Along with that, it’s possible for the vast majority of us to go on with our lives in wartime without any consciousness that we’re at war. We have the strongest military in the world and we spend more on it than the rest of the world combined, but still the cohort of people that are on these deployments is less than 1%. That’s why some people think what might get people more energized is the return of the draft. First of all, I don’t think that’s going to happen; it has no political support. My own recommendation— and this also has no political support— is to have a massive war tax. You really soak the rich. You triple their taxes; if you want to have these wars, pay for them. That would really bring some challenges to it. [laughs]
The leadership appears to have absolutely no intention whatsoever of changing course. As you said, if you want to sit at the table you have to be drinking their water. Not a single voice of any influence comes forward to suggest an alternative. How do you see this? How do you explain it? How does one respond?
When you’re in these positions, even people like John Kerry— who once, decades ago, was an eloquent critic of the very military and political establishment he presides over now— lose all that critical edge that would make any kind of fundamental challenge to the premise that American power is necessary and indispensable. To challenge it, it’s going to take something from below that won’t necessarily take the same form as ’60s protest. It’s a very different time, and there’s very little confidence that street protests do anything, though one of the things that made the Occupy movement so surprising is that people did come out, permanently, into the streets. It was a fascinating thing. It’s going to take something like that and some radical change, obviously, in our political system, in the way we elect people, in the kind of people we elect to office.
There are some good people in Congress, but obviously not enough. There are people like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others who are willing to fundamentally rethink our role in the world, but that has to expand tremendously to get any kind of traction.
You summarize one of Obama’s speeches as making the point that people and nation are one, and that’s a very important lie. The question is, What do we mean when we use the word “we”? The divorce of power from citizenry is radical now. Is there a “we” we can truly talk about?
It is dangerous when we conflate the royal “we” of the government and the national “we,” as in “We the people,” because they are not the same, but this usage is commonplace nonetheless. I do think there is such a thing as national identity, obviously, but I am at pains to distinguish between government policy and national mood.
Obama is great at convincing us of this national “we” being one and the same as our role in the world, and that’s why they’re always saying things, as Obama did in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing, that those who dove in to help the survivors, that’s who we are as a nation. If you want to understand how we respond to evil, this is it—fearlessly, selflessly, that’s who we are. Then, of course, when we have a massacre in Kandahar or troops are photographed urinating on corpses, all of these examples pile up and yet the president and Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta always say the same thing: “This is not who we are.”
Never mind the great long record indicating that it is who we are.
Yes.
The moral and political reckoning your book indicates is imperative on every single page— what are the instruments by which this reckoning can be completed? I name two myself: history and language.
Yes, the rectification of names and language and memory is a huge part of the project. It’s not going to change things overnight— no book can do that much— but it does add up.
This is the story of the true relevance of good scholarship, right? Scholarship is irrelevant when it’s not good, honest, authentic.
This book relies deeply, as every book does, on other people’s work. There have been hundreds of very serious, important monographs on very small aspects of this story; I was surprised when I first started to think about this book that there weren’t more like it because it seems to me such an obvious question to raise, the broad question of the war’s impact on us as a culture and a people. In fact, it had not actually been done very much.
The Reaganesque pose of American strength: I assume you’re on for the idea that it is, more than anything else, an expression of fear and weakness.
I am. I might even say that the conception of masculinity that has so underwritten American foreign policy forever has undergone a shift toward something reflecting a deep insecurity and real psychological weakness. You see this among real policy makers and in popular cultural expressions. One thing that’s interesting about that Rambo character, if you watch the movies, is that as overdetermined as his masculinity is— the films make Tarzan look like a wimp— underneath it he’s a very fragile person. He’s dragged out by his commanding officer; he’s reduced to tears.
You ask, Who are we? But you didn’t tell us who we are. I want it straight, no chaser: Who are we? Are we frightened? Are we hopelessly confused? Are we propagandized beyond retrieval? Are we in some sort of regenerative phase?
You kind of hit on it: I do think we remain in a profound national identity crisis. We really don’t know who we are. We have a set of stock images that have been with us for ages and they’ve worn out; Vietnam turned them upside-down. We’re like Humpty Dumpty, in the decades after Vietnam, trying to cobble the pieces back together again, but it is a very fragmented figure. We don’t have a clear national “we” anymore, so in that sense the next 50 years might be very interesting because we’re changing every day. Where we are 50 years from now could actually look very different.
I often urge readers to find the optimism buried in the pessimism. A lot of things in this country have to collapse before we make any progress, so let’s hope they collapse. Do you agree?
My optimism comes from a sense that change does happen, that history is not inevitable, that change often comes when you least expect it. This climate-change movement is important, so I hope that doesn’t collapse. I hope the environment really doesn’t— it can’t. I do think that movement, which is gaining steam even on campuses, they are starting to make connections between other issues, like foreign policy. Any effort to change our reliance on fossil fuels, for example, can’t be done only at a local or a national level; it has to be global, so there has to be this reliance on that old-fashioned thing called diplomacy.
Do you think we live in a democracy?
We don’t live in a vibrant democracy or, for that matter, even a vibrant republic, because we’ve operated as an empire for so long. The institutions that sustain empire do degrade democracy; they can’t coexist. It goes back to what we said about people feeling powerless. Empire thrives on the unaccountable exercise of power, and that further enlarges the gap between the kind of government that still exists— we still elect people to office— but it could obviously be much more genuine and thorough. It would be a great thing if we had the ability to make decisions in more aspects of our life.
The history of American foreign policy is the history of a sequestered elite. This has to be addressed. I hope it is….