The US State Department is holding a two-day conference this week on the spread of anti-American attitudes around the world. It sounds too good to miss. But miss it most of us will, unfortunately. The closed conference in an undisclosed location is an invitation-only affair restricted to 20 scholars and 50 government officials.

The State Department spokesman Richard Boucher announced last week that the conference on Thursday and Friday would explore "various manifestations and roots of anti-Americanism around the world, what it means for the United States and how the United States may address it". According to Boucher, it is the culmination of a major in-house project on anti-Americanism in Europe, Russia and the Muslim world. Just what Latin America, that historic bastion of anti-Americanism, has done to be excluded is not clear.

It is tempting to make the US government's anxiety to get to grips with the resurgence of anti-Americanism sound deeply sinister. Having once, at a similar gathering, heard Condoleezza Rice, then still an academic, dismiss a list of European, Arab and Asian nations as "the road-kill of history", I think it is fair to assume that some of the generalizations on display this week will not be for the politically squeamish.

At the same time, though, one cannot help but admire that earnest side of US policy-making which insists on the need to confront difficult truths. It is a reminder of an America that has been much overlooked in the last 12 months. Has our Foreign Office ever sat down to discuss why lots of people round the world dislike Britain? I doubt it. It is a big mistake to imagine that Americans have a monopoly on political complacency and insensitivity.

But Americans do not have a monopoly on political wisdom and good judgment either. If something useful is to come out of this week's conference, it should be an increased capacity for intellectual humility and historical awareness on all sides. If US leaders can at last move beyond simplistic goals and slogans in the way they conduct and articulate the war on terrorism, then some good may have come of the debate. And it would help if we on our side were less crude in our own stereotypes too.

This process will have been helped by an article published in the New York Times yesterday by Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his article, Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser warns that the US risks dangerous isolation because of its persistent "semi religious" approach to terrorism. Accusing the administration of operating in "a historical void", Brzezinski observes that it acts "as if terrorism is suspended in outer space as an abstract phenomenon, with ruthless terrorists acting under some Satanic inspiration unrelated to any specific motivation." If the administration fails to move beyond this one-dimensional approach, America risks being seen as "morally obtuse and politically naive" by its allies, and risks laying itself open to further terrorist attacks. Brzezinski's article is merely one example of the very serious, increasingly wide-ranging debate that is now unfolding in the United States about the way that the nation engages with the rest of the world in the aftermath of September 11.

It has taken many months for that debate to surface fully, though it was always taking place among consenting adults in private, and its arrival marks an extremely important change in American politics.

There has always been a much more intelligent, thoughtful side to the American response to September 11 than the one revealed by its political leaders. But the combination of an inarticulate president with a rightwing agenda, a traumatized public mood, and a misplaced predisposition on the part of many Europeans to oversimplify America have combined to obscure it for the audience on this side of the ocean.

In some ways, Europeans have always suffered from a temptation to caricature America. The British, possibly deceived by our shared language, are among the worst offenders. We put America in a box, stick a label on it and wait for our fears and prejudices to be confirmed. We often seem to have a lazy, patronizing desire to portray America as a wackier, more dangerous and more irrational country than most of it really is. We also ascribe a hysteria to US life that is in many respects more truly characteristic of our country than of theirs.

We consistently fail to understand that America is not one single hegemonic culture. The US is much better understood as multifarious and dynamic, divided on gender, educational, race and regional lines. In politics, America is currently split down the middle, as it has been for much of the past decade, and as the 2000 presidential election contest revealed dramatically. What makes George Bush significant is that he is attempting to govern as though these divisions do not really exist.

This could be an expensive error. In their striking new book The Emerging Democratic Majority, the left-of-center writers John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira have used census data, voting studies and exit polls to argue that a combination of deep-rooted modern American demographic, economic and cultural trends is beginning to stack the odds ever more heavily against the Republicans.

The new majority, they argue, is based on professionals, women and minorities, all of whom, especially the Latino minority, are growing as a proportion of the electorate, and all of whom are keen to vote. These Democratic voters are concentrated in postindustrial urban "ideopolises" in the north-east, the upper midwest, the west coast and in significant parts of the south, including Florida and Virginia. Judis and Teixeira go out of their way not to be deterministic, but their argument is undeniably intriguing. As long as Democrats remain fiscally moderate, socially liberal, reformist and egalitarian, the authors say, the party will enjoy the edge over Republicans for years to come.

We in Britain seem at times to have persuaded ourselves that America is a land inhabited by crazy people and governed by buffoons. But we make fun of them at our peril. If Judis and Teixeira are right, America could prove itself to be a land of rather sensible people governed by smart modern pragmatists. The implications are rather reassuring.

The America we think we know is not the new America that is emerging in the 21st century. This poses a challenge to reflexive anti-American stereotypes. It also cautions against the temptation, on both sides of the Atlantic, to pretend that America and the rest of the world are engaged in an apocalyptic struggle on behalf of good and evil. That isn't the case either. The real America is more ordinary, more normal and more sensible - and getting more so every day. The problem with America is its government. What they, and we, need is regime change.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

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