America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  These memos were intended to be kept secret. There was nothing secret, however, about the reaction of numerous right-wing politicians and media commentators to the Abu Ghraib revelations. Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) declared to his colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee: “I’m probably not the only one at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.…You know, they [the prisoners at Abu Ghraib] are not there for traffic violations…they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents.”138

  Senator Inhofe attacked the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as “humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heroes, are fighting and dying.” His fellow Republican senator, Trent Lott (Mississippi), declared: “Frankly, to save some Americans’ troops lives or a unit that could be in danger, I think that you should get really rough with them.” Reminded that at least one prisoner had been beaten to death by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib, Lott replied: “This is not Sunday school. This is interrogation. This is rough stuff.”139 Similar statements came from right-wing media figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage. Limbaugh declared: “Maybe the people who ordered this [the abuses at Abu Ghraib] are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver…boy, there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us—in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.”140

  Right-wing radio star Michael Savage described Arabs as “non-humans” and declared that “conversion to Christianity is the only thing that can probably turn them [Arabs] into human beings.” He said: “Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing to what I’d like to see done to these people.”141 Savage’s talk show is broadcast on 350 radio stations and has an audience of some 7.5 million people. Limbaugh’s goes out on 680 stations and has an audience of around 20 million.142

  Senator Inhofe’s attack on the ICRC was echoed two days later by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial entitled “Red Double Cross,” which decried the organization’s “increasing politicization” and warned that it was at risk of becoming “just another left-wing advocacy group along the lines of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International” (the Journal has always been glad to cite these bodies as respectable authorities when it comes to attacking countries which its editors hate and wish to target).143 Of course, these statements did not represent the views of all Republicans. They drew a sharp rebuke from former prisoner of war Senator John McCain, who praised the ICRC’s record and stressed America’s duty to abjure torture and respect international conventions.144

  This tradition is clearly antithetical to the formal aspects of the American Creed when it comes to both the administration of justice and the equality of rights—it certainly does not believe either that fundamental rules of justice are to be found in law books or that “all men are created equal.” However, in the past it has usually coexisted comfortably enough with the creed at home, because the eruptions of popular fury and folk justice have been short-lived responses to particular real or perceived threats.

  The exceptions were the Frontier, where the threat from the Indians and the tradition of vigilanteeism and collective punishment which it produced, lasted as long as the Frontier itself, and the South, where the constructed threat from the Blacks required collective repression that lasted from the origins of these colonies to the 1960s. The implication of these traditions for the “war on terrorism” will be among the subjects explored in the following chapters.

  The Tea Parties

  The Tea Parties that developed in the United States in 2009 embrace much of the old Jacksonian tradition, but also extend well beyond it.145 They represent the latest stage in the shift of American populism to the Right, visible since the 1960s and analyzed by Michael Kazin, Kevin Phillips, and others. Kazin’s work on the history of populism in the United States links the American nationalist thesis and antithesis in a way that applies perfectly to the Tea Parties (which emerged 14 years after his book was published):

  The first element in the shared language of politics was Americanism itself. This was the creed for which independence had been won and that all genuine patriots would fight to preserve. It was breathtakingly idealistic: in this unique nation, all men were created equal, deserved the same chance to improve their lot, and were citizens of a self-governing republic that enshrined the liberty of the individual. It was also proudly defensive: America was an isolated land of virtue whose people were on constant guard against the depredations of aristocrats, empire-builders, and self-aggrandizing office-holders both within and outside its borders.146

  The Tea Parties are indeed an especially powerful synthesis of the American nationalist thesis and antithesis of the American Creed described in the last chapter and the racial, regional, and class anxieties described in this one. At the same time, however, the Tea Parties as such—like previous populist movements—seem highly dependent on the specific circumstances that gave them birth, and unlikely to last for very long. Apart from tax cuts and a passionate but extremely vague commitment to the Constitution, they wholly lack a program for government, and they almost pride themselves on their lack of a national organization. Moreover, polls seem to suggest that while they are supported by a very large minority of Americans, the more a majority get to know about them, the more a majority has swung against them—as their lack of a program and the extremism and sheer ignorance of some of their leaders have come under increased media scrutiny.

