A FRACTIOUS FUTURE? DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CONTENTION IN THE YEARS AHEAD
As the nation moved beyond the early period of wound and bereavement, even the Trent Lott affair, an inadvertent yet perversely revealing exercise in collective memory, did not challenge the movement toward civil pluralism. The Lott brouhaha erupted on the occasion of the centennial birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond, who had run for president in 1948 promising to stave off race mixing. Goofily, if somewhat obliquely, Lott mused that if the rest of the country had followed Mississippi's lead in voting for the racist Thurmond, "We wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."[20]
It would be easy to reject the controversy as another instance of media spectacle—the stylized form through which Americans prefer to confront the awkward legacy of race. Once again the nation was privy to a vivid dramaturgy of personal character and sincerity, replete with overheated cries to repent and atone and redemptive appeals for what Lott called "forgiveness and forbearance." "Segregation, " he declared at a press conference, "is a stain on our nation's soul." His subsequent appearance on Black Entertainment Television (BET), where he condemned the "wicked[ness]" of racism and confessed that he was part of "immoral leadership in my part of the country, " was distinguished from countless other charged moments of racial transgression and apology mainly by its inept groveling. The infinitely pliable Lott told BET newsman Ed Gordon that he now supported a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and even affirmative action. The shallowness of Lott's affect and his obsequious
The larger problem with Lott's apology thus transcended questions of authenticity. The personalistic language of sin and redemption did not adequately honor the institutional realities at work. These included the role of racism in building the modern American party system and the Republican Party's continuing reliance on veiled appeals to antidemocratic sentiments. Ronald Reagan may not have been a racist, but when he opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the Neshoba County killing field of the trinity of civil rights martyrs, segregationists thrilled to his promise of "states rights." Virginia senator Carl Allen, rebutting charges that he flew the Confederate flag, insisted on righting the record: The Confederate flag, he corrected, hangs on the wall of his den. Most embarrassing of all, Attorney General Ashcroft, the man in charge of enforcing federal civil rights statutes, had effusively praised the neoracist magazine Southern Partisan, as well as its quixotic effort to rehabilitate the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.
Yet for all its limitations, the Lott drama offered more than fluffy confection. It served as a genuine ritual moment through which "the shape of the devil" was made incarnate and thereby exorcized. If "deviant forms of behavior, by marking the outer edges of group life, give the inner structure its special character, "[21] Lott gave Bush a bonanza chance to consecrate the far boundary. Seizing the offer to clarify the blurry line between ethnic and civic belonging, the president rebuked Lott sternly and cast him beyond the Republican pale. "Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive, and it is wrong. Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country."[22] Reinforcing the pattern of conservative multiculturalism, the watchword of the Republican leadership quickly became inclusion, and Republican leaders tripped over themselves to promise rewards to historic black colleges, not quite grasping the irony involved in helping keep blacks in their own separate places.
It scarcely matters that such moral indignation was part of an effort to invent a boundary rather than affirm an established one. Boundary setting almost always has this quality of retrospective conjuring. Still, real consequences will ensue from this moving line of the permissible and forbidden. It will be harder for the Republican Party to wink at the ethnocentric portions of its base. Pilgrimages to Bob Jones University, which into the 1990s translated its fear of racial mongrelization into bans on
There is much here that is less than edifying. Just as the cold calculus of the Latino vote gave birth to the warmth of Republican compassion, the new racial sensitivity of Republicans was less attuned to the hurt feelings of blacks than to the good opinion of white suburban Republicans and independents who bristle at racial meanness. But this is the messy way cultures, and political cultures particularly, work and moral boundaries get defined, through earnest conversion and savvy concession. After all, the political incorporation of the working classes in modern democratic states owed just as much to power and pressure as to persuasion. The result is still an extension of the moral infrastructure of citizenship.
There was something else reassuring about the high camp burlesque of Trent Lott's ablutions, as well as the tawdriness of Enron and World Com and the proliferation of ever more lurid versions of "reality" television and "Girls Gone Wild" videos on late-night cable. It reminded us that September 11 did not put an end to cultural and political life as we have known it. At the same time, the return of Al Qaeda, musings about Islamicists' seizure of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, brief panics over Arab infiltrators at the Canadian border, the looming war in Iraq, and the frightful bluster of the North Korean dictator Bush liked to call "a pygmy" all hinted at a world spiraling out of control—at least a world escaping the clutch of familiar theories. Given the power of unimagined events to astonish, it may be premature to hazard guesses about the future. Still, it is possible to glimpse two major sources of fractiousness in the years ahead.
