Who
can deny it? It's an almost physical pleasure to
watch President George W Bush's fall from grace.
And it's so easy. All you have to do is say, "Bush
has botched the war on terrorism. Bush is not
keeping us safe from terrorists - or from the
terrors of nature." You've already got over half
the country with you, and more are jumping on
board the anti-Bush train every day. But before we
settle in to ride that train to political glory,
we ought to consider whether it can really take us
to a better future.
A recent TV ad from
MoveOn.org sums up the commonest theme of the
campaign to cripple, if not topple, the Bush
presidency: "We're no safer today than we were
four years ago." The rest of
the case goes something like
this (and who can deny its accuracy): We have good
reason to be afraid. We're more vulnerable than
ever to another attack on our soil, because the
Bush administration is fighting the "war on
terrorism" totally the wrong way. In fact, in Iraq
it isn't really fighting the "war on terrorism" at
all. In growing numbers, critics, even
conservative ones, agree that the president's
misadventure in Iraq has diverted us from the war
we have to fight, the war against the real threat:
al-Qaeda.
At the recent huge Washington
peace rally, speakers denounced the war as a
diversion from another pressing threat. "National
security begins in New Orleans, homeland security
begins at home," Jesse Jackson told the crowd.
When real danger was upon us, the president's
critics charged, you were busy doing something
else. You failed in your solemn duty to protect
us. How can we trust you to protect us in the
future from the threats that we fear? One
demonstrator's sign summed up the point
succinctly: "Make levees, not war."
Again,
who can deny that making levees makes much more
sense than sending more Louisiana National Guards
to Iraq? But if we only hold back the peril we
fear, and stop at that, we won't ever get real
safety or security. Here's why:
Hurricane
Katrina has sealed the public image of Bush as a
failure. He is, after all, a one-issue president.
His success hinges completely on getting high
marks in protecting us from danger. Now his big
gamble - turning the "war on terror" into a war on
Iraq - is backfiring big time. When the waters of
Lake Pontchartrain washed away much of New
Orleans, they also washed away most of Bush's
"political capital". But he had already been
losing plenty of that between the Tigris and
Euphrates.
The Bush administration still
doesn't seem to get it. With hundreds of thousands
descending on Washington to protest his war, the
president could only repeat his stale old mantra:
"will, resolve, character." With more of the same
coming from the White House, we can pretty well
count on a steadily weakening presidency - unless
there is another terrorist attack that kills a
large number of Americans or destroys a symbol of
American nationalism.
The president's only
chance to recoup would be a reprise of September
11, sending another chill of fear up the spine of
the body politic. Bush's success has always
depended on the fear factor, on the prospect of
threat without end.
Fear does move public
opinion. That's a lesson the anti-Bush forces have
learned well. Their nemesis in the White House has
turned out, in this way, to be their master
teacher. They are using fear most effectively to
bring down a presidency built on fear. It's a
delicious irony.
It's also a blessing, at
least in the short run. A weakened presidency
suffers on every front. The privatization of
social security is moribund and will soon be
pronounced dead on Capitol Hill. Chief Justice
Roberts will be bad, but he may not be the Antonin
Scalia clone that Bush promised his right-wing
base. And when was the last time you heard the
words "compassionate conservatism"? Though there
is plenty to worry about under a weak Bush, it
would have been far worse under a strong Bush.
But what price will we pay for this
blessing in the long run if we purchase it with
the currency of mounting public fear?
The price of fear Fear can be
an energizing emotion. It can move us to fight or
flight. But fear, when it becomes overwhelming, is
more likely to paralyze - think of the proverbial
deer in the headlights. Long ago, in Hiroshima,
psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton discovered that
when there's too much fear, it curdles into
despair. If threat seems to be everywhere, with no
escape in sight, people stop trying to imagine how
things could get better. In fact, it seems that
they stop imagining anything at all, except more
peril. Lifton called this condition "psychic
numbing".
His great insight was that the
bomb didn't have to fall for this tragedy to
befall us. In a sense, Hiroshima had already come
to America. During all those Cold War years, when
Americans lived under the shadow of superpower
"mutual assured destruction" or MAD (as the madly
accurate acronym of that moment had it), seeing no
way out, psychic numbing took its toll. What
historians often call the "national security
state" has actually been a national insecurity
state, based on the sort of numbing fear that was
bound to make Americans more conservative, more
fearful of change.
The idea of a whole
society working together to imagine a better
world, and then turning imagination into reality,
has been off the American radar screen for some
six decades now (except for a brief ray of light
in the 1960s). When it seems safer to allow no
significant change at all, politics naturally
becomes an exercise in circling the wagons and
hunkering down for an endless siege. The September
11 attack and the Bush-orchestrated response
ensured that the United States would continue to
be a hunkered-down national insecurity state (and
now a homeland insecurity state) well into the
21st century.
