Isolation and/or Cooperation: part one - The Incarnation of Isolation

There’s nothing new in saying that all moments in time, when placed under a microscope, reveal a dense weave of contradictory fibers that somehow hold together to form a unified fabric. Telescoping away from this fabric, patterns emerge depicting the moment en toto. What is depicted is always the contest between these often obscured—because they are either too big or too small to clearly make out—contradictions of thought, act, and attitude. All of which is to ask: what contradictions persist today? And what do they say about the way we’re talking to each other? Two fat, essential threads run through American cultural and political life over the greater portion of the last decade, both extensively covered in popular and scholarly circles: one is the inclination to fracture and atomize, an instinct to withdraw into defensive positions, reacting to perceived threats. The other, ostensibly countervailing, inclination is to engage in multiple communal discourses, an instinct to aggregate and mass process information, a form of ‘proaction.’ Clearly, the former is an effect of 9/11, and the latter a product of the Internet. Any understanding of how current public debate is conducted, maintained, and understood must acknowledge and triangulate the conflictual nature of these threads, as well as the ways they, seemingly paradoxically, weave together to depict this modern moment. And, to be honest, these dual threads of reactive defensiveness and proactive discussion are hardly the unique providence of the modern moment. Though the antecedents were different, a similar paradox existed in, no doubt, Andrew Jackson’s America as it did in Lyndon Johnson’s America, et al. A similar paradox existed in, no doubt, post-Weimar Germany as it did on the cusp of the French Revolution. Historic precedent is significant, of course, but my interest lies in delineating these threads in medias res rather than ab ovo; my interest lies in talking about what we’re saying, not what we said.

Political psychologists characterize the instinct to withdrawal as a move towards intolerance and exclusion rooted in judicial, legislative, nationalistic, psychological, and religious rigidity, what they call the “worldview defense” stemming from explicit thoughts of one’s mortality. John Judis’s article in the August 2007 The New Republic succinctly summarizes the causal relationship between post-9/11 stressors and increased manifestations of worldview defense in America. I suspect, however, that there’s more than fear of death contributing to the current ambivalent feelings towards American policies at home and abroad. Though I’m no authority in these ideologies, I recognize that debates surrounding American interventionism and (often, versus) isolationism are deep and deeply troubled. George Washington warned against embroiling the young country in the “ordinary vicissitudes” of making and breaking geopolitical alliances. Adams lost his job to Jefferson because he refused to enter into a much-clamored-for war with France. But recent history has swung the pendulum away from those early non-interventionist tendencies: including, the United States involvement in both World Wars, the Cold War strategy of containment (for more on which see Isaacson and Thomas’s The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made), resulting in Truman’s invasion of Korea and Eisenhower’s (and Kennedy, and Johnson, and Nixon’s) invasion of Vietnam, Clinton’s dealings with Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), and the current Taliban retaliation in Afghanistan and the long embargo and subsequent invasion of Iraq. But even during these eruptions of intervention, our national disposition towards interventionism has been vexed, e.g., we entered the United Nations but rejected the League of Nations; the deposing of Saddam Hussein was widely supported before it was decried. So, even before our September tragedy, American political ideologues walked a fine line between embracing and rejecting interventionist and/or isolationist strategies.

George W. Bush also publicly walked the same fine line. In the second presidential debate of the 2000 campaign, he famously proclaimed that, “I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” A day later he would expand on that statement, claiming that, “If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble, and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.” These comments are interesting for two reasons, I think: one, they draw a subtle distinction between interventionism and isolationism that highlights the vexation noted above even as it attempts to counterbalance it. It seems that, for Bush, a ‘humble’ American foreign policy models “freedom” for other countries through the restraint of power, not its exhibition (mostly defined, if history is any indication, as use of force). This position can be labeled non-interventionist in its urging of caution towards non-defensive military engagements, but it’s not strictly isolationist, given its call for open ideological exchange (that ‘exchange’ might not accurately describe the transaction is another issue). Bush had previously qualified his position on isolationism during a November 1999 interview with the BBC when he said, “there is a protectionist and isolationist sentiment in our country and I'm going to resist that sentiment madly because I believe that we can and must lead the world to peace.” For a time this “humble” desire to “lead the world to peace” by “project[ing] strength in a way that promotes peace” resonated with the American electorate, as we know.

