American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century Edited by Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley Edinburgh

American Thought
and Culture in the
21st Century

Will the 21st century be the next American Century? Will American ideas and
power dominate the globe in the coming years? Or is the prestige of the United
States likely to crumble beneath new international challenges?
This ground-breaking book explores the changing patterns of American
thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, when the worlds
richest nation has never been more powerful or more controversial. It brings
together some of the most eminent North American and European thinkers to
investigate the crucial issues facing the United States during the early years of
our new century.
From the hidden political shifts beneath the electoral landscape to the latest American Thought Edited by
Martin Halliwell
biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality
television, this book explores the political, social and cultural contours of and Culture in the
and
contemporary American life but it also places the United States within a global
narrative of commerce, ideological conflict and international diplomacy. 21st Century
Catherine Morley
These eighteen new essays address such pressing issues as leadership, foreign
policy, propaganda, religion, health, technology, digital media and 9/11 culture.
The authors look back to the Clinton years and earlier periods of 20th century
American life, but they also look forward to the new horizons of the century
to come to the unknown challenges of a global future and the soaring
possibilities of American enterprise and imagination.

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester.

His most recent books include American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh
University Press, 2007) and The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and
American Intellectual Culture (2005).
Catherine Morley is RCUK Academic Fellow in the Cultures of Modernism at
Oxford Brookes University. She has recently published Epic Gone West: John
Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (2008).
ISBN 978 0 7486 2602 1

Edinburgh University Press

22 George Square
Edinburgh
EH8 9LF
www.eup.ed.ac.uk

Cover image: Jules de Balincourt, US World Studies II (2005). Oil and enamel on panel 122 x 173 cm.
Courtesy of The Saatchi Gallery, London. Jules de Balincourt 2006
Cover design: Barrie Tullett
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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE

IN THE 21ST CENTURY
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AMERICAN THOUGHT
AND CULTURE
IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Edited by
Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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editorial matter and organisation Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley, 2008
the chapters their several authors, 2008

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Monotype Garamond by

Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 2601 4 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 2602 1 (paperback)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors ix

Introduction: The Next American Century? 1

Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley

PART 1 POLITICS
1. American Politics in the 1990s and 2000s 21
Dominic Sandbrook
2. American Leadership into the New Century 35
John Dumbrell
3. 9/11 and US Foreign Policy 49
David Ryan
4. Three Variations on American Liberalism 65
Peter Kuryla
5. The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism 81
Kevin Mattson
6. US Propaganda 97
Nancy Snow
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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

PART 2 SOCIETY
7. Contemporary Social Criticism 115
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
8. Religion in Post-Secular America 127
Wilfred M. McClay
9. The US and Globalisation 145
Howard Brick
10. The Future of Medicine 161
Christopher Thomas Scott
11. Technology in the 21st Century 179
Carroll Pursell
12. America and the Environment 195
John Wills

PART 3 CULTURE
13. Contemporary American Culture 211
Martin Halliwell
14. Cultural Pluralism and National Identity 227
Rebecca Tillett
15. Writing in the Wake of 9/11 245
Catherine Morley
16. American Ways of Seeing 259
Liam Kennedy
17. Television and Digital Media 275
Lynn Spigel and Max Dawson
18. Animation and Digital Culture 291
Paul Wells

Bibliography 307
Index 318

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume has provided us with the chance to work with some amazingly
talented scholars and we are very grateful to all the contributors for their
incisive commentary on the time of our time, to evoke the words of the late
Norman Mailer. When we were working on the early stages of this project
we were very aware that time always catches up on books dealing with the
present. Many readers will come to this volume when the 44th President
of the United States of America is in the White House: either the first black
president or the oldest man ever to take office. This book does not discuss
in detail the 2008 presidential campaign, as we were keen for it to appear
in print before the 2008 election to bookend the dramatic years that have
formed the first phase of the 21st century.

I am very grateful to Nicola Ramsey, Senior Commissioning Editor at

Edinburgh University Press, for her early encouragement when I emailed
excitedly from the Library of Congress in 2003, and for helping us to develop
these embryonic ideas into this published volume. I am also indebted to the
Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford for granting me
the status of Senior Academic Fellow in 2007. That year was a very profitable
one for this volume, as it enabled me to work very closely in Oxford with my
co-editor Catherine Morley. This has been a very happy project, largely
because Catherine has been such a delightful colleague to work alongside
and extremely tolerant of my nocturnal e-habits. Catherine and I would like
to warmly thank the Saatchi Gallery for enabling us to use a reproduction
of Jules de Balincourts painting US World Studies II (2005) as our cover
image.

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to colleagues in the Centre for

American Studies and the Department of English at the University of
Leicester; to my co-editor on another Edinburgh project, Andy Mousley; and
to colleagues and friends in the British Association for American Studies.
Finally, my greatest debts go to my families in Derby and Leicester, and
especially to Laraine Porter.
Martin Halliwell

While I was working on this collection, I was also carrying out my duties as
a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. I would like to thank everyone at
Brookes for their help and advice, especially Alex Goody, Daniel Lea and
Steve Matthews. I have also benefited enormously from a fellowship at the
Rothermere American Institute, where I have tapped the experiences and
expertise of many of my co-fellows. Colleagues in the British Association for
American Studies have offered sage advice on a range of issues, for which I
am most grateful. One of the greatest gifts to the editor of a collection such
as American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century is to have a co-editor such
as Martin Halliwell, who has made this job both immensely enjoyable and
much less burdensome. I am deeply appreciative to have worked with such a
consummate professional.
As well as colleagues, I thank my parents and family, Deirdre, Elaine and
Rachel for their faith, love and encouragement. Above all, my heartfelt
gratitude goes to Dominic Sandbrook, for great stoicism and patience in the
face of innumerable evenings and weekends lost to the rigours of the editing
process.
Catherine Morley

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Howard Brick is Professor of History at Washington University in St Louis.

He specialises in 20th-century intellectual and cultural history and is the
author of several books, including Age of Contradiction: American Thought and
Culture in the 1960s (2000) and Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society
in Modern American Thought (2006).

Max Dawson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication

and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. His work explores the idea
that new technologies ranging from the remote control to the mobile
telephone will reform or rehabilitate television. He has published articles on
both television and new media.

John Dumbrell is Professor of Government at the University of Durham

and a specialist on the US presidency and international relations. He is the
author of numerous publications, most recently President Lyndon Johnson and
Soviet Communism (2004) and A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations
from the Cold War to Iraq (2006), and co-editor of two volumes, Vietnam in Iraq
(2007) and Americas War on Terrorism (2008).

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Centre

for American Studies at the University of Leicester. He has published six
monographs on American and transatlantic intellectual, cultural and literary
history, most recently The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American
Intellectual Culture (2005), Transatlantic Modernism (2006) and American Culture
in the 1950s (2007).

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton

Institute at University College Dublin. He specialises in American urban
studies, visual culture, globalisation and transatlantic relations. He is the
author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995) and Race and Urban Space in
American Culture (2000), and is currently working on a book on photography
and international conflict.

Peter Kuryla teaches history at Belmont University, Nashville and in the

Department of English at Vanderbilt University. He specialises in 20th-
century intellectual and cultural history and is currently working on a book
project entitled The integration of the American mind: intellectuals and the
creation of the Civil Rights Movement.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is Professor of History at Syracuse University,

New York. She specialises in 20th-century American social, cultural and
intellectual history and has written extensively on race and the family.
Amongst her publications, she is the author of Black Neighbours (1993) and
Race Experts (2002) and co-editor of Reconstructing History (1999).

Wilfred M. McClay is SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities,

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He specialises in intellectual,
religious and cultural history. He has authored and edited many works
including The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994), Religion
Returns to the Public Square (2003) and Figures in the Carpet (2007).

Kevin Mattson is Connor Study Professor of Contemporary American

History at the University of Ohio, specialising in 20th-century American
politics and culture. Among many other works, he is author of When America
was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (2004) and Upton Sinclair and
the Other American Century (2006), and co-editor of Liberalism for a New Century
(2007).

Catherine Morley is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of

Leicester, formerly RCUK Academic Fellow in the Cultures of Modernism
at Oxford Brookes University and Fellow of the Rothermere American
Institute, Oxford. She has recently published The Quest for Epic in Contem-
porary American Fiction (2008) and her work has appeared in numerous
academic journals and edited collections.

Carroll Pursell is Adjunct Professor of Modern History at Macquarie

University, Sydney with specialist interests in the history of technology and
the environment. He is the author of The Machine in America, 2nd edn (2007)
and Technology in Postwar America (2007) and editor of A Hammer in Their Hands
(2004) and A Companion to American Technology (2004).

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

David Ryan is Senior Lecturer in US Diplomatic History and Foreign Policy

at University College Cork. He specialises in US intervention and regional
conflict in the post-Vietnam context. Recent books include US Foreign Policy
in World History (2000), Frustrated Empire: US Foreign Policy from 9/11 to Iraq
(2007) and (with John Dumbrell) co-editor of Vietnam in Iraq (2007).

Dominic Sandbrook is a member of the Oxford University history faculty

and a columnist for the London Evening Standard. His books include a
biography of Eugene McCarthy (2004), two bestselling histories of Britain in
the 1950s and 1960s, Never Had It So Good (2005) and White Heat (2006), and
a forthcoming history of the United States in the 1970s, Spirit of 76 (2009).

Christopher Thomas Scott is Senior Research Scholar in the Center for

Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. He is director of three pro-
grammes on stem cell technology, including the founding Director of the
Stanford Program on Stem Cells in Society. He has published widely on the
political, legal, ethical, technological and economic impacts of stem cell
research.

Nancy Snow is Associate Professor in the S. I. Newhouse School of Public

Communications at Syracuse University. She is a frequent media com-
mentator on American foreign policy, propaganda and the causes of anti-
Americanism, and amongst her publications are Propaganda, Inc. (2002),
Information War (2004) and the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (2008).

Lynn Spigel is the Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures in the

School of Communication at Northwestern University. She has written
extensively on broadcasting, consumption and media in post-war and
contemporary America. She is author of Make Room for TV (1992), Welcome to
the Dreamhouse (2001) and TV by Design (2008) and, amongst other volumes,
editor of Television after TV (2004).

Rebecca Tillett is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the

University of East Anglia. She specialises in 20th- and 21st-century multi-
ethnic American literature and film, race, environmental history and
postcolonial theory. As well as numerous articles, she is the author of
Contemporary Native American Literature (2007).

Paul Wells is Professor of Animation Studies in the Animation Academy at

Loughborough University. He is a broadcaster, writer and filmmaker, and has
published widely on animation, performance and digital culture, including
Understanding Animation (1998), Animation and America (2002) and Funda-
mentals of Animation (2006).

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

John Wills is Lecturer in American History at the University of Kent. His

research is in US environmental, cultural and visual history, with special
interest in nuclear protest, popular tourism and cyberculture. Among his
book-length publications are Invention of the Park (2005), Conservation Fallout
(2006) and The American West (2009).

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INTRODUCTION
THE NEXT AMERICAN CENTURY?

Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley

One of the most symbolic political speeches of the early 21st century was
given by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Speaking at the Labour Party
Conference a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, Blair gave a lasting image of the political and moral chaos
created by events of 11 September 2001. After discussing the need to extend
freedom around the globe, Blair proclaimed This is a moment to seize. The
kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle
again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us. 1 Although Blair
did speak of the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant and
those living in want and squalor, behind these now famous words was the
implication that, at least as long ago as the symbolic end of the Cold War
in 1989, relative harmony and stability had characterised world affairs.
Perhaps bolstered by the robust economies of the United States and United
Kingdom in the late 1990s, Blairs speech did not reference the Gulf War
of 19901, the recent ethnic wars in East Europe or ongoing political
turbulence on the Asian subcontinent, which might have detracted from the
vision of a world of certainty shaken to the core by the atrocities of 9/11.2
Within this mythic structure and with the ashes still falling in Manhattan
Blair detected a moment of rupture, of irrevocable change, which would take
time to assess and even longer to settle down into a meaningful pattern. It
was a speech primed for a moment of adversity, but also one born out of fear
let us reorder this world around us that global power was, perhaps, being
wrenched away from North America and West Europe and new blocs were
forming elsewhere.3
The fact that in the years following this speech there grew a close but, for

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

some, uncomfortable relationship between the British leader and the US

President, George W. Bush, revealed that Blairs fears of national decline
within a new world order were real ones. This was at least part of the reason
that Blair attempted to revive a North Atlantic alliance which would help
both countries to renew their special relationship and, more imperiously, to
reorder the world. Blair was accused by many during the Iraq War (which
began in March 2003) of ignoring domestic politics and pandering to Bush,
particularly as the US President sidestepped United Nations protocol and
entered into what would prove to be a long and bloody conflict in Iraq. In his
speech, Blair resurrected the Enlightenment idea of America as a beacon
of liberty, which had not been extinguished by the trauma of 9/11, and a
political model for the world enshrined in the US Constitution with its
inalienable rights granted to every citizen.
Part of the problem with the United States in the early years of the 21st
century has been one of perception, particularly for those on the outside
looking in. Sympathies around the world were focused on New York City
in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and even during the invasion of
Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorists.
However, pre-emptive war in Iraq jeopardised the liberal values that Blair
upheld for what many saw as myopic moral clarity (a term wedded to
neoconservative philosophy), which masked the newly aggressive foreign
policy of the Bush administration and also hid economic and, very possibly,
personal motives that looped back to the earlier Gulf War when Bushs father
George H. W. Bush was in the White House. Many critics have argued that
9/11 rescued George W. Bushs presidency, giving it a sense of mission that
it lacked in his first eight months. Such views were reinforced because Bush
repeatedly seemed to use the national trauma of 9/11 for his own political
advantage most notably in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in September
2005, which conveniently, for the President, coincided with the four-year
anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Most critical accounts of Bush have a liberal slant though, blaming the
Republican Party (particularly the think-tank of neoconservatives with its
figurehead of Dick Cheney, Bushs running partner and later his Vice-
President) for stealing the premiership away from Clintons natural
successor, Al Gore, in the 2000 presidential election. The culture wars of the
1990s fuelled full-scale political warfare in the early 21st century, even leading
to blue states in the North East threatening to secede from the union in the
immediate aftermath of Bushs second victory over the Democrat candidate
John Kerry in the 2004 election.4 However, what many such criticisms of
Bushs executive decisions overlook is that 9/11 had been a long time
coming, rooted in a history of antagonism between the US and Middle
Eastern countries and with intelligence about potential attacks available
during the Clinton presidency.

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INTRODUCTION

HISTORICAL RUPTURE OR CONTINUITY?

One of the purposes of American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century is to
broaden the debate about whether 9/11 did represent a rupture ushering
in a new kaleidoscopic pattern and the symbolic beginning of the new
millennium or whether the lines of political, social and cultural continuity
with the recent and more distant past are much stronger than many early
21st-century accounts credit.
The turning point theory of history is one that is seductively neat. Blair
began his October 2001 speech by claiming that 9/11 marked a turning
point in history and a journalistic account of 9/11 begins with the words:
significant days in world history are like turning points of fate.5 We are
still drawn toward taking (from a US perspective) 1776, 1861, 1917, 1941 and
2001 as moments in which the continuous threads of history are broken and
rewoven through national or international conflict. Millennial thought in the
months leading up to the turn of the 21st century became obsessed with
numbers and dates, fuelling widespread panic that the Y2K computer bug (in
which all digital clocks would be reset) would crash business and economies
around the world. More specifically, a number of accounts of the terrorist
attacks have drawn parallels between 11 September 2001 and 7 December
1941 when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor marked US entry into World
War II a parallel that gives some weight to this idea of a turning point in
which American sovereignty is threatened by foreign forces. Theories
proposing that 9/11 was a repeat of Pearl Harbor were shared by the general
public, professional critics and conspiracy theorists alike.6 That 9/11 was an
attack on mainland America, rather than on a trading and military outpost in
the Pacific, gives greater weight to this theory. And amongst the devastating
loss to families bereft of loved ones in the collapse of the twin towers, was a
larger transnational story, in which the World Trade Center represented
a triumphant symbol of global capitalism perhaps, even, to use Francis
Fukuyamas potent image from 1989, a supreme symbol of the end of
history. But, as a number of essays in this volume explore, Fukuyamas
account of the end of history in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in
which he argued that all nations were converging on a model of Western
democratic capitalism, was premature and overlooked strong currents
elsewhere across the globe.
The turning point theory of history has a number of problems. It tends
to reduce complex historical forces to a mechanistic theory of cause and
effect, or privileges catastrophic events at the expense of more subterranean
political, social and cultural currents that might turn out to have more
profound effects on shaping the future. The exhaustive media coverage
of 9/11 was without precedent, but much of it overlooked the broader
historical patterns that inform and help to explain the contours of the early
21st century. It is tempting to seize on momentous and dramatic occasions

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Twin Towers to mark new values
and belief systems but, as the historian Robert McElvaine noted in 2005,
political turning points are often hard to recognize. Sometimes events that
seem certain to have a redefining impact on political allegiances turn out
not to do so.7 Without diminishing the significance or horror of 9/11, or
ignoring the subsequent internationalist turn in US foreign policy, McElvaine
argues that in terms of political realignment 9/11 appears to have been
such a non-turning point in that the 2004 presidential elections were close
to a rerun of those four years earlier. McElvaine does not want to dismiss
the turning point theory out of hand, but he points to other less dramatic
moments specifically a scientist in Seoul National University in South
Korea who, in spring 2005, produced stems cells that provided a genetic
match for diseased patients. One of the purposes of this book is to
reconsider the events and consequences of 9/11, but also to explore other
spheres of activity (such as McElvaines example, drawn from medicine and
biotechnology) which have contributed to the shifts in thought and culture
in the early years of this millennium.
The political thinker David Marquand has criticised Blairs use of the
turning point theory as an example of national leaders not knowing enough
about history and indulging in presentism a criticism that could also be
made of Bush in not heeding the warnings of the Vietnam War when he
chose to invade Iraq.8 Two more recent potent metaphors have challenged
the turning point model of history, suggesting that history is in continuous
motion, accreting change rather than exploding through violent rupture. In
1993, conservative thinker Samuel Huntington first outlined what he saw as
a long-standing clash between the ideologies of East and West, a clash of
civilizations, which discourses of multiculturalism in the 1990s did little
to disguise or ameliorate. This is a story that goes back at least as far as the
Korean War (19503) in which President Trumans engagement in military
conflict in Southeast Asia was a key phase in the foreign policy of con-
tainment (a philosophy devised by statesman George F. Kennan in 1947),
which attempted to keep at bay communist forces that threatened American
democratic values. Huntingtons thesis evokes much longer antagonisms,
which bring into focus religious belief systems that position Christianity
in conflict with Muslim and Confucian traditions and pits the growing moral
relativism in the West against a version of moral absolutism in the East.
Huntingtons thesis, expanded in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order, is arguably as limited as Fukuyamas end of
history, but it does indicate that the apocryphal calls in the 1990s that
globally we could relax into a new postmodern epoch (to evoke the French
theorist Jean-Franois Lyotard) were short-sighted.9
Another metaphor that has come to the fore since 9/11 has been the
journalist Thomas Friedmans theory of a flat earth. The fall of the Berlin
Wall, for Friedman, did not just liberate all the captive peoples of the Soviet

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INTRODUCTION

Empire, but it tipped the balance of power across the world to those
advocating democratic, consensual, free-market-oriented governance.10
This description can be read as another inflection of Fukuyamas end
of history thesis. But Friedman is critical of the Bush administration for
exporting fear rather than hope, and his vision is more nuanced than
Fukuyama in suggesting that other important factors (including the dotcom
boom, the development of sophisticated computer and digital technologies,
and the outsourcing of jobs to other countries) have contributed to a flatter
globe, in which the borders between nations have become more permeable
and economic and technology flows are swifter.11 There are dangers of living
in such a world Friedman worries that the opportunities for terrorism
are much greater but also cause for optimism as the most creative and
imaginative individuals (one would hope regardless of class, race, creed or
gender) will prosper in this brave flat world. Rather than focusing on the
catastrophe of 9/11, with its emphasis on death, destruction and trauma,
Friedman encourages his readers to use the stimulus of 11/9 (when the
Berlin Wall fell) to become part of a generation of strategic optimists, a
generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things
can be better but also acts on that imagination every day.12 Friedman not
only encourages his American readers to look beyond the spectre of 9/11
and the borders of national identity, but he wishes to offset the critical
tradition of the jeremiad (into which Huntingtons thesis fits) with the more
optimistic American currents of resourcefulness and renewal.

REMAPPING AMERICA
One aspect of Thomas Friedmans work is that it shifts attention away from
temporal processes of change and rupture towards thinking about global
relationships in spatial terms where location and dislocation become key
tropes. This turn towards spatialisation can be seen as a growing discourse in
the academy (at least in North America and West Europe) since the 1990s,
highlighting geographical and geopolitical issues which broaden the under-
standing of global markets, climate change, immigration and technological
forces. If we want to resist the argument that 9/11 represented a moment of
historical rupture, then we might be convinced by the theory of a tipping
point in which 9/11 intensified certain emergent patterns through a process
of reterritorialisation. While this theory is tempting, as the French-born
artist Jules de Balincourt emphasises in his artwork US World Studies II
(reproduced on the cover of this volume) the topographical shifts that have
occurred both in the real world and in the international imaginary over
the last few years have remapped what appeared to be fixed coordinates.
Balincourts image was the centrepiece of the USA Today exhibition held
at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in autumn 2006, showcasing a
generation of artists born in the 1960s and 1970s grappling with the

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

problems of a post-9/11 world. Balincourts faux-naif style draws critical

attention to the geopolitics of the contemporary landscape and exemplifies
one of the aims of the USA Today exhibition: to situate art made in any
given place between the global and the local, art that is both multivalent and
grounded in locational matters.13 As one of Balincourts series of carto-
graphical paintings of the United States, US World Studies II turns the familiar
national map upside down, rearranges the states and depicts the Mississippi
River dividing the country in two, roughly into blue and red states. This
painterly remapping forces viewers to rethink their geographical assump-
tions, national perspectives and regional allegiances within this strangely
familiar and yet uncanny landscape. As a young French critic of economic
hegemony, the fact that Balincourt has crammed the rest of the world
into a small pencil sketch in the bottom of the painting reveals that
territorialisation and geopolitics are in urgent need of reassessment in the
early 21st century.
Balincourts US World Studies II is indeed critical of a US-centred per-
spective of the globe, and the artists sense that transnational identities
and institutions are those most in need of critical attention is reflected in
the surge of scholarship on transnationalism since the 1990s. On the one
hand, it might be argued that the proliferation of partial and often highly
specialised mechanisms for cross-border governance since the 1980s has
contributed to this rapidly growing intellectual field of inquiry, which spans
disciplines from economic policy to literature and the humanities. As Saskia
Sassen observes, the most prominent of such mechanisms are those that
cover global trade (the International Standards Organization, for instance),
the global art market and the cross-border circulation of professional
workers contained in all the major trade agreements (notably NAFTA and
the GATTs).14 An alternative view, though not entirely unrelated in terms
of trade networks and communications, is that international migration has
forced political and economic scientists to consider new means of discussing
the channels between nation states.15
Though rooted in the real phenomena of transcultural governance and
migration, the term transnationalism is not without considerable com-
plexity, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the events in its
aftermath when the very notion of global networks has taken on a more
sinister hue. The sociologist Steven Vertovec, for example, identifies six
different variations, arguing that it is at once a term to describe social
morphology that spans borders, including ethnic diasporas and technological
networks, and a mode of cultural reproduction emphasising the fluidity of
constructed styles and social institutions. Drawing on Arjun Appadurais
notion of new maps of desire and attachment in the diasporic subject,
transnationalism also denotes a kind of consciousness. This consciousness is
one of decentred attachments, with the idea of an identity being fastened to
more than one nation and even partaking of a shared imagination.16 Finally,

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INTRODUCTION

according to Vertovec, the term describes sites of political engagement

(especially in terms of International Non-Governmental Organisations
INGOs), the (re)construction of place or locality, and avenues of capital: the
supply, transfer, marketing, investment of information transfer strategies of
corporations.17
While at the beginning of the new century the term transnationalism has,
according to Vertovec, become something of a catch-all phrase amongst
academics, it is worth bearing in mind that it originated in the United States
with the essayist and critic Randolph Bourne. His essay Transnational
America (1916) referred to the nation as a federation of cultures, a
cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures with an
intellectual internationalism [interested in] different cultural expressions.
Of course Bournes essay must be read in the context of his rejection of the
war fever that was beginning to overtake many American ethnic groups in
1915, when the cry for preparedness was often a code for heightening the
will to fight on an international scale. But the essay is also a challenging
rethinking of the melting pot metaphor, rejecting it on the basis that it
would inevitably produce a homogenous culture based on the dominant
Anglo-Saxon model, washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uni-
formity. Responding to an intellectual climate which was beginning to
question the success of assimilation and to look unfavourably on those who
became known as hyphenated Americans, Bourne claimed that if freedom
means a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and
industrial and social institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not
been free. In discussing the rhetoric of war advocates, he remarked:

We have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned

by the evidence of vigorous traditionalistic and cultural movements
in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians and Poles,
while in the same breath they insist that the alien shall be forcibly
assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestionably
label American.18

Furthermore, Bourne clearly advocated an interrogation of the nature of

American-ness, envisaging the United States as a nation of immigrants who
could retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and hence be more
valuable and interesting to each other for being different, a nation of
cosmopolitan interchange in spite of the war and all its national
exclusiveness.
The spirit of Bournes thinking informs current work in studies in trans-
nationalism, much of which is resistant to the notion of an unquestioned
American nationalism. For American Studies scholars, this has engendered
something of a paradigm shift in terms of the conception of the discipline.
However, this is not necessarily a new trend for the field; indeed, much of the

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

intellectual vigour of American Studies comes from its ongoing tendency

towards self-examination. As Karen Haltunnen points out, since the 1960s,
American Studies has undergone three successive challenges: the assault on
the myth-and-symbol school of the 1950s and its sense of the homogenous
American mind or character; the response to Benedict Andersons
imagined community by way of exposing the fictive qualities of American
bourgeois nationalism; and finally the disruption caused by globalisation to
the isomorphism of culture and place.19 Haltunnen regards these challenges,
which are all clearly interlinked, as especially problematic, and she laments
the loss of the national in current American Studies, largely because it
erodes the sense of place which is the bedrock of the discipline. This absence
of the national, or at least the desire to erase it, was evident in Janice Radways
1998 address to the American Studies Association. Her address, entitled
Whats in a name later reprinted in Donald Pease and Robyn Weigmans
The Futures of American Studies (2003) examined three alternative titles for the
discipline, including United States studies, intercultural studies and inter-
American studies, before concluding that while it might be possible to
keep the name, the discipline ought to pursue a more comparative agenda.
What she advocated, therefore, was a bifocal vision, a capacity to attend
simultaneously to the local and the global, as they are intricately inter-
twined. 20
The idea of the American nation state, or the need to be attentive to the
nation, is not considered by Radway. But, as Vertovec, Haltunnen and others
such as Edward Said, Paul Jay and Thomas Friedman observe, the nation is
a crucial component of any transnational identity. John Carlos Rowe detects
that the nation in the twenty-first century will undergo dramatic changes
and other social, economic, and political organizations will challenge the
nations hegemony. 21 Similarly, Appadurai suggests that the rise of the global
landscape, rather than obliterating the nation state, presents a weakening of
its structure and composition:

The waves of debate about multiculturalism that have spread through-

out the United States and Europe is surely testimony to the incapacity
of states to prevent their minority populations from linking themselves
to wider constituencies of religious or ethnic affiliation. These
examples, and others, suggest that the era in which we could assume
that viable public spheres were typically, exclusively, or necessarily
national could be at an end.22

This destabilising of the nation state has profound repercussions for any
study of the United States based on nativist and nationalist paradigms: it
heralds the disruption of traditional connections in national culture, which
for Rowe and Appadurai is both positive and empowering. Clearly resistant
to the notion that globalised cultures themselves become homogenous,

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INTRODUCTION

Appadurai insists upon the process as the conscious mobilization of cultural

differences in the service of a national or transnational politics.23
The theorist Julia Kristeva, like Rowe, perceives the 21st century as a
transitional period between the nation and international or polynational
confederations and calls for a reconfiguration of the national in terms of a
universal, transnational principle of Humanity that is distinct from the
historical realities of nation and citizenship. 24 For Kristeva this universal
principle of Humanity, which she derives from the 1789 Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen, must include the negative and violent aspects
of its history. Thus, the old model of national ideology is not to be discarded
completely. It is to be recovered and utilised for all its expansive and inclusive
possibilities, taking something of the shape of Montesquieus esprit gnral
that goes beyond national and political ideologies into higher entities set
forth by a spirit of concord and economic development.25
Regardless of whether one believes, like Rowe, Kristeva, Appadurai and
others, that the demise of the nation state is upon us or, indeed, whether
one shares their universalist humanism, the fact remains that in the post-
millennial global environment of economic, cultural and ideological
exchange, the self-sufficiency and definition of the nation state has been
radically altered. Thus, as American Studies scholars, we are impelled to
question preconceived ideas of an ingrained national identity. Kristevas
notion of a universal, transnational principle of Humanity is problematic for
a number of reasons, the most obvious being its erasure of cultural difference
and assimilation of minority cultural practices, literatures and groups.
Furthermore, the idea of a universal principle can only exist in opposition
to an exclusionary principle, thus strengthening the binaries Kristeva strives
to eradicate. Ultimately, then, the appropriate stance is perhaps less one of
a blanket humanist universality than of a model that acknowledges the
continued existence and relevance of the nation state, and the means whereby
it infects and inflects cultural thought. In the defamiliarised topography of
Jules de Balincourts painting, America may no longer be what it once seemed,
and the rest of the world may no longer have the same relationship it once had
with the United States, but the nation state remains.
In part stimulated by worries about these changing power relationships,
a number of critics have recently focused on founder of Time and Life
magazines Henry Luces famous phase, the American Century. Luce used
the phrase in February 1941 as a call to the nation to assume leadership of
the world a call which he reiterated later in 1941 in the wake of Pearl
Harbor to create the first American Century.26 The phrase has been revived
recently to contrast the rise of the US as an economic and political
superpower in the 20th century with the realisation that this new historical
phase is unlikely to be the next American century.27 President Clinton
optimistically ended his 1999 State of the Union address with such an image:
Let us lift our eyes as one nation, and from the mountaintop of this

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

American century, look ahead to the next one.28 However, a number of

commentators have already predicted that the 21st century may well be a
Chinese century or even an Indian century, where the hegemony of North
America and Europe is challenged or completely reshaped. Many have
responded with unease to Chinas disturbing human rights record,29 but The
Economist highlighted the 2008 Beijing Olympics as an opportunity to show
off Chinas rapid modernisation to the outside world and a chance to prove
just how much Chinas Communist rulers have achieved in restoring the
countrys prestige.30 Thomas Friedman and other thinkers answer the rise of
other global players with the call for the US to become more resourceful; a
renewal of hope, but also the sense that in a competitive world American
industry and enterprise can prosper.

