This is a Part 2 of a discussion of Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World (2003) by Robert Jay Lifton. Part 1 was posted yesterday.
American Creed, American Mission
Lifton writes about the sense of invulnerability that came from "a glorious aloneness" based on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protecting the US to some degree from the more dangerous powers in the world. Since the US faced possible nuclear annihiliation from the Soviet Union for decades, I'm not so convinced by this particular part of his argument. But it's true that Americans did have a sense prior to 9/11 that in some way the "homeland" was safe from external attack, particularly with the end of the Cold War.
But he also talks about the sense of "American exceptionalism," of which he sketches the historical background. This is the notion of America as a special nation, a haven of freedom and a pioneering force for democracy. Here he is undoubtedly speculating about how mass psychology works. But in his case, it's an informed speculation, not pop psychology:
American exceptionalism has often had the overall psychological quality of a sense of ourselves as a blessed people, immune from the defeats and sufferings of others. But underneath that sense there had to be a potential chink in our psychological armor - which was a deep-seated if hidden sense of vulnerability.
In addressing this sense of vulnerability, he says that for a country collectively attachedto the notion of ourselves as a superpower, the "idea of vulnerability is intolerable, the fact of it irrefutable. One solution is to maintain an illusion of invulnerability." And he suggests that this is the solution implied in the Bush administration's drive to eliminate "terrorism," if not evil itself, from the world.
An alternative would be to have some more realistic acceptance on a psychological basis of "the essential vulnerability of life on earth." This could allow policy-makers to focus more on realistic and attainable goals of protecting the country and its citizens from the worst threats, while avoiding the inevitable follies that stem from attempting to achieve impossible goals. But, he says, writing before the famous quoteof the administration official sneering at the "reality-based community" became famous: "No such reality can be accepted by those clinging to a sense of omnipotence."
At issue is the experience of death anxiety, which is the strongest manifestation of vulnerability. Such a deep-seated sense of vulnerability can sometimes be acknowledged by the ordinary citizens of a superpower, or even at times by its leaders, who may admit, for instance, that there is no guaranteed defense against terrorist acts. But those leaders nonetheless remain committed to eliminating precisely that vulnerability - committed, that is, to the illusory goal of invulnerability. When that goal if repeatedly undermined - whether by large-scale terrorist acts like 9/11, or at present by militant resistance to American hegemony in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East - both the superpower and the world it acts upon may become dangerously destabilized.
Referring to the official National Security Strategy of 2002, says that the Bush Doctrine envisions "an empire of fluid world control," fluid meaning its form shifts in response to events all over the world, and that the vision of the Bush strategists "is nothing less than an inclusive claim to the ownership of history." And it's in this context that the question of how "reality-based" the thinking of the Bush administration is on foreign policy becomes really disturbing. Lifton writes:
The administration's strategic document quotes a phrase from one of the president's speeches concerning the dangers we face "at the crossroads of radicalism and technology." What is meant by that phrase is the apocalyptic marriage between ultimate zealotry and ultimate weapons in our enemies, but the "crossroads" mentioned applies no less to American policy, specifically as laid out in this document [the National Security Strategy]. The administration's radicalism takes the form of aggressively remaking the world in an American image. Our unprecedented world dominance, made possible by our unique military technology, becomes our means of doing so. The fluidity of this version of imagined world control is consistent with the Rumsfeld doctrine of a fluid military. The latter is to sustain the former. Technology and fluidity are counted up on minimize American casualities and streamline war-making in general. [my emphasis]
Anatol Lieven talked about the type of American self-image in which the Bush administration hopes to remake the world, or at least the Muslim Middle East, in a recent essay: Liberal Hawk Down The Nation 11/25/04 (also available at the Carnegie Endowment site). And he describes the ways in which it can become very destructive.
The language of democratizing the Middle East, and the liberal hawks' brand of internationalism, are very attractive to the Washington political elites and indeed to many ordinary Americans, for they are rooted in what has been called the "American Creed" (a term coined by G.K. Chesterton and since employed by a range of writers from Gunnar Myrdal to Samuel Huntington). The American Creed involves passionate and absolutist belief in democracy and "freedom," and is a critical element in American civic nationalism. Language derived from the creed therefore has a tendency to command the automatic and unthinking assent of many Americans, irrespective of the particular national, regional or historical circumstances. ...
It may be objected that whatever the political provenance of the idea, surely a strategy of democratization is in itself a good thing. And as the ultimate goal of the United States and European strategy in the Muslim world, this is true. But when this becomes the only goal and the only strategy, and when the understanding of the historical development of democracy is extremely simplistic, then this approach is very wrong. Its encouragement of a messianic vision of the United States and its role in the world fuels self-righteous nationalist extremism in America itself. Such attitudes openly despise the interests and views of other nations.
And Lieven quotes historian C. Vann Woodward on the American Creed:
The true American mission, according to those who support this view, is a moral crusade on a worldwide scale. Such people are likely to concede no validity whatever and grant no hearing to the opposing point of view, and to appeal to a higher lawto justify bloody and revolting means in the name of a noble end. For what end could be nobler, they ask, than the liberation of man.... The irony of the moralistic approach,when exploited by nationalism, is that the high motive to end injusticeand immorality actually results in making war more amoral and horrible than ever and in shattering the foundations of the political and moral order upon which peace has to be built.