The first of these fault lines is domestic. September 11 will continue to complicate the trajectories of civic liberalism and compassionate conservatism and the relationship of each to one another and to the more ancient versions from which each descended. In this context the Republican capture of the Senate is not without danger for the party; Bush's growing power to enact his vision of the United States could split the nation. After all, the detribalization of the right symbolized by Bush's stance on immigration and his response to the Lott affair resolves one aspect
The vibrancy of his communitarian rhetoric provides some clues to Bush's response to that choice. His inaugural speech sketched a vision of responsibility, not simply for oneself but a duty to help others: "When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side." The president's sermonizing at a black church on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in 2003 concretized this ethic of care. "There are still people in our society who hurt. There is still prejudice holding people back. There is still a school system that doesn't elevate every child so they can learn. There is still a need for us to hear the words of Martin Luther King, to make sure the hope of America extends its reach into every neighborhood across this land."[23]
Yet the radical tension between the halcyon Fourth Way rhetoric Bush campaigned on (and continues to utter on ceremonial occasions) and the hard conservative agenda he has plied while governing perhaps better indicates Bush's resolution of the conservative dilemma. Even as he has astutely avoided the most polarizing wedge issues, Bush has signaled a cultural warrior side in his opposition to stem cell research and furtive gambits to define the fetus as a person; in his ardor for abstinence and expunging talk of condoms from government Web sites and social policy; and in federal court nominees whose conservative version of judicial activism is deeply skeptical of the national idea embodied in the doctrine of incorporation and its nationalizing extension of the Bill of Rights to state governments. By waging culture war by other means—on the side, on the sly—Bush has honored the center's moderation in the very effort to evade its attention and wrath.
Bush has offered an equally conservative economics that is at odds with both the idiom of the collective good and popular opinion. The constancy in that stance lies less in the ideological coherence of pristine antistatism than in the indulgence of corporate priorities on taxes, health care, stock market regulation, energy, the environment, and trade. Even the sacrosanct idiom of patriotic unity, let alone national security, did not carry the day against the special wishes of the chemical industry when the two collided over the Chemical Security Act. That bill, authored by Senator Jon Corzine and supported by homeland security chief Tom Ridge, would have subjected chemical plants on which a terrorist attack might produce hundreds of thousands of casualties to the same regulations
The contradiction between such rival images of America will likely fly apart, although concern with global threat may stave off public restiveness, both with Bush's less-than-centrist policies and the disproportionate benefits they allocate to the privileged classes. As E. J. Dionne Jr. argues chap. 14), it is not impossible that a Fifth Way built around military mobilization might realign American politics and culture. At the least public attention has been diverted from domestic matters, and our warrior in chief has deferred the day of reckoning with ominous economic news. At the same time, Dionne points out, so far terror has altered strategic possibilities and political priorities more than it has changed the dispositions of the center. Here lie the seeds of serious ideological division in the years to come, for if anything, September 11 revived the obvious primacy of the national idea. It made clear the need for federal efforts of all sorts, from homeland defense to public health. Bush suffered defeats on campaign finance and the Arctic oil reserve and retreated on school vouchers. The Enron and other corporate scandals lay bare deep populist resentments that had not disappeared from the middle classes simply because they too now had joined the investor classes.
This gap gives Democrats real opportunities. But although their electoral chances may teeter on the empirical shape of the economy and the contingency of their candidates' charisma, conviction will also determine their fate. What kind of nation do the Democrats envision? Do they have the resolve to stand up—for a rival vision of America, against their own dependence on wealthy donors. With the exception of Al Sharpton the Democratic contenders cluster around some variant of the Third Way creed. They have the advantage of being more in tune with the center of opinion on health care, abortion, tax cuts, and the environment. To enact
Already, the civic liberalism of Democrats is vulnerable to venal and parochial tendencies of its own. As with Fourth Way compassion, Third Way respect for civil society and the market can be a marketing device to "take back the center." Second, Democratic attention to its fragments, from teachers to trial lawyers, threatens an expansive notion of social membership. Third, aside from Sharpton none of the Democrats has spoken as prophetically as DiIulio has about the ghetto poor. To reduce the moral and emotional distance between the majority and the disprivileged, will Democrats speak as urgently as Bush did in his 2003 State of the Union Address, when he replaced Clinton's therapeutic rhetoric with a more evangelical idiom of recovery? "For so many in our country—the homeless and the fatherless, the addicted—the need is great. Yet there's power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people." So far, preoccupied with the middle classes, Democratic candidates have been silent. Finally, as the slew of Democrats who voted against the first Gulf War but now embrace the second attests, a more muscular foreign policy can be a stratagem or a craven ritual of masculinity as much as it can be the principled resolve of a liberal nationalism that would extend the duty of the nation-state to the suffering citizens of the world.