FRAMING 21ST-CENTURY THOUGHT AND CULTURE

Another aspect of this shuttling between the hope of renewal and the
potency of critique is to widen the field of inquiry to look beyond national
politics and the Bush administration, which has dominated the way in which
the world has viewed America in the first eight years of the 21st century. It is
the attempt of this volume to assess the character and legacy of the Bush
presidency, but also to broaden the focus far beyond this. Another collection
of essays published 50 years ago, entitled The Search for America (1959),
embarked on an exploration of American values by subjecting them to
double scrutiny with social science and humanistic perspectives interlacing
one another in tension and complement.31 The editor of this volume, Walter
Huston, assembled a very distinguished cast of mid-20th-century thinkers,
including Eleanor Roosevelt, Benjamin Mays, J. K. Galbraith, Margaret
Mead, Erich Fromm, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and provided an
early example of what the then-emerging field of American Studies could
do. But Huston realised that such interlacing of critical perspectives is an
extremely difficult task. The danger in searching for a holistic picture is that
the detail often gets left out; it is easy for snapshots to speak to a set of
historical truths, rather than simply capturing a particular moment of time
within a single photographic frame.
American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century takes its inspiration from the
goals of The Search for America, particularly Walter Hustons aim to provide a
thoughtful and suggestive discussion of the chief problems that confront us,
individually and as a nation. Huston did not seek to provide a panacea (there
were enough social panaceas in the 1950s) nor an uncritical celebration of
American life. Indeed, he notes that the net effect of such widespread
examination

is not soothing: those who talk about the United State these days as if it
were a completed society, one which has achieved its purposes and has

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INTRODUCTION

no further great business to transact will, I fear, draw little comfort

from these chapters.32

The protean nature of American identity is one that thinkers such as William
James, Erik Erikson, Robert Jay Lifton and Christopher Lasch have
identified as deeply rooted in the history of the United States. But the
counterforce to this proteanism is an exceptional sense of national
coherence that has persisted since the early Republic, even despite all its
contradictions and silences, as Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin have
recently described.33 Rather than searching for unified theories or grand
narratives, though, this volume tries to strike a balance between interrogative
and critical approaches, while also acknowledging that the diversity of
American thought and culture is one of its most enduring qualities. American
Thought and Culture in the 21st Century tries to broaden the frame further than
Huston by looking at the United States both from the inside and from
without. To facilitate this, the volume draws contributors based in North
America, Europe and Australia to examine the ways in which the flux and
diversity of American identity and thought can be given shape and definition
in the early years of the new millennium.
Divided into three discrete sections dealing with Politics, Society and
Culture, American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century offers a range
of challenging and unique perspectives on contemporary issues such as
leadership, diplomacy, health, the environment, the mass media and digital
culture. The opening essays of the three sections sketch some of the broader
coordinates in recent and current political, social and cultural life, providing
routes into the following five essays in each section, which deal in turn with
more specific topics.
In the books opening essay, for instance, Dominic Sandbrook reminds us
that in many important ways American politics remains in the shadow of
Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator. Reagans passing in 2004 was
lamented on both sides of the political spectrum: his career proved an
inspiration for the supposedly new conservatism of George W. Bush; and he
even re-emerged in a heated discussion during the Democratic primaries
in January 2008 when Hillary Clinton accused Barack Obama of praising
Reagans leadership style. Amidst the more hysterical commentary on the
Bush era, Sandbrook sounds a note of caution: beneath the surface of
American politics, he argues, there is a remarkable continuity between the
late 20th and early 21st centuries.
John Dumbrells essay develops this point, tracing the continuities
between the Clinton and the Bush presidencies in the context of their
increasingly militarised global leadership. Moving from American diplomatic
policy to the arena of domestic security, Dumbrell makes the case that 9/11
had profound repercussions, propelling Bush towards increased executive
power and authority at home. Tracing assertions of presidential authority in

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

foreign policy, especially concerning the invasion of Iraq, Dumbrell explores

Bushs war with the Democratic Congress and the development of the
administrations absolutist stance, concluding that at the end of the first
decade of the 21st century the agenda would seem to be one of restraining
presidential authority at home and adjusting to a deeply uncertain situation
abroad.
On the subject of US relations with the international community, David
Ryan argues that even at the dawn of the 21st century, memories of defeat in
Vietnam hang heavily over foreign relations. He contends that the Bush
administrations reaction to 9/11, rather than offering a departure from
established policy, built on trends that have been evident since the 1960s.
Furthermore, Ryan argues that the fallout from Iraq will be the toppling of
the normative authority that the US has enjoyed unchecked since the end of
the Cold War. Meanwhile, Nancy Snows piece on propaganda takes a fresh
look at official rhetoric, noting the influence of marketing and public
relations techniques on government operations. Like the other authors in
this section, Snow traces supposedly current phenomena back to the later
decades of the 20th century. Returning to the Cold War, she examines
the language of Reagans Evil Empire speeches to demonstrate how the
President made full use of the media, information, propaganda and cultural
diplomacy to overthrow the Soviet Union. Similarly, she argues, in the
immediate post-9/11 environment global public relations and advertising
techniques were applied in an effort to win hearts and minds in the global
War on Terror.
These complex cultural patterns are explored in terms of political theory
in the essays by Peter Kuryla and Kevin Mattson on liberal and conservative
thought. Both authors argue that in the transformed political landscape
there are still currents of old-fashioned heartland conservatism and
reform liberalism jostling alongside the extreme partisanship of culture-war
adversaries like Ann Coulter and Michael Moore and other more nuanced
ideological expressions. What unites all the essays in the Politics section is the
legacy of the later decades of the outgoing century, from Vietnam to the
Cold War to the Great Communicator to postmodern relativism. In this
respect, 9/11 emerges as much less of a turning point than is commonly
imagined.
Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn laments the lost art of the public intellectual in her
essay on contemporary social criticism, which leads the second section on
Society. Citing thinkers such as Russell Jacoby, George Cotkin and Sven
Birkerts on the rise of celebrity culture, the demise (or reduced readership
and relevance) of the intellectual journal, and the proliferation of the
gratuitous insult, Lasch-Quinn argues that a revived and more widespread
social criticism is a necessity to inject new life into democratic politics, and to
measure the nation at the turn of the new century against its founding ideals
and incipient promise. Indeed, Howard Bricks essay on globalisation takes

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INTRODUCTION

up this very issue. Contrary to common assumptions regarding the relative

newness of the concept of globalisation, Brick argues that the tension
between insularity and a cosmopolitan appeal to the world has marked
American culture since the early Republic. According to Brick, the growth
of US power, particularly after 1898, was registered conceptually by more
explicit attention to world contexts and a willingness to understand the
American experience in terms strikingly similar to those adopted by other
peoples across the globe.
Foundational issues of this kind are also addressed by Wilfred McClays
penetrating examination of the resurgence of religious debate in what
he describes as a post-secular nation. McClay makes the point that the
apparent resurrection of religion at the beginning of the 21st century has less
to do with 9/11 than with the inability of secularism to fill the shoes of
religion in providing a moral framework by which individuals might live their
lives. Emphasising the same kind of historical continuities that are fore-
grounded in the Politics section, McClay observes that the resurgence of
religion in public life is not a recent phenomenon. Since the presidency of
Jimmy Carter, the taboo on the public expression of religious belief has been
steadily eroding. George W. Bushs intensely Christian rhetoric, especially
since his address at the National Cathedral on 14 September 2001, is not
without presidential precedents or successors, as evidenced in the 2008
presidential party candidate campaigns of Mike Huckabee and Barack
Obama. Finally, McClay suggests that the ubiquity of religion in public life is
undoubtedly linked to the idea of an American civil religion, the same kind
of national creed that was enthusiastically celebrated after the 9/11 attacks.
What Americans face as they move deeper into the 21st century, therefore, is
not a split between religious denominations, but a political division between
religious conservatives and religious liberals.
Christopher Thomas Scotts compelling essay on medicine makes much of
George W. Bushs religiously motivated antipathy toward embryonic stem
cell research by imagining a fictional future scenario in which President Bush
suffers from Guillain-Barr Syndrome (GBS), an immune system disorder
that mercilessly attacks the bodys nervous system. Scotts essay examines the
Bush administrations record on stem cell research, and takes the long view
by returning to the first embryo war in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, since
when no government funds have been allocated to embryonic research.
Comparing the US to the UK, in which the fictional future Bush is to be
treated, Scott observes that Britains Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority oversees IVF clinics and laboratories making embryonic stem
cells. He notes that the Presidents greatest ally is home to the British Stem
Cell Bank, a facility that catalogues, stores, characterises and distributes to
researchers around the world. Appealing to his compatriots to emulate the
British record of biomedical research, Scott concludes with a passionate call
to arms foreshadowing Carroll Pursells and John Willss illuminating

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

essays on technology and the environment in defence of science which is

so often the bugbear of public debates.
Martin Halliwells piece, which opens the third section on Culture,
examines cultural eclecticism and diversity at the turn of the century.
Halliwell develops Kurylas and Mattsons earlier explorations of conser-
vative and liberal crosscurrents in contemporary American life by assessing
the interpenetration of politics and culture. Moving from a discussion of
American intellectuals and the culture wars he focuses on musical protests
against the Iraq War and the ways in which filmmakers, both within
and outside Hollywood, have reengaged with pressing political issues. This
emphasis on diversity is given historical and social context in Rebecca
Tilletts essay on pluralism and national identity, which traces the long history
of multicultural relations in the United States in order to cast new light on
the emerging discourse of nationalism in the wake of 9/11.
Catherine Morleys essay on literature after 9/11 examines the widespread
sense among American writers that words were impotent, even redundant, in
the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Looking at
a range of novels from Claire Messuds The Emperors Children (2006) to Don
DeLillos Falling Man (2007), Morley explains how the visual has come to
haunt the literary writer, much as the visual technologies that sent images of
the burning towers across the globe on 11 September permeated the global
cultural consciousness. This idea is developed in Paul Wellss essay on digital
culture and animation in the form of technologically mediated virtual
histories, and in Lynn Spigel and Max Dawsons essay on television. Spigel
and Dawson explore how televisions future and its possible influences on
social and political life are dependent upon a new set of developments
related to its convergence with digital technologies, the rise of multichannel
systems and the growth of multinational media conglomerates. They
examine how all of these developments have already changed an old
television culture; and yet, as they point out, television still functions to
define the nation in often exceedingly nationalist ways.
This point is elaborated in Liam Kennedys essay on photojournalism,
which argues that the medium has had a long and complex relationship with
the production of national identity and its international extensions. For
Kennedy, photojournalism provides a very useful medium for analysing
the close yet shifting relationship between visual media, the mythos of the
nation, and the geopolitical visions of the state. Kennedy examines the role
of photojournalism in the framing of US foreign policy and explores how the
photojournalistic image has mutated in the 21st century both to support and
to challenge the states geopolitical ambitions.
Persistent themes recur through these eighteen essays, from the import-
ance of religion in American life, to the interfusion of politics and culture,
to the prevalence of technology and the image, to the continuities between
the new and old centuries. But what strikes us most about these eighteen

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INTRODUCTION

provocative pieces is the sheer diversity, energy and force of their ideas,
which is testament to the vitality and promise of American public discourse.
Certainly, the nation faces unprecedented global challenges, from the
growing economic power of China and India to the constant threat of
political and religious extremism. But, if the 21st century encourages us to
remap the United States and reassess its place in world affairs, it does not
mean that the experience and energies (as well as the social problems) of
20th-century America have vanished. As the shaken kaleidoscope which
Tony Blair spoke of in autumn 2001 starts to settle on the first decade of
the new millennium, these essays remind us that the spirit of the American
Century remains a reality.

NOTES
1. For Tony Blairs Labour Party Conference Speech 1 October 2001 see
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/speeches/story/0,,590775,00.html.
2. Nor did Blair in his 2001 speech refer to the dotcom crash of March 2000,
which, together with 9/11, was to destabilise the US economy until September
2002.
3. The then British Ambassador to the United States, Christopher Meyer, often
quoted Blairs words from this speech: we were with you at the first. We will stay
with you to the last. For discussion see Kathleen Burk, Old World New World: The
Story of Britain and America (New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2007), pp. 6489.
4. This notion of a divided America has appeared in numerous accounts since the
millennium, Simon Schama going as far as using the acronym DSA (Divided
States of America) in his article Onward Christian soldiers, The Guardian, G2,
5 November 2004.
5. Inside 9-11: What Really Happened, by the reporters, writers and editors of Der
Spiegel magazine (New York, NY: St. Martins, 2001), p. ix.
6. For an extended discussion of conspiracy theories around 9/11 (including the
frequent parallels with Pearl Harbor), see Peter Knight, Outrageous Conspiracy
Theories: popular and official responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United
States, New German Critique, 103(35), Spring 2008, 16593.
7. Robert S. McElvaine, Are we at a turning point in history, History News
Network, 27 June 2005, http://hnn.us/articles/12405.html.
8. David Marquand, A man without history, New Statesman, 7 May 2007,
http://www.newstatesman.com/200705070031.
9. For a reading of Huntingtons clash of civilizations thesis see Richard Crockatt,
After 9/11: Cultural Dimensions of American Global Power (London: Routledge,
2007), pp. 1035.
10. Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the
21st Century (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 49.
11. Ibid., p. 450.
12. Ibid., p. 469.
13. Meghan Dailey, Made in America, in USA Today: New American Art from the
Saatchi Gallery (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006), p. 13.

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

14. Saskia Sassen, The multiplication of cross-border governance mechanisms:

implications for democracy and social order, The Transnationalism Project,
http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu/gov.html.
15. Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, Transnationalism in question, American
Journal of Sociology, 109(5), March 2004, 1177.
16. See Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1983).
17. Steven Vertovec, Conceiving and researching transnationalism, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 22(2), 44762.
18. Randolph Bourne, Transnational America [1916], in Paul Lauter (ed.), The
Heath Anthology of American Literature (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp.
13948.
19. Karen Haltunnen, Transnationalism and American Studies in Place, The
Japanese Journal of American Studies, 18, 2007, 56.
20. Janice Radway, Whats in a Name?, in Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman
(eds), The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002),
p. 65.
21. John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. xxixxii.
22. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minnea-
polis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 22.
23. Ibid., p. 13.
24. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York,
NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 7, 26.
25. Ibid., pp. 4455.
26. See John Morton Blume, V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during
World War II (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanavich, 1976) and James L.
Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston, MA:
Twayne, 1987).
27. For recent uses of the phrase American century see Nicholas Guyatt, Another
American Century?: The United States and the World Since 9/11 (New York, NY:
Zed Books, [2000] 2003), Kent H. Hughes, Building the Next American Century:
The Past and Present of American Economic Competitiveness (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Richard Crockatt, America at the
Millennium, in Howard Temperley and Christopher Bigsby (eds), A New
Introduction to American Studies (London: Longman, 2007), pp. 37696.
28. For Clintons State of the Union address of 19 January 1999 see
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/01/19/sotu.transcript/.
29. In early 2008 film director Steven Spielberg resigned as artistic advisor to the
Beijing Olympics in protest against Chinas history of violence in Tibet and
Darfur; the lighting of the Olympic torch in Athens in March 2008 was met with
televised protests by the activist group Reporters Without Borders; and the
journey of the torch was met by numerous protests and disruptions.
30. Simon Long, Chinas Great Game, The Economist, Special Issue: The World
in 2008 (2007), 16. In February 2008, Time magazine ran a feature on the
mass suburbanisation of China, comparing it to suburban growth in the US

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INTRODUCTION

after World War II: Bill Powell, The Short March, Time, 25 February 2008,
2632.
31. Walter Huston (ed.), The Search for America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1959), p. vii.
32. Ibid., p. viii.
33. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (eds), Americanism: New Perspectives on the
History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
p. 12.

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PART 1
POLITICS
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1. AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE

1990s AND 2000s

Dominic Sandbrook

On 11 June 2004, the American people bade farewell to President Ronald

Reagan with a day of mourning on a scale not seen for 30 years. For Reagans
funeral, the first such state occasion since the death of Lyndon Johnson in
1973, the nation appeared united in grief. A few days earlier, more than
100,000 people had filed past the former governors coffin at his presidential
library in California. In Washington, a similar number queued to pay their
respects as Reagan lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. And on the day of the
funeral itself, every American military base in the world fired a 21-gun salute
in Reagans honour, while church bells across the nation tolled 40 times and
several states held a minutes silence. Breaking off from an agonisingly close
re-election campaign, President George W. Bush told the nation that when
the sun sets a great American story will close. 1
That Reagan would be deeply mourned on the right, among the conser-
vatives who had propelled him into office and by the Republican Party whose
success he had done so much to assure, was no surprise. Some called for
him to replace Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar note or John Kennedy
on the half-dollar coin, while the Senate Republican leader Bill Frist even
suggested that the Pentagon be renamed in his honour. Foreign observers
wryly noted the efforts of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which cam-
paigned for every county in the nation to name something, whether a street,
highway, school or plaza, after the late President.2 The remarkable thing,
however, was how far this spirit of affection, even reverence, transcended
partisan boundaries. During the dog days of the Iran-Contra scandal and the
virtual collapse of Reagans administration after 1986, few would have
predicted that he would be remembered as a great president. Yet almost

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

20 years later, equally few doubted it. Democrats joined Republicans in

paying tribute to Reagans legacy; black joined white in the crowds and the
queues. Three years later Gallup found that only Abraham Lincoln matched
Reagans standing as the greatest United States president, while millions
of viewers of the Discovery Channel voted Reagan the greatest American
ahead of Lincoln, Martin Luther King and George Washington.3

A CONSERVATIVE CONSENSUS
If nothing else, the extraordinary outpouring of grief and nostalgia for
Reagans life and achievements suggested that the centre of American life
had shifted well to the right by the first years of the new century, an
impression cemented by George W. Bushs re-election in November 2004.
And although the debacle of the occupation of Iraq, as well as such perceived
fiascos as the slow reaction to the Katrina disaster, badly wounded the
Republicans during the 2006 mid-term elections, it is hard to deny a general
impression of conservative momentum. Indeed, Reagans high posthumous
standing was only one indication of the widespread respectability of
conservative ideas and values among large swathes of the American public,
something that would have been difficult to imagine during the 1960s and
1970s, when the California governor was often written off as an extremist or
a crank. Even if conservatives bemoaned the erosion of Bushs popularity
under the pressure of the Iraq imbroglio, they could console themselves that
in three successive national contests (2000, 2002 and 2004) the Republican
Party had shown itself a remarkably resilient and effective vote-winning
force. They could also reassure themselves that for all the failings of the Bush
administration, the ideas that underpinned political and economic conser-
vatism remained alive and well. Across the political spectrum, in fact,
Reagans prescription of free markets, low taxes and patriotic populism was
widely accepted.
In this context, the Democrats gains in the 2006 mid-terms actually made
oddly depressing news for old-fashioned liberals. In almost every major
initiative or referendum, voters opted for the most conservative option on
the ballot, the exceptions being in Missouri, where they approved stem
cell research, and minimum-wage initiatives. And in Congress, as Bushs
disaffected former speechwriter David Frum reminded readers of Britains
conservative Daily Telegraph, the Class of 2006 was very different from
previous Democratic intakes of 1958, 1974 or 1986, being in general much
more conservative than the caucus they joined. In Virginia, for example,
Democrats celebrated James Webbs Senate victory over George Allen;
yet, astonishingly, Webb was an unashamed conservative and Confederate
enthusiast who had served as Reagans Secretary of the Navy. In neigh-
bouring Tennessee, meanwhile, the defeated Democratic candidate Harold
Ford identified God as his campaign manager and printed the Ten Com-

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AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE 1990S AND 2000S

mandments on the back of his business cards. This was no great liberal
revival, for exit polls, too, showed strong and continuing support for the
military campaign against Islamic extremism, anti-terrorist surveillance
measures, the prison at Guantnamo Bay and an aggressive stance against
Iran. America, wrote Frum, remains a very, very conservative country.4
As in recent periods of Republican dominance, notably the adminis-
trations of Richard Nixon (196974) and Reagan (19819), conservative
success was accompanied by liberal howls of pain about the alleged collapse
of civil liberties, the rise of a new moneyed elite, the undeclared war on the
working poor, and other dire predictions of a right-wing apocalypse. The
likes of Michael Moore, in other words, were nothing new, but merely heirs
to the liberal Cassandras who had warned in the early 1970s that Richard
Nixon was about to launch a military coup, or that the United States teetered
on the brink of fascism. A more sensible and level-headed verdict on
American politics in the early 21st century, however, would be that despite
the surface froth and bubble of invective and denunciation, the country
actually remained surprisingly calm, peaceful and united. For all the
exaggerated, even hysterical commentary about culture wars and red and
blue states, American society continued to display a remarkable degree
of consensus. While almost all Americans remained wedded to the values
of free-market capitalism, polls consistently showed their disapproval of
racism, sexism and general intolerance. The hard-line evangelicals on whom
foreign journalists often relied for entertaining copy remained little more
than an eccentric minority; indeed, church attendance continued its long
decline since the high point of the Eisenhower years.
Indeed, George W. Bush himself, rather like Reagan before him, typified
this unacknowledged consensus. Like Reagan, he often subordinated hard-
right dogma to practical politics; like Reagan, he failed to dismantle popular
social programmes like Medicare, and he abandoned attempts to reform
Social Security after encountering severe Congressional resistance. The first
Republican President to appoint an openly homosexual man to his adminis-
tration, he belied charges of callous racism by appointing the first black
Secretary of State (Colin Powell), the first black National Security Advisor
(Condoleezza Rice) and the first Hispanic Attorney General (Alberto
Gonzalez). It was a reflection of how much attitudes had changed that
Bush also appointed more women and members of minority groups to his
administration than any of his predecessors, Republican or Democratic;
while liberals charged that this was mere window-dressing, it nevertheless
sent a powerful signal that the old prejudices were, in theory at least, no
longer acceptable. And even Bushs deeply controversial immigration
proposals, which promised to grant temporary guest-worker status to some
12 million illegal immigrants, suggested an underlying pragmatism that
belied the frequent charges that he was no more than a fanatical conservative
ideologue.

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Despite all the breathless, often ill-informed commentary surrounding

them, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 played little part in shaping
the broad consensus of the early 21st century, the contours of which were
already visible during the Clinton years. Perhaps the most remarkable thing
about this consensus, and certainly the one that would immediately strike
an observer from, say, the 1950s and 1960s, was the virtual collapse of
economic and political liberalism. In his essay for this volume, Peter Kuryla
notes that most definitions of liberalism are vague and unsatisfactory, and
one reason is that scholars show curiously little interest in what liberal
politicians themselves claim to espouse. In fact, post-war liberalism can be
defined quite precisely. What united liberal champions like Harry Truman,
Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and
Edward Kennedy was their shared commitment to protecting and extending
the New Deal state, usually along the lines promised by Truman in his Fair
Deal platform of 1948. Liberals also believed, often in a rather vague way, in
the efficacy of Keynesian demand management to sponsor economic
growth and with it, they hoped, domestic prosperity and equality without the
need for punitive redistribution of wealth. As time went on, they became
increasingly identified with the cause of civil rights, too, although by the
mid-1970s racial segregation had become unacceptable on both sides of the
partisan divide. Finally, they were united in their commitment to defeating
international Communism; indeed, muscular liberals of the Kennedy stripe
were often more gung-ho than their Republican counterparts, as the
experience of Vietnam was to prove.
The collapse of liberalism was one of the two big political stories of the
1970s and 1980s. Although older historians often blame the searing experi-
ences of the Vietnam War, black urban unrest and the meteoric rise and fall
of the counterculture, the real causes were rather more mundane. The
passage of Lyndon Johnsons Great Society meant that the promise of the
Fair Deal, nursed and nurtured for almost two decades, had largely been
fulfilled. Having put most of their proposals into effect, therefore, older
liberals had simply run out of ideas. More seriously, however, the premise of
painless growth on which their programme had been based was utterly
shattered by the economic downturn of the 1970s. A combination of
runaway inflation, rising world commodity prices, tumbling productivity
growth, the decline of heavy industry and, especially, vast increases in the
cost of Middle Eastern oil meant that liberals could no longer fall back on
the innocent optimism that had underpinned their appeal in the preceding
decades. To make matters worse, they had few answers to the crime wave
that blighted so many American cities during the Nixon years, and with
stagflation and cultural change driving a wedge between working-class trade
unionists and their well-educated white-collar allies, liberals found it hard to
repudiate the famous caricature of pointy-headed intellectuals. By 1976, the
Democratic Party had clearly shifted to the right, nominating the fiscally

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AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE 1990S AND 2000S

conservative Jimmy Carter; four years later, even after Carter had adopted
a tough anti-inflation programme in defiance of the partys traditional
supporters, Edward Kennedys liberal challenge failed to unseat him. Perhaps
the last genuine liberal of the old school nominated for the presidency was
the luckless Walter Mondale in 1984; afterwards, the Democratic Party
belonged to a succession of technocratic centrists, from Michael Dukakis to
John Kerry.
The other big story of the late 20th century, of course, was the rise of
conservatism. Liberals often liked to argue that conservatism was nothing
more than rampant greed or thinly disguised racism, or that its advance was
really a question of big-business sponsorship.5 But this missed the point.
Conservatism was unarguably the most exciting and dynamic political creed
of the 1970s and 1980s, and it also, equally unarguably, held genuine appeal
for millions of Americans. Like liberalism before it, the conservative move-
ment was an often uneasy coalition, shot through with tensions and
contradictions, but its basic thrust was clear. Drawing on old Republican
traditions of small government and self-reliance, New Right champions like
Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp promised to slash taxes, roll back the reach
of the federal state and unleash a new era of entrepreneurship and prosperity.
With American corporations suffering in an age of rising wage costs and
foreign competition, business leaders handed over millions of dollars in
sponsorship and funding, and a flood of policy proposals poured forth from
the new foundations and think-tanks of the age. And while liberals struggled
to make sense of the economic malaise of the 1970s, conservatives offered
an appealingly simple agenda, insisting that tax cuts, deregulation and stead-
fast austerity to squeeze inflation out of the system would relieve the miseries
of millions of their fellow citizens.
Of course there was more to conservatism than economics: indeed, the
Republican presidential victories of 1988, 2000 and 2004 were won largely on
social and cultural issues, from urban crime to homosexual marriage. But
although liberals often insisted that their adversaries wanted to turn back the
clock to some forgotten age of reactionary prejudice, what is really striking
is the extent to which conservatives accepted, or at least struck a compromise
with, the changing social and cultural values of the modern world. Both
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush drew considerable flack from
evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell for their refusal to turn back the clock in
matters of abortion, gender and sexuality. Indeed, it is remarkable that
despite having been born again and reaching out to Christian funda-
mentalists during his presidential campaigns, George W. Bush, too, made
sure that his administration contained a high proportion of black and female
faces. Conservatisms appeal, in other words, was all the stronger because
it was not merely reactionary. While its champions might appeal to old-
fashioned prejudices in their election campaigns the so-called dog whistle
effect, as exemplified by George Bushs famous Willie Horton ad in 1988, or