Woodward's reference in that quotation was to the Vietnam War in particular. That war was also justified in terms of grand goals of freedom and democracy - among several other justifications, which kept changing over the entire course of the war. A phenomenon with which we are also familiar from a much more contemporary conflict.
Lifton characterizes the way in which that vision of exporting the American Creed to the world by force and violence is incorporated into the Bush Doctrine:
The National Security Strategy is in fact a statement of American susceptibility to the lure of the infinite - to a vision of achieving total sway over human endeavors. It represents a kind of omega point of superpower omnipotence and megalomania.
A happy ending?
I've focused here on the parts of Lifton's book that I found especially relevant to the analysis of Bush's larger vision of the world: its background, its political appeal to Americans and its very troubling effects in practice. But Superpower Syndrome also has a number of other useful observations on mass psychology and the politics of war. For instance, he talks about the way in which public reaction rallied around the war, as it always does, immediately after the invasion of Iraq:
While there were extensive protests right up to and after, the moment of invasion [a fact which seems to be slipping quickly down the proverbial memory hole - Bruce], the country at large quicly rallied around the flag and the commander in chief, with high approval ratings for both the war and the president. ... But there remained considerable uneasiness about this demonstration of unlimited and unopposed American power.
But he then talks about the evolution of public opinion in what were still the early months of the counterinsurgency war when the book was completed, with the less-than-completely-enthusiastic welcome by the Iraqis, Bush's ridiculous fly-boy photo op on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the contradictory messages that came from the administration. "American therefore havebeen left with a mixture of enthusiasm, confusion, anxiety, and anger in relation to the official survivor mission their government has embraced in their name following upon 9/11."
And there are many useful observations as well from his previous studies like those mentioned at the start of this post. And this description of war fever has applications beyond our current situation:
War-making can quickly become associated with "war fever," the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience of transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one's own nation, to realize its special destiny and the immortality of its people. In this case, the growth of war fever came in several stages: it began with Bush's personal declaration of war immediately after September 11, had a modest rise with the successful invasion of Afghanistan, and then a wave of ultrapatriotic exceses - triumphalism, and the labeling of critics as disloyal or treasonous - at the time of the invasion of Iraq. War fever tends always to be subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fear of new terrorist attacks at home or against American abroad - and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq.
In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges describes his own experience to the drug known as war fever:
When we ingest the anodyne of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fudamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. I partook of it for many years. And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war's simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me - maybe it is a part of many of us - that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war - and very stupid once the war ended.
But Lifton's main focus in Superpower Syndrome is the dangerously inflated sense of national purpose and mission represented by the Bush Doctrine and this administration's dysfunctional response to the 9/11 attacks and the jihadist threat. And his warning is a serious one:
Yet a sense of megalomania and ominpotence, whether in an individual or a superpower, must sooner or later lead not to glory but to collapse. The ownership of history is a fantasy in the extreme. Infinite power and control is a temptation that is as self-destructive as it is dazzling - still another version of the ownership of death.
Near the end of his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment, to which I refer often on this blog, Kenneth Galbraith explains that he cannot meet the conventional expectations of such a book as that one:
Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy - one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority [here he has reference mainly though not exclusively to the United States] would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of ugency to correct what is wrong, [and with] the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.
Lifton, however, does try to give a bit of a "happy ending" to his book. He suggests that people "do not have to collude in partitioning the world into two contending apocalyptic forces." And yet, his insistence on maintaining hope includes the following recommendation; it will be quickly apparent to anyone who followed the political rhetoric on both sides of the recently concluded presidential campaign that such a turn of events will not be easy, and not voluntarily embraced by the current administration and Republican Party:
The American superpower is an artificial construct, widely perceived as illegitimate, whatever the acquiescence it coerces in others. Its reign is therfore inherently unstable. Indeed, its reach for full-scale world domination marks the beginning of its decline. A large task for the world, and for Americans in particular, is the early recognition and humane management of that decline.
The humane management of American decline: the very fact that he phrased it that way makes me wonder if Lifton wasn't trying to say the same thing with irony that Galbraith said explicitly. In fact, in his theoretically hopeful final chapter, he describes how the Bush administration's strategy of nurturing a feeling of American victimization and the jihadists' nurturing of Muslim and Arab feelings of vicitimization are likely to feed off each other.
[The] danger of totalized victim consciousness [in which a group sees themselves as the only true victims] looms large in connection with 9/11. America was attacked. More than 3,000 people were murdered, whether at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or in crashed airplanes. In response, fierce feelings of victimization have been poured into unrestrined but narrowly conceived survivor missions. For a superpower in particular, the mindset of victimization can readily be seized upon and turned into a sense of unlimited entitlement. Justification is then felt in drawing from a broad repertoire of violence to reassert a sense of hegemony, of control over world events, and the need to do so can become so great that an enemy is required.
For the executives of Halliburton, the promotion of such a situation can be beneficial and rational from an individual and business point of view. But for the people who have to kill and die and come home with body parts missing or their souls shattered in the wars that result from such a state of affairs, it is not a desirable situation. And Lifton continues:
Significantly, there is a parallel mindset of victimization among Islamist terrorists. They see Islam as having been victimized historically by the West, as well as by its own despotic leaders, andthey see themselves and their coreligionists undergoing continuing victimization by the Untied States.
No, it's hard to see a happy ending for this process.
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