Anti-Americanism made more sense in Cold War days. Then it had a logic, as a kind of rational aberration: the liberal Left wanted a weaker US, because they believed the Soviet way of life had much to offer and might one day triumph. But the anti-Americanism we see today, in which no serious alternative system of production, social organisation or international order is advanced, makes no sense at all. The only logic to wanting to see America humbled is that of the cutting off of noses and the spiting of faces. Never mind if Europe is once again exposed to easterly winds or whether the gas is on or off, never mind if Iranian theocrats develop a warhead with a delivery system that can carry it to Paris, Berlin or London.

It would be going too far to say that anti-Americanism can drive you crazy, but it can certainly rob you of intellectual honesty and a healthy regard for your own interests. It is especially prevalent in the arts, but then that is a field where, like juveniles or lunatics, people are not seen as responsible for their political opinions, so there is little point in citing the wilder statements about America of celebrated writers, artists, ballerinas or playwrights.

Then there is France, where the Sartrean anathema against the US remains in force among many. I recently read an interview in a Russian-French publication with Emmanuel Todd, a respected historian and demographist. No rancorous old communist or Putin apologist, he nevertheless made a remarkable statement: that the difference between the American and Russian world view was that the first was hegemonic and the latter egalitarian - a wilfully perverse observation that tells us nothing about the US or Russia, but a great deal about France and the French.

The excesses of America's home-bred Americanophobes, such as Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal, are almost rational by comparison, in the sense that a revulsion against the self is a natural phenomenon, a sort of legitimate point of view especially in a guilt-ridden Puritanical psychology. But Todd does not have that excuse. To be fair, his latest book, Après La Démocratie (Gallimard, Paris, 2008), has a programme - an outright plea for European protectionism - but its salient characteristic, as ever, is a compulsion to talk America into the grave: "Between the decline of the United States and the arrival of China at its maturity, Europe represents once again, and for several decades to come, the greatest concentration of scientists, engineers, technicians and qualified workers on the planet."

The attempt to write off democracy in America, one of the greatest achievements of humankind (what other country is capable of mounting an election campaign like the one we have just witnessed?) as a self-evident failure, in contrast to the vibrant new protectionist Europe to come, and to obliterate American successes in science and technology, could be dismissed as so extreme as to be irrelevant to the debate.