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his sons visit to Bob Jones University in 2000 they took care to strike a
more accommodating pose in office.
During the early 1970s, Richard Nixon, the first major Republican figure
to grasp the appeal of the new conservatism, had often been accused of
campaigning to the right but governing from the centre. To some extent, his
successors did the same. Much of Ronald Reagans success can be attributed
to his keen sense of pragmatism: not only did he effectively ditch radical
supply-side economics within his first few months, he preserved much of the
welfare state and, thanks to his defence spending, ran up a huge federal
deficit, a far cry from the balanced-budget conservatism of old. George
Bush, who memorably promised not to raise taxes but then did precisely that
to try and address his predecessors deficit, was frequently accused of being
nothing more than a woolly East Coast centrist. At first glance his son, who
stuck much more closely to a narrow partisan base under the tutelage of Karl
Rove, did the opposite: after initially presenting himself as a compassionate
conservative, playing down ideological differences during his contest with
Al Gore in 2000, the second Bush then infuriated liberals with his unilateral
foreign policy and enthusiasm for faith-based projects at home. Again,
though, this can be overstated: he made little effort to roll back the state,
abandoned controversial welfare reforms, and disappointed many conser-
vative zealots with his Supreme Court selections. And historians may well
judge George W. Bush not as some extremist anomaly, but as merely one in
a succession of conservative presidents stretching back to the mid-1970s,
albeit one governing at a time when the opportunity to flex presidential
muscles as John Dumbrells essay explains was probably greater than at
any point since the Johnson era.
If American politics in the early 21st century was governed by an under-
lying, undeclared consensus, then how do we explain the extraordinarily
frenzied and vituperative tone of public debate during this period? Any
reader of Michael Moores enormously successful broadside Stupid White Men
And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation (2003), for example, or of
Ann Coulters wildly hysterical tracts Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold
War to the War on Terrorism (2003) or Godless: the Church of Liberalism (2006),
would certainly be hard pressed to recognise much bipartisanship. However,
a little caution and common sense are in order. As with most bestsellers,
many Americans had the good sense neither to buy nor to read such
effusions (despite the vast publicity surrounding them), while polls since
the 1970s consistently found that just under a third identified with neither
party, but considered themselves independents.6 In fact, harsh rhetoric and
negative campaigning were products not of vast ideological divergence but
of an electoral system that relied heavily on television and, above all, on
highly personalised, character-based campaigns. What is more, although the
strident tone of American political debate since the 1980s shocked many
foreign observers, it did not really represent anything new. During the 1930s,

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for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been attacked in just as fierce terms
as those used to describe George W. Bush, while the ferocity of political
campaigning in the nineteenth century would make even many modern
consultants blanch. In fact, a glance at the platforms of both parties since the
1990s suggests remarkably little difference, and journalists reporting on the
presidential debates of 2000 and even 2004, when passions were said to be
higher than ever, often complained that there was little to choose between
the two adversaries. Predictable, plodding and downright dull, wrote one
columnist on the website Mediavillage.com; he was referring to the first
BushKerry contest, but in truth he could have been writing about any
debate since 1992.7

BILL CLINTON AND THE END OF IDEOLOGY

If there was one moment when the contours of this new post-Cold War
consensus became clear, it was not the aftermath of the World Trade Center
bombing, but the aftermath of Bill Clintons election victory in November
1992. Initially hailed as a moment of liberal resurgence, Clintons triumph
was actually nothing of the kind. True, he had worked for George McGovern
in 1972, but the Arkansas governor was a very different kind of Democrat:
cautious, fiscally prudent, always keen to blur the ideological boundaries
between himself and his opponents. Even before he took office, in fact,
Clinton had taken the key decision to reject major public investment in
favour of paying off the Reagan deficit, a choice that went down extremely
well with the bond market and with the conservative Federal Reserve chief
Alan Greenspan, but which deeply disappointed his liberal advisor, friend
and fellow Rhodes scholar Robert Reich, who now found himself pushed to
the sidelines of the administration. Although some accounts have Clinton
moving to the right only after the Republican landslide of 1994, his centrist
instincts had in fact been in evidence from the very beginning.8
As a consensual, centrist politician who relied on distinctly non-liberal
advisors like Dick Morris and David Gergen, Clinton was the ideal politician
for the times. With the Cold War over at last, ideological conflict now seemed
distinctly old-hat; indeed, Clinton took office just months after Francis
Fukuyama published his controversial book The End of History and the Last
Man (1992), which argued that the end of Soviet socialism meant the
unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. What Fukuyama
meant by this was the victory of free-market capitalism, parliamentary
democracy and consumerist individualism, forces against which politicians
and nation states were increasingly powerless.9 Clinton himself spent much
of his few weeks in office bitterly bemoaning his impotence against the great
forces of global capital: in an early meeting with his economic team, he
complained incredulously that the success of the program and my re-
election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond

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traders? 10 Yet if Clinton privately chafed against the constraints of presi-

dential leadership in the age of bond markets, outsourcing and globalisation,
he proved distinctly willing to ditch long-cherished liberal programmes in the
name of the new order. When Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in August 1996, for example, he
horrified traditional liberal Democrats opposed to the idea of welfare
reform. Yet the issue did him no harm in the November election; indeed,
some commentators believed that it cemented his victory over the
Republican senatorial warhorse Robert Dole, whose aggressive rhetoric went
down less well with suburban floating voters than did Clintons emollient
centrism. By the time he left office four years later, Clinton could plausibly
argue that despite the miserable sexual scandal that overshadowed his second
term, he presided over a nation more at ease with itself than at any time since
the 1950s.11
Had it not been for its unprecedented conclusion in the Supreme Court,
the presidential election of 2000 would have gone down in history as one of
the least inspiring of modern times, and arguably the least interesting since
Dwight Eisenhowers re-election in 1956. The exhaustion of liberal ideas in
the Democratic Party was well illustrated by the contest between Al Gore
and Bill Bradley for the presidential nomination. Although perceived as the
more liberal candidate, Bradley had in fact been a leading Atari Democrat of
the early 1980s, part of a group of so-called neoliberals (the label never
stuck and soon came to mean something quite different) who urged their
comrades to abandon old welfare-state ideas and to embrace the techno-
logical, managerial possibilities of the Reagan era. His campaign hamstrung
by the assistance of the present author, Bradley attempted to campaign
against Gore from the left, but promptly lost every primary he entered.
Within months of the New Hampshire primary, in fact, he had bowed out of
political life. As for Gore, he effectively promised a continuation of Clintons
technocratic centrism, which left him open to attack from the self-selected
gadfly Ralph Nader, with, as it turned out, disastrous consequences for
Gores electoral prospects. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries were
expected to present easy pickings for the wealthy, well-funded Texas
governor George W. Bush, but complacency dragged him into a bruising,
dirty battle with the unpredictable John McCain. Bush beat McCain only by
swinging sharply to the right, especially in the brutal South Carolina primary.
Once McCain was out of the race, however, Bush swung just as sharply back
towards the centre, suggesting that American politics in the new century
would not be dominated by the clash of ideological opposites, but by the
time-honoured battle for the centre ground.
Looking back at the results of the 2000 election, the unexpected
denouement aside, the two really striking things are how little had changed
since 1996 and how little would change by 2004. In all three elections, the
Democrats drew most of their strength from the urban Northeast,

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AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE 1990S AND 2000S

California, and the industrial states of the Midwest, while the Republicans,
as in previous elections, could rely on winning much of the South, the
Mountain states and the rural Midwest. No election was a landslide: even
in 1996, when the Republicans were judged to have fought a lacklustre
campaign, they picked up 40.7 per cent of the total ballots cast and 159
electoral votes. The similarities between 2000 and 2004 were particularly
remarkable. Both elections were extremely close, with John Kerry finishing
just 2.5 per cent short of the President in the latter. Even though turnout
increased by some 12 million votes, thanks largely to high voter interest in the
aftermath of the war in Iraq and frantic get-out-the-vote efforts by both
parties, the electoral maps also looked astonishingly similar. On both
occasions, the Democrats piled up big leads on the West Coast and in the
North East, while the Republicans swept the entire South, the Great Plains
and Mountains, and the industrial states of Ohio and Indiana. Only three
states changed hands, with Iowa and New Mexico moving into the
Republican camp and New Hampshire falling to the Democrats, almost
certainly because Kerry was a local candidate. In most states, the margin of
victory shifted by only a few per cent over four years, indeed, despite the
manifold foreign policy controversies of Bushs first term, a casual observer
might easily think that nothing had changed or indeed happened at all.
What this suggests, of course, is that in the context of the broad sweep of
American political and social history, the terrorist attacks of September 2001
were much less significant than is often alleged. Despite the immediate
devastation and enormous shock, the outpourings of flag-waving rage or
tortured introspection, there is no evidence that the attacks radically altered
the course of American political life. In 2004, a comprehensive Los Angeles
Times exit poll found that despite all the attention paid to the issue, just
29 per cent of voters named terrorism amongst their two primary concerns
in choosing their candidate, while even fewer, 16 per cent, cited the war in
Iraq. As in 2000, and as in almost every other election since World War II, in
fact, domestic issues predominated: 40 per cent cited moral/ethical values,
33 per cent chose jobs/economy, and smaller percentages opted for such
issues as education, health and homosexual marriage.12 Insofar as the issues
of terrorism and Iraq had an impact, therefore, they probably acted to
strengthen existing ideological instincts and patterns of allegiance, driving
up levels of partisan enthusiasm (and hence turnout) without actually
producing any great electoral shifts. The obvious conclusion is that, as in the
period between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, or most famously in the
Gilded Age, politics in the early 21st century had settled into a pattern, with
the two parties confirmed in their regional strongholds and enjoying a
roughly equivalent share of the national vote. For all the politicians rhetoric
about an age of change, therefore, American politics was notable above all
for its predictable stability.
With the two parties locked in a virtual dead heat at the presidential level,

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and given the lack of movement since 2000 as well as the intemperate, even
violent tone of public debate, many commentators drew the conclusion
that the nation was divided into two implacably opposed camps, or red
(Republican) and blue (Democratic) states.13 In fact this formula, much
beloved of those for whom it reinforced old regional prejudices, made
little sense. Once again, a look at the results of the 2004 election proves
instructive. Of course, as in any other period of American history, an
obvious regional pattern revealed itself, but within each state there could be
enormous variations. Even in the most partisan regions, the losing candidate
could generally be assured of a third or more of the vote, so while Kerry
picked up 37 per cent of the vote in Alabama, 40 per cent in Mississippi and
41 per cent in Georgia, Bush won 37 per cent in Massachusetts, 39 per cent
in Vermont and 44 per cent in Connecticut. Indeed, although caricatures
often painted the South or New England as ideologically homogenous, one-
party regions, the reality, especially when Congressional and gubernatorial
elections were taken into account, was of intense, passionate competition
at almost every level. Only one group of electors, in fact, came close to
deserving the one-party blue label: the people of the District of Columbia,
who gave John Kerry almost 90 per cent of the vote in 2004, after voting in
similar numbers for Al Gore four years earlier. In the so-called red states,
meanwhile, the picture was always more variegated than much commentary
suggested. Even at the height of the Bush presidency, a visitor to Austin,
Texas or Chapel Hill, North Carolina or New Orleans, Louisiana, would have
a hard time recognising the red-raw blood-and-Bibles stereotypes beloved
by many Democratic writers. Similarly, even states like Massachusetts and
Minnesota, famously the heartlands of Democratic liberalism in the 1950s
and 1960s, sent Republicans like Mitt Romney, Norm Coleman and Tim
Pawlenty to the governors mansion or the Senate.

THE MYTH OF THE CULTURE WARS

The other stereotype beloved of press commentators during the Clinton and
Bush years, of course, was that of culture wars. Although the phrase was
occasionally used during the 1980s, it owed its popularity to a thoughtful and
influential bestseller by the sociologist James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars:
the Struggle to Define America (1992). As so often, the timing was no accident.
Hunters analysis appeared at a point when traditional liberal-conservative
debates about the role of the state and the proper management of the
economy had run out of steam; indeed, only months after Hunters book
came out the Democrats elected a president who turned out to be more
Reagans heir than his repudiator. Hunters thesis that politics was
increasingly dominated and defined by cultural issues such as abortion,
censorship, gun control, gender and sexuality and the relationship between
church and state therefore seemed eminently sensible. He argued that

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whereas in earlier periods American society had been splintered along

denominational lines, pitting Protestants against Catholics during the Gilded
Age or the 1920s, for example, the true divide in the 1990s was that between
Progressivism and Orthodoxy. Progressives, he thought, tended to be
relativists, tolerant of competing moral viewpoints; their orthodox neigh-
bours, however, claimed to derive their morality from some external
authority (usually God), which meant that they were much less flexible on
issues like abortion.14
Hunters argument clearly made a lot of sense, not least since it explained
such recent developments as the alliance between traditionalist Catholics and
evangelical Protestants, two groups that had loathed one another for years
but had now come together to fight abortion, feminism, homosexuality and
the march of godless secularism. His terminology soon found its way into
public discourse, most famously when the maverick conservative Patrick
Buchanan told the 1992 Republican National Convention that there is a
religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural
war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War
itself . Pausing to denounce environmental extremists and radical
feminism, Buchanan warned that the agenda Clinton and Clinton would
impose on America abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme
Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in
combat is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still
call Gods country. Needless to say, the Republican faithful loved it.15
Although Buchanans rhetoric soon passed into political legend, it is worth
remembering that at the time his speech was regarded as something of a
gaffe, striking a tone of strident negativity that went down less well with
the nation at large than did the relentless baby-boomer optimism of the
Democratic convention the same year. This is not to deny that cultural issues
clearly played a crucial role in electoral politics under Clinton and Bush: in
2004, for example, it was the issue of homosexual marriage that brought out
many Republican and independent voters in swing states like Ohio, where
Bush benefited from heavy support from church-goers and, especially,
Catholics. But whether all this really deserves the label of a culture war is
another matter entirely. Nobody died. And despite much commentary to the
contrary, polls suggested that even the most ostensibly divisive social issues
elicited a surprising degree of consensus. In the case of abortion, for
example, polls since at least 1980 consistently indicated that no more than
one in five Americans thought that the practice should be made illegal. As for
gun control, at least two-thirds of the electorate consistently supported it,
while three out of four Americans consistently opposed the concept of
homosexual marriage.16 The picture that emerges, therefore, is that of an
electorate not split down the middle into two rigid, monolithic blocs, nor that
of a conservative electorate obsessed by social and cultural deviance, but
a much messier, more variegated one: an electorate that was increasingly

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tolerant but nevertheless slow to change; an electorate that flickered

inconsistently between moral traditionalism and individualist libertarianism;
an electorate, in fact, that looked not unlike the American people of 20, 50
or 100 years before.
* * *
This sense of complexity is well captured by the five essays in this section
of the book. Peter Kurylas thoughtful essay on contemporary American
liberalism traces the different intellectual origins of an ideology that often
appears vague or inchoate, placing 21st-century liberal debates in a long
continuum that encompasses the likes of John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr,
John Rawls and Richard Rorty. For Kuryla, the future of liberalism lies in a
compromise between what he identifies as its divergent components: the
philosophical heirs of John Rawls, often concerned more with principles
than practice; the pragmatic muscular liberals, fixated on the everyday
imperatives of practical politics; and the polemicists, for whom politics
is above all a matter of tearing down the ideological edifice of the Bush
administration. Kevin Mattson, meanwhile, concentrates on what he sees as
the parallels between conservatism and postmodernism, arguing that insofar
as they are both concerned with challenging the grand narratives of post-
war politics and culture, they can be seen as strange bedfellows in the 21st-
century world of cultural fragmentation and dissonance. Yet paradoxically,
as Mattson notes, the triumph of conservatism was also based on the
populist and anti-intellectual tendencies deeply rooted in American history,
forces to which Kurylas liberals stand opposed, but which remain as marked
today as they did when Richard Hofstadter identified them in the early 1950s.
The three other essays that complete this section are all concerned not
with political creeds but with particular aspects of modern American
political life. David Ryans essay on American diplomacy argues that even at
the dawn of the 21st century, memories of defeat in Vietnam hung heavily
over foreign relations. The Bush administrations reaction to the attacks of
September 2001, he argues, did not represent a departure from established
policy, but its culmination, building on trends that had long been evident.
Meanwhile, Nancy Snows piece on propaganda takes a fresh look at official
rhetoric during the period, noting the influence of marketing and public-
relations techniques on government operations, as well as the apparent
contradictions between principles and practice. Finally, John Dumbrells
essay on leadership suggests that conceptions of the nations global role were
influenced by a curious mixture of arrogance and anxiety, pointing out a
number of divergent influences on American foreign policy from Wilsonian
idealism to the kind of hard-headed realism that would do Henry Kissinger
proud. At home, meanwhile, leadership was above all a question of the
shifting balance between the White House and Congress, which after
September 2001 tipped decisively in the Presidents favour, only to tip back

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AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE 1990S AND 2000S

again when the occupation of Iraq ran into serious trouble in 2005 and 2006.
As Dumbrell rightly notes, much of the commentary on Bushs adminis-
tration tends towards the hysterical; the challenge for the next few years,
both for politicians and for commentators, is to restore a sense of balance.
If there is one theme that unites the five writers in this section, it is the
sheer influence and longevity of the Reagan revolution. All five contributors
agree that the contours of American political life had already been traced,
if only thinly, during the 1980s, when the so-called Great Communicator
demonstrated the enormous electoral appeal of his mixture of economic
conservatism, moral traditionalism and patriotic populism. During the years
of Reagans ascendancy, critics often wrote him off as a stooge, a front man,
an ignorant actor parroting the views of his sponsors and advisors. But, as
his most acclaimed biographer, Lou Cannon, points out, Reagans success
was a tribute not so much to the messenger but to the message, which clearly
resonated with millions of Americans.17 They voted for Reagan, and later
for George W. Bush, not because they were idiots or were duped or
were brainwashed by the nations major corporations, but because they were
attracted by a message that emphasised hard work, low taxes, traditional
morality and old-fashioned optimistic patriotism values that in an age of
dizzying economic and technological change appealed more than ever. And
it was Reagans funeral in 2004, far more than the presidential election that
followed it, that really brought home the degree of his post-presidential
ideological victory. Fifteen years before, his old Democratic opponents had
congratulated themselves that they had seen the last of their most dangerous
adversary. Little did they know that he would cast such a long shadow.

NOTES
1. New York Times, 11 June 2004, 12 June 2004.
2. The Times, 12 June 2004.
3. USA Today/Gallup poll, 911 February 2007, http://www.pollingreport.com/
wh-hstry.htm. On The Greatest American, see New York Times, 7 July 2005.
4. Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2006.
5. See, for example, Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The
Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York, NY: Norton,
1991); Thomas Frank, Whats the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the
Heart of America (New York, NY: Metropolitan, 2004).
6. See the database of Harris polls since 1969 at http://www.polling
report.com/institut2.htm.
7. Ed Martin, writing at http://www.mediavillage.com/jmentr/2004/10/04/
jmer-10-04-04/, 10 October 2004.
8. See Robert B. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet (New York, NY: Knopf, 1997); George
Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (New York, NY: Little,
Brown, 1999).
9. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?, The National Interest, 16, Summer

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

1989; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY:
Free Press, 1992).
10. Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (New York, NY:
Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 84.
11. See Ron Haskins, Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law
(Washington, DC: Brookings, 2006).
12. Los Angeles Times poll, 2 November 2004, http://www.pollingreport.com/
2004.htm#Exit.
13. See, for example, Thomas Byrne Edsall, Building Red America: The New
Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power (New York, NY: Basic
Books, 2006).
14. See James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America (New York,
NY: Basic Books, 1992).
15. Patrick Buchanan, Republican National Convention speech, 17 August 1992,
http://www.buchanan.org/pa-92-0817-rnc.html.
16. See the historical databases at http://www.pollingreport.com/abortion.htm,
http://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm and http://www.pollingreport.com/
civil.htm.
17. Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York, NY: Public Affairs,
2003), pp. 11617.

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2. AMERICAN LEADERSHIP INTO

THE NEW CENTURY

John Dumbrell

In 1987, George Shultz, Secretary of State under President Reagan, declared

that the great ideological struggle that has marked this century ever since the
Bolshevik revolution of 1917 has essentially been decided.1 Speaking two
years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, George Shultz was a little premature
in proclaiming the termination of the Cold War. However, the significance,
not least for American thought and culture, of the late 20th-century
ideological and material victory over Soviet communism can scarcely be
overstated. The international business of the 20th century admittedly
diverted by the rise of fascism in the 1930s was the contest between
communism (or at least bureaucratised state socialism) on the one hand and
democratic capitalism on the other. The geopolitical cataclysm symbolised
by the crashing wall in Berlin appeared not only a vindication of national
mission and American exceptionalism. It also seemed to signify, as Francis
Fukuyama famously put it, that all the really big questions had been settled
in favour of America and the liberal idea.2
The present chapter concerns itself with ideas of American global
leadership as they developed between 1989 and the first decade of the new
century. The discussion will then turn to consider leadership in a domestic
context. Just as Fukuyamas end of history had huge implications for
American leadership in the world, so did the end of the Cold War and the
onset of the War on Terror profoundly affect concepts of leadership at the
national level. By 2002, contrary to the expectations of the early 1990s, the
power of the US President was following an aggrandising trajectory. Not
only did the conditions of the post-9/11 era stimulate an enormous growth
of executive power and authority in the realms of foreign policy and
domestic security, the early 21st-century White House also advanced a

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species of big government presidentialist conservatism, which had severe

implications for traditional Madisonian notions of fragmented national
leadership. We turn first to the international debate over leadership.

POST-COLD WAR AMERICAN GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

The global transformations that accompanied the collapse of Soviet
communism brought with them an almost inevitable burst of American
triumphalism. Neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer hailed
in 1991 the unipolar moment and called on American elites to make the
most of the unique opportunities presented by the Soviet implosion.3 The
national mood, however, in this immediate post-Cold War period was far
from universally confident. Perceptions of American decline overshadowed
the electoral politics of the early 1990s and even had an impact on the first
presidential effort to set out a framework for American leadership in the new
global context: President George H. W. Bushs New World Order speech of
September 1990. Though attacked from the left as revamped imperialism,
the New World Order rather reflected a conception of American leadership
that was rooted in multilateralism, limited liability and the upholding of
international law.4 In a speech at West Point military academy in January
1993, the outgoing President Bush declared that the US would use force in
the future only where its application can be limited in space and time, and
where the potential benefits justify the potential costs and sacrifice.5 If this
was a new imperialism, it was an imperialism tailored to an awareness of the
limits to US globalism.
The 1992 presidential election was concerned more with the trade and
budget deficits than with any post-Cold War celebration. President Bill
Clintons conception of Americas world leadership was circumspect and
geared primarily to the economic sphere. Clinton followed the route of
selective engagement, prioritising international issues that had either a
significant domestic overspill or which had direct relevance to core US
economic or security interests. Presidential Decision Directive 25, issued in
May 1994, declared that the US would participate in United Nations
peacekeeping only if risks were acceptable and objectives clear. In Stephen
Walts marvellous phrase, Clinton sought hegemony on the cheap.6
Lurking behind this cautious approach to international leadership were
memories of over-extension in Vietnam, along with the post-Cold War
visibility of the kind of new populism that surfaced in Ross Perots 1992
electoral challenge to both Bush and Clinton. New populism disavowed
seamless international engagement, especially when (on the right) it was
associated with the United Nations and foreign policy as social work, and
(on the left) when it appeared to embrace capitulation to the forces of
economic globalisation. Elements of the new populism of the right
notably a revived nationalism and a willingness to favour unilateralism in

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foreign relations found their way into the Republican Party programme
which triumphed in the 1994 Congressional elections, and continued to
affect attitudes towards international leadership into the new century.
During the 1990s, those politicians and intellectuals who favoured strong
US global leadership battled consciously against what they perceived as the
forces of isolationism. Within the Republican Party, this contest took
the form of neoconservative assaults on the narrow nationalism that
distinguished the programme of the post-1994 majority in Congress. Joshua
Muravchik rebuked neo-isolationism in 1996, noting History will long
marvel at the denouement of the cold war. Not only had Soviet leaders just
upped and threw in the towel, their American counterparts responded to
victory not with triumphalism but with a similar collapse of confidence.7
On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton attacked protectionists and neo-
isolationists on the left and labour wing of his party. In his second inaugural
address ( January 1997) Clinton used a phrase that came to signify his
administrations commitment to international leadership: America stands
alone as the worlds indispensable nation.8
By the time Clinton made this inaugural address, the US debate over post-
Cold War global leadership had shifted significantly. The recessionary
economic climate of the early 1990s had disappeared. The huge Reagan
budget deficit was now under control. The American consumer boom,
the computer revolution and US-sponsored globalising free trade had
transformed outlooks and expectations. The promise of 1989 at last seemed
to have been made real. Clinton announced that for the very first time in
all of history, more people on this planet live under democracy than
dictatorship.9 US leadership was now geared to the family of nations:
market democracies embracing free trade and acknowledging the indis-
pensability of American leadership. The new confidence of the late 1990s,
underpinned by the nationalism of the Republican Congress, also con-
tributed to a new willingness to conceive international leadership in
unilateralist terms: certainly, as in Kosovo in 1999, to act militarily without
any United Nations remit. This new assertion of leadership also required a
degree of remilitarisation, reversing the secular decline in defence spending
which had begun in the very last years of the Cold War. By 2000, the US was
spending $280 billion annually on defence a sum completely beyond the
aspiration of any rival.
As American political and intellectual elites looked forward to the new
century, concerns ranged from the emergence of new threats to the
problems and possibilities of undisputed global supremacy. By 2000,
Americas international eminence was indeed extraordinary. The most cited
threats of this period were the borderless threats identified by the Clinton
administration: refugee flows, HIV-AIDS, environmental pollution and
international terrorism. Two major reports produced in 1999 by the US
Commission on National Security, chaired by former Senators Gary Hart

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and Warren Rudman, concluded that borderless threats embraced new

vulnerabilities, notably over-reliance on attackable information systems and
the unpredictable nature of globalised economic shifts.10 Clintons bridge
to the new century involved a cornucopia of programmatic pathways,
emphasising cultural diversity as well as the indispensability of American
international leadership. More ominously, Samuel Huntingtons notion of
the clash of civilizations, the putative replacement of global economic and
ideological cleavages by cultural ones, gained huge currency, even before the
terror attacks of 9/11.11
In general, however, the American turn-of-the-century mood was as much
preoccupied with the undisputed nature of US global leadership per se,
as with any threats to that leadership. By the turn of the century, the
combination of hard military power, economic strength and soft cultural
assets the international attractiveness of the United States seemed to have
carried all before it.12 National Security Advisor Sandy Berger announced in
January 2001, Today, as President Clinton leaves office, America is by any
measure the worlds unchallenged military, economic and political power.
The world counts on us to be a catalyst of coalitions, a broker of peace, and
a guarantor of financial stability.13
In the early post-Cold War years, Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson
warned America of the imperial temptation.14 As the new century dawned,
shelves of books appeared, all criticising, condemning or celebrating a new
imperial age. Andrew Bacevich wrote that empire was un-American. Its
characteristics pomp and privilege, corruption and excess were quite
alien to Americas Puritan heritage.15 Yet Rome had travelled a not dissimilar
path. Could the US not learn from Romes mistakes? What about Britains
more recent experiences with empire? Perhaps the US could pick up tips
from its imperial predecessors. At least on the neoconservative right, the
whiff of empire was in the air even before 9/11. What 9/11 did, of course,
at least in the short term, was to weaken those inhibitions on the projection
of power that had so affected the presidencies of the elder Bush and
Clinton.16
As the younger Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the
US was poised between unilateralist and cooperativist conceptions of
international leadership. In some ways, the US was now so unlike other
countries its economic and military power was now so unchallenged that
cooperative leadership, at least in so far as that concept implied some kind of
partnership among equals, was scarcely feasible. Under the new President,
however, American global leadership was to become increasingly militarised
and its global instincts more unilateralist.
The presidency of George W. Bush saw a prolonged debate between new
nationalist and neoconservative understandings of how America should
exercise global leadership. New nationalism seemed to be the Presidents
own default position on leadership. It derived from a tradition that weaves its

