America's foreign critics are unflattering, unfair, and worth hearing

There are truths only foreigners can bring to American ears

Wang Huning.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

Americans like to be praised. When the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 19th century, he noted his hosts expected to be admired the way court poets apotheosized European monarchs. Because "the majority lives in perpetual self-adoration," Tocqueville observed, "there are certain truths that only foreigners or experience can bring to American ears."

Tocqueville brought some of those truths to light. Though remembered as an admirer of American democracy, Tocqueville was dismayed by individualist, commercialist, and conformist tendencies. He's still the best-known in a long string of foreign critics of the United States, intellectuals whose judgment of the U.S. can be uniquely instructive, especially when it's unflattering.

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.