The second source of fractiousness ahead lies in global danger, the proper response to which is already creating inchoate divisions among the American people. How to respond is a matter of deep symbolic questions as much as technical ones.What do we want? What kind of people do we want to be? And what kind of world do we want to be in?
Bush's answer has been a nationalism that restates the neoisolationist rhetoric of American self-interest—unilateralist in spirit if not execution, suspicious of entanglements, and wary of idealism, yet without the demonizing that marked absolutist Americanism. As in the domestic sphere, external threat has given the commander in chief the slack to
Still, the public's patience is not infinite. It may be that by the time of this book's appearance, war in Iraq is over or in motion. As of early 2003, however, a goodly portion of the American public was nervous about the direction of Republican foreign policy. Support for war in Iraq plummeted once the proviso was added that the Americans go it alone without allies or multilateral legitimacy. Such nervousness tipped the balance of policy power in December 2002 from renegade unilateralism to the decorative performance of concern for entangling alliances, global opinion, and the United Nations.
Before contention can erupt over foreign policy, however, there must be an alternative, precisely and passionately argued. And the truth is that in whatever other respects Bush's prosecution of the imperial mission remains deficient, he has responded with a resolve that grasps the magnitude of the threats in play and the stakes at peril. Even if the idiom of evil evokes tribal fears of strangeness, even if it expresses the particularistic values of Bush's born-again experience and confirms the increasing sense that he is engaged in a theological showdown with the wicked, it does define the character of the world we live in. It is hard to argue with Bush's simple, but not simplistic, reflection on Saddam Hussein: "[If] electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape … is not evil, then evil has no meaning." Both the clarity of a bicentric world order defined by superpower competition and the short-lived relief of a post-cold war era have given way to the frightful instability of a singlepower hegemony beset by a swirl of regional threats amplified by the dispersal of the technical means of destruction. It behooves those who support a more universalistic notion of American civil religion to specify how they will translate lofty aspirations into a determined response to dangerous enemies.
In such a world, Michael Ignatieff observes, the United States, although
Woodrow Wilson's image of a redeemer nation, much like his promise "to cleanse, " calls up too many bad associations of manifest destiny and mission civilitrice; Kennedy's grandiosity—"We shall pay any price, bear any burden"—reminds us that mission can transmute into missionizing hubris. High-flown talk of rights is understandably galling to those who cannot forget oil-driven CIA coups, Central American death squads, and the litany of authoritarian regimes who have been the United States' proxies, henchmen, and "friends." As the United States' task spirals from self-defense to toppling and building regimes to exporting rights to fighting primordial evil, Daniel Bell's warning in "The End of American Exceptionalism, " is apt: American righteousness is ever in danger of transmuting into self-righteousness.[26]
But from Carter's version of civil religion—"Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere"—to Clinton's more tempered formulation, the idealism of rights enforced by American power remains a powerful beacon. As different as they are, both men, retrieving that moral tradition from the repertoire of American values yet tempering it with humility and historical self-reflection, helped reinvent liberal nationalism; at least they revived its spirit, a necessary step after the disenchantment of Vietnam. Senator Joseph Biden's edgy response to a European journalist at the Davos meeting—in which he first confessed to the astonished reporter that oil really is a key factor in the Iraq debate, then quickly added at least for the French—restores perspective: the United States is not the only nation with dirty hands. Similarly, Germany's reluctance on Iraq may serve to restrain the cowboy predilection embodied in Bush's pledge to get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive, " but then again, it is not a bad idea to recall European dithering in the face of Hitler's evil. That the lessons of Munich were learned too well by the generation that gave us Vietnam does not mean one cannot learn them too poorly. Would the world not be a better place if it had taken to heart the lessons condensed in the mantra Never Again and applied them to the Rwanda genocide and not just to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans?
All of this points to the flip side of our imperial role, which Ignatieff notes, too; an imperial power, at times a reluctant one, the United States has also been a strangely idealistic one that embraces the ideal of self-determination. Felicitously, it may be that this deeper idealism, the projection of civic nationalism onto the world stage, may promote our selfinterest better than a narrow realpolitik. A little less swagger, not so much amnesia about the United States' complicity in ignoble adventures, and fewer snipes at "Old Europe" might have given more credibility to Bush's last-minute recourse to the tradition of rights as he prepared to strike Baghdad.
