He doesn’t actually use the term, but, in any case, he gives an historical analysis that is quite striking.
Exactly. So, defeat, Carter’s incomplete effort to accept it, and then a massive embrace of denial, which I consider a huge bad investment. And we keep throwing good money after bad. In ’89, when the [Berlin] Wall came down, a moment of illusory affirmation. This is why it’s vitally important for us to claim credit for the Soviet collapse, which is absolutely wrong. Then in 2001, a moment of unforgiving truth that set us on a really remarkable course. That’s my progression. In biblical terms, we went from the New Testament’s humanism back to Old Testament revenge and retribution. I wonder if there isn’t even a kind of psychological impulse here: We went back to the Puritan notion of justice. This is my third progression.
That’s smart, and you date this from ’75 to the present, but I think that perfectly encapsulates the entire period of the book, from the ’50s to the present.
From the Tom Dooley days on.
Exactly, because Dooley was New Testament: more confident, expansive, confident that we could, in fact, bring the blessings of Americanism to the world. We no longer have that confidence. We have this victim mentality, that there are evildoers out there and we are the seat of virtue, but very little confidence now. Bush may say that he wants to bring light to the benighted, but I think it’s a much more defensive, brittle, even xenophobic kind of conception.
Was this advance or regression into victimhood and hollow triumphalism a conscious or unconscious matter? It seems to me that the more intractable aspect would be the unconscious aspect, because it’s an animal drive.
The effort to reconstruct American nationalism after Vietnam has both conscious and unconscious aspects. How else could you explain, for example, the construction of a new form of American heroism? When we were growing up, the common definition was that a hero is someone who puts his or her life on the line for a noble cause. In the decades after Vietnam, we modified that and came up with an idea that if you simply put on a uniform in service of the country— either in the military or the fire department or the police— you are conferred a kind of automatic hero status.
Some people may be more heroic than others, but the way we pay homage to military service in this very empty way… It’s in the culture and the commercials. Every time you turn on a football game there’s a flag-waving memorial to military service. I think that comes out of the Vietnam war and a search to recover a sort of pride in the American nation. That brand of patriotism has deep roots, but it became ever more reflexive in the 1980s and especially after 9/11. It pops up in all kinds of weird places. It first became most noticeable at the time of the Iran hostage crisis, when these 52 Americans suffered this ordeal. To suffer an ordeal is not inherently heroic, and yet they came home to this unbelievable hero’s welcome.
We’ve confused heroes and victims.
Yes, exactly. Rambo was kind of the classic victim-hero.
Bless you for watching those movies! The unconscious element is rather prominent, in any case. Do you agree?
I do.
I was reading Staughton Lynd’s old book [“The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism”], which says resistance during Vietnam expressed itself by way of Enlightenment ideals. O.K., but Nietzsche had already advised us that Enlightenment thought would prove not enough; we have to reinvent atop it. What about the form dissent takes?
The variety of dissent in the ’60s is almost irreducible. It’s so hard to generalize either Enlightenment thought or something more mixed and complex. In the post-Vietnam period, it’s interesting how the dissent of the ’60s has been reduced— just as the war has been reduced— to this small set of images: The image of the anti-war movement has sort of become Jane Fonda.
A dismissible, marginal…
Right, exactly. In fact it included, by the end, elements of labor, there were campus-based elements, every religious denomination was involved. Even business eventually turned against the war. Their protest, of course, was not in the streets, but it was not insubstantial in helping to explain the end of the war.
It has obvious roots in the civil rights movement; King’s eloquent anti-war testimony in his famous 1967 speech at Riverside Church hits the variety of elements that you’re suggesting here. It’s not just an Enlightenment recognition that reality doesn’t square with our ideals, but a darker sense of the root of the nation. It goes beyond Vietnam. King says that; it’s not just a matter of getting out of this one war. We have to change who we are as a people and unless we overcome our tribalism we’re never going to come close to overcoming militarism— by which King really meant imperialism— or materialism— by which he really meant capitalism.
You don’t have to go even as far as European social democracy. You need simply to go back to the ideals this country was founded on and proceed from there. Is this possible?
To go back to those original ideals?
Look, it was very few years before we abandoned them, one way or another. Maybe our true identity is a people without ideals. What’s your thought?
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to return to some of the founding ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence or, for that matter, even in the Constitution. Whether this would solve our problems or not, at least it would be a step in the right direction for us to have a foreign policy, for example, in which Congress took its Constitutional responsibility to decide matters of war and peace and to actually challenge this ever-more imperial presence.
Even these “authorization of military force” resolutions in place of declarations of war, simply defer authority to the executive under the pretense of debate. It simply puts Congress in a position of rubber-stamping the president.
Remember the pictures in Life magazine of the Soviet Duma with all hands up? If that isn’t our current….
Wayne Morse, who was one of the two people to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [in 1964], called for a people’s foreign policy. He used that phrase!
My concern with this question of Enlightenment ideals is that the exceptionalist story is actually woven into those ideals; the idea that we are doing something that has not been done before.
A new order, yes.
I want to move into the question of passivity, which profoundly disappoints me. Relative to the ’60s, it’s one of the heartbreaks of our period. What’s your take on the public’s passivity toward, say, American responsibility in the Ukraine crisis? We installed another murdering dictator in Cairo and no one gives a damn. How do you view this?
It’s very discouraging. It’s not that the American public is gung-ho about our role in the world. I think the majority of Americans are disgusted, actually, sick and tired of all of these wars, but feel powerless to do anything about it. I think the war-making machine is so powerful and so longstanding that people feel it to be impervious to change. It’s almost as if it has a life of its own.
The deep state, as some people say.