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AMERICAN LEADERSHIP INTO THE NEW CENTURY

way back to the Frontier and the nationalism of President Andrew Jackson.17
More immediately, it derived from the rather narrowly defined nationalism
that had been such a prominent feature of Republican Party thinking in the
1990s. Bush, particularly early on, presented himself as a new nationalist:
prepared to exercise international leadership, but only in a manner congruent
with strictly and narrowly understood American interests. Remove those
interests and the world would have to resolve its own problems.18 In 1999,
Bush declared that, unless the leader of America sets his own priorities, his
priorities will be set by others.19
Against the new nationalist version of international leadership, the version
embraced by the top echelon of Bushs foreign policy team, stood neo-
conservatism and militarised democracy-promotion. The tradition of
democracy-promoting global leadership associated with President Woodrow
Wilson stood opposed to that deriving from Jackson and President
Theodore Roosevelt. Sometimes understood as a form of interests-based
realism, neoconservatism is more sensibly construed as a coming together of
democratising idealism with a commitment to military primacy, all strongly
rooted in the soil of American exceptionalism.20 Neoconservatives, like Paul
Wolfowitz, deputy to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the first
George W. Bush administration, tend to see interests and ideals as
interpenetrative.21 In Americas case, at least, the one reinforces the other.
Neoconservatism frequently, as with the 1992 Defence Guidance (the
framework for post-Cold War US leadership written under Wolfowitzs
sponsorship by Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad), does express itself in
interests terms.22 Yet Americas exceptionalist, democratising vision never
lags far behind. For Charles Krauthammer, the realist/idealist circle is
squared by the concept of democratic realism, wherein pro-democracy
interventionists accept a commitment to more traditionally conceived
national interests, such as access to Middle Eastern oil and strong national
defence.23
The shock of 9/11 immeasurably strengthened the hand of those within
the administration, and particularly within the Pentagon, who favoured
a neoconservative construction of American global leadership. Charles
Krauthammer wrote on 21 September 2001 that this was no time for
agonized relativism.24 As originally conceived, the War on Terror reflected
new nationalist rather than neoconservative conceptions of global leader-
ship: more forward defence than democracy-promotion, more Theodore
Roosevelt than Woodrow Wilson. The neoconservative position was that
9/11 had opened the way for transformative action, conceived in moral
as much as in narrow strategic terms. At least in relation to the Middle East,
the neoconservative agenda rapidly gained ground. Forward defence in
Afghanistan gave way to an approach that embodied more strongly the
theme of democracy-promotion/imposition. The shift to a democracy-
promoting rhetoric, seen at its most spectacular in Bushs second inaugural

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address of January 2005, was also unquestionably connected to the failure

to unearth weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, the notion of
leadership defended by the administration after 9/11 always combined the
new nationalist (with American interests defined more expansively than
before 9/11) and the neoconservative versions of global leadership.
Speaking at West Point in June 2002, Bush not only claimed a virtually
absolute right to pre-empt threats from other countries by taking military
action against them, he also promised to extend the peace by encouraging
free and open societies on every continent.25 By November 2003, speaking
in London, Bush was defending a Wilsonian form of world leadership: a
concept of leadership rooted in the interdependence of ideals and interests,
drawing also from the post-Cold War doctrine, very dear to the Clinton
administration, that international democracy guarantees international
peace.26 The administrations mind-set was still shaped by the Cold War
victory. The events of 1989 had, it felt, been a vindication of American ideals;
market democracy was bound to prevail, provided always that Washington did
not lose its nerve. The 2002 National Security Strategy opened thus: The
great struggles of the 20th century between liberty and totalitarianism ended
with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable
model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.27
Failure and chaos in Iraq called into question the entire expansive
conception of global leadership that underpinned Washingtons response to
9/11. The terror attacks themselves revealed starkly that the global hyper-
power was vulnerable to the asymmetric threat mounted by international
terrorism. The widespread opposition to American action in Iraq not least
in the ranks of traditional allies threatened also to erode US soft power.28
By this time, American commentators were examining problems of over-
extension and international blowback.29 John Ikenberry called on America
to rediscover its cooperativist version of global leadership, based on the view
that Americas security partnerships are not simply instrumental tools but
critical components of an American-led world political order that should be
preserved.30 Global domination, argued Stephen Walt in 2005, was simply
too demanding and was ultimately destructive of sustainable leadership.31
By the second half of the first decade of the new century, it was clear that
America would face significant challenges to its global leadership. A specialist
literature emerged on yet more new threats: not just borderless ones like
terrorism, but also the more traditional threat posed by a rising (and in
political terms at least, still communist) China. Such threat-mongering
tended to underplay the difficulties in Chinas path and to overplay the
likelihood of conflict between what are almost bound to be the worlds two
most powerful countries in the medium-term future.32 What was evident,
however, some years after the Iraq invasion, was that American conceptions
of global leadership were likely as in the era following the Vietnam War
to develop against the background of a keen awareness of limits. Hillary

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Clinton, running for the Democratic nomination in 2007, gave her support
to US democracy promotion, but only in digestible packages.33

LEADERSHIP AT HOME
The end of the Cold War affected conceptions of leadership at home almost
as much as views on Americas world role. The domestic and international
politics of the pre-1989 era combined to create a heroic model, in particular,
of presidential leadership. The imperial presidency of Richard Nixon
(196974) and the defeat in Vietnam had, it is true, produced a reaction to
various excesses and abuses of presidential authority. The presidency of
Jimmy Carter (197781) was, at some level, an antidote to the heroic
presidential model. Yet the conditions of the Cold War high levels of
defence mobilisation, ever-present nuclear threat, prolonged invocation of
crisis invited enhanced executive power. The heroic model of presidential
leadership was not simply the product of international conditions. It related
also to the rise of television and to expectations of mobilisation for domestic
change, whether in a liberal (as in the cases of John Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson) or (as in the case of President Reagan) a conservative direction.
Heroic presidential leadership also reflected the relative strengths of state
and federal levels of political authority; although, of course, the Cold War era
also witnessed the spectacle of heroic presidents, notably Nixon and Reagan,
actually espousing the cause of rolling power back to the states. What was
undeniable about the strong post-New Deal presidency was the sustaining
context of the Cold War.34
In a sense, the Cold War victory was a victory for presidential power, a
victory made possible (according to preference) by John Kennedys handling
of the Cuban missile crisis, or by Ronald Reagans strategy of negotiation
from strength. Despite all this, the ending of the Cold War was accompanied
by expectations that the ability of the presidency to survive as the prime
focus for national leadership would be compromised. A 1993 report by the
American Assembly on Public Engagement in US Foreign Policy after
the Cold War noted: We have inherited a conception of the man in the
Oval Office hearing all the evidence, making lonely decisions, and then
persuading the nation. With the ending of the Cold War, however, foreign
policy making increasingly resembles the process by which domestic policies
are made, and the president must be prepared to build mutually supportive
coalitions at home and abroad that will give authority and legitimacy to
his/her decisions.35
Bill Clintons leadership style was certainly presidentialist and activist.
He had no intention of emulating the semi-detached style of President
Reagan, nor of surrendering to a constrained model of post-Cold War
leadership. Yet Clintons own orientation to the job of being leader involved
more than mere super-activity. To some extent Clintons thinking on national

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leadership reflected at least a hint of the suspicion of power that was

characteristic of the generation that came to political maturity during the era
of the Vietnam War. More importantly, Clintons leadership was consciously
fashioned for a post-liberal, post-heroic America. As a founder of the
Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, Clinton had been part of a
movement within the Democratic Party to prepare for executive office in
times that demanded fiscal caution and the exaltation of compromise
(triangulation) over ideology. In this line of thought, successful leadership
meant not repeating the McGovern mistakes of 1972 by racing too far ahead
of public opinion. Clintons style was emotional; it involved a good deal
of listening and searching out consensual pathways to the new century.
According to Margaret Hermann, his style was one of search and check:
search for information that will bring about good policy and check where
relevant constituencies stand to see if consensus is possible.36
Clintons contribution to the development of presidential leadership
his legacy to the new century differed significantly between domestic
and foreign policy. In foreign policy, in defiance of the expectations of the
early 1990s, Clinton generally kept the process under presidential control.
Congress and other non-executive actors gained important new leverage in
some areas; such an area was policy towards Cuba, now relegated from the
high importance accorded to it during the Cold War. However, the reins of
high foreign and security policy-making were kept in the White House. The
means of doing so involved, as during the Cold War, the frequent invocation
of external threat and the plausible assertion that, if the US were to have a
clear international direction, only the President could provide it. Like his
Republican predecessor and his Republican successor in office, Clinton paid
only minimal and largely symbolic heed to legislative war powers.37
On the domestic side, especially after the 1995 Republican takeover of
Congress, Clinton was more obviously committed to listening, triangu-
lation and compromise. A key example here was the welfare policy reform
of 1996. Even in domestic policy, however, Clinton achieved some
remarkable victories for traditional, liberal notions of strongly activist
presidential leadership. The 1994 Republican Contract with America was, in
effect, a blueprint for a system of national Congressional government. The
Contract was complex and included provisions, notably the item veto
(allowing the President to cancel specific items in appropriations bills), which
actually augmented presidential authority. The main thrust of the Contract,
however, was to put forward a national manifesto for Congressional
leadership, with a detailed schedule for 100 days legislative action. In the
event, this new era of post-Cold War Congressional government never
appeared. It was destroyed by Clintons grasping of the initiative in foreign
policy; by overreaching and misjudgement by the would-be prime minister,
House Speaker Newt Gingrich; by the lack of a veto- or filibuster-proof
Republican majority in the Senate; and by a skilled combination of

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compromise and confrontation (especially in the annual budget battles)

by the White House. In 2001, Clinton handed on to George W. Bush a
presidential office whose wings remained surprisingly unclipped, despite the
impeachment and the vicious partisan political warfare of the 1990s.
The new, post-2000 presidential style was assuredly not one of search and
check. The Republicans who entered the White House in 2001 were strong
proponents, not of Gingrich-style Congressional government, but of firm
executive leadership. The White House developed doctrines of the strong
presidency, rooted in notions of inherent power, which echoed those
advanced by President Richard Nixons Justice Department in the early
1970s, and in ideas of the unitary executive, which had been developed
during the 1990s.38 In a truly Nixonian touch (though also one which echoed
Clintons response to the Lewinsky scandal), the new administration relied
heavily on notions of executive privilege in order to protect sensitive
information.39 The argument advanced by Vice-President Richard Cheney
and other leading administration conservatives was that America needed to
rediscover the tradition of assertive presidential leadership which had been
lost during the national overreaction to Watergate and the Vietnam War.
Cheney himself emerged as possibly the most powerful Vice-President in US
history. According to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, President
George W. Bush (even before 9/11) wanted to restore the executive
authority the president had traditionally been able to exercise.40 Management
in this new order was perfunctory in style and, despite Bushs famous status
as the first President with an MBA, strangely disordered.41 Bush tended to
equate explanation with weakness. Bob Woodward quoted him thus: Im the
commander see, I dont need to explain I do not need to explain why I
say things.42 According to James Pfiffner, Bush eschewed deliberation, and
his White House does not adhere to any regularized policy development
process.43
At the level of legal argument, the White House put its faith in a
controversially presidentialist reading of constitutional history.44 Such
assertions of authority naturally found fertile ground in the political
conditions which followed the 9/11 attacks. The US Congress lacked the
political will seriously to raise issues of constitutional propriety when, for
example, it delegated huge powers relating to national security surveillance
to the executive in the Patriot Act of 2001. Such legislation raised major
questions relating to civil liberties and to legislative authority. Democrat
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia emerged as the most conspicuous
defender of Congressional prerogatives after 9/11; in the atmosphere that
prevailed, at least in the period 20015, his case for Congress asserting its
right to lead assumed the same practical irrelevance as that of the legislative
opponents of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution.45 In domestic policy, the
administration was, of course, anxious to obtain legislation. This was big
government, rather than do nothing, conservatism. Legislation such as the

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No Child Left Behind education reform, signed into law by President Bush
in January 2002, sprang from a familiar process of compromise and
adjustment in Congress, though it certainly marked a new high point for
federal involvement in (usually state government-led) educational practice.
Unsurprisingly, it was for policy areas related to the War on Terror that the
fiercest assertions of executive power were reserved.
The most swingeing assertion of presidential authority in foreign policy
was the doctrine of pre-emption. At West Point in June 2002 and in the
National Security Strategy published later in the year, President Bush averred
a limitless personal authority to order military action against any nation that
posed in the Presidents judgement, and in the Presidents judgement alone
either an immediate or even a longer-term threat to US security.46 The
doctrine thus effectively conflated pre-emption (the heading-off of an
immediate threat) with prevention (cancelling remote threats). The Iraq
invasion of 2003 was, in this terminology, actually preventive rather than
pre-emptive.47 Presidentially adjudicated pre-emption is not entirely novel,
but never before had this aspect of effective executive authority been
expressed quite so starkly. Anthony Lewis wrote that the doctrine overthrew
the commitment that the United States and all other members of the United
Nations have made to eschew attacks across international frontiers
except in response to armed aggression.48 As an inherent presidential
power, pre-emption also left no apparent room for checks by the US
Congress, much less by any international body. Assertion of executive
authority was remorseless, with particularly striking examples involving the
treatment of enemy combatants. In 2002, following the invasion of
Afghanistan, Bushs Justice Department argued that Congress could no
more regulate the Presidents ability to detain and interrogate enemy
combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements in the
battlefield. The President, according to the Office of Legal Counsel, has the
inherent authority to convene military commissions to try and punish enemy
combatants even in the absence of statutory authority.49 Such claims amount
to an assertion of presidential supremacy. Intense controversy extended not
only to the detention of combatants notably at Guantnamo in Cuba, but
also in a range of clandestine sites but also to their interrogation.
Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona led a major effort in 2005 to
outlaw torture of terror suspects. The resulting legislation was accepted by
President Bush, but only with the attachment of a signing statement,
declaring the executives intention to enforce the law only in a manner
consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the
unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief .50
Sweeping and controversial claims of executive authority are bound to be
challenged, at least in the medium to long term. In the case of the Bush
presidency, formal and effective challenge emerged firstly at the judicial level.
The key Supreme Court cases involved the habeas corpus rights of detainees.

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AMERICAN LEADERSHIP INTO THE NEW CENTURY

In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Justice Sandra OConnor, writing for the Court,
held that the administration position on denying legal appeals from detainees
could not be supported by any reasonable view of the constitutional
doctrine of separation of powers, since it serves only to condense power
within a single branch of government. The Court reaffirms today the
fundamental nature of a citizens right to be free from involuntary confine-
ment by his own government without due process of law.51
The Hamden v. Rumsfeld decision of 2006 further damaged the adminis-
trations absolutist stance. The military commissions established to deal with
War on Terror detainee cases were deemed improper, since they lacked
statutory backing and contravened the Geneva Conventions. Justice Stevens,
writing for the Court, opposed the administrations assertion of a sweeping
mandate for the President to invoke military commissions whenever
he deems them necessary.52 As with the McCain torture legislation, the
administration found an escape: this time by achieving statutory backing for
the tribunals. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 explicitly denied
admissibility to evidence extracted under torture; yet it also provided a
framework for trial by military commission, with no clear right for a non-US
citizen to appeal detention before American courts. Towards the end of
2007, the stage appeared set for further Supreme Court determinations
regarding habeas corpus and due process rights.53
Legislative reassertion was part of the agenda for the Democratic
Congress, which convened in January 2007 and proceeded to investigate
executive conduct of foreign policy and to challenge administration claims to
exclusive leadership rights over the conflict in Iraq. For House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, the priority was to achieve legislation that ends the blank
check for the Presidents war without end.54 The ability of the new Congress
radically to affect the conduct of the Iraq conflict was reduced by its inability
to muster enough votes to override presidential vetoes. The administration
view was clearly put by Vice-President Cheney: military operations are to be
directed by the President of the United States, period. 55

As America waved goodbye to the Cold War, it seemed that leadership by

and in the United States might be transformed. When George Washington
returned to his farm at the end of his presidency in 1797, he invoked the
memory of the Roman leader Cincinnatus, who had swapped dictatorship
and the ways of war for modesty and peace. As we have seen, any expectation
that post-1989 America would emulate Cincinnatus, destroy its sword and
revert to modest leadership was quickly disappointed. The Cold War victory
produced a long, albeit initially hesitant, period of extreme confidence in the
universal currency of American democratic, capitalist values. By the early
years of the new century, White House assertion of presidential authority
also matched, in truth exceeded, those made by Cold War presidents. The
political conditions of the immediate post-9/11 years encouraged sweeping

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assertions of American global power, just as they underpinned presidential

aggrandisement at home.
Much commentary on Bushs presidential leadership certainly much
European commentary tends towards the hysterical. In the final few
sentences of this chapter, let us try to restore a sense of proportion. Bushs
globalist presidentialism was driven by ideology: a mixture, as we have seen,
of new nationalism, neoconservatism and the assumption that Congress is
incapable of acting responsibly, especially in any area connected to foreign
policy. Such doctrines and assumptions are highly contentious at best; at
worst, they transgress fundamentally constitutional provisions concerning
checks on executive power and separation of powers. Yet the American
system of shared and limited leadership will work only if all elements within
it act to protect their interests and jurisdictions. In the period between 2001
and early 2007, the US Congress at the federal level, the representative
branch singularly failed to do this. From 2008 onwards, the agenda would
seem to be one of rebalancing: at home, the move to restrain presidential
authority; and abroad, adjustment (yet again) to a newly constrained
internationalism.

NOTES
1. American Foreign Policy: Current Documents 1987 (Washington, DC: Department of
State, 1988), p. 29.
2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, The National Interest, 16, 1989, 318, 4.
3. Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs, 70, 1991, 2333.
4. See John Dumbrell, American Foreign Policy: Carter to Clinton (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997), pp. 1624. Also, Noam Chomsky, World Orders: Old and New
(London: Pluto Press, 1994).
5. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush: 19923: Book 2
(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1993), pp. 22289.
6. Stephen Walt, Two cheers for Clintons foreign policy, Foreign Affairs, 79, 2000,
6376.
7. Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-
Isolationism (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1996), p. 9.
8. Available on Clinton Presidential Library website: http://www.clintonlibrary.
gov/.
9. Ibid.
10. See Ian Roxborough, The Hart-Rudman Commission and Homeland Defense
(Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2001).
11. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
12. See Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New
York, NY: Basic Books, 1991).
13. A Foreign Policy for the Global Age, 17 January 2001, available on Clinton
Presidential Library website.
14. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation (New York,

46
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AMERICAN LEADERSHIP INTO THE NEW CENTURY

NY: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992).

15. Andrew J. Bacevich, The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire
(Chicago, IL: Dee, 2003), p. ix.
16. See Robert Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New
York, NY: Random House, 2002); Michael Cox, Still the American Empire,
Political Studies Review, 5, 2007, 110.
17. Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: The Anatomy of American Nationalism
(London: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 96.
18. Condoleezza Rice, Promoting the National Interest, Foreign Affairs, 79, 2001,
4562.
19. Cited in Stanley Renshon, The Bush Doctrine Considered, in Stanley Renshon
and Peter Suedfeld (eds), Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in
an Age of Terrorism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), p. 13.
20. See Gerard Alexander, International Relations Theory meets World Politics, in
Renshon and Suedfeld (eds), Understanding the Bush Doctrine, p. 42.
21. See Mark Bowden, Wolfowitz: The Exit Interviews, The Atlantic Monthly, July
August 2005, 11022.
22. See James Petras and Morris Morley, Empire or Republic? American Global Power
and Domestic Decay (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995).
23. Charles Krauthammer, In Defense of Democratic Realism, The National
Interest, 77, 2004, 1527.
24. Charles Krauthammer, Visions of Moral Obtuseness, in Micah L. Sifry and
Christopher Cerf (eds), The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New
York, NY: Touchstone, 2003), pp. 21718.
25. See John Dumbrell, The Bush Doctrine, in George C. Edwards and Philip J.
Davies (eds), New Challenges for the American Presidency (New York, NY: Pearson
Longman, 2004), p. 231.
26. Cited in David H. Dunn, Bush, 11 September and conflicting strategies of the
War on Terrorism, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 16, 2005, 1133, 23.
27. The National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: The White
House, 2002), p. 1.
28. See Josef Joffe, Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (New York, NY:
Norton, 2006), p. 131.
29. See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,
2nd edn (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2004).
30. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity, 2006),
p. 228.
31. Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy (New
York, NY: Norton, 2005).
32. See Robert Ash, David Shambaugh and Seiichiro Takagi (eds), China Watching:
Perspectives from Europe, Japan, and the United States (New York, NY: Routledge,
2006).
33. Jeffrey Goldberg, The Starting Gate, The New Yorker, 15 January 2007, 2636,
28.
34. See Jon Roper, The American Presidents: Heroic Leadership from Kennedy to Clinton
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
35. Daniel Yankelovich and I. M. Destler (eds), Beyond the Beltway: Engaging the Public

47
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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

in US Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Norton, 1994), p. 283.

36. Margaret Hermann, Advice and advisers in the Clinton presidency: the impact
of leadership style, in Stanley Renshon (ed.), The Clinton Presidency: Campaigning,
Governing, and the Psychology of Leadership (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995),
p. 161.
37. See Ryan C. Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars: The Constitution, Congress, and War
Powers (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002).
38. See Steven G. Calabresi and Kevin H. Rhodes, The structural constitution:
unitary executive, plural judiciary, Harvard Law Review, 105, 1992, 1153216.
39. See Robert M. Pallitto and William G. Weaver, Presidential Secrecy and the Law
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
40. Cited in John E. Owens, Presidential power and congressional acquiescence in
Americas war on terrorism: a new constitutional equilibrium?, Politics and
Policy, 34, 2006, 258303, 265.
41. See James P. Pfiffner, The First MBA President, Public Administration Review, 67,
2007, 620.
42. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2002),
pp. 1467.
43. Pfiffner, The first MBA President, p. 8.
44. See John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after
9/11 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard Posner, Not a
Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Anita Miller (ed.), George W. Bush versus the US
Constitution (Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago, 2006).
45. See Robert C. Byrd, Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency
(New York, NY: Norton, 2004).
46. See Dumbrell, The Bush Doctrine, in Edwards and Davies (eds), New
Challenges for the American Presidency.
47. See, for example, remarks of Senator Edward Kennedy: www.truthout.
org/docs_02/10.9A.kennedy.html.
48. Anthony Lewis, Bush and Iraq, New York Review of Books, 7 November 2002,
713, 8.
49. Cited in Jules Lobel, The Commander in Chief and the Courts, Presidential
Studies Quarterly, 37, 2007, 4965, 49.
50. Ibid. See also Phillip J. Cooper, George W. Bush, Edgar Allen Poe, and the use
and abuse of presidential signing statements, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 35,
2005, 51232.
51. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (542 US 507, 2004). Rasul v. Bush (542 US 466, 2004)
established that a non-US citizen could petition against detention.
52. Hamden v. Rumsfeld (126 S.Ct. 2749, 2006). See David Cole, Why the Court said
no, New York Review of Books, 10 August 2006, 413.
53. Various cases, notably Boumedienne v. Bush, are pending.
54. See www.house.gov/pelosi/press/release/May07/newiraq.html.
55. Cheney, remarks to the Heritage Foundation, 13 April 2007 (available on
Heritage Foundation website).

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3. 9/11 AND US FOREIGN POLICY

David Ryan

For all the horror of that Tuesday and the fathomless pain and grief visited
on countless families, 9/11 was an event that thus far does not represent
a significant turning point in US diplomatic history or foreign policy.1 It
was quickly superseded by other events unrelated to the causes of 9/11.
Influential strategists within the Bush administration seized on the horror to
gain assent from liberal Americans to move the country towards a war in Iraq
that neoconservative strategists desired, but that many within the US, albeit
with considerable liberal acquiescence, shunned because of the memories of
Vietnam.
This chapter contends that the dominant reaction led by the Bush
administration instantaneously broadened the context by falling back on old
ideas associated with notions of victory and confrontation, with ideologies
resulting from defeat in Vietnam, and with the Cold War inclination to think
in dualistic terms. While the event was and is of immense importance in
order to understand US foreign policy, one must also understand the ideo-
logical system of the epoch in question.2 As the French historian Fernand
Braudel famously wrote:

I remember the night near Bahia when I was enveloped in a firework

display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out,
shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So
it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.3

The Bush administrations decision to take war to Iraq has meant that in
many ways 9/11 has been overshadowed; its specific implications for US
foreign policy will still need to be addressed after settlement of the Iraq War.

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9/11 has been widely interpreted as an act of ill-defined opposition to

Western modernism and US power. The symbolic termini were important:
the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, architectural expressions of
power and mastery, control and lordship, were constructed in 1973 just as
concepts and cultures of postmodernism were identified as resulting from
cultural logic of late capitalism and the crisis of endless accumulation.4
Postmodernism simultaneously undermined and augmented the architec-
tural narratives associated with the Twin Towers. The Pentagon, the other
target of 9/11, represented the strategic node of US military power and
hegemony. These buildings also embodied the two dominant theses on US
foreign policy: the end of history and the clash of civilizations. The Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center represented the material manifestation of
US leadership in the world economy and economic integration since the end
of World War II, whereas the Pentagon stood as a potent symbol of US hard
power. As this chapter will explore, these discourses, associated in the 1990s
with conservative thinkers Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington
respectively, were both revived after 9/11.
The end of history thesis suggested that the story of progress had
culminated in the Western dream of liberal democracy, with all peoples
and cultures moving towards that inexorable end. The clash of civilizations
thesis proposed that with the end of the Cold War the struggle over ideas
of freedom, democracy and justice had ended. Henceforth international
relations would be characterised as a clash of civilisations, centred particu-
larly on the conflict between the West versus Islam and the so-called
Confucian world, but ultimately reduced to a clash between the West and the
rest.5 Flawed though the thesis was, its cultural resonance was widespread at
the time that Huntington published his essay in 1993, and then again after
9/11. The two theses represented a strong urge towards a restoration of US
ideological and cultural power. Fukuyama and Huntington both had a deep
appreciation of the importance of the constructed notion of the West and
the values that it ostensibly represented. Reacting to the intellectual and
cultural developments of the 1960s and building on both the triumphalism
of the 1980s and the simultaneous rise of Islamism, these narratives
envisaged new horizons that harkened back to the Cold War of the 1950s, a
period of relative consensus, material wealth, of Rockwellesque certainty
and confidence, a period in which Daniel Bell had proclaimed the end of
ideology. Nevertheless, it was a period that was simultaneously tempered by
an anxiety attuned to external Soviet threats and internal cultural narratives
of subversion.6
The intellectual and cultural ramifications of the 1973 US defeat in
Vietnam were far-reaching. Understanding these ramifications is pivotal to
understanding US foreign policy after 9/11. The strategic implications of the
US loss in Vietnam were profound. That experience induced widespread US
inhibition on the use of hard power associated with the Vietnam syndrome,

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9/11 AND US FOREIGN POLICY

precipitating a significant readjustment in US relative power that undermined

their preponderance to which they had become accustomed. Policy-makers
had to adjust to a post-heroic age, in which there was widespread reticence
on sending US troops into protracted ground warfare. Henceforth inter-
vention would be circumscribed by a set of criteria, articulated by Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger and later by Colin Powell, which had to be
addressed before the intervention or application of hard power. These
limitations were anathema to other strategists who seized on the opportunity
of 9/11 to extract the nation from these constraints.
If hegemony rested on the acceptance of US ideas and legitimating
discourses, these too were increasingly threatened by a multipolar world
order and the multiplicity of postcolonial voices after Vietnam. Even if the
neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer extolled the unipolar
moment in the early 1990s, the construction was premised on the end of
Cold War bipolarity, which privileged a view of the world that masked many
other forces and ideas.7 As early as 1969 the US National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger recognised that

many of the salient characteristics of the present period of international

politics spring from the diffusion of independent political activity
among and within states following the decline of the cold war, the
loosening of cold-war alliances, and the assertion of national and
subnational loyalties in the wake of colonial dissolution.8

The centrifugal forces in world politics were obvious and US strategists

immediately crafted instrumental lessons of the Vietnam War that would
facilitate further US intervention.
Beneath this, the meta-narrative of US diplomacy and foreign policy lay in
tatters. The elite cultural affinity with certain ideas linked to US identity
democracy, liberty, self-determination were fundamentally challenged in
Vietnam, but also crucially within the US as the civil rights and feminist
movements challenged ingrained conceptions. The 1960s, precursor to the
advent of postmodernism, exercised an enormous social and psychological
displacement that dislodged traditional attitudes.9 Yet, there were limits.
Perry Anderson credits Alex Callinicos and Terry Eagleton for emphasising
that the immediate origin of postmodernity was in the experience of defeat:
within another few years, all the signs were reversed as, one by one, the
political dreams of the sixties were snuffed out. 10
The process of decentring took many forms. There was the rise of
alternative centres of global power in Europe, China and Japan, the OPEC
challenge that limited cheap oil (a basis for so much Western wealth and
cultural confidence), whilst Third World revolutionary politics and post-
colonial thought threatened the stability and meaning of Western ideologies.
Cumulatively, these changes ushered in a period of doubt, fragmentation,

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pluralism and a decentring of power and influence away from Washington

and Wall Street. Postmodernity and postcolonial interpretations of power
undermined US meta-narratives and social constructions of US identity
from within and beyond its borders.11 The phenomenon was a fundamentally
disorienting experience for elite decision-makers engaged in US foreign
policy.12
US leaders turned to realism to guide their foreign policies. Open-ended
commitments and universal ideals were shunned while national interests
were narrowly defined to foster the longevity of US power. Kissinger warned
that we must be wary both of the zealous ideologues who would over-
commit us and of those who would withdraw us from meeting our legitimate
responsibilities and interests.13 The observation was prompted by reaction
to a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Nisbet, which reflected on John
Kenneth Galbraiths article Who needs the Democrats? (1970). Galbraith
argued that wars came with a certain and devastating reliability every time the
Democrats were in power, while Nisbet adopted the pragmatist philosopher
William Jamess dichotomy between the tender-minded and tough-minded
to contrast the foreign policies of the idealist Democrats and the realist
Republicans. Nisbet recounted:

Among modern intellectuals there is a frequently observed fondness

for the uses of power, especially centralized, bureaucratized power in
service to large-scale moral objectives. In a modern nation state, war
is the supreme crisis, the highest expression of a complex of elements
including love of large-scale undertakings involving masses of people,
power, centralization, bureaucracy and chronic political moralism.14

Kissingers antidote centred on an intelligent tough-mindedness that

balanced foreign policy capabilities and aspirations. The tender-minded
who took the US into Vietnam, according to Kissinger, put too much
emphasis on the structures of their thought rather than examining actualities
of the enemy or Southeast Asian culture. Kissinger credited the Republicans
for stripping away the moralisms that still suffocate our thinking and
facilitating a more effective pursuit of US national interests and security. The
Republican Party was divided on the attractions of realism. When the Iraq
Study Group reported in late 2006 and recommended similar tough-minded
ways in which to conclude the US occupation of Iraq, divisions within the
GOP were exposed.15 While President Nixon and Kissinger advocated such
amoral realism, the traditional reading of American history and diplomacy
was far more appealing to a range of intellectual strategists some of them
later neoconservatives who distanced themselves from this realism and
eventually found a home in both the Reagan and George W. Bush adminis-
trations. The sense of limits imposed after the Vietnam War and at the
conclusion of the Gulf War of 1991 chaffed against the tender-minded

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sentiments and ambitions of these figures. Whether it was the reassertion of

US power and a restoration of its hegemony, the ostensible promotion of
democracy, or the desire to overthrow and deliver a crushing defeat on Iraq,
it was this tide of intellectual engagement (often pulling against the current
of US culture) that assumed one Vietnam was enough. This is pivotal for
understanding the turn in foreign policy that separates the 20th century from
the 21st century.16 The events of 9/11 provided the opportunity, and briefly
allowed these intellectuals to row with the emotional tide built on grief and
outrage, which swept along previously war-weary and reticent liberals.