And even after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, President Bush, in his 2006 State of the Union address, stressed that, while “the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting,” America “rejects the false comfort of isolationism.” But this State of the Union, delivered four years after 2002’s famous “axis of evil” address, revokes the distinction between isolationism and interventionism as subtly as it was drawn in 1999 and 2000:

To overcome dangers in our world, we must also take the offensive by encouraging economic progress, and fighting disease, and spreading hope in hopeless lands. Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need . . . Our country must also remain on the offensive against terrorism here at home. The enemy has not lost the desire or capability to attack us . . . In all these areas -- from the disruption of terror networks, to victory in Iraq, to the spread of freedom and hope in troubled regions -- we need the support of our friends and allies. To draw that support, we must always be clear in our principles and willing to act. The only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world. Yet we also choose to lead because it is a privilege to serve the values that gave us birth. American leaders -- from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan -- rejected isolation and retreat, because they knew that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.

Isolationism here, as Bush redefines it, is no longer leadership by example, or at least it’s no longer just about that. Instead, isolationism “ties our hands,” preventing us from taking and remaining on “the offensive.” “The offensive” smacks of classic interventionism, even if Bush constitutes it as comprising both a humanitarian and a martial aspect, including a singular moment when the two aspects intertwine, i.e., “the spread of freedom and hope in troubled regions.” “American leadership” cannot just be “projected” anymore; it must be reified. In the 2000 debate cited above, Bush stated that he was “not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it gotta be.’” “We can help,” he continues, “I mean, I want to empower people. I don't -- you know, I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do. I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country, say, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’” But in his 2006 State of the Union, the only “alternative” to the presence of American “leadership” “is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world.” Freedom, after 9/11 “marches;” it helps people, Bush contends, though he elides that it does not seem as particularly interested anymore in helping them help themselves. By the time the “opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign” to “undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war” commences on 19 March 2003, the distinction between isolationism and interventionism has collapsed like an over-jostled soufflé. All of which may well be known to us in retrospect, but what’s important to note is that, again, for a time this less ‘humble’ desire “to disarm Iraq” also resonates with the electorate.

The second reason that Bush’s comments on isolationism, and their evolution, interest me, then, concerns the mostly seamless, widely accepted, and rarely questioned transition from freedom projected to freedom protected that occurred between 2000 and 2003. Certainly audience reactions weren’t entirely seamless and unilaterally accepted, but exceptions, like former Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, are, sadly, noteworthy. (For more on these exceptions, including Landay and Strobel, see the Bill Moyer’s Journal episode “Buying the War.”) And, given the historic uneasiness with interventionist ideologies and their counterparts, and contemporary uneasiness with the 9/11 attacks (nestled snugly in the middle of that three-year period), it is perhaps understandable that critical questioning was in short supply. Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg’s In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (2002) suggests that Bush’s post-9/11 ethos (my word) derives from “his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God's will to 'rid the world of evil'" (qtd. in Judis). In other words, American’s own post-9/11 ‘worldview defense’ dovetails with the sort of qualities and characteristics expressed by Karl Rove in the speech I cited in my 29 April post, e.g., “a readiness to act and a comfort in deciding,” “an ease in making decisions,” “a consistency of purpose, but a willingness to change strategy in moments of crisis,” and “an internal self-confidence.” In 2001, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan presaged Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg’s speculations, and even Rove’s cogitations, on the Bush ethos:

The charismatic figure Mr. Bush follows is the last big American president, the last who had the massive presence of a battleship, Ronald Reagan. People kept wondering last year during the election if Mr. Bush had it in him to be a Reagan. I thought maybe he did. But now as I watch him I think: Truman. Harry Truman did it all through gut and instinct and character. He was a good man who loved his country. He loved to read history and could quote Ovid, but he was no intellectual, not a man of strikingly original thought; his mind wasn’t so much creative as quick, and solid as a rock. He grew into the job, on a steep learning curve, forced by history to absorb facts and decide quickly. He didn’t know about the atom bomb until the first week of his presidency. Mr. Bush has been on a similar steep curve, forced to absorb and decide quickly, and his decisions too seem to have been issued from a mind that’s quick and solid as a rock.

Three years later (in 2004) she writes that “I think Mr. Bush is admired and liked after three years of war, terror, strife and recession because people have eyes.” “They look at him, listen to him, and watch him every day.” Noonan continues:

They can tell that George W. Bush is looking out for America. They can tell he means it. They can see his sincerity. They can tell he is doing his best. They understand his thinking because he tells them his thinking. They think he may be right. They’re not sure, but at least they understand his thinking . . . Americans do not think Mr. Bush has a persona to dazzle history, they think he is the average American man, but the average American man as they understand the term: straight shooter, hard worker, decent, America-loving, God-loving.