  The experience of recent decades, however, suggests that while radical conservative movements within the Republican Party may not succeed in seizing control of that party, let alone winning the presidency, each populist wave has pulled the party another step toward the Right—to the point where many aspects of the party today would not be recognizable to Presidents Eisenhower or Nixon. This has certainly been true of the Tea Parties, whose role in encouraging the Republicans to reject compromise with the Obama administration in the debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling in July 2011 almost led to a national default. The conservative commentator David Brooks wrote:

  If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases…But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative. The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern. And they will be right.147

  At the same time, if the Tea Parties themselves do not triumph or survive, the underlying trends that gave them birth will remain and even intensify. For while the immediate impulse for their creation was the economic recession after 2008, the election of a black president, and the Obama administration’s health care reform, all three of these developments were reflections of deeper patterns that will continue and may even intensify in the decades to come: the long-term economic decline of large sections of the white middle and working classes, dating back to the 1970s, and the growing inequality of U.S. society; the demographic decline of the white population; and the increasingly unsustainable nature of government programs that favor the middle clas
ses. So far, despite widespread fears, the government has not in fact begun to reform Medicare and Social Security. Sooner or later it will have to do so or face fiscal collapse.

  The radicalization of the Republican Party visible since the 1970s is linked to this slow economic decline of its white middle class base, as well as to the cultural and religious factors that I will describe and analyze in the next chapter. Compared to the decades before the Great Depression and from the 1940s to the 1970s, most individual middle class and working class incomes from the 1970s to 2008 stagnated or declined. Overall real median household income peaked in 1999 at $53,252. By 2009 the U.S. male median wage had dropped 28 percent in real terms since 1970.148 This has been a truly shattering decline, which was only made bearable for a while by the entry of married women into the workforce, which supported overall family income, while at the same time increasing childcare costs and strains on family life. Adding enormously to the strain has been the increase in job insecurity even for those in good work, with unionized labor being replaced by short-term contracts.

  Associated with these trends has been a steep rise in social inequality, which had decreased in every year but two between 1947 and 1968, then stabilized, before rising steeply after 1981. This trend was principally due to the decline of manufacturing jobs in the face of Asian competition and the growing importance of “knowledge-based” businesses closed to those without higher education. The especially steep increases in inequality after 1981 and 2001 also reflected the beginnings of the Reagan and Bush administrations, with their programs of tax cuts for the wealthy.149

  Closely associated with this trend has been a decline in social mobility and the opportunities for children of the working and middle classes to better their social and economic status compared to their parents. As of 2012, the United States is now almost at the bottom among the developed economies. As has often been pointed out, the belief in America as a model of universal economic opportunity compared with other countries, so beloved of the Tea Parties, no longer has any basis in fact. Once again, this is essentially a mythological understanding of the United States, handed down from a vanished golden age of the past.150

  These trends sharpened after 2000. Despite overall U.S. economic growth and an improvement in productivity, between 2000 and 2008, real median income decreased by 1.6 percent, while the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) going to wages declined to its lowest levels since records began. By 2003–2004, median incomes no longer increased even when the economy was growing well—while incomes for the already wealthy top 5 percent of Americans soared.151 This was partly because of a decrease in manufacturing jobs of 22 percent between 1998 and 2008—in other words, before the beginning of the recession. To put it simply, even when the U.S. economy is growing, far fewer of the benefits are now going to most Americans than at any time in America’s history. This in turn led to a pessimism about personal and familial prospects with no precedents in times of overall growth.152

  The resulting conservative populism, however, itself seems likely to drive both the economy and white middle class prospects down further—as already seems clear from what has happened in California since the rise of the antitax movement in the 1980s. Unable either to raise additional revenue or to make deep cuts in middle class entitlements, governments will be forced to cut even more deeply in the only areas where they can cut (other than the military, which is still not threatened by truly deep cuts): infrastructure, research and development, education, and strategic investment. This is likely to drive the United States still deeper into relative and even absolute decline.

  If the response of large parts of the white middle class is yet more right-wing populism, and if the U.S. Constitution continues to allow them a blocking vote in Congress, then a vicious circle may be created in which decline leads to populism and more populism leads to more decline. Closely linked is the way in which growing economic inequality embitters the white middle and working classes, who react by insisting on tax cuts for the rich and cuts to government programs, thereby producing yet more inequality, yet more bitterness, and yet more populism. This is a process analogous to the crew of a listing ship shifting the cargo in the direction of the list and not against it, until eventually the ship capsizes.