THE RESTORATION
After Vietnam, few Americans advocated a return to isolationism. There was
a move away from internationalism, but more particularly a majority of
Americans briefly favoured demilitarising US power.17 Most pertinently for
this essay, the emergence of the Vietnam syndrome that reluctance to
commit US troops to ground combat abroad unless interests were defined,
objectives articulated and success assured became more pronounced over
subsequent decades.
The post-Vietnam attitude to ground warfare represented a strand of
democratic constraint on executive power. Intellectuals closely related to
power and policy formation in Washington and the think tanks were keen
to limit such constraints. With the 1968 Tet Offensive it became acutely
apparent that the Vietnamese opposition had found the point of vulner-
ability in the American mind 9/11 provided the opportunity to overcome
this reticence on ground warfare. But 9/11 did not fundamentally change the
culture of US foreign policy; it gave certain intellectual strategists the chance
to redress old mentalities. Albert Wohlstetter (the Cold War intellectual and
University of Chicago academic, who was also an influence on then Deputy
Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz) pointed out that of all the disasters
of Vietnam the worst may be the lessons that well draw from it. The
popular lessons might indeed inhibit White House agendas.18 State Depart-
ment analysis reaffirmed the fear. In 1975, a high level study observed that

having been badly burned in Viet-Nam, the American people now

appear to have quite different, and more limited, visions of our proper
role in the world and our ability to influence events. In a sense a control
mechanism has evolved within our society which is likely to prevent for
the foreseeable future any repetition of a Viet-Nam style involvement.19

Such constraints, domestic or foreign, were anathema to a growing number

of intellectual strategists, and particularly those involved in the neocon-
servative movement. Initially Kissinger tried to limit the impact of the
lessons of Vietnam on US strategy.20 But certain lessons were worth learning.

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And, while Kissinger and Nixon placed interests above values, many sub-
sequent administrations tried to reverse that formula with the re-injection of
values into their policies. It took on different forms in the Carter, Reagan,
Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, but ultimately the return of the
tender-minded proclivity would again force the US to face the results of the
quagmire of the vanities.21
Kissinger recognised that Americans would not long support a foreign
policy that jarred with their traditional attitudes.22 Jimmy Carters electoral
victory over Gerald Ford in 1976 represented, in part, a repudiation of the
particular interest-focused approach to foreign policy, the sense of cultural
moral confusion and identity crisis associated with the Vietnam War, and the
turmoil of the early 1970s.23 Carters National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski described a sharp contrast with the past, especially, as he wrote
to Carter, because

you have re-identified the United States with an ideal. Traditionally, the
United States has been seen abroad as a society that is associated
with certain basic values. During the last several years, however, the
impression became widespread that domestically we are concerned
with consumption and abroad only with the balance of power. Your
stress on human rights has corrected this.24

Brzezinski went on to outline the world the Carter administration had

inherited:

The international position of the United States at the end of 1976 was
not good. Our Allies were uneasy about our constancy, our will, and
our ability to lead. Our adversaries were openly speculating about the
political consequences of the general crisis of capitalism. The third
world was generally hostile or disappointed. The American public
distrusted our policies and deplored the apparent lack of moral content
in our actions and goal.

He suggested that there was a sense amongst overseas nations that

Americans were fearful of change and indifferent to emerging global
aspirations. Collectively, the Carter administration intended to restore our
spirit, inject a moral content into US foreign policy, to cooperate and work
multilaterally with allies, seek reconciliation in regional conflict, and finally to
seek strategic accommodation.25
Here was the re-injection of values, but William Jamess tender-minded
description could not be applied because, if anything, Carter did not over
commit the nation. Despite the constraints on the use of force during the
Reagan era, there was a considerable cultural shift to the right.
The meaning of US power and the fundamental purpose of its foreign

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policy were central to neoconservative thinking.26 Fukuyamas thesis on

the end of history had widespread appeal, particularly his view that the
terminus of progress through liberal democratic capitalism had been
reached.27 The confidence with which the argument was advanced belied the
narratives of US decline that were simultaneously put forward. During the
1960s, the American Idea, of unlimited possibility and the transformation of
humanity, no longer convinced some Americans themselves. The neo-
conservatives reacted to this cultural doubt and pushed the beliefs in
American worth and American primacy up the agenda. William Pfaff
suggests that it was inconceivable that the US cultural acceptance of its
international role, its engagement and the sacrifices of the various wars could
produce much less than anticipated.28
The end of history thesis provided an antidote. Fukuyama stipulated
that, despite the necessary adjustments in philosophical developments, the
present condition represented the culmination of the orthodox or traditional
meta-narrative of US foreign policy, of the march of freedom and the
progress of democracy. Triumphal histories of the Cold War abounded
during the 1990s. Indeed, one of the reasons why Vietnam is relatively
neglected in school and college curricula is that that war raised fundamental
questions about US identity and history.29
The gist of the argument found its way into President Bushs 2002
National Security Strategy. It asserted that the great struggles of the 20th
century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for
the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national success:
freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.30 Yet, the philosophical confidence
was still tempered by doubts about US power and the collective memory
of its earlier defeat. The combination of these cultural and intellectual
uncertainties, coupled with the inhibitions on US power, produced a bitter
and dangerous sentiment that would measure US primacy through its ability
to employ unilateral military action. It was an imperative for the Reagan
administration to reconstruct a strong American identity through military
power. Yet despite the obvious but unsatisfactory victory in the Cold War
and the more traditional but limited victory in Iraq in 1991 the idea of
America had been tarnished. The culture of defeat had to be reversed: a
sense of defeat that could not be fully satiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989.31
The 2003 victory in Iraq briefly fulfilled the yearning for triumph. But
this was soon confounded by various forms of resistance from Falluja, Najaf
and elsewhere. Initially, Bush exuded confidence following the short-term
success in Afghanistan over the autumn of 2001. The neoconservatives
celebrated. Charles Krauthammer pointed out that power is its own reward.
Victory changes everything, psychology above all. The psychology in the
region is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. 32 Next, they
took up the old project. Stung by the decision of George H. W. Bush to halt

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the Gulf War in 1991, where the lessons of Vietnam suggested it ought to
stop, they decided to return. US victory in that country would become
an example and produce a demonstration effect across the region. The
confidence of American opponents would be shattered, their actions
inhibited. That sense of victory was reflected in the visions that emerged in
2002, primarily contained in Bushs National Security Strategy and in the idea
to democratise the Middle East over the next generation.
The explicit and implicit narratives of a desire to recreate preponderance
can be traced backward from the National Security Strategy of 2002, which
indicated that our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential
adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or
equalling, the power of the United States. The military priorities included the
need to dissuade future military competition; deter threats against U.S.
interests, allies, and friends; and decisively defeat any adversary if deterrence
fails.33 The desire for the restoration of primacy of US power was also
clear in the leaked 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document that sought to
discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or
seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Moreover
competitors must be deterred from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role.34 Earlier still, Reagans National Security Council worried about
the loss of U.S. strategic superiority, not just because of perceived Soviet
advances, but also because of the increased political and economic strength
of the industrial democracies in Europe.35 A world characterised by a greater
distribution of power disturbed these strategic thinkers who were nostalgic
for the earlier US preponderance and disparity of power.36 After the Iran-
Contra affair of 1986, Robert McFarlane, a former National Security
Advisor, reflected predominant Reagan administration beliefs in hearings
before Congress:

We had just witnessed a five year period where the Soviet Union tried
out a stratagem of sponsoring guerrilla movements that would topple
moderate regimes, and install their own totalitarian successor, and they
had phenomenal success If we could not muster an effective counter
to Cuban-Sandinista strategy in our own backyard, it was far less likely
that we could do so in the years ahead in more distant locations We
had to win this one.37

There was probably no need for such a victory in Nicaragua except that the
Sandinista government had been constructed as a Soviet puppet regime in a
Manichaean view of the global order.
As such events demonstrate, much of US identity and one basis of its
nationalism is formed in opposition and opprobrium directed at an Other.
Despite the early injunctions in US foreign policy not to go in search of
monsters to destroy, they have usually animated its foreign policy and

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provided it with an overarching purpose. Broad conceptual dichotomies

have provided a momentum and a point of contrast to bring US identity into
sharp relief. These dualities the product of intellectual conception but
with some basis in historical fact have defined US policy and ideology from
inception, but particularly through the Monroe Doctrine, which advanced
the conceptual divide between the old and the new world, updated in the
discourses of civilization and barbarism at the turn into the 20th century.
Woodrow Wilsons foreign policy ostensibly updated the Monroe Doctrine,
but with universal application. And as the Cold War ended, a range of work
reflected the vindication of Wilsonian liberal internationalism, from Tony
Smiths Americas Mission (1994) to Frank Ninkovichs The Wilsonian Century
(2001) and Akira Iriyes Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997).38
These dichotomies returned in the early Cold War, at the outset of which
President Truman enjoined audiences to make a choice at that juncture in
world history between two and only two ways of life. His doctrine of
1947 represented the popular articulation of containment, which according
to the dominant narratives of US diplomatic history took the US into
Vietnam.39 Head of Policy Plannng, George Kennan, understood that the
effects of the Soviet challenge would make US culture and society more
cohesive.40 Similarly, Bushs early response after 9/11 presented another
dualistic choice of either standing with the US or against it. The adminis-
trations rhetorical conflation of all sorts of disparate opponents belied
reality and set Washington on course for Iraq, thus evading the implications
of 9/11.
Fukuyamas book The End of History and the Last Man might have provided
the philosophical aspiration long associated with US liberalism, prefacing a
decade of heightened consumerism and the rise of globalisation. The project
complete, there was no further need for the strenuous life or the barbarian
sentiment articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier.
But, as a source of motivation, Fukuyamas thesis failed to grasp other
models of political and cultural life. The triumph of the market was
unsatisfactory; the last man, in Fukuyamas reading of Nietzsche, was a
comfortable slave, with physical security and material plenty, a person who
believes in nothing (or everything) 41 Clintons vision of the globalization
of the free market had undermined the efficacy of military power, which
chaffed against neoconservative agendas. On this subject, Irving Kristol
once lamented that whats the point of being the greatest most powerful
nation in the world and not having an imperial role? 42

QUAGMIRE OF THE VANITIES

It is possible, Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests, that the destruction of
September 11 uncovered the suppressed remains of Vietnam.43 After
Vietnam the malaise of the late 1970s was quickly reversed through Reagans

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rhetorical constructions and re-imagining of America. Such reversal is not

unique, but part of the recognizable set of patterns or archetypes that recur
across time and national boundaries. Schivelbusch remarks how surprising
it is that the depression is so short lived before turning into a unique type
of euphoria.44 The dreamscape of that United States (again in part a
construction) contrasted explicitly with the identification of the Other as the
evil empire in 1982 and coincided with the demise of the Soviet bloc and
the Soviet Union itself by 1991. Interpretations of that collapse are diverse
and at times unrelated to US foreign policy. Yet in the United States the
analyst, historian and cultural commentator who stands on the side of
the victorious is easily tempted to interpret triumphs of the moment as
the lasting outcomes of an ex-post facto teleology.45 That is, they take the
demise of the Soviet Union as necessarily a result of the application of US
policies of containment rather than a series of alternatives relating to the
Soviet economy and managerial system, the rise of religion and nationalism
within the USSR, or other internal issues. The intellectual and cultural echoes
of the triumphal outcomes of both the Cold War and the Gulf War masked
a deeper lingering cultural doubt, expressed specifically in the US indecision
and ambivalence on conditions and potential interventions in Bosnia,
Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti.
Paradigms do not have to be true to become accepted wisdom, yet
without paradigms, as Ernest Gellner has appropriated Hobbes, the life
of ideas would be nasty, brutish and short.46 After the Cold War, and again
after 9/11, Huntingtons clash of civilizations thesis was far more appealing
than Fukuyamas soporific end of history. Huntingtons thesis created an
abstract and reductive understanding of the new dynamics in international
relations. Although criticised in many regards, it was widely referred to after
9/11 as the nation searched for an overarching understanding of what the
atrocities meant.47 The thesis was predicated on a sense of fear and loathing.
For Huntington, it is human to hate. For self-definition and motivation
people need enemies. 48 Bruce Cumings has declared that 9/11 appeared to
bring this theory to life. The US realism of earlier thinking or the idealism
associated with the Fukuyama thesis found no cultural resonance im-
mediately after 9/11.49 Yet in Huntingtons thesis, as Edward Said suggests,
the basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the Cold War opposition
reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often
insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the events of 9/11. 50 The thesis
was certainly echoed in cultural discourse. Intellectual analyses of the US
response to 9/11 played on the title of two books published in 2002:
Tariq Alis The Clash of Fundamentalisms and of Gilbert Achcars The Clash of
Barbarisms.
Despite the official denial that the wars taken to Afghanistan or Iraq or
that more amorphous war on global terrorism represented such a clash,
this is not the way that much cultural discourse projected it. Moreover, the

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9/11 AND US FOREIGN POLICY

Manichaean strain that pervaded Bushs rhetoric both before and after 9/11
is telling. The complexity of the heterogeneous world and the origins of the
conflict in US policy in the Middle East and elsewhere were elided with
simplistic formulae. The mindset was palpable before and after 9/11. In 2000,
Bush admitted that he did not know who the enemy was, but soon explained:
when I was coming up, with what was a dangerous world, we knew exactly
who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them were.
Today were not so sure who the they are, but we know theyre there. 51
After 9/11, such identities settled into cultural caricatures as the President
conflated the attacks with the benign meta-narratives and ideologies of US
history and diplomacy. He told his audience that these attacks were on
American freedom and its way of life. He warned citizens all over the world
that they were either with the United States or against it. That dualism,
intended to bring Americans together, papered over ongoing cultural
fragmentation. It obscured conditions and understandings of US policy,
past, present and future: Washington had ongoing ties to many authoritarian
regimes that reflected the realities of power but jarred with the ideologies
Bush identified as under attack on and after 9/11.
Moreover, the dualism found multiple echoes throughout US culture.52
The conflation of figures and forces into the enemy reinforced the dualistic
predisposition. First, al-Qaeda was conflated with the Taliban, and then
they were conceived as the terrorists, before quickly merging with the
tyrants.53 Not content to remain philosophical realists willing to leave
opponents alone so long as they leave the US alone, tender-minded moralism
returned to the fore in foreign policy, particularly when it came to Saddam
Hussein. The Iraqi leader found himself the immediate subject of discussion
and the target of retribution in the wake of 9/11, even despite the in-
congruity of the association between that tyrant and those terrorists.54
Nevertheless, despite widespread condemnation, opposition and wariness
of the US inclination to change the regime in Iraq (unilaterally if necessary),
the emphasis was now on the structure of the strategists thought rather
than the actuality of the particular enemy, the Iraqi terrain, or the people
over which they fought. While direct comparisons to Vietnam are difficult,
frequently misguided and sometimes motivated by ideological or political
agendas, at least one here is worth noting. Both Presidents Johnson and Bush
enjoyed the support of public opinion at the times of the decision to escalate
(1965) or invade (2003) and even though a particular sense of idealism
informed their decisions, inside this idealism, Robert Brigham writes, lay
the belief that the United States knew no limits to its power.55 It was
precisely this lack of significant public debate and the absence of effective
checks and balances on the imperious executive that facilitated US entry into
both Vietnam and Iraq. Writing in the aftermath of 9/11 and Afghanistan,
Walter LaFeber identified a nation so strong that others could not check it,
and so self-righteous that it could not check itself .56 And so the familiar

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pattern of acquiescence and exceptionalism, of deference and difference,

prefaced the path to the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that will have
a profound and inhibiting impact on US foreign policy.
The commitment in Iraq produced another interest that closely resembled
previous administrations concerns with US credibility. The need to stay the
course, to demonstrate resolve and the tenacity of the American people in
the face of a war the end of which became even more elusive beyond the
narrative of Iraqification and US withdrawal was dogged by the structures
of thought evident since the end of the Vietnam War.
The Iraq War represented another of those occasions not seen since the
earlier decades of the Cold War in which the tender-minded values took
precedence over the US national interests. The costs in terms of human
lives, both Iraqi and American, in terms of dollars, in terms of strategic
positioning and, fundamentally, in terms of attitudes towards US foreign
policy and power were considerable. It was manifest in the extensive
diplomatic opposition, in the widespread anti-Americanism across the globe
since 2002, the internal doubt and scepticism of the Executive and in the loss
of US normative authority.57
There are obvious dangers associated with such overarching intellectual
adventures related to the paradigms advanced by intellectuals closely
associated with power.58 This is particularly the case if such ideas are
implemented through military power; indeed Fukuyama defected from the
neoconservative cause because of the overemphasis on militarism.59 It took
the Vietnam War and the global changes that characterised the 1970s to
deconstruct the Cold War paradigm (particularly that formulated by tender-
minded strategists) and to turn the US off grand designs and universal
projects. But the fallout from Iraq promises not only to erode the appeal of
the tender end of history and the tough clash of civilizations theses, but
also to reinforce the Vietnam (and now Iraq) syndrome and its lessons, and
usher in a period of relativism, particularism and further erosion of the meta-
narratives of US diplomatic history and foreign policy. The very yearning
to re-inject a purpose and moralism into US foreign policy, in many ways
against the current, squandered a fleeting opportunity engendered by the
widespread sympathy and outrage of 9/11.

NOTES
1. See David L. Anderson, One Vietnam War should be enough and other reflec-
tions on diplomatic history and the making of foreign policy, Diplomatic History,
30(1), January 2006, 18.
2. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 34.
3. Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1980), pp. 1011.

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9/11 AND US FOREIGN POLICY

4. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and

Recovery (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 292.
5. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
1992) and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs,
72(3), Summer 1993, 2249.
6. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), p. 89; Alan
Ryan, Introduction, After the End of History (London: Collins and Brown,
1992), p. 3.
7. Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs, 70(1), Winter
19901, 2333.
8. Henry Kissinger, memorandum from the Presidents Assistant for National
Security Affairs to President Nixon, 20 October 1969, document 41,
Foundations of Foreign Policy 19691972, vol. 1, Foreign Relations of the United
States 19691976, p. 131.
9. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991), p. xx.
10. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, p. 91.
11. See Part 2 of Joyce Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History (New York, NY:
Norton, 1994).
12. Alfred E. Eckes and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 18190; Immanual
Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1983),
pp. 7593.
13. Henry A. Kissinger, memorandum for the Staff Secretary, The White House,
n.d., NSC files, Subject files, box 378, press, TV, news 19701, vol. 1, Nixon
Presidential Materials.
14. Robert Nisbet, War, Crisis and Intellectuals, Wall Street Journal, 25 January 1971.
15. Kissinger, memorandum for the Staff Secretary, 19701; James A. Baker and
Lee H. Hamilton, The Iraq Study Group Report (New York, NY: Vintage, 2006).
16. David Anderson, One Vietnam should be enough, 121.
17. Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy Since Vietnam
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 37. Sobel demonstrates
through a review of public opinion that there was considerable wariness on the
use of military solutions in regional conflicts.
18. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by
War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1578; David Ryan,
Vietnam, victory culture and Iraq: struggling with lessons, constraints and
credibility from Saigon to Falluja, in John Dumbrell and David Ryan (eds),
Vietnam in Iraq (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 113.
19. W. R. Smyser, memorandum to Secretary Kissinger, Lessons of Vietnam,
12 May 1975, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific.
Country file: Vietnam (23), box 20, Gerald R. Ford Library (GRF).
20. Henry A. Kissinger, memorandum for the President, Lessons of Vietnam,
12 May 1978.
21. The term is that of Slavoj iek. See also his Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London:
Verso, 2004).
22. Kissinger, Lessons of Vietnam, 12 May 1975.

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

23. See, for example, Carters statement: our country has been through difficult
times in the last few years with an unpopular war in Vietnam and Cambodia,
with the Watergate revelations bringing disgrace on the White House itself,
with doubt being cast on the legality of operations within our intelligence
community and within the FBI itself , Jimmy Carter, Remarks of the President
at the Department of Defense, The Pentagon, 1 March 1977, Defense Depart-
ment Visit, Jimmy Carter Library (JCL).
24. Zbigniew Brzezinski, memorandum for the President, 22 April 1977, Presi-
dential Interviews, JCL.
25. Brzezinski, memorandum for Rick Hertzberg and Rick Inderfurth, The White
House, 11 January 1978, State of the Union 1978, Beloved Community, JCL.
26. Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (London: Profile,
2006), pp. 4850.
27. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. xi.
28. William Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends (New York,
NY: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 1823, 188.
29. Rick Berg and John Carlos Rowe (eds), The Vietnam War and American Culture
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 13.
30. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
(Washington, DC: September 2002).
31. See Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat and Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory
Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
32. Cited in Michael Cox, American power before and after 11 September: dizzy
with success?, International Affairs, 78(2), 2002, 275.
33. Ibid.
34. Patrick Tyler, U.S. strategy plan calls for insuring no rivals develop, The New
York Times, 8 March 1992; David Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 190.
35. US National Security Strategy and accompanying papers, April 1982, document
8290283 (NSDD 32) System II, NSC Records, Reagan Presidential Library.
36. See David Ryan, Frustrated Empire: US Foreign Policy, 9/11 to Iraq (London: Pluto,
2007), pp. 97114.
37. Peter Kornbluh, The US role in the Counterrevolution, in Thomas W. Walter
(ed.), Revolution & Counterrevolution in Nicaragua (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1991), p. 325.
38. Anderson, One Vietnam War should be enough, p. 16.
39. Ibid., p. 4.
40. See George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs, 25, July
1947.
41. Bruce Cumings, Time of Illusion: Post-Cold War Visions of the World, in
Ellen Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Triumphalism (New York, NY: The New Press,
2004), p. 80.
42. Corey Robin, Remembrance of Empires Past: 9/11 and the End of the Cold
War, in Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Triumphalism, pp. 27581.
43. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 293. See also Marilyn B. Young, Still stuck
in the big muddy, in Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Triumphalism, pp. 26273.

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9/11 AND US FOREIGN POLICY

44. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 10.

45. Reinhart Koselleck cited in Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, pp. 34.
46. Ervand Abrahamian, The US Media, Samuel Huntington and September 11,
Middle East Report, 223, Summer 2002, 62; Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture: The
Historical Role of Rationality and Rationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 113.
47. Richard E. Rubenstein and Jarle Crocker, Challenging Huntington, Foreign
Policy, 96, Fall 1994, 11328; Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle
for Palestinian Self-Determination 19691994 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994),
pp. 38492.
48. Huntington cited by Nicholas Guyatt, Another American Century? The United States
and the World after 2000 (Sydney: Pluto, 2000), p. 193.
49. Cumings, Time of illusion: post-Cold War visions of the world, in Schrecker
(ed.), Cold War Triumphalism, p. 92. Samuel Huntington actually opposed the US
war in Iraq but his ideas nevertheless informed broad cultural comment.
50. Edward Said, The clash of ignorance, in Don Hazen et al. (eds), After 9/11:
Solutions for a Saner World (San Francisco, CA: AlterNet, 2001), p. 84.
51. Cited in Frances Fitzgerald, George Bush and the world, New York Review of
Books, 26 September 2002, 84.
52. President George Bush, address to a Joint Session of Congress and the
American People, The White House, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases
2001/09/20010920-8.html, 20 September 2001.
53. President George Bush, Graduation Speech at West Point, The White House,
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/print/20020601-3.html, 1 June
2002.
54. Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments, p. 188.
55. Robert K. Brigham, Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (New York, NY: Public Affairs,
2006), p. xiii.
56. Cited in Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation
of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 412
13; Walter LaFeber, The Bush Doctrine, Diplomatic History, 26(4), Fall 2002,
558.
57. See Jrgen Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
58. See Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
59. See Fukuyama, After the Neocons.

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4. THREE VARIATIONS ON
AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Peter Kuryla

Liberalism in the United States refers to a politico-cultural persuasion that

has advocates almost exclusively in the American Democratic Party. The
word also describes a group of political theorists who do philosophy, and
who tend to complicate and defy mainstream American party identifications
and labels because their concerns largely transcend them: a debate that pits
theorists called liberal against those called communitarian. Most books
and articles written about liberalism in the United States in recent years
consider political culture and strategy, which can appeal to most every liberal,
especially those of the more partisan variety. Less frequent, knottier treat-
ments take on philosophical or historical issues and tend to attract a much
smaller, primarily academic readership. Sometimes the different approaches
reach across audiences, but not very often. Nonetheless, for purposes of
convenience, we might describe American liberalism at the start of the
21st century as a set of variations on a theme, the variations being (1)
pragmatic/pluralist, (2) Rawlsian/rights-based and (3) polemical/radical.
A first, tradition-seeking liberal mode might be described as meliorist or
pragmatic or, to borrow a more expressive phrase from the philosopher
William James, an ever not quite.1 A second, philosophical variation travels
best under the terms of a Rawlsian debate, often concerned with what the
political theorist John Rawls referred to as public reason, an idea that has
inspired a vigorous transatlantic exchange ever since the appearance of
Rawlss Theory of Justice in 1971. A final, more popular trend merits the
description of anti-authoritarian or polemical, sometimes concerned with
exposing the perfidy of that plutocratic cabal whom the filmmaker and
provocateur Michael Moore has called, with characteristic subtlety, Stupid

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White Men.2 Obviously, these variations require explanations. Playing in

these modes means offering some context for each of them, which helps to
account for the domestic, international and stylistic contours of contem-
porary liberalism in light of recent developments: the terrorist attacks of
11 September 2001 and especially the George W. Bush presidency.