As a result one can imagine a convergence of will, duty, interest, and ideals around a rival global stance: against an updated nationalism that avoids entanglements but goes light on the moralistic withdrawal from otherness, an updated universalism that proclaims rights (and partners) but goes light on redemptive crusading. In a sense these two gestalts would represent more tempered, civil versions of their global antecedents of isolationism and interventionism, much as the Third and Fourth Ways represent more temperate versions of their domestic antecedents. To push the isomorphism a bit further, such domestic divisions match global ones, and both express rival moral schema, with their own ways of construing the role of interest and morality in social life, the character of obligation, and the permeability of boundaries of self, community, nation, and humanity.
Who knows what the increasingly menacing future will bring. In any case trying to conjure the future only underscores the limits of the narrative of fragmentation, its ability to direct conversation toward certain topics at the expense of others. Above all, its focus on issues of civic membership and communal integration draws attention away from the matter of unequal life chances in the United States, just as the moralizing rhetoric of "axis of evil" simplifies the complex sources of global alienation and failed states, as well as the United States' historical role in promoting both.
The power of terror to eclipse an array of vital national issues underlines one cost the nation has already incurred. The initial economic repercussions of September 11—airline layoffs and stock market swings; the harm to commerce caused by the anthrax threat to the mail; the disruption of global tourism, travel, and trade; and much more—should also give pause. The strength of the international economy is its weakness: it has never been more tightly coupled and thus vulnerable to shocks. A sustained downturn in American living standards will have long-term
At the moment, however, such fearsome scenarios remain more a possibility than a destiny. Our most recent history vindicates a sunnier view. For the most part conflicts stirred by ethnic, racial, and cultural divisions continue to flow through democratic channels of dispute and settlement. The restraints on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab violence affirmed by powerful state institutions attest to the democratic learning that has taken place. There are other grounds for solace, especially those moments of national tribulation during which the end of the American experiment was proclaimed. It may be that the United States has lost a good deal of its self-congratulatory faith in its exceptionalism, its conviction of being a providential nation blessed by God. In the long run that may prove to be a blessing in disguise. This greater sense of humility may temper American arrogance as we navigate a world of dangerous complexity. The stakes have never been higher: not just our most prized values but the nation's very survival.
NOTES
I thank Tom Remington for his astute comments on this chapter.
1. Quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion: An Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era (New York: Vintage, 1976), 37.
2. Daniel Bell, "The End of American Exceptionalism, " in The American Commonwealth, 1976, ed. Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 220.
3. Quoted in Mark Lisheron, "Before Sept. 11, A Nation Divided, " Austin American-Statesman, Dec. 30, 2001, D6.
4. Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think about God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking, 1998), 279.
5. Yaron Ezrahi, "The Clash between Nationalism and Democracy in Contemporary Israel, " unpublished manuscript.
6. Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1969; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1971), 511.
7. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1997), 2, 17.
8. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 116.
9. Michael Ignatieff, quoted in ibid., 134.
10. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way and Its Critics (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2000), 51.
11. Mark Lisheron, "From Rubble to Resolve, " Austin American-Statesman, Sep. 16, 2001, A19.
12. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order(New York: Basic Books, 1971), 240.
13. New York Times, Sep. 19, 2001, A20.
14. "A Nation Challenged: Portraits of Grief, " New York Times, Oct. 18, 2001, B13.
15. The host of the television show Politically Incorrect had dared venture the impolitic opinion that Osama Bin Ladin was no coward. "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2, 000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building—say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
16. Somini Sengupta, New York Times, Oct. 10, 2001, B1.
17. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 286.
18. Alan A. Dershowitz, "Why Fear National ID Cards, " New York Times, Oct. 13, 2001, A22.
19. Jonathan E. Smaby, "American Ramadan, " New York Times, Nov. 18, 2001, sec. 4, 13.
20. Quoted in Michelle Cottle, "Separate Ways, " New Republic, Dec. 23, 2002, 14.
21. Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans (New York: John Wiley, 1966), 13.
22. Time Magazine, Dec. 23, 2002, 25.
23. New York Times, Jan. 21, 2003, A16.
24. John Judis, "Poison: The GOP Sacrifices National Security for the Chemical Lobby, " New Republic, Jan. 27, 2003, 12.
25. John DiIulio to Ron Suskind, Oct. 24, 2002. http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2002/021202_mfe_diiulio_1.html. The letter was the source of Suskind's story "Why Are These Men Laughing?" Esquire, Jan. 2002.
26. Bell, "End of American Exceptionalism" (my paraphrase).