For Noonan, one assumes, Bush’s “resolute invocation of doing God's will to 'rid the world of evil'” is precisely what is called for in these troubled times. She applauds presidential characteristics who utilize “gut and instinct and character.” She appreciates that Bush is not an intellectual, but could, theoretically, like Truman, “quote Ovid.” And she values a president who does “his best,” so long as “he means it.” Indeed, she wants her president to be sincere, to be a “straight shooter.” Noonan wants, I’d argue, the worldview defense president; a president who projects a “protective shield” behind which civic audiences may huddle during confusing and confused times. Goebbels’s 1945 birthday speech for Hitler (cited in my 29 April post), delivered when “all forces of hate and destruction have been gathered once again,” suggests a similar desire for a particularly centralized kind of leadership. In his Anatomy of Fascism (2004), Robert Paxton lists “the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations:” including, among others, 1) “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions,” 2) “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external,” 3) “the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary,” 4) “the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny,” and 5) “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason” (p. 41).

Let me be clear, Bush is not a fascist, even a closeted one. But there are undeniable ethotic parallels between what Paxton calls the “mobilizing passions” that have allowed fascism to flower, and the recently displayed worldview defensives that have allowed Bush, cribbing from Rove and Noonan, to act ‘from the gut.’ The reason the electorate resonated with those moments of time when Bush’s non-interventionism (pre-2001) shifted towards subtle interventionism (2001-2003), then shifted again towards his embracing of preemptive intervention (post-2003) is, I suspect, because his ideological migration seemed perfectly natural given the circumstances of crisis. In other words, he acted as a “natural leader,” who “alone is capable of  incarnating the group’s identity.” As Noonan points out in her column titled "Plainspoken Eloquence" after Bush’s “axis of evil” State of the Union address in 2002, “A great gut plus a reliable character is maybe the exact perfect mix for any president, but certainly for a wartime president.” In that same 2002 article, Noonan describes what she notes is a “blunt” “unveiling” of “what will perhaps be known as the Bush Doctrine;” “[T]he United States will no longer hope for the best in the world and respond only after being attacked; we will, instead, admit and act on the facts of the WMD era and actively search out our would-be killers wherever they are and whoever supports them and shut them down dead.” Paxton, I suspect, would sense some similarities between the “emotional lava” of Goebbels’s birthday speech (in some senses his farewell to the Fuhrer and the Reich) and Bush’s 2002 State of the Union. Bush:

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side.  I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons . . . In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we've been called to a unique role in human events.  Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential.

“Misfortune must not make us cowardly,” Goebbels proclaimed, “but rather resistant, never giving a mocking watching world the appearance of wavering. Rather than hoisting the white flag of surrender that the enemy expects, raise the old swastika banner of a fanatic and wild resistance, renewing the oath that we swore so often in the happy and safe days of peace, thanking god again and again that he gave us a true leader for these terrible times, feeling bound in our hearts to his sorrows and trials, thus showing the enemy world that they can wound but not kill us, that they can beat us bloody but not force us down, torture us, but not demoralize us!”

I’m talking here about similarities in rhetorical presentation, not political intention. Just as those qualifications Rove outlined in his 2002 Utah remarks about what makes a president great do not necessarily represent intrinsic ethos as much as an epideictic proposition that audiences must ultimately either accept or reject, so too is the group identity to be “incarnated” up for negotiation. The trouble, clearly, is what happens when the group is disinclined to negotiate. What then? Does the leader’s ethos become authoritative by default? Can someone who possesses uncontested authority be considered a “natural” leader? Noonan wants her leader to be a “straight shooter,” because it is important, for her, that voters “can see his sincerity.” But what if she, like Rove’s audience member who called Bush “such a good man,” merely accepts a constructed version of Bush’s ethos as natural instead of recognizing an authentic version? (Perhaps she didn't presage Rove at all.) “I wrote to one of Mr. Bush’s aides the other day,” Noonan relays in her 2001 article, “a smart and gifted man, and he sent back a note saying the most moving thing that has happened to him the past two months is ‘seeing that George Bush is a great man—a truly great man.’” Perhaps in some ways Bush really is a great man; my point is not to argue with Noonan. Instead, I wonder if ‘natural’ leadership is a priori or a posteriori? That is, can leaders act natural, or does performance of ‘natural’ leadership negate the authentic natural? What, even, is connoted by that word ‘natural?’: someone who possesses essential leadership, genuine leadership, unaffected leadership, or unrestrained leadership? How do audiences figure it all out?

Part two of this thread (forthcoming) will take up the ways civic audiences recognize and exercise (or don’t) their agency in these kinds of ethotic transactions with their leaders, especially in relation to the proactive communal discourse I mentioned at the onset of this post.

Comments

[Eric]

Yeah, it's me. I know I owe you a long letter. It's coming. Promise. Thanks for checking out my blog. I'm using it to work through ideas for my project. More later. Take care.

[Nisa Qazi]

Is this your blog, D? I'm so excited!