very nature of democracy and a redefinition of the nation's value system. Cultural balkanization is a harmful side effect of multiculturalism, a manifestation of America's demographic transition. "Culture of Complaint" is a series of lectures compressed into 3 subsections where the author presents a detailed examination of several aspects of current American civilization. The first chapter analyzes the relationship of culture to a politically and morally disintegrated state. Hughes discerns external and internal causes behind the decline of America. In the last 20 years national consensus fell victim to divisive political maneuvering and a failure of communication between liberals and conservatives. The notion that the United States was a country where diverging interests and antagonistic aspirations could be placated by appeals for the welfare of the country became a casualty of a general obsession with victimhood, cultural separatism and the idea of political correctness. America's current preoccupation with victimhood is a projection of Puritan thought processes onto the present. The Puritans escaped the evils of "religious and political persecution to create a new world in order to redeem the fall of European man". This "experiment in applied theology" developed into a nation devoted to the sanctity of political equality and individual rights. It is one of the ironies of history that the ideas of erstwhile colonial victims came to be seen as the ideology of the oppressor. The Puritan value system based on the duality of victimhood and redemption became the accepted norm in the first 160 years of American democracy chiefly affording the privilege of the latter for inhabitants of European stock. The country underwent a demographic revolution in the post World War II. years as the principal origin of immigration shifted from Eastern and Southern Europe to Southeast Asia and Latin America. Furthermore the Civil Rights Movement culminated in the acquisition of political equality for the nation's largest ethnic minority, African-Americans, the descendants of 176