AMERICAN LIBERALISM, CONTESTED AND ELUSIVE

First, though, it is important to provide a framework. American liberalism
has long invited wonderfully vague and aphoristic descriptions of its essential
nature because its applications have been so various, making it impossible
to define adequately. Protean, as one historian has chosen to put it, but
the underlying logic of liberalism remains elusive.3 To understand what
liberalism means and speculate about its prospects requires something that
many liberals will find unsatisfying and even dead wrong no matter how one
approaches the topic: an extended attempt at a reasonably encompassing
definition. American liberalism has been defined as much by its champions
as by its critics, each having absorbed something of the others perspective.
Not surprisingly, the literature of liberalism and its critics is remarkably vast,
and liberals can disagree amongst themselves over the finer points of their
persuasion (this is especially true for Rawlsians and their critics). Such rutted
and muddy terrain inevitably transforms definitions into arguments, and,
provided one doesnt get too mired along the way, arguments into both
proscriptions and prescriptions. Gaps are inevitable in any brief treatment,
personnel and ideas overlap, popular understandings are at best vague
and amorphous, and conceptual slippage occurs between the modes of
liberalism.
In any event, nearly every variation on liberalism in the US draws lines of
descent from the historic creation of the limited American welfare state,
starting with the New Deal of the 1930s and proceeding through the Great
Society of the 1960s. While liberals disagree about their precise history and
about the wisdom of one or another state-sponsored effort to achieve a
greater measure of social and political equality for American citizens, in
nearly every case they throw in their lot with the general history of govern-
ment action on this score.4 Yet, even this identification can be illusory.5
Liberals in the United States also claim affiliation of one kind or another
with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and with the rights revolution
it spawned, which came to include women, Latino Americans, Native
Americans, Asian Americans, Americans with disabilities, and, uneasily for
some, gay Americans. Liberals in the 21st century prize diversity and debate
as a general proposition, though some confusion exists over the proper tenor
and method for rights-talk and acquisition. Against the potential chaos of a
multicultural America, the Civil Rights Movement and its heroes exist as
unassailable examples of liberal values, especially figures like Martin Luther

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King Jr and Rosa Parks. Such monumental historic figures lend moral clarity
to the liberal respect for individual rights and freedoms. Still, the relationship
between liberal and minority politics in the US has long been complex
and even fractious, and it remains problematic. Minority groups alternately
resist and affirm their alliance with liberals. Forthright expressions of bigotry
routinely merit liberal condemnation, but for the most part painful and
difficult discussions of race and ethnicity among liberals and minority
spokespersons have faded since the culture wars of the 1990s. Especially
after 2001, arguably liberals have dedicated much more attention to conser-
vative opponents and to shoring up consensus than to stirring up troubling
divisions.
Liberals tend to be suspicious of political realism and lean toward idealism
in international relations. In this field more than any other, liberals show an
acute sense of history. The precise lessons of this history remain unclear. The
tough, anticommunist internationalism of Harry S. Truman and later John F.
Kennedy still inspire, but American liberals in the 21st century feel the
residual aches and pains of the war in Vietnam, a debacle undertaken
by a liberal administration under Lyndon Baines Johnson. The common
narrative of American left liberal politics witnessed the short-lived liberal
consensus or triumph of the early 1960s rent apart by Vietnam.6 As President
Johnson put it, playing characteristically blue: If I left the woman I really
loved the Great Society in order to get involved with that bitch of a war
on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.7 He
was spot on. What followed was a period of confusion and ambivalence in
which liberals evinced little faith in unilateralism and felt some reluctance to
use military power, some even questioning the importance of foreign policy
altogether. As a result, liberals have not established a consistent regime for
deciding when and if international events warrant the use of force. By 2006,
all were opposing the Iraq War, but some are hawkish and more are dovish.
Nonetheless, liberals do tend to espouse internationalist solutions to the
problems posed by the status of the US as world superpower. They have
some faith in diplomacy, multilateralism and in transnational organisations
like the United Nations, against the current Bush administration.

THREE VARIATIONS
Thinking about liberalism as variations on a theme requires some respect
for disconnections between theory and praxis and between popular and
scholarly applications. Politicians and journalists, who influence up to the
minute popular understandings in the greatest measure, rarely consider
publicly the theory or method that underpins their beliefs and as a result
resist philosophical labels. Rawlsian or pragmatic modes of liberal thought
have adherents who work out the theoretical and philosophical implications
of their beliefs, but this is rare in American politics. Suffice it to say that a

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small minority of American liberals actively theorise their political beliefs,

creating and cultivating liberalism with some fidelity to its specific variations,
while the vast number play much more freely in whatever mode suits them at
a given time. Thus in more precise terms, variations should not be confused
with immediately discernible groups or with followers of a given creed or
way of thinking. While each variation does have more sophisticated and
doctrinaire adherents who hail primarily from the academy, for the most
part liberal commentators, journalists, politicians, policy makers, wonks and
hacks choose the forms that fit their eye best when the situation warrants.
Like Americans of almost any political persuasion, liberals can espouse a
commonsensical, vulgarised pragmatism.

PRAGMATIC LIBERALISM
The pragmatic mode of American liberalism is different from simple
common sense. It has become increasingly relevant and conscious of itself
in recent years for at least three reasons. First, amidst a debate following the
philosopher Richard Rortys revival of the thought of John Dewey, which
took shape during the 1980s and reached something like maturity in the
1990s, pragmatism emerged as an alternative to academic postmodernism
and to the culture wars of the mid-1990s. Second, pragmatic liberals
attempted to define and locate their ideas within a usable tradition of
conscientious statecraft in the wake of the Democratic Partys move to the
centre under the second term of President Clinton, from 1997 to 2001.
Finally, some liberals have begun the search for coherent and hard-minded
alternatives to the apparent dominance of conservatism or neoconser-
vatism during the current Bush administration, particularly after the
terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Pragmatic liberals when aware of a tradition, draw insights from fin-de-sicle
pragmatic thinkers like William James and, two decades later, John Dewey.
Thus, they are not pragmatists in the vernacular conception of that term,
which denotes a type of moral relativism or tractability. Rather, like James
and Dewey, they value tolerance, for ideas and for peoples experiences,
cherish free but rigorous experiment, and view society as always unfinished
but consistently made and remade with human hands, which demands a high
degree of moral responsibility and humane consideration for the results.
No doubt, many liberals would probably eschew the term pragmatic as a
description of themselves. Most would harbour suspicion for pragmatist
theories of truth, which posit contingency rather than foundations or
absolutes. But given their hopes for the world and for American society, they
understand politics and policy-making as the art of the possible, to use a
phrase that the Democratic Senator (and liberal warhorse) Edward Kennedy
offered recently when working in the pragmatic liberal mode.8
Whether explicitly cognizant of it or not, pragmatic liberals draw even

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more from the Cold War anticommunist successors of the earlier

pragmatists, especially from thinkers like the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
and the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, along with literary and cultural
critics like Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling. This group of mid-century
public intellectuals wrote continuously about complexity and tragedy, from
which they begat something of a tradition. As such, they tended to think
historically, looking to the past for individual examples of their mood with
heroism as their common theme. The mistaken optimism of the years
immediately following World War II gave way to a dark, threatening and
uncertain world where even prosperity invited banality and conformity and
where contingencies reigned all of which demanded moral intelligence, or
in some cases, as Kevin Mattson has recently explored, a fighting faith.9
At the close of the 20th century and into the 21st century, the historical
circumstances are certainly different, but the mood is quite similar. Post-
modern excesses, regarded as relativistic, demand the academic pragmatists
sober and complex sense of social hope and meliorism in the face of irony,
cynicism, and whimsy. The dilution of programmatic efforts meant to
address problems of inequality and poverty, best encapsulated by the Clinton
administrations cooperation with conservatives in the dismantling of
government welfare programmes in the late 1990s, require the pragmatist
policymakers relentless capacity for social and political experiment. Such
things require a certain measure of optimism, but must always be tempered
by the realisation that such experiments will inevitably lead to further testing.
The increased presence of religious intolerance at home and abroad should
lead away from crushing binaries like those of the Cold War the forces of
freedom versus the Axis of Evil to use George W. Bushs language and
toward realistic, openly debated, tolerant solutions unsullied by the hubristic
stain of rank Americanism.
In the wake of the attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administrations handling
of the war in Iraq, pragmatic liberalism has enjoyed something of a renais-
sance. Before his death in 2007 at the age of 89, Arthur Schlesinger called
for renewed attention to the thought of Niebuhr, who, in his estimation
was tireless in cautioning Americans not to succumb to self-righteous
delusions of innocence and infallibility. He wondered, moreover, amidst
the recent revival of popular religiosity in the US, and a faith based
administration under George W. Bush, whether or not 9/11 had revived the
myth of our national innocence.10
Such a weary sense of tragedy and fallibilism has yet to find widespread
purchase among less seasoned liberals. More hawkish sorts have used Cold
War pragmatic liberalism to strike out against dovish elements to their left in
the Democratic Party. Peter Beinart, for example, a columnist for The New
Republic, has called for a tough liberalism of the muscular type advocated by
anticommunist liberals like Schlesinger, particularly in the latters idiosyn-
cratic but essential 1949 Cold War work, The Vital Center.11 In this case,

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worldwide terrorism equals totalitarianism as the object of combat.12

But foreign policy realism is far from the only contemporary application
of the pragmatic liberal variation. More generally, many liberals in the prag-
matic mode often espouse some version of a benign, tolerant nationalism
that respects cultural pluralism and particularism yet, with a sense of
complexity that refuses to let it overwhelm sources of solidarity.13 This
perspective has found some traction, but is certainly not without its critics.
The cultural historian Eric Lott, for one, derisively labels this tendency
The New Cosmopolitanism of the Color Blind Club.14 Nonetheless, for
supporters of this view America can be a great nation, but only with a
sense of responsibility, rigor, or, as one of its most able defenders James
Kloppenberg has argued, the proper virtues.15 This also speaks, with some
significant disagreements over the details, to the philosopher Richard Rortys
recent emphasis on national hope as a route toward achieving our
country.16 In a more popular application, the pragmatic renaissance deals in
what former Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration, Robert
Reich, has dubbed positive patriotism:

a patriotism thats based on love of America, but not on contempt

for whats not American; that cherishes our civil liberties and our
democratic right to dissent; that understands that our national security
depends as much on Americas leadership and moral authority in the
world as it does on our military might; and that emphasizes what we
owe to one another as members of the same society.17

Thus pragmatic liberalism, whatever its proponents claims to the contrary,

has somewhere deep in its essential makeup a sort of residual Puritanism.
This is surely what Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most perceptive Cold War
critic, was writing about in 1950 when he famously championed liberalisms
first essential imagination of variousness and possibility while criticising its
impulse to organization. 18 At their best, pragmatic liberals would tell others
how the world should be yet are often reluctant for having done so.
Unnervingly, the moralistic, elitist side of this brand of liberalism has always
been tempered by a characteristic lack of confidence, a refusal to levy that
final judgment an ever not quite, to borrow again from William James.
Pragmatic liberals style themselves the own quintessentially jittery elect of
modern America.19 This includes a hopeful and whiggish sense of national
history used to defend their discomfiting but necessary position at the centre
of affairs.
This is why the American pragmatic liberals capacity for criticism of self
and others is so compelling. As often as not, in pragmatic mode liberals
express with consummate skill the belief that their faith can be stronger or
better than its current uses allow. Thus, today as in the past, pragmatic liberals
in the US make frequent use of declension narratives of one kind or another,

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even when things seem to be going their way. At its best, this tendency
is sharp-minded, radically empirical and breathlessly experimental; at its
worst it is frustrating in its predilection for collective hand wringing and
gradualism.20 In its pragmatic mode American liberalism can never be
revolutionary; its impatience for abstractions and for utopias doesnt allow
such things. In the future, however, it promises to remain a prominent liberal
variation. Its tradition is weighty and inclusive, carefully maintained by expert
practitioners. Yet its greatest advocates are baby boomer intellectuals, now a
generation of senior citizens. Nearly four decades after the tumult and failed
utopianism of their late 1960s youth, they find some solace in the realisation
that Dad was probably on to something, although Mom and lots of others
now deserve a fair hearing. However careful and intelligent, calls for
complexity, rigor, moral responsibility or fallibility by cultural aristocrats
have rarely set younger generations afire. In the early 21st century, amidst a
very unpopular war, the irony is keenly felt.

THE RAWLSIAN DEBATE: RIGHTS VERSUS THE GOOD

Rawlsians are similarly unpersuaded by radicalism, but for somewhat
different, rather subtle reasons. The pragmatists search for a usable tradition
flitters around but rarely seeks and even defies any concrete resolution of the
practical dialectic of American liberalism, whether pragmatic, polemic, or
Rawlsian: the protection of individual liberty from forms of authority on the
one hand and the use of the state to ensure the free exercise of that liberty
on the other. Of course, this involves the difficult problem of equality, and
of what conditions in the form of rights and/or entitlements are necessary
for citizens to pursue the ends they wish, which supposes some definition of
citizenship more generally. Along that sliding scale, political philosophers
tend to drop in all over the place, but at least with a high degree of analytical
clarity.
If pragmatic philosophers like Dewey or James, mid-century pragmatists
like Trilling, Niebuhr and Schlesinger and more recently Rorty have played
a major role in shaping modern pragmatic liberalism, then John Rawls
deserves the credit for developing liberalism as a comprehensive type
of political philosophy. Countless political thinkers in the US identified
themselves as liberals long before John Rawls, but generally speaking they
understood it normatively, as with Louis Hartzs The Liberal Tradition in
America (1955), or even presupposed its (often vague) meaning. Starting in
1971 with the appearance of A Theory of Justice, a remarkable synthesis of
Immanuel Kant and the classic social contract theorists, and continuing with
Political Liberalism (1993), Rawlss ideas have dominated formal political
thought in the US for nearly 40 years. A caveat is necessary: the Rawlsian
variation here refers not to Rawlss thought specifically, but to the massive

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debate that continues over his work, which by now has taken on a life of its
own even after Rawlss death in 2002.
In the Rawlsian mode then, the task becomes less one of intellectual
history than the history of ideas, less one of national institutional history
than a questioning of basic, universal principles. Liberalism moves beyond
considerations of utilitarian, majoritarian democracy or of the practical give
and take of politics, concerning itself with staking out the inviolable rights
that each person possesses because of their status as human beings. In
Kantian terms, liberalism means the basic framework through which people
are treated not as means to some end but as ends in themselves. In Rawlsian
terms, politics can only be just when human beings, through self-interested,
purely rational means, establish the basic principles that govern political
activity, which, being reasonable, are based on fair and equal conditions free
from contingencies like political affiliation, race, ethnicity, and gender.21
Liberals who take part in this debate disagree over whether liberalism can
be an all-encompassing moral worldview or doctrine, or if it refers only to
those shared values that are explicitly political: in other words, societys main
political, constitutional, social and economic institutions and how they fit
together to form a unified scheme of social cooperation over time.22 There
is concern that liberalism in this mode, when considered in universal terms,
indulges in a familiar Enlightenment conception of values that a priori
supersede or undergird all others for their basic rationality. As a solution to
this problem, many Rawlsians instantiate some form of political space or
blank proceduralism that both protects and respects a plurality of more
fundamental or comprehensive value systems.
For John Rawls, at least, a politically liberal society exists when people
subject problems and issues to a tribunal of public reason, where the
standard for judging the merits of a certain argument or policy is reciprocity,
so that people use political power for some end only when it is clear that
those affected can reasonably accept the justifications offered for such
ends. Appeals to absolutist or all-encompassing doctrine and authority are
unacceptable in the space of public reason because such creeds inevitably
exclude others, discarding mutual respect and ignoring the things that people
in their political role as citizens share. Rawls and those like him hope that
despite basic differences among citizens in a democracy over what creeds
and doctrines they hold most dear, some overlapping consensus can exist
over time about political matters. When it doesnt, the only recourse is
political philosophy.23
Arguably, the Kantian or Rawlsian variation of liberalism best explains
common and very prevalent liberal claims to the Civil Rights Movement and
its major figures, especially Martin Luther King Jr. Despite significant
differences of opinion about the wisdom of the tactics employed by civil
rights activists and those who learned from such tactics, then and now, the
Rawlsian liberals dismissal of utilitarian and majoritarian ideas (the greatest

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good for the greatest number) mark an appeal to fundamental individual

human rights and to the necessity of public reason values shared by the
movement. Dr King and the movement, it follows, merely desired that
national authorities enforce the social contract.
Yet, the healthiest disagreements among liberals in the Rawlsian mode are
about whether life in a body politic necessitates an idea of the good or of
virtue, which recalls the ancients, especially Aristotle. Here, more orthodox
Rawlsian liberals do battle with communitarians. With the exception of
some neo-Marxist and Catholic communitarian thinkers and some minimal
state libertarian thinkers, both groups would merit the label liberal in the
commonplace American sense of the word. Generally speaking, Rawlsian
liberals make clear, against classical Republican traditions, that a commonly
sought after conception of a virtuous or good society violates the individuals
conception of the good, which demands respect.24 Regarding the Civil Rights
Movement, Rawlsian communitarians might argue, against their liberal
opponents, that Martin Luther King Jr valued tradition and dreamt of a
beloved community, whose members shared some idea of the good.
The movement dealt with much more than individual rights; its members
demanded national recognition that certain people had for too long been
excluded from the American community.25
With the exception of the pragmatic liberal thinker Richard Rorty, liberals
working in the Rawlsian mode tend not to engage too much with their
pragmatic counterparts. This could be an academic disciplinary boundary,
in that many tradition-minded pragmatists are historians or philosophers in
the Continental tradition, while most liberals of the Rawlsian variation are
political theorists or philosophers in the analytic tradition. The Rawlsian
variation is thus not confined to the US but is very much an Anglophone
debate. One suspects that theorists working in this mode find pragmatists
provincial or lacking when it comes to analytical rigor for their evasion of
philosophy. In this sense, Rorty garners their attention primarily because he
has recognisable international and analytical bona fides.26
This is too bad. Some liberals and communitarians voice concern that
more orthodox Rawlsian liberals and their libertarian cousins offer a
thin, rather arid conception of political life. While potentially chaotic, the
pragmatist brings in much of the day-to-day warp and woof of human
experience. The pragmatic stress upon experience might present a way for
liberals and communitarians to talk to one another more effectively. Recently,
for example, some effort has been made to bridge the distinction between
community and autonomy, often with John Dewey as the thinker of choice.27
In any case, the differences are perhaps too profoundly rooted in dis-
agreements over basic philosophical perspectives and traditions.
In popular terms, the theoretical divide between liberal and communi-
tarians is lost on most American liberals, who can alternately embrace one
or the other position, or more often, some combination of the two at the

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same time. Liberals carry the Rawlsian debate without much sense of
contradiction. Almost all seek stronger constitutional protections for their
individual rights against incursions by the state: they roundly condemn the
Patriot Act, for example, or vigorously support the American Civil Liberties
Union. At the same time, they fear the loss of older, intermediate forms of
association apart from the state, particularly in the latters alliance with
national and multinational business interests on whatever level of federalism:
national, state or municipal. They worry, with Robert Putnam, about the
dissolution of American civic culture and its declining social capital.28
Liberals often lament the collapse of small independent businesses in the
face of big-box retailers such as Wal-mart; they excoriate the swallowing up
of unaffiliated forms of media by massive conglomerates like Clear Channel
Communications; some believe that it takes a village to raise a child, all the
while proclaiming the inviolability of the Bill of Rights and civil rights
protections against local prejudices.29 In sum, the Rawlsian debate translates
into a largely uncritical embrace of both liberal and communitarian elements
by liberals in 21st-century America.
Whatever its peculiarities, for the time being at least this variation on
liberalism in America shows little sign of abating, having become something
of an academic industry on both sides of the Atlantic. It remains to be seen
whether many of its adherents will take on a more expansive role as
politically involved public intellectuals. Nonetheless, some of the most
interesting work in this area involves conceptions of global universal human
rights, of whether certain procedures or political spaces can transcend
traditional national boundaries. The Rawlsian idea of overlapping consensus
negotiated within a space of political reason suggests that multilateral
solutions to international problems can be arrived at periodically whatever
the differences in comprehensive belief systems, especially religious ones like
Christianity or Islam. The cosmopolitanism of the debate, partly the result of
its abstraction, immediately separates it from many other US liberal
variations, which can be provincial and partial to domestic issues.30

POLEMICAL LIBERALISM
Liberals have often found themselves under attack in recent US history,
whether from different kinds of American conservatives, from this or that
minority group whose cause they purport to defend, or from traditionally
very small but often very vocal groups of American leftists as a general rule
liberals tend to have a soft spot for American leftists, who in turn love to
spurn them. If the effective practice of politics is necessarily an adversarial
art, then real or imagined persecution is its most effective rallying cry.
American liberals follow this logic along with American conservatives, the
truth of the matter being that in the past two decades conservatives have
used such tactics far better than the liberals.31

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Simply put, in the context of mainstream US politics, liberalism has

become a bad word. It is nearly suicidal for any American politician to openly
espouse it. While countless Democratic politicians work in any one of its
modes, they refuse to embrace the label. More than a few self-described
liberals today use the word progressive as a preferred label in order to
rid themselves of the opprobrious stink of the term. Yet, because of the
conservative success in recent years, liberals now talk a great deal about
taking a page from their conservative opponents. Because of a reaction
against the Bush administration, progressive liberals now list among their
number a group of writers whom the sociologist Alan Wolfe has called
the New Pamphleteers.32 Stridently partisan, a touch angry, at times un-
reasonable, cynical, and often bitingly funny, liberals in this polemical
mode represent perhaps the most vibrant strain of the persuasion in the
21st century. Alongside the pamphleteers, others working in the mode write
screed in print media, crack jokes on cable networks, and flood their opinions
onto the blogosphere. The humorists Jon Stewart of the Daily Show and
Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report are heroes-cum-clown princes for
this liberal variation. The adversarial, largely unprogrammatic style of the
DailyKos liberal weblog represents the position nicely, as does the vaguely
populist, anti-authoritarian style of the documentary filmmaker Michael
Moore. Stupid [read: wealthy, conservative] White Men are indeed targets.
Polemicists call for populist rhetoric and policies designed to cull votes
from proletarian and petite (rather than haute) bourgeoisie elements. Many
have come to disdain the heightened identity politics climate of the 1990s,
discarding political correctness. Thus, in addition to wondering Whats
the Matter with Kansas (to cite the title of Thomas Franks 2004 critique),
liberals of this cast puzzle over how it is that, in the title of Geoffrey
Nunbergs 2006 book, Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising,
Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading,
Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.33
While a very recent phenomenon, it would be hasty to assume that
polemical liberals lack any tradition whatsoever; they are merely ignorant or
dismissive of such things. While the direct provenance is impossible to trace,
polemical liberals have adopted some of the existentialist absurdity prevalent
in the humour of civil rights activists, the New Left, and some Cold War
liberals. The style is somewhat unique though, in that, to use Stewarts phrase,
many liberal outlets for humor offer fake news, the forebears of which are
certainly skits from ensemble comedy television shows such as Monty Pythons
Flying Circus in the UK (196974) and later Saturday Night Live in the US
(est. 1975). Perhaps to the disappointment of more established liberals,
the newest generation gets much of its news from comedy shows and the
blogosphere formats which encourage polemics rather than programmes,
running somewhat counter to the traditional liberal emphasis on fair hearing
and patient toleration for opposing perspectives.

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Yet polemical liberalism owes its vibrancy to its unqualified embrace of

multimedia formats: print, of course, but especially the web, movies, and
even music. In movie houses and on home video, Michael Moore has found
receptive soil, seeding Americans historic appetite for conspiracies with the
wildly suggestive Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). In the film documentary Sicko (2007),
Moore joined an increasingly widespread chorus of calls for some form of
national health coverage, offering devastating and characteristically intimate
portraits of people horribly mistreated by colossally insensitive insurance
companies. And more than a few liberals probably took some pleasure in
finding that the venerable rock n roll artist Neil Young has aged with
welcome and only slightly unexpected irascibility. As Martin Halliwell
discusses in this volume, Youngs Living with War album (2006) launched a
devastating salvo against the current Bush administration and a complacent
American public. In these kinds of areas, pragmatists and Rawlsians have yet
to fully embrace the 21st century and can seem rather toothless when it
comes to the raw, sanguinary delights of a polemic done up just right.
Still, the stubborn unreality and sometimes ham-fisted sloganeering of the
current Bush administration (Young critiques the slogans Shock & Awe and
Mission Accomplished in Living with War) no doubt has much to do with
the popularity of fake news and partisanship, so the staying power of this
variation is questionable after the end of the Bush presidency. The polemicist
move toward populism and bread and butter domestic issues are part of a
suite of concerns that include problems such as globalisation (flattening to
use Thomas Friedmans term) and restrictions on greenhouse gases, the
negative implications of which find ultimate coherence in the policies of
George W. Bush and his allies in government and in corporate America.
If polemical liberalism is to survive much further into the 21st century,
its momentarily fruitful adversarialism must be replaced by a positive
programmatic effort. In turn, George W. Bush, its principle organising
symbol, must be superseded by a more nuanced understanding of larger
local, national and transnational socio-economic forces, particularly those
wrought by global capitalism and its glitteringly clean and sophisticated
technologies. But the impersonality of forces, their multiplicity and
complexity, makes pointed appeals and criticisms difficult in a political
system that cherishes its binaries: us versus them, Democrat versus
Republican, liberal versus conservative. Perhaps the answer lies in more
communication and interaction, or somewhere in the thick of middlebrow
culture and in multimedia formats la Thomas Friedman and Al Gore: in
other words, between the leading lights of the three variations. Perhaps
not. Can Rawlsian debaters abandon philosophy momentarily for more
immediate concerns? Can pragmatists eschew a measure of complexity to
embrace propaganda? Will polemicists tighten up their arguments, and if
they do, will they be nearly as witty? Barring the incredible, liberals in the 21st
century will find themselves amidst the familiar push and pull of American

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party politics. Acknowledging the inevitable, the liberals who stay around, as
well as those to come, will bear the familiar burdens of trying to clear some
space and time for moral complexity, unencumbered communication and
cultural achievement in a democracy that has rarely admitted such things.

NOTES
1. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Writings, 19021910 (New York, NY:
Modern Library, 1987), p. 776.
2. See Michael Moore, Stupid White Men and Other Excuses for the Sorry State of the
Nation! (New York, NY: Regan Books, 2001).
3. Gary Gerstle, The Protean Character of American Liberalism, The American
Historical Review, 99, October 1994, 1043.
4. American liberalism is nominally part of global liberalism writ large, which has
been conflated with democratic institutions and free enterprise economics.
Roger M. Smith, Liberalism and Racism: The Problem of Analyzing Traditions
in David Ericson and Louisa Bertch Green (eds), The Liberal Tradition in American
Politics: Reassessing the Legacy of American Liberalism (New York, NY: Routledge,
1999), pp. 927, argues that even the common laissez faire conception of
liberalism is a product of 20th-century thinkers. American liberalism, then,
arises in response to an older liberal tradition, which had only recently been
identified as such, stemming from Protestantism and developing through
Hobbes and Locke, the Enlightenment, American revolutionary thinkers,
utilitarians and Social Darwininsts.
5. The exception here are Kantian liberals like Robert Nozick, who against more
egalitarian-minded Kantians like John Rawls, advocate the minimal state,
which most American liberals would label libertarian. See Robert Nozick,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1978).
6. For example Alan Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in
the 1960s (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1984).
7. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York, NY:
Harper and Row), p. 263.
8. Edward M. Kennedy, Kennedy on immigration agreement, http://kennedy.
senate.gov/newsroom/press_release.cfm?id=80405880-2B4F-4E23-80D4-
A11142E93803.
9. For the origins of fighting faith see Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr (adopting Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jrs phrase), The Vital Center (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
1949), p. 256.
10. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr, The New York Times,
18 September 2005, Section 7.
11. Peter Beinart, A fighting faith: an argument for a new liberalism, The New
Republic, 13 December 2004, 17. See also Kevin Mattson, When America Was
Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).
12. Casey Nelson Blake neatly points out a common misuse of Niebuhr: Curiously,
many of Niebuhrs contemporary admirers miss the irony (as it were) of
enlisting their hero in the service of projects to remake the Middle East that
are stunning in their naivet, hubris, and utopianism: Casey Nelson Blake,

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Obama and Niebuhr, The New Republic, Open University, 4 May 2007,
http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?pid=104944, p. 2.
13. The intellectual historian David Hollinger calls his specific and nuanced version
of this a postethnic America. See Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multi-
culturalism (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995).
14. See Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York, NY: Basic Books,
2006), pp. 4593. Lott rightly points out the pragmatic liberals increasing
appreciation of the novelist Ralph Ellison for the latters emphasis on possibility
and complexity.
15. James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998).
16. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For the differences, see John
Pettegrew (ed.), A Pragmatists Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual
History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
17. Robert Reich, Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America (New York, NY:
Knopf, 2004), pp. 14685. Reich includes a reading list with Dewey, Schlesinger,
and Rorty as prominent figures.
18. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954),
p. 10.
19. This residual sense of election probably comes from mid-century pro-
nouncements, like Trillings, that liberalism was Americas sole intellectual
tradition (The Liberal Imagination, p. 5), and certainly Louis Hartzs similar
observations in The Liberal Tradition in America which first appeared in 1955 and
has remained in print since.
20. While unhinged at some moments, Eric Lott details such instances nicely: Lott,
The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, pp. 123. Declension is played nicely by a
sampling of phrases from titles of books about liberalism by liberals: The
Collapse; The Decline; The Failure; The Wrong Turn, and so on.
21. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1971]
1999), pp. 340.
22. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, [1993]
2005), p. xli.
23. Ibid., pp. 346.
24. See Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics (New York, NY: New York
University Press, 1984); Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D, Miller and Jeffrey Paul (eds),
The Communitarian Challenge to Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996). Ludvig Beckman argues that Rawlsian liberalism can be expanded
to include ideas of virtue: see Ludvig Beckman, The Liberal State and the Politics of
Virtue (London: Transaction, 2001).
25. See Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics, p. 6.
26. A good example is Mark Evans, Pragmatist Liberalism and the Evasion of
Politics, in Mark Evans (ed.), Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Liberalism
(London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), pp. 14861. See also Cornel West, The
American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
27. See for example Daniel M. Savage, John Deweys Liberalism: Individual, Community,

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THREE VARIATIONS ON AMERICAN LIBERALISM

and Self-Development (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002)

and most recently Archon Fung, Democratic theory and political science: a
pragmatic method of constructive engagement, American Political Science Review,
101, August 2007, 44358. An earlier, significant, Emersonian effort to include
sociability as a sine qua non of rights-based liberalism is George Kateb, The Inner
Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992).
28. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
29. See Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New
York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
30. It should come as no surprise here that Thomas Friedman enlists the help of the
communitarian Michael Sandel in his increasingly influential recent book The
World is Flat (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005).
31. For a review of some recent literature on this subject see Michael Tomasky,
How Democrats should talk, The New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007,
268.
32. Alan Wolfe, The new pamphleteers: when the establishment disappears,
polemics fill the void, The New York Times Book Review, 11 July 2004, 12.
33. See Thomas Frank, Whats the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart
of America (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2004) and Geoffrey Nunberg,
Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-
Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing,
Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2006).