  A more complex question is the impact of continued conservative populism on U.S. foreign policy. As already mentioned, the white population of the U.S. heartland has very strong traditional impulses toward isolationism. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had a strong effect in turning people away from more invasions and occupations. A representative figure in this regard is the country singer Merle Haggard, who reacted with belligerent fury to the 9/11 attacks, but by 2005 was already singing “America First,” in which he pays tribute to U.S. troops, but also laments America’s crumbling infrastructure and economy, and calls for America to “get out of Iraq, and get back on track.”153

  C. Vann Woodward, writing in the 1960s, described most white Americans as having traditionally been “bellicose but not militaristic.” They are willing—even overwilling—to fight if America is attacked or even insulted, but are not committed to the permanent celebration and projection of military power and values.154 Even after the militarizing effects of the cold war, this remains true to a considerable extent today. It is closely linked to the fact that many Americans can also be said to be “bellicose but not imperialistic,” and are indeed very unwilling to recognize that they possess even an indirect empire.155 Open exaltation in empire, and celebrations of parallels with the British and other empires, remained restricted to a few neoconservatives and others.156

  Bellicose nationalism, however, is a different matter, and certainly is very widely present in the white population and in the populist tradition. Michael Kazin makes the point that even some left-wing populists like “Mother Jones,” who were strongly opposed in principle to militarism and standing armies, could respond with strong and even ferocious support for particular wars (in her case, American involvement in World War I) after they had actually started.157

  This gut bellicosity, the “Don’t Tread on Me” or “Spread Eagle” position, and the opportunities this gives for political manipulation and exploitation, were summed up with amazing frankness by Irving Kristol, writing in 1989:

  If the president goes to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win…The American people had never heard of Grenada. There was no reason they should have. The reason we gave for the intervention—the risk to American medical students there—was phony but the reaction of the American people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was going on but they backed the president. They always will.158

  While often an embarrassment to U.S. foreign policy, the “Don’t Tread on Me” tendency is also extremely useful to any U.S. leader planning a war. Many of these figures can be counted on to support almost any war, as long as they can somehow be convinced that the United States has been attacked or insulted. The stance of some conservative Republicans over the Kosovo War is a revealing example. This attitude is also reflected in the demand of Republicans that Obama should either have avoided involvement in the Libyan conflict of 2011 altogether or engaged with much greater force.

  Most Republicans opposed the Kosovo War, out of hostility to the Clinton administration and out of opposition to “humanitarian” wars in which U.S. national interests did not seem to be at stake (the importance of preserving NATO as a vehicle for U.S. influence in Europe, and therefore for giving it something to do, was missed). It might have been expected therefore that when the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed, and the Chinese reacted with bitter criticism of the United States, these men would have explained this as a lesson of the dangerous wider “unintended consequences” of supposedly minor, limited military operations. Not at all. The reaction was one of furious belligerence, strongly flavored with traditional attitudes toward
the character and proper treatment of Asians and lesser breeds, as in this statement by Representative Tom DeLay:

  While the bombing of the embassy is an unfortunate example of collateral damage during Mr. Clinton’s war, the prestige of the United States has been harmed more by the constant apologies and groveling of the President in its aftermath. It seems that every time the television is on, the President is apologizing to Communist China…No wonder the PRC government thinks it can walk all over the United States. Communist Chinese leaders do not understand weakness in leadership. They respect unquestioned power, firmness of purpose and unquestioned shows of strength.159

  This instinctive belligerence has been much in evidence since 9/11, and in ways very damaging to the conduct of the struggle against Islamist terrorism. President Bush himself was careful to avoid this, and to speak of Islam and Muslim peoples with respect. But on the American nationalist Right, there was an explosion of aggressive chauvinism, not just against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and even Saddam Hussein, but against Islam and the Muslim world in general.160

  As disagreement between the United States and parts of Western Europe (and most of the rest of the world) over war with Iraq intensified in 2002–2003, the bitter hostility of American nationalists was extended to any country that refused to follow the United States into war.161 This spirit led to the U.S. House of Representatives voting to change the designation of “French Fries” in its restaurant to “Freedom Fries,” but it also affected even some normally moderate and intelligent American analysts.162