All of us, supporters and
critics alike, have absorbed this lesson. When we
criticize Bush because he has failed to keep us
safe, we score valuable political points. But we
pay a price for those points, because we reinforce
the basic premises of the national insecurity
state - that danger is everywhere and can never be
eliminated; that all systemic change is dangerous;
and that our best hope lies in a government strong
enough and pugnacious enough to prevent
significant change and so protect us from fear's
worst effects.
The urge to be safe, to
keep fear at bay, is certainly natural and
understandable. But after more than half a century
in a state of heightened national insecurity,
Americans have largely forgotten the other side of
the human coin: the urge to be daring, to take
chances that can lead to positive change.
Insecurity is now in the national bloodstream.
That's why anti-Bush campaigns that evoke fear can
be so successful. To be successful in the longer
term, though, we have to constrict that sense of
insecurity, to return it to the more modest place
where it belongs, until actual security comes into
sight.
Otherwise, no matter how much
anti-Bush campaigns weaken the president, they end
up reinforcing the pervasive insecurity that has
been the key to his political success. They make
it more likely that the public will want future
leaders in the Bush mold, who demand "peace
through strength". No flip-flops need apply.
Securing a politics of hope The
human resource - potentially so readily available
- that can help us break out of this cycle of fear
and numbing is imagination. Imagine American
political language and life no longer based simply
on the question, "How can we be safe?", but on the
question, "How can we make life better for all of
us?" Imagine it for a little while, and you begin
to realize that such a profound shift would give
us the best chance - maybe the only chance - to be
really secure.
Consider, for example,
Class 5 hurricanes. It's a good idea to build
stout levees, if they are just a first step. For
real security, though, we have to move beyond fear
to hope. We have to focus on the positive changes
that will help everyone, even if there is never
another great storm. We should reclaim wetlands -
nature's own buffer against flooding - to create a
stable environment where myriad species, including
humans, can flourish creatively. We should support
the decades-old local organizations in poor,
stricken areas, the folks who know how to build
vibrant communities in their own neighborhoods. We
should take steps to cool down the Earth to make
wetlands more stable, growing seasons more
predictable, and harvests more bountiful.
The prospect of really making things
better gives people a reason to think and act
together. It makes them feel empowered. Once set
loose, hopeful attitudes and actions build on each
other. That's when genuine change begins - whether
in relation to wetlands, poverty, global warming
or any other issue, including the "war on
terrorism".
You hardly have to be as well
educated as the average al-Qaeda activist (who, it
turns out, is pretty well educated) to see that
present American efforts to "make the world
better" are mainly efforts to protect US power and
interests. The president and the power brokers can
hide that truth behind a verbal smokescreen, using
phrases like "protect America", "keep our nation
safe" and "defend our homeland against foreign
enemies". It's an easy rhetorical trick.
Once you start talking the language of
"protecting and defending", though, you're on your
way into the land of self-fulfilling prophecies.
To make the smokescreen work, the administration
then has to turn everyone who disagrees into "the
enemy". It's a natural next step to set out to
destroy them, which, of course, turns them into
genuine enemies.
But suppose the US had
spent the past six decades letting other people
decide what "a better world" means to them and
then helping them achieve their own goals. That's
so far from the pattern of our foreign policy that
it takes a wrenching effort just to imagine. Try
to make that effort; then ask what kind of
"terrorist threat" we would have. There's no way
to know for sure. But it seems a reasonable bet
that we'd be a lot safer than we are today.
It makes sense to join the liberal chorus
of "end the war in Iraq so we can protect
ourselves against terrorists" as long as it's just
a first step, as long as we go on to say things
like: "Instead of draining our national treasury
for endless war, we demand that our tax dollars be
used to repair the damage done to Iraq and to fund
services in our communities." Those words, from
the United for Peace and Justice website, echo the
sentiment of hundreds of groups that are imagining
a better future.
Many demand that our tax
dollars be used to fund services and repair damage
all over the world. After all, that's actually the
best way to begin to protect ourselves from
danger. But even that won't work if we do it
simply because we are scared. We'll never be safe
if we make safety our ultimate goal. We'll be safe
only if we let safety be a by-product of a society
working together to improve life for everyone.
The best way to be secure is to imagine a
genuine politics of hope. Imagine. Unfortunately,
when John Lennon said, "It's easy if you try," he
was quite wrong. After six decades of our national
insecurity state, it's incredibly hard. But it's
an effort that anti-Bush forces ought to make. The
alternative is, however inadvertently, to
reinforce the politics of fear that Bush and his
kind thrive on. The belief that danger is
everywhere - that we must have leaders whose great
task is to keep us safe - is the one great danger
we really do need to protect ourselves against.
Ira Chernus is professor of
religious studies at the University of Colorado at
Boulder. He is the author of American
Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, and is
currently working on Monsters to Destroy, a
book about religion and the neo-conservative "war
on terror". He can be reached at
chernus@colorado.edu