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5. THE RISE OF POSTMODERN

CONSERVATISM

Kevin Mattson

If an American talks about contemporary politics with a citizen of the

European Union, the term neoconservatism will likely come up. This is not
the neoconservatism of the 1970s, when the term originated, but the
neoconservatism that propelled George W. Bushs decision to invade Iraq.
It suggests a conservatism that draws from Leo Strauss and emphasises
Americas role in spreading democracy abroad; a conservatism of grand
universals willing to embrace the nasty practice of war; a conservatism that
hopes to make democratic omelettes by breaking caseloads of eggs. This
type of conservatism is important and has been discussed widely elsewhere,
symbolising a new and, for obvious reasons, important constellation of ideas
in American life.1
It is also likely that our make-believe EU citizen will have heard of the
culture wars the idea that Americans are divided between red and
blue, between NASCAR fans and latte drinkers, between traditionalists and
modernists. What is not so recognised is just how much these culture wars
have transformed the intellectual landscape of America, especially the broad
contours of conservative intellectual life today. With the recent critical
interest on the neoconservatism of the Bush administration it is easy to
overlook what I will call in the essay postmodern conservatism, a type of
conservatism that relates directly to the rise of the culture wars during the
1980s and 1990s.

THE POSTMODERN TURN IN CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT

Though a slippery term, postmodernism can be defined first and foremost
as a long-term exhaustion in modern rationalism. The cultural historian

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Morris Dickstein once connected this strain of postmodernity to the 1960s:

One of the healthier things we learned in the sixties, and are unlikely to
forget, was to be more skeptical of the pose of objectivity. Distrust about the
claims of powerful actors who used tones of rationality, disinterestedness
and objectivity lasted long after debates surrounding the Vietnam War (they
are nicely captured in shots of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
displaying charts and graphs to justify troop escalation in Vietnam, shown
evocatively in Errol Morriss documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons
from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, 2003). Rationality itself started to look
irrational this was a central feature of so much 1960s protest and political
criticism discussed in numerous places, including the Intercollegiate Review.
Writers like Theodore Roszak believed that the decades counterculture
radicalised the idea as it grew disillusioned with the conventional scientific
world view and mans infatuation with the machine. The countercultures
expressive individualism pushed aside McNamaras cold-hearted scientific
outlook and conjured a non-intellective consciousness through drugs, rock
music, and, of course, the new sensibility of the time.2
Tenured radicals carried much of the 1960s spirit into the halls of
academe during the 1970s and 1980s. Critiques of logocentrism and
universal claims to truth became the intellectual tools of the academic left,
most prominently visible in literary and aesthetic theory. Consider Susan
Sontags critique of interpretation as an act of violation of arts visual erotics;
Richard Rortys and Jacques Derridas anti-foundationalism; Jean Franois
Lyotards dissection of meta-narratives; or Stanley Fishs rejection of
objective meaning and an embrace of the individual reception of texts. All
these arguments questioned the universal foundations for Western truth-
claims. Postmodernism exploded the universalistic pretensions of the West
(for instance, the language of rights and reason) as too tightly bound up
with domination and power, especially when placed in the context of the
colonial domination of the non-Western world. Universalism, one philos-
opher explained in a long work that tried to define the term postmodernism,
is now seen as an anxious and pretentious and yet ultimately futile effort to
enforce rigor and uniformity in an unruly world. Thus, universalism has
been replaced by eclecticism and pluralism. By embracing these ideas, the
academic left threw off its own intellectual inheritances. As the historian
John Patrick Diggins once quipped: The Academic Left was the first Left in
American history to distrust the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. 3
The postmodern turn generated suspicions about intellectuals role in
public life. This was particularly evident in Europe, where there was once a
great deal of respect paid to intellectuals and where post-structuralism made
its first splash. As Mark Lilla puts it: The days in Europe when intellectuals
turned to philosophers to get their political bearings, and the public turned
to intellectuals, are all but over.4 During the 1960s and 1970s, Michel
Foucault criticised Jean-Paul Sartre for speaking in grand and universalistic

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tones that simply wound up justifying Soviet totalitarianism. The idea of

critics standing outside and passing universal and objective judgment on
their societys injustices was no longer defensible, especially as truth claims
appeared culturally and historically bound. Foucault himself, we now know,
showed a frightening sympathy for the Iranian revolutionists who, in 1979,
threw off the Western prejudices of the Shah for Islamic fundamentalism.
For Foucault, the universal project of the Enlightenment associated with the
West had exhausted itself, and the universal intellectual was now dead.5
So what do these developments usually associated with post-structuralism
and the academic left have to do with the conservative intellectual move-
ment? A great deal. There has always been an anti-intellectual current in
post-war conservative thought, starting with William F. Buckleys famous
God and Man at Yale (1951). By the 1970s, this anti-intellectual strain grew
more explicit. The New Right activist Paul Weyrich argued that the Old
Right was strong on intellectualism, pointing his fingers at the National
Review. For Weyrich, the intellectualization of conservatism limited the
movements impact.6 He echoed Kevin Phillipss celebration of George
Wallaces attack on pointy headed intellectuals. Though neoconservatives
during the 1970s, writers like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, might
have appeared as the rights last gasp of high intellectualism, Kristols
condemnation of an overeducated new class and Podhoretzs personal
diminution of intellectuals in his autobiographies such as Making It (1967)
suggest otherwise. The intellectual, in all of these treatments, appears not
only snobbish and self-important but self-interested, certainly not deserving
of pronouncing truths that transcend the faiths and beliefs of ordinary
citizens. In other words, conservatives had got to Foucaults position much
easier and often much earlier.7
This feature of postmodern conservatism, strange as it might sound at
first, helps explain the rise of one of the more prominent new groupings
among right-wing intellectuals: the theocons, who rose to prominence
during the 1990s and published their writings in the pages of First Things.8
These thinkers spoke directly from their religious faith and rejected the need
to translate their ideas into a more universal language or separate them
from their Catholic roots. Neoconservatives might have touted the virtues
of religious belief, but it was from a rationalistic perspective: that is, the
sociological benefit of belief. Writers like Richard John Neuhaus, George
Weigel and Michael Novak, in contrast, criticised American public policy
from the standpoint of papal declarations and even went so far as to declare
the legitimacy of civil disobedience against a corrupt judiciary in the name of
Catholic moral principles. Theocons built upon the New Right of the late
1970s, especially Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority and Christian Voice, that
already displaced the more secular language of Barry Goldwater. The terms
of the Enlightenment became for theocons simply an impediment to faith,
little else. Witnessing 9/11, they called for Christian America to battle

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militant Islam, making their religious particularism more explicit and

reaching back to the religious war metaphor used by Whittaker Chambers
during the Cold War in his famous book, Witness (1952). Theocons might
appear a logical extension of Chamberss Cold War thinking, but their
prominence also represented a postmodern imperative to find alternatives to
Enlightenment rationalism. Religious particularism matched the era better
than neoconservative secularism. And so we see a strange amalgamation of
absolutist faith and relativistic ramifications.9
This is evidenced in the rights own contribution to contemporary cultural
fragmentation. Again, this development is traditionally associated with the
academic left, especially the rise of multiculturalism and identity politics in
the wake of the black power and feminist movements of the 1960s.10 Faith in
a unified culture trumping disparate identities grew tentative after the battles
of the 1960s exposed racial oppression and gender disparities; the 1970s
emphasis on black is beautiful and ethnic pride only pushed the envelope
further. The resulting feel of postmodernity is largely a sense of fracturing
and splitting apart, of pluralistic identities breaking up any overarching sense
of collective belonging. Though conservatives are traditionally known as
critics of identity politics and multiculturalism, they have contributed to
cultural fragmentation in increasingly louder tones.
The clearest indication is the vituperative style that marks popular, best-
selling conservative writing today, its highly charged rhetoric and shrillness
evident to any casual observer. Prominent conservative intellectuals do not
conceptualise their role as engaging a wider public through civilised debate.
Instead, they act as cheerleaders for their sides belief system, reconfirming
pre-held opinions among the already-believing and preaching to the choir.
Their writing style mirrors the advice given to politicians by Karl Rove, the
Republican Partys political mastermind between 2000 and 2007, who argued
that conservatives should play to their base, build a politics out of pillorying
the enemy, and win through small margins. In a society that fragments
political opinions and associates those opinions with lifestyles of red versus
blue states (beer swilling NASCAR fans versus wine drinking liberals),
conservative intellectuals feel obliged to stoke the anger of their own
segmented audience. Thus, the historionic feel of writers like Ann Coulter
and Michael Savage, two of the rights bestselling authors. Their books serve
as the finest expressions of how postmodern conservative intellectual life
contributes to and is informed by cultural fragmentation.11
Ann Coulter has accrued the most fame (through what some might label
intellectual branding) on this front, more than any other conservative writer.
She has cultivated a persona of venom and meanness that sells large
quantities of books. But nobody reads Coulters books to learn anything they
didnt already know. The tone is of red-faced shouting and screaming, not the
sort of style that prompts people to reconsider their opinions. For instance,
liberals arent just wrong for Coulter, they are demonic. If Americans knew

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what liberals really believed, she writes, the public would boil them in oil.
For Coulter, liberals are like Arabs without the fighting spirit. Its better to
go to war with them. As Coulter put it in her book How to Talk to a Liberal (If
You Must) (2004) that parenthetical portion of the title evokes her thesis
the way to argue is this: You must outrage the enemy. If the liberal youre
arguing with doesnt become speechless with sputtering, impotent rage,
youre not doing it right. Coulter plays well to an audience that wants to
secede from a wider public sphere, nurturing a conservative fan club that
holds its opinions in airtight vacuums and disengages from the demands of
civilised discourse, leaving its enemies sputtering with rage.12
Alongside Ann Coulter stands Michael Savage, a man who acquired fame
in the world of talk radio, not exactly known as an intellectually sophisticated
medium. Savage is especially interesting since his biography highlights
another postmodern theme: a sense that the postmodern self lacks co-
herence and is simply a series of different poses that rely upon social
confirmation. Consider Savages biography: born Michael Alan Weiner over
65 years ago, he became a hippie who once swam naked with Allen
Ginsberg and got married in a rain forest and studied ethno-medicine at the
University of California at Berkeley. During the 1970s, he hung out at City
Lights Bookstore, the capital of Beatnik culture, and wrote about herbal
medicine and health food. He then became a small capitalist, marketing
herbal supplements and teas. Then as the country drifted rightward, he
decided to become a talk-show host of The Savage Nation where he calls
for nuking the Middle East, shooting illegal immigrants, and taking out
commies, pinkos, and perverts.13
Savages books read like the rants of a talk-radio-show host whose
bellowing is matched by his audiences frantic nodding and cheering. His
treatment of liberalism is akin to Coulters. Liberalism for Savage is a mental
disorder that has so twisted reality that the terrorists are tolerated when
they should be annihilated and that glorifies Arafat, Kinsey, and Clinton
when they should be vilified. Savage moves with blistering speed from one
opinion to another, failing to check if they make sense together. For instance,
he condemns liberals for a godless worldview and then quickly leaps into a
treatment of the pop singer Madonna and the Kabala, as if his own minds
instantaneous connection should be obvious to all. His books become a
group of incoherent thoughts that only those already convinced might find
convincing. They succeed (at least in terms of sales) due to the postmodern
currents into which they play. And they point to a general rise in what some
call smashmouth commentary that has defined the right.14

APOCALYPSE NOW: THE CULTURE WARS AS DEFINING MOMENT

As Coulter and Savage make clear, the postmodern conservative mind is in a
state of permanent apocalypse. This was true already by the Cold War when

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Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham saw the conflict between the West
in absolutist and religious terms. Throughout the 1990s, a new set of culture
wars fought at home became all the more important. In three major
conservative battles (1) the legislative push to police Americas colleges to
cut down on liberal bias, (2) the introduction of intelligent design in public
schools, and (3) the continuing war against the liberal media postmodern
conservatism crystallised in more perfect form than in Iraq. Crossing the
postmodern divide, conservatives came out the other side stronger. The
conservative mind drew upon the battle lines drawn earlier by the New Right
over public school textbooks and abortion and ingested these battle lines
into its own permanent psychic state. David Horowitz would call these
wars of aggression; Coulter would speak of throttling liberals. Out of the
struggles of war, the postmodern conservative mind emerged more clearly.

POLICING COLLEGES
Gaining political power during the 1990s, conservatives grew annoyed that
their reach did not extend to academe. New Leftists (or tenured radicals)
still seemed to hold all the power there. For conservative writers, academia
was now a hotbed of multiculturalism, speech codes, political correctness,
identity politics, and an incoherent canon that threw out the great books
tradition of yore. And academe for conservative intellectuals throughout
the 1990s symbolised liberalism writ large. Conservatives pummelled the
postmodern university, blaming liberalism for shoddy education Alan
Blooms The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Dinesh DSouzas Illiberal
Education (1991) key among them but these books didnt change anything.
The problem demanded building upon the electoral successes of conser-
vatives throughout the 2000s and thus bolder activism: something more akin
to war.
Enter the gladiator David Horowitz, the leading conservative activist on
all things academic and a prolific author. In 2003, he helped form Students
for Academic Freedom (SAF). He urged the organisation to mimic the
academic left: I encourage students, Horowitz explained, to use the
language that the left has deployed so effectively on behalf of its own
agendas. Radical professors have created a hostile learning environment
for conservative students The university should be an inclusive and
intellectually diverse community. 15 Horowitz clicked off the key words
of the academic left to justify right-wing student activism. To embolden the
cause of right-wing diversity, Horowitz drafted the Academic Bill of Rights
(ABOR), a boilerplate piece of legislation that scolded liberal professors for
indoctrinating their students and encouraged state legislatures to police
higher education classrooms to ensure intellectual diversity. Starting in 2004,
Horowitz pushed for its passage in numerous states.16
Horowitz took up the tradition of conservative activism against academe

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but rejected his elders objective universalism. Consider William F. Buckleys

original attack against Yale in his God and Man at Yale (1951). Buckley had
been an absolutist on questions surrounding academic freedom, while
Horowitz had turned postmodern. Buckley wrote: It is my view that as long
as academic freedom takes the implied position that all ideas are equal, or
that all ideas should, in the students mind, start out equal, it is a dangerous
concept. 17 Horowitz reversed this logic, his idea of intellectual diversity
growing out of contemporary theories about the indeterminacy of
knowledge. Here is the original ABOR statement: Human knowledge is a
never-ending pursuit of the truth since there is no humanly accessible truth
that it not in principle open to challenge, and that no party or intellectual
faction has a monopoly on wisdom. 18 So though Horowitz shared Buckleys
vision, he also knew that the terms of activism and intellectual politics had
changed.
Horowitz also knew that he could play upon popular strains of anti-
intellectualism and populist hatred of academe. But he went one step further
by arguing for legislation that would allow state legislatures to police class-
rooms because professions wouldnt police their own members. Professional
codes of conduct simply shrouded power and domination. The professoriate
would never stop imposing its political views on college students unless
policed by the state. The ABOR called for the protection of students from
the imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological
nature.19 Horowitz combined this paternalistic language with the political
language of the 1960s. He pierced claims to objectivity, arguing that
professors simply wanted to indoctrinate young minds with liberal ideology.20
Horowitz echoed New Left students of the 1960s who had questioned
scientific neutrality and professional objectivity, but he hardened the critique.
He also sounded like Michel Foucault delineating an inherent nexus between
knowledge and power, discovering the conservative benefits of postmodern
theory.
Horowitzs activism conjures memories of New Left radicalism in other
ways. Right-wing students demanding the curriculum reflect their own
ideological orientation sound a lot like students who wanted relevant
curriculum during the 1960s that would help them understand Vietnam. The
language of rights and participatory democracy also live on in Horowitzs
activism, conceptualising, as it does, the student as a consumer of academic
goods and thus sharing a voice in their delivery. Both right-wing students
and their New Left progenitors exerted pressure that challenges claims to
institutional stability and professional authority. After all, Horowitz encour-
aged right-wing students to police classrooms and document bias. And one
offshoot from the ABOR is a bill in Arizona that would force professors to
provide alternative coursework if students find the assigned material
personally offensive.21 The utter absurdity of such a programme seems
obvious, loading up institutions with ridiculous demands. Although

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Horowitz disagrees with this particular version of legislation, it clearly sprang

from his own ABOR activity, and it is hard to see how it diverges from his
own thought. It simply pushes the demand that students determine their
own education to its logical conclusion. And it is clearly in line with the 1960s
ethic of student empowerment.
Horowitz also assumes that winning political power ensures cultural
transformation that political revolution demands cultural transformation.
After two years of SAF activism, Horowitz reflected on the 2004 presidential
election and when asked stated, the election is a big boost for the academic
bill of rights, no question. 22 One of the sponsors he linked up with in late
2004 made the connection between political power and the right to police
classrooms explicit, illustrating the dangerous blowback for an intellectual-
activist alliance on the right. Larry Mumper, a state senator from Ohio,
endorsed the ABOR and asked: Why should we as fairly moderate to
conservative legislators continue to support universities that turn out
students who rail against the very policies that their parents voted us in for? 23
Buckleys original desire for the executive power of alumni and trustees
acting through the university president was now placed in the hands of state
legislatures. Horowitz champions populist democracy amassing power in the
halls of state legislatures and then transforming the university.
Horowitzs activism on behalf of right-wing students exemplifies the
postmodern conservative mindset. He sees knowledge as relative and
celebrates diversity and plurality. He believes politics is king and that power
always colours any claim to objectivity. And he sees his activism as a
legitimate and rightful inheritance of the 1960s spirit. Tenured radicals
with poststructuralist ideas bouncing around in their minds might be the
embodiment of the 1960s to some, but so too is Horowitz. Call it the
horseshoe effect of cultural politics in the age of postmodernity: the
academic left and postmodern right coming full circle. Horowitzs own
biographical zigzags suggest that this should not come as a surprise.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN IN SCHOOLS

If conservatives have traditionally questioned academia for its liberal
machinations, their dislike of modern science is no less pronounced. Go
back to the Cold War and listen to the conservative intellectual Frank Meyer
(an editor at National Review) complaining about liberalisms science-wor-
ship.24 Conservatives nurtured their own romantic streak, one that perceived
limits to materialism and scientific inquiry. Whittaker Chambers who
excommunicated Ayn Rand in part for her attacks on the irrationalities of
religion and what today would be called her logocentrism believed science
had displaced marvelling at the wonder of life and the wonder of the
universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. As he sat at
the breakfast table and examined his daughters ear with its beautiful features,

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Chambers came to believe that design presupposes God, that nature could
not be explained by cold-hearted scientific rationalism.25
Chamberss critique of science found an odd set of characters taking it up
during the 1960s. The critique found resonance in Americas counterculture.
As the leading theorist of the counterculture, Theodore Roszak, pointed out
in 1969, the leading mentors of our youthful counter culture have called
into question the validity of the conventional scientific world view. The
young, he believed, were dropping out of a technocratic system built upon
the prosperity ensured by science and technology. When hippies returned
to nature and kids started drifting away from Christianity towards eastern
mysticism (such as Shamanism and Zen), they were embracing a magical
world view that renewed the sort of wonder about the world Chambers had
experienced with his daughters ear at the breakfast table. The scientific
world view no longer persuaded the young. Sciences authority collapsed,
much like the authority of parents and government.26
The countercultures impact and shockwaves were felt long after the
1960s, though the more radical and transformative talk of Roszak became
quickly dated, blowing away like so much marijuana smoke. Still, academic
postmodernists who worked in philosophy and history continued to argue
that sciences foundations were more historically rooted and less objective
than previously believed. The writings of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyarbend
most explicitly explored these themes, and their criticisms resonated with
the academic left and its theories about the indeterminacy of knowledge
developed in philosophy and English departments. Generally though,
doubts about science drifted back to the right especially as the New Right
pressed an evangelical basis for conservative activism. Conservative intel-
lectuals criticised scientists amoral outlook about genetic engineering and
their tendency to see biological roots to all behaviour, as they questioned
the immorality of abortion. But it was the call to teach intelligent design in
public schools that became the most important movement critical of science
and constitutive of postmodern conservatism. Here, conservative intel-
lectuals did not just criticise sciences power, but offered a new vision to
explain the world.27
Intelligent design (ID) is typically understood as an updated version of
Biblical creationism, a view that seemed to have disappeared from public
sight after the Scopes Trial of 1925. But intelligent design offered some-
thing creationism had not. It did not begin with the Biblical story of creation
but rather with doubts about Darwins explanations of evolution, a distinctly
postmodern starting point. In 1996, IDs leading exponents formed a think
tank called the Discovery Institute based in Seattle, Washington. Led by
Phillip Johnson, the author of Darwin on Trial (1991), a leading evangelical
critic of evolution and a demi-intellectual of sorts, the writers and publicists
gathered here came up with the teach the controversy approach to
presenting ID, sometimes called the wedge strategy (named after a con-

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troversial paper known as the Wedge Document discovered in 1999

that showed how anti-evolution activism could help replace materialistic
explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings
are created by God).28 The Discovery Institute has offered fellowships to
writers and support for grassroots initiatives (that created numerous
successes) in states like Ohio, Kansas and Texas. And it has accomplished
this by arguing that Darwinian evolution is one theory that should be taught
alongside other theories, including Chamberss argument that design pre-
supposes God.29
ID proponents argue that teachers have the right and responsibility to
expose students to diverse viewpoints about evolution. In 2001, Senator Rick
Santorum used that rationale to introduce a Senate Amendment promoting
ID and tying it to the No Child Left Behind Act (this ultimately failed), and
President Bush echoed it a few years later in 2005 when he lent his support
to the movement.30 Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can
understand what the debate is about, the President explained, implying that
liberal teachers were repressing diversity in Americas classrooms. The goal
in introducing ID into the classroom was to expose people to different
schools of thought.31 Exponents of ID have, in the words of the New York
Times, successfully transformed the debate into an issue of academic
freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.32 As
Horowitz mined the postmodern concept that all knowledge is indeter-
minate in order to justify the ABOR, defenders of ID embrace the
postmodern view of science as one of many paradigms that help human
beings make sense of their world.
The history of this movement is more detailed than my treatment here
suggests (indeed, an entire book about the movement was published in
2004). And there are numerous less-well-known intellectuals arguing its
case. But most important in this context is the style of argument made on
IDs behalf. No scientists confirm the nature of the arguments made by
proponents of ID, which allows figures like Phillip Johnson to think of
themselves as rebels against a steadfast liberal establishment. Because of this,
postmodern theories have informed their battle plans. Teach the con-
troversy is indebted, after all, to the postmodern doubts about truth being
singular. Johnson once explained: Im no postmodernist but Ive learned a
lot from reading postmodern theory. This makes his thinking, as he put it,
dead-bang mainstream in academia these days.33 In this, he is certainly
right. Like Horowitz, Johnson has taken up the language of radical relativism
and postmodern theories of knowledge in order to do battle against the
liberal establishment all for the purpose of conservative aims and giving
insight into a mindset framed by the necessity of war.
Those who have studied the success of ID admire its well-orchestrated
media and publicity campaign. Most proponents of the theory are not
working in laboratories garnering counter-evidence against Darwins

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findings. They are, instead, writing for a wider public and mobilising action
at the state and local level. The success of the movement is due to the
conservative movements capacity to transform the world of the mass media
and to a decline in citizens view of journalistic ethics over the last few years.
And this brings us to the final culture war that informs the contemporary
conservative mind.
AT WAR WITH THE LIBERAL MEDIA
The rights war against the liberal media is an old one. Complaints about the
media littered the pages of the National Review during the 1950s, and Barry
Goldwaters run prompted more. In 1964, M. Stanton Evans argued that
managed news shut Barry Goldwater out of the mainstream.34 This view
found more prominent voices during the late 1960s. In 1969, Vice-President
Spiro Agnew famously berated television news as hostile to President
Richard Nixons oversight of the Vietnam War. He condemned the instant
analysis and querulous criticism of television news shows perpetrated by
a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the
majority of whom were hostile to Nixon. Television news people were
urbane and lived within the geographical and intellectual confines of
Washington D.C. or New York City. Agnew took Evanss critique and
pushed it in more explicitly populist directions, a touch of Kevin Phillipss
Wallace-ism added to the mix.35
Two years later, Edith Efron, a right-wing writer at TV Guide, would blast
liberal bias in her bestselling book The News Twisters (1971). The book was
chock full of charts showing that, indeed, Spiro Agnew was right: the press
had treated Nixon harshly. From here, Efron argued that the FCC fairness
doctrine and the First Amendment were too broadly interpreted. The First
Amendment, she wrote, gives the press the right to be biased. For instance,
it allowed the mainstream media to treat the white middle class and
provincial people with disdain. The media also flattered the New Left, or
what she referred to as the kids. She believed that a silent majority would
rise up in revolt against the presss bias (her argument won an invitation to
Nixons White House that she declined). And then in passing, Efron pointed
out something else: that study after study has revealed that people buy
publications with whose editorials they agree. This insight, more than her
call for a revolt on the part of the silent majority, transformed the future of
the mass media.36
Efrons view worked in tandem with the initiatives of New Journalists
who were writing around the same time and had questioned the importance
of objectivity in reporting. During the late 1960s, the new sensibility joined
the world of journalism witnessed in the pioneering work of Tom Wolfe,
Joan Didion (who wrote for National Review briefly), Norman Mailer, and
Hunter S. Thompson. New Journalisms subjectivity its faith that the
reporters consciousness deserved attention and should be included in any

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and all stories was easily radicalised into profound doubt about the
possibility of any objective treatment of events. This was the postmodern
kernel in the movement. New Journalism could be understood as a product
of the 1960s, but it could also be gleaned in the National Reviews early
editorial in favour of a personal journalism the manly presentation
of deeply felt convictions and necessarily an accompanying ethic of
controversy. That didnt sound all that different from Tom Wolfes original
definition of New Journalism as personality, energy, drive, bravura.37
Efrons argument that consumers buy the media they prefer and the
rebellion against objectivity found in the work of New Journalists helped
clear the way for the new media that defines our own age: cable television
with its widespread choice and a plurality of political news shows; the
Internet with its search driven culture and opinionated blogs; and talk radio,
a medium highly favourable to populist rantings with explicit partisan
leanings. All of these outlets have effectively dismantled the ideal of
objective journalism. As do the incessant complaints about the mainstream
media now labelled simply MSM by conservative writers and their search
for a more authentic personal journalism.
Just how far these changes have gone and how much the right is
responsible for them can be seen in the stodgier world of book publishing.
Today, niche marketing has generated an array of conservative book
publishers (or divisions within existing houses): Random Houses Crown
forum, Penguins imprint Sentinel, Simon and Schusters Threshold Editions
(run by Mary Matalin), Encounter Books in San Francisco, and the oldest
conservative publisher, Regnery. Publishers hunt for opinionated and bold
arguments that can be marketed to well-defined political audiences. Judith
Regan, once an editor at Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster) who signed
Sean Hannity (and more memorably O. J. Simpson), explained: What people
respond to in this culture is loud and brash and pointed and sometimes
vulgar thats what gets peoples attention, on TV and radio and in books.
Shades-of-gray books are very difficult to sell. 38 Publishers now promote
conservative books that are clearly tagged as such books by Coulter,
Savage, OReilly through a well-defined segment of networks, including
conservative websites and magazines, Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and
right-wing book clubs.
By the mid-1990s, some conservatives were honest enough to admit that
they had transformed the MSM.39 In essence, the counterestablishment of
National Review and a few other publications now started to look more like a
full-fledged postmodern establishment, if such a term makes sense. In 1996,
one writer for the Weekly Standard explained that conservatives dominated
talk radio and some television outlets, from Limbaugh to the Capital Gang.
Talk radio, of course, was a medium that reached large numbers with no
pretence of professionalism or objectivity, and it carried with it a more
widespread revolution in the media. This same Weekly Standard author went

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on to explain that the liberal media with its air of press-as-clerisy would
reject the new regime of radio gas-bags, TV shoutathons, and Internet
yahoos. 40 But the revolution would be televised and could not be held back by
the elite trying to suppress the populist rage that an Efron could only dream
about. This new conservative counter-regime would soon include Fox News
and then Internet blogs.41 Conservatives created a new media landscape that
blurred the line between news and opinion, eliciting a profoundly post-
modern cultural victory. As Nicholas Lemann pointed out, conservatives are
relativists when it comes to the press. In their view, nothing is neutral: there
is no disinterested version of the news; everything reflects politics and
relationships to power and cultural perspective. 42 That was the essence of
their revolt and its transformational success in making a new world fraught
with cultural fragmentation and dissonance the world of postmodernity.

THE END GAME OF POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM

The postmodernism of MSM critics, ID proponents, and ABOR activists
work in tandem. So too does the stridency of Horowitz, Coulter, and Savage.
Other critics have noticed a growing postmodern streak in conservative
activism and thought today. For instance, the literary critic Stanley Fish
believes ID proponents adopt postmodern ideas for the sake of strategy, to
win influence and to wedge their ideas into a culture that rejects absolutist
claims. But in reality the strategy is much more pervasive than Fishs
interpretation suggests. Postmodernity frames numerous culture wars
fought by the post-war conservative mind and has helped create something
resembling a ragtag establishment an establishment that glorifies rebellion,
loudmouthed rantings, a debunking of professional authority, and a relativist
view of truth. Postmodern conservatism has been much more trans-
formational than the term strategy suggests.
What critics like Stanley Fish miss (most likely because they want to hold
on to their own left-leaning postmodernism) is that the conservative mind
was a mind born in a state of war. Its sense of apocalypse and rightfulness
lends itself to the use of whatever means necessary including relativistic
tactics. It is not that the conservative mind adopts relativism and post-
modernism as tools that are simply strategic in nature, slyly chosen to make
headway. It is that the mindset of war propels fervent choices of war-like
tactics. These are not just convenient tools being adapted, they are weapons
weapons that reflect the apocalyptic mindset making the choice. The tactics
and the mindset are much more closely wedded than critics like Fish imagine.
And the tactics and mindset make for the odd combination of fervent
absolutism matched with postmodern relativism.

As postmodern conservative intellectuals have waged their wars, they have

helped create a culture in which the fine art of discerning truth from

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falsehood seems unnecessary. A culture in which the line between news

and opinion no longer holds, where all truth claims are shields covering up
political belief and prejudice; a culture which is disrespectful of professional
competence and holds intelligence in contempt, pilloried as elitism and
snobbery; a culture that no longer thinks it important to discern high culture
from low or good argument from bad so long as entertainment is found.
But there is no reason to believe that any of this will stop conservative
activists from hurdling forward. David Horowitz has too much gleam in his
eyes similar to the student radicals who took over Columbia University
with great gusto in 1968 to stop any time soon. Ann Coulter seems too
angry and seems to do too well in book sales to wonder if theres something
corrosive about yelling and demonising opponents. ID proponents have won
too many victories to wonder if perhaps their own relativistic conception of
knowledge might do damage to education or respect for scientific inquiry.
And the Weekly Standard editors are just too hip to wonder if popular culture
and suburban sprawl might not be the utopian agents they want them to be.
The post-war conservative mind has unleashed new forces that feed into the
populist and anti-intellectual tendencies deeply rooted in American history
and this has won it popularity. Today, it becomes imperative for critics of the
conservative mind to point out how it threatens civil culture, faith in pro-
fessions and scientific knowledge, the ability to discern facts from political
opinion, and the general pursuit of the life of the mind. In the end wars of
aggression create blowback and damage. We should not forget that.

NOTES
1. For more on neoconservatism there are many sources. See Jim Mann, The Rise
of the Vulcans: The History of Bushs War Cabinet (New York, NY: Viking, 2004);
George Packer, The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2005), Chapter 2; Gary J. Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism
and the New Pax Americana (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).
2. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977), p. 248.
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, [1968] 1995), pp. 205, 227, 207.
3. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 55, 57. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the
American Left (New York, NY: Norton, 1992), p. 347.
4. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York, NY: New York
Review Books, 2001), pp. 1867.
5. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980), p. 126. On
Foucaults fascination with the Iranian revolution see Janet Afary and Kevin
Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
6. Paul Weyrich, Blue collar or blue blood?: The New Right compared with the

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THE RISE OF POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM

Old Right, in Robert Whitaker (ed.), The New Right Papers (New York, NY: St.
Martins Press, 1982), p. 50.
7. For more on this theme see Kevin Mattson, Rebels All!: A Short History of Postwar
Conservative Ideas in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2008).
8. See on this point, Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 142.
9. Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (New York, NY:
Doubleday, 2006); see also my review, Attacking Secular America, Dissent,
Winter 2007, 13941.
10. See here especially Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York, NY:
Metropolitan, 1995).
11. This tendency is mirrored on the left in the work of Al Franken and Michael
Moore. For more on this point, see Mattson, The Perils of Michael Moore,
Dissent, Spring 2003, 7581.
12. Ann Coulter, Slander (New York, NY: Crown, 2002), p. 197 and How To Talk to
a Liberal (If You Must) (New York, NY: Crown, 2004), pp. 37, 10.
13. David Gilson, Michael Savages long, strange trip, www.Salon.com, 5 March
2003.
14. Michael Savage, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current,
2005), pp. xx, xxvi.
15. Horowitz quoted in Stanley Fish, Intellectual Diversity: The Trojan horse of a
dark design, Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 February 2004, p. B14.
16. For a fine overview of this history see Chapter 2 of Michael Brub, Whats
Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (New York, NY: Norton, 2006).
17. William Buckley, The Ivory Tower: here lies the empty mind, National Review,
20 April 1957, 382.
18. Academic Bill of Rights, http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/abor.
htm.
19. Ibid.
20. For more on this see Mattson, A Student Bill of Fights, The Nation, 4 April
2005, 1617.
21. Quoted in Avoid whatever offends you, Inside Higher Education, 17 February
2006, insidehighered.com
22. Quoted in Jeffrey Brainard et al., GOP looks to put its mark on higher
education, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 November 2004, A11.
23. Larry Mumper quoted in Joe Hallett, Right wingers bill to stifle campus left-
leaners is a surefire backfire, Columbus Dispatch, 30 January 2005.
24. Frank Meyer, Principles and heresies: the bigotry of science, National Review,
8 March 1958, 234. See also Albert Hobbs, The falseface of science,
Intercollegiate Review, January 1965, 1722.
25. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington, DC: Regnery, [1952] 2002), pp. 19,
16.
26. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, [1969] 1995), pp. 205, 258. Howard Brick, The Age of
Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998), p. 116.

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27. Andrew Ferguson, How Steven Pinkers mind works, The Weekly Standard,
12 January 1998, 1624.
28. Quotation of Wedge Document in Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science
(New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005), p. 173.
29. For more on this history, see Michael Ruse, Liberalism, Science, and Evolution,
in Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson (eds), Liberalism for a New Century
(Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2007).
30. Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross, Creationisms Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent
Design (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 2401.
31. Bush quoted in Linker, Theocons, p. 187.
32. Jodi Wilgoven, Politicized scholars put evolution on defensive, New York Times,
21 August 2005, 1.
33. Quoted in Stanley Fish, Academic Cross-dressing: how intelligent design gets
its arguments from the left, Harpers, December 2005, 71.
34. See for instance, M. Stanton Evans, At Home, National Review, 21 January
1964, 6.
35. Agnew quoted in Chris Lehmann, The Eyes of Spiro are upon You, The Baffler,
14, 2001, 27.
36. Edith Efron, The News Twisters (Los Angeles, CA: Nash, 1971), pp. 19, 68, 132,
142, 168. The quotation about agreeing with the press can be found on p. 27.
37. National Review Editorial, Statement of Intentions, in Gregory Schneider (ed.),
Conservatism in America Since 1930 (New York, NY: New York University Press,
2003), p. 198. Tom Wolfe quoted in Howard Brick, The Age of Contradiction
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 38. For more on new journalism
see Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldnt Write Straight (New York, NY:
Crown, 2006).
38. Paula Span, Making Books: The Politics of Publishing, Washington Post, Book
World, 6 November 2005: posted on the net at http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/03/AR2005110301847.html.
39. See here Michael Massing, The End of News?, New York Review of Books,
1 December 2005, 237.
40. Andrew Ferguson, Media-bashing, Liberal Style, The Weekly Standard, 29
January 1996, 39.
41. See for instance Jonathan Last, What Blogs have Wrought, The Weekly Standard,
27 September 2004, 2731.
42. Nicholas Lemann, Fear and Favor, New Yorker, 1421 February 2005, 172.

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6. US PROPAGANDA

Nancy Snow

In September 1992, a relatively obscure international treaty took effect in the

United States. Originally signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in
1977, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
ultimately oversaw passage by Carters Republican successor once removed,
President George H. W. Bush, after a two-thirds Senate vote. Article 20 of
the ICCPR reads: 1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes in-
citement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.1
The covenant makes no attempt to legally define propaganda. It was
signed into law in the US within the context of a country that had just one
year earlier successfully defeated Iraq using methods of mass persuasion that
were then unparalleled since the Cold War. Saddam Hussein was referred to
as the Hitler of the Middle East from the Presidents lips down to the
newsrooms of the mainstream media and every manner of commercial
product was created with his tyrannical visage: from T-shirts to golf balls to
urinal mats making him the object of ire for democracy-loving Americans.
Even if average Americans could not locate Iraq on a map, they certainly
knew that this Hussein guy was another bad H who mandated ultimate
humiliation and defeat. Following the swift and overwhelming US-led
coalition victory in pushing Iraq out of Kuwait, General Colin Powell
responded to a question about the number of Iraqi dead from ground troops
or air sorties: Its really not a number Im terribly interested in.2
Were the communication techniques used to transform a former US
ally in the Iran/Iraq war to a desert Hitler exemplary of this prohibited
propaganda for war? It is unlikely, since the US was responding forcefully to
an aggressive breach of territory by Iraq into Kuwait. The ICCPR, though

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general in its language, suggests that propaganda in response to a warlike act

(exhibited in this case by Saddam Hussein) is not prohibited. Nevertheless, it
is likely that the US would not define any advocacy for its persuasive cause as
propaganda for war, whether in response to an aggressive act by Iraq in
August 1990 or in anticipation of aggression by Iraq with its elective military
invasion in 2003. To this day, the US officially and popularly views the
contested P word with much derision. It is viewed as inherently deceitful
and thus morally repugnant to democracy-loving people who value the truth
over the big lie. American propaganda in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries is conceived as something that only totalitarian states engage in,
notably the axis of evil coalition of nation states like North Korea, Iraq and
Iran that President Bush derided in his January 2002 State of the Union
address:

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil,
arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass
destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could
provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their
hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United
States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be
catastrophic.3

Totalitarian states are known to lie to citizens, censor the media, conceal
operations, and generally view the open society with disdain. Propaganda
is used to serve the interests of the totalitarian state by manipulating the
emotions, attitudes, and behaviours of citizens in service of the state. When
democracies go to war, they elect to use propaganda in preparation for war
but do so reluctantly and reserve their most manipulative propaganda
methods for the enemy or enemy sympathisers. In peacetime, democracies
like the US are thought to engage in mass persuasion through consensus,
open debate, and dissent, with minimal censorship (for national security
purposes only), and promotion of hard news facts over biased views.
It is a well-established myth that democracies are reluctant to use
propaganda. The US as the leading democratic republic is also the worlds
largest producer and consumer of propaganda. Its crowning achievement in
propaganda is that it has managed to convince many of its citizens that
propaganda is what others do. The US prefers other words to the besmirched
term propaganda, including advertising, public relations, public diplomacy
and marketing. All of these professional persuasion industries were con-
ceived and developed in the US. Edward Bernays, the founder of American
public relations, wrote two books about his practice, Crystallizing Public
Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), both of which are purported to have
heavily influenced the techniques of the chief propagandist for the Third
Reich, Joseph Goebbels.4

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US PROPAGANDA

Several myths permeate the American system of P-word denial: (1) that
the US resorts to the use of propaganda in wartime; (2) that totalitarian
regimes engage in propaganda endlessly through lies and deceit; and (3) that
while totalitarian governments lie to their people, democratic governments
always tell the truth. The reality isnt black and white, but democratic heads
of state often paint these pictures in such duo chrome.

WHITE HOUSE PROPAGANDA

Consider the example of Ronald Reagan, the late 20th-century president
dubbed the Great Communicator for his legendary ability to sway the
masses. Reagan is credited with having shepherded the end of the Cold War
in many respects through words alone. On 8 June 1982, 20 years before the
Axis of Evil speech by his 21st-century Republican successor, Reagan spoke
these words in an address before the British Parliament later dubbed by some
as the original Evil Empire Speech, or more commonly known as the
Westminster Speech:

We see around us today the marks of our terrible dilemma predictions

of doomsday, antinuclear demonstrations, an arms race in which the
West must, for its own protection, be an unwilling participant. At the
same time we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion
and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the
human spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a
hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accom-
modation with totalitarian evil? 5

Reagan proposed a global campaign for American-style democracy over

dictatorship. Anticipating critics that might be put off by this new cultural
offensive, Reagan said: this is not cultural imperialism; it is providing the
means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity.
Reagan followed this speech ten months later, on 8 March 1983, with a
further Evil Empire Speech to the 41st Annual National Association of
Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. This was forcefully directed at communism
and Americas ideological archenemy, the Soviet Union:

Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totali-
tarian darkness. Pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But
until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of
the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its
eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of
evil in the modern world.6

As these speeches indicate, Reagan was the first Cold War president to fully

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engage media and information strategies relative to the promotion of

national security objectives overseas, in particular, the ideological overthrow
of the Soviet Union. Two months before his Evil Empire Speech in Florida,
the President signed National Security Directive 77 Management of Public
Diplomacy Relative to National Security to establish a Special Planning
Group (SPG). This group included a committee on international infor-
mation to assume the responsibilities of the existing Project Truth Policy
Group, and an international political committee that would coordinate
outreach with foreign policy sectors (military, diplomatic, economic) as well
as domestic sectors (universities, philanthropy, political parties, press) in
order to build up the US Governments capability to promote democracy
furthermore, this committee will initiate plans, programs and strategies
designed to counter totalitarian ideologies and aggressive political action
moves undertaken by the Soviet Union or Soviet surrogates.7 New York Times
columnist William Safire wrote that the creation of the SPG proved that the
role of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in ideological warfare
had shifted from mouthpiece to policy participant.8

DEMOCRATIC PROPAGANDA AND TRUTH

Embedded in the philosophy of American public diplomacy (especially
when linked to national security) is that when the US Government engages
in psychological warfare, government-sponsored broadcasting and media
management, it is with the intention of spreading truth and democracy. In
1950, another American Cold War President Harry S. Truman proposed
a Campaign of Truth to challenge imperialistic communism and to
promote the cause of freedom against the propaganda of slavery.9 Three
decades later, Reagans own propaganda campaign Project Truth was
challenging Cold War communism through CIA-backed financing of anti-
communist insurgency groups across the globe. Project Truth later
renamed Project Democracy was run by ex-CIA agent Walter Raymond
Jr, who was directed by his former boss CIA Director William J. Casey, to
mount a strategic communications strategy against the communist threat
coming from the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and Marxist
rebels in El Salvador.
The Reagan administration was worried that the Soviets were trying to
gain a foothold in Central America, just a days drive from the American
South. President Reagan backed the Contras (from the Spanish term La
Contra, short for movement of the contrarrevolucionarios) and identified them
as freedom fighters and the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers
while the Sandinistas were painted as terrorists.10 Raymond was hand picked
to offer a hands off approach to the propaganda operation, since the CIA
is prohibited from influencing domestic public opinion on foreign policy.
Raymond would later describe his efforts as gluing black hats on the

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Sandinistas and white hats [on the Contras].11 To help the Nicaraguan rebels,
Project Democracy set up an unauthorised Office of Public Diplomacy for
Latin America and the Caribbean in the US State Department. Headed by an
ardent anticommunist Cuban American consultant Otto Reich, the office
engaged in illegal practices, including leaking classified information that
supported the Contras rebel cause as well as preparing news stories that
demonised the Nicaraguan government and idealised the Contras. A team
of psychological warfare specialists was brought in to exploit news media
themes, including spreading false accounts of Sandinista prostitutes being
procured for US reporters covering the Central American conflict and stories
of Sandinista commandants living the high life that was dubbed Sandinista
chic.12 By spring 1986, $100 million in aid to the Contras was approved by
the US Congress and the Iran-Contra scandal would not come to light until
a November report in a Beirut newspaper Al-Shiraa revealed an elaborate
Iranian-arms-for-hostages scheme that financed the Contras efforts.
Project Democracys efforts may have been sidelined by the Iran-Contra
Scandal of 1987, but a formal defence of democracy was in place with the
creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a bipartisan
organisation founded in 1983 in response to Reagans Westminster Speech.
A quarter of a century later, in June 2007, President Bush singled out NED
as an instrument in his administrations fight to end tyranny and promote
democracy. A White House fact sheet notes that the

United States has nearly doubled funding for democracy projects since
2001. The Presidents FY 2008 budget requests nearly $1.5 billion in
funding for Democracy, Governance and Human Rights up from less
than $700 million in 2001. In addition, funding for the National
Endowment for Democracy has more than doubled from $31 million
to $80 million since 2001.13

MANICHEAN DESTINY
The National Endowment for Democracy utilises emotionally and signifi-
cantly meaningful symbolic words like democracy to allow propaganda to
thrive and prosper in a more open society. Democracy is a word so cherished
in American society and culture that it is easily converted into a world view
that is distinctly Manichean, dominated by what Alex Carey called powerful
symbols of the Satanic and the Sacred (darkness and light).14 In the US,
democracy represents all that is sacred, even though its attributes are rarely
detailed or made specific. It is often linked to an evangelical religiosity, not
surprising for the most religious democratic republic in the world. The
Gallup organisation reports that one third (31 per cent) of Americans believe
in the literal interpretation of the Bible and another 47 per cent believe that
the Bible is the inspired word of God.15 Nearly 80 per cent believe that

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God exists, while only 1 per cent is convinced that God does not exist.16
While belief in God and church attendance has dropped off since the 1960s,
the rise of evangelical faith mixed with political and social control and
expression has increased. Though John F. Kennedy promised an anxious
nation that he would vehemently separate his Catholic faith upbringing from
government rule, all the late 20th and early 21st-century American presidents
have openly expressed faith in God, although none more vocally than
George W. Bush (a topic Wilfred McClay discusses in the next section of this
volume).
President George W. Bush emphasises his fundamentalist Christian faith
in God and credits it with having turned his life around at age 40 after years
of alcohol abuse. His faith also directs his foreign policy:

I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George go
and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God
would tell me George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. And I did. And
now, again, I feel Gods words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians
their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle
East. And, by God, Im gonna do it.17

It is not such expressions of Heaven and Hell or Good and Evil which always
dominate propaganda rhetoric but their secular equivalents: The American
Dream, American Way of Life, Spirit of America, Americas Purpose in the
World, and American Values. These God terms are contrasted with Devil
terms like Communism during the Cold War or Islamofascism and Militant
Islam during the War on Terror. Islamofascism is not just counter to
transcendent American values but also threatening to Americas way of life
and freedom.
Less than two weeks after 9/11, President Bush told the nation and a joint
session of Congress why the leading Islamofascist terrorist organisation
al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon:

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right
here in this chamber a democratically elected government. Their
leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms our freedom of
religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and
disagree with each other.18

Any society so oriented toward fear appeals (loss of freedom and a particular
way of life) is more susceptible to powerful propaganda symbols like the
promotion of democracy that serves as a method of social control. Add the
inclination that the US has toward taking action over contemplative reflec-
tion, then all the ingredients are in place for non-questioning of fundamental
premises. These premises include the unexamined truth that democracies

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are good and any methods that enhance democracies are okay as long as the
intended goal is noble.

ADVOCATING AMERICAS STORY

Reagans ideological efforts to advance democracy and counter communist
appeal were shepherded along by his close friend, former Hollywood
producer and bandleader Charles Z. Wick, under whose eight-year tenure
from 19818 the United States Information Agency (USIA) budget
doubled.19 Wick was accused of keeping a blacklist of banned Americans like
well-known liberals Walter Cronkite, Coretta Scott King, David Brinkley and
the more radical MIT professor Noam Chomsky, all considered undesirable
representatives of the US to those seeking to strike a delicate rhetorical
balance between the Evil Empire rhetoric and trust, but verify stance
toward the Soviet Union. The US media, including the venerable New York
Times, made much hullabaloo of the list that Wick initially defended in the
spirit of partisanship but then distanced himself from when legislators who
held the purse strings for his agency made charges of censorship.20
Wick was famous for his Z-grams (from his middle initial) to staff that
expressed his zealous ideas to merge propaganda activities from USIA with
White House directives, including a more confrontational stance in govern-
ment broadcasting against the Soviet Union. He visited more overseas USIA
posts (known as USIS, for United States Information Service) than any
other director, four of which were in the Soviet Union.21 Other than the
brief tenure of acclaimed broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow as USIA
director during the Kennedy years, the propaganda agency would never
have such an activist director whose background was tailor-made for the
marketing and selling of Americas story to the world. Wicks former director
of Worldnet Television, Alvin Snyder, referred to the Reagan-Wick duo
as commander in chief and the supreme commander in the war of
propaganda, who oversaw their share of foot soldiers in the American
propaganda effort, including Snyder. Snyder says of his USIA tenure:

I had no problem with practicing advocacy journalism, because I felt we

were transmitting good propaganda; an exaggerated version of the
truth, perhaps, but still fundamentally the truth. I would later learn that
many of us at the USIA were often duped by government officials from
the intelligence community, the White House, the State Department,
and the Pentagon into transmitting lies Disinformation without
realizing it at the time. We became unknowing warriors of disinfor-
mation, and then we became knowing ones.22

Al Snyder still acknowledges Charles Wick as the most successful open

propagandist in USIAs 50-year history.

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PROPAGANDA, INC.
When Bill Clinton was elected President in November 1992, I was one
month into a two-year Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) programme
at the United States Information Agency. Every day I traversed the entrance
of an independent federal agency whose motto was displayed prominently
on its facade: Telling Americas Story to the World. In the context of
American propaganda, this motto became heavily infused with marketing the
nation in a post-Cold War environment. Clinton had won the presidency on
his its the economy, stupid mantra of his campaign staffers like James
Carville and George Stephanopoulos. The new buzzword globalisation was
entering the psyche of the American public and Clinton utilised the
propaganda of the deed through transforming a former Cold War agency
into a quasi-Commerce Department.
USIA leadership at the time knew that the Agency was on life support. It
had no domestic constituency to lobby on behalf of the Agencys interests,
due in part to antiquated Smith-Mundt legislative prohibitions from the
1940s banning the distribution of overseas propaganda (films, pamphlets
and programmes) to the American people. Global media organisations like
Ted Turners Cable News Network or CNN (founded in 1980), which had
earned legendary status for leading the first television war during the Gulf
War, and the World Wide Web (launched in 1992), electronic technology
instrumental in the first Internet war in the former Yugoslavia, were
eclipsing the ability of government propaganda efforts to manage global
information efforts. USIA elected to get involved where it was needed,
including areas deemed important to the Clinton Doctrine that promoted
the enlargement of economic ties between the US and other countries.
Telling Americas story was now selling Americas story through
promotion of the World Trade Organization and the pro-free trade North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) legislation.23 Foreign policy
crises did elevate foreign propaganda, albeit briefly. In April 1999, Clinton
issued a Presidential Decision Directive (PDD 68) that created an
International Public Information Committee (IPI) to counteract the bad
press the administration was receiving in US military operations in Kosovo
and Haiti. Once again, propaganda was tapped in the service of national
security objectives as stated in the IPI charter: (1) assist US Government
efforts in defeating enemies; (2) identify hostile foreign propaganda and
deception that targets the US; (3) enhance US security, bolster Americas
economic prosperity and to promote democracy abroad; and (4) control
international military information to influence the emotions, motives,
objective reasoning and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments,
groups, and individuals.24
The IPI charter included a caveat addressing possible blowback in foreign
media manipulation. While all IPI activities are overt and address foreign

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audiences only since foreign media reports are frequently reflected in

American news media, it will be impossible to entirely preclude a backwash
of the IPI-generated information into America. Despite efforts to co-
ordinate international propaganda efforts, the face of white propaganda
efforts, the US Information Agency, was shuttered as an independent agency
in autumn 1999. A hoped-for peace dividend and a super bubble on Wall
Street carried the sentiment of the day before the millennium. Looming
beneath the surface was growing anxiety of a clash of civilizations to use
Samuel Huntingtons term (as David Ryan discusses in this section) that
could spoil everything and cause many to wax nostalgic for an official
propaganda agency. A short 24 months later, the US would emerge on a path
with the most sophisticated propaganda machinery in its history.

PROPAGANDA TODAY: MATCHING REALITY TO RHETORIC

The events of Tuesday, 11 September 2001 were the ultimate propaganda of
the deed that caused more immediate loss of life in a series of surprise terror
attacks than in previous US history. Within hours of these attacks, President
Bush declared war on the terrorists responsible for training the suicide-
attackers and those nation states that harboured them. No state had declared
war on the US, but within weeks of 9/11 the first target in the War on Terror,
Afghanistan, was held responsible for harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists
responsible for 9/11. On 4 October 2001, just days before the US attacked
Bin Ladens hideout in Afghanistan, the London-based Economist wrote that

another sort of war is already under way, one in which journalists are
already playing an important role as a conduit or filter, though not
just the scribblers and broadcasters from the West. It is the propaganda
war. That word has come to have a derogatory meaning, of the
dissemination of untruths. In this case, Americas task is (in truth) to
disseminate truths, about its motives, about its intentions, about its
current and past actions in Israel and Iraq, about its views of Islam. For
all that, however, this part of the war promises to be no easier to win
than the many other elements of the effort.25

At the onset of the US-led war on terrorism, both propaganda and public
diplomacy emerged as significant conceptual frames of reference. Public
diplomacy was used to refer to the US efforts to win hearts and minds in the
global War on Terror. In particular, a new public diplomacy czarina was
named in 2001, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public
Affairs Charlotte Beers, who within a year of 9/11 rolled out a much
anticipated campaign known as Shared Values to attempt to communicate
effectively with Muslims overseas.
In the immediate post-9/11 environment, American propaganda had

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taken on a Terrorism, Inc. sheen whereby global public relations and

advertising techniques were being applied to the War on Terror in an effort
to shift US foreign policy from a focus that was self-reflective and problem-
based (Why do they hate us?) to one that was externally oriented (How do
we reposition Brand USA?).
Charlotte Beers was not the first to attempt to reposition Brand America
from a country known for its aggressive military and economic posture to
one known for religious freedom and appreciation of non-Christian religions
like Islam. Her tenure was marred by an expert background in advertising
that was globally suspect. The Shared Values Initiative was perceived as
nothing more than an advertising programme for how happy Muslim
Americans were in America. What were identified by the US as televised
mini-documentaries that ran from October 2002 to January 2003 in parts of
the Middle East and Asia were actually 90-second infomercials. Designed to
illustrate free speech, entrepreneurialism, and other important cultural values
of the US through personal narratives told by actual Muslim Americans, they
were delivered in an environment of a drumbeat for war in Iraq and a
reduction in US credibility in the world. Global public opinion surveys
from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey showed that much of the world was
already quite familiar with how well Muslim Americans were living. The
contentious issue remained specific US policies in the Muslim and Arab
world, which Shared Values, a product of the State Department, chose not
to address.
The Shared Values campaign of winter 20023 was rolled out prominently
during the holy month of Ramadan as a symbol of goodwill and acknowledg-
ment of appreciation of religious differences. Its cultural sensitivity to