Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
George W. Bush is not the first American leader to exploit fear to justify harsh national-security policies. Decades, even centuries before the PATRIOT Act, presidents in turbulent times used fear to justify the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Red Scare and the anti-communist Palmer Raids after World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the McCarthy abuses of the Cold War.
It is, of course, also possible for leaders to exploit fear in a positive way. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office during the depths of the Great Depression, he challenged Americans to steel themselves with confidence and optimism, and to participate in the nation's renewal. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he famously said. And the way Roosevelt defined fear in that inaugural speech has uncanny resonance today. It is, he said, "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Later, FDR marshaled the nation's moral resolve to confront the twin specters of Hitler's Nazism and Japanese imperialism.
On the eve of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill likewise spoke to the fear of his countrymen and summoned them to rise above it. "The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us," he told the House of Commons in 1940, after France had fallen. "Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
Bush, too, has at times used this kind of transcendental rhetoric, claiming that fighting "evil" is part of America's destiny. "In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty -- that we have been called to a unique role in human events," he said in his 2002 State of the Union address.
But Bush's message is dramatically different from Roosevelt's or Churchill's. First, he has not called upon Americans to make many, if any, actual sacrifices. The "America: Open for Business" campaign that was launched a few weeks after airliners slammed into the World Trade Center, encouraging Americans to go shopping, was hardly a call for blood, sweat and tears. Second, even when he does summon Americans to surmount the challenge, there seems to be a constant, subliminal message that says something else altogether: You have much to fear, and we are the only ones who can protect you.
It's a strategy based on a psychological double-game, one whose core message draws from a paralyzing current of dissonance: Go about your normal daily business, but also be afraid. The nation is at grave risk, but we have the exclusive power to keep you safe.
In her testimony Thursday, Condoleezza Rice repeated the theme: "We're safer, but we're not safe."
Some experts think that team Bush appeals to fear because it really is afraid. "I'm not so cynical as to say they have a deliberate strategy to incapacitate the American people for political purposes," says terrorism expert Jessica Stern, who served on President Clinton's National Security Council and now teaches public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "I think the truth is that the administration itself is afraid." Bush's militarism, she says, was a result of 9/11. "The attacks really shook us to the core, and some of our leaders believe the way to deal with such an event is to strike out. Even if you can't find the enemy responsible, you still have to strike out somewhere."
George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen believes that Bush officials may be hyping threats so as not to be accused of negligence. In his new book, "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age," Rosen writes, "We've seen the temptations for politicians to pass along vague and unconfirmed threats of future violence in order to protect themselves from criticism. This cycle fuels the public's demand for draconian and poorly designed laws and technologies to eliminate risks that are, by their nature, difficult to reduce."
But other critics say Bush's aggressive anti-terrorism agenda is driven more by ideology than by visceral impulse or political cover. Robert Lifton argues that 9/11, and the fear it created, simply gave the administration a potent backdrop for its long-desired plans to assert American global military supremacy. "Our recent technology revolution allows a powerful country like the U.S. to imagine what I call 'fluid world control,'" says Lifton. "I believe that's what the Bush administration seeks: It's described in their national security strategy, which combines a powerful apocalyptic current with a military fundamentalism. Appealing to uncertainty and fear makes it easy for many Americans to lapse into a simplistic embrace of such aggressive militarism."
Corey Robin, a political science professor at Brooklyn College, says that the Sept. 11 attacks empowered a reactionary movement in American politics that was pent-up for decades. "There was a long-standing right-wing movement that said the 1960s and '70s produced too open of an American society, with too many civil liberties concessions," says Robin, who studies the history of fear as a political tool. "Conservatives have long believed in a deep connection between the domestic social and moral order, and foreign policy. J. Edgar Hoover sincerely thought that you needed a kind of racist, racial hierarchy inside America in order to deal with the foreign threat."
That vision closely linking hard-line social conservatism to national security, says Robin, seems to rule Washington again today.
"I think the likes of John Ashcroft also believe that too open a society will lead to another 9/11," he says. "Intense public fear in the wake of the attacks offered a perfect opportunity to turn the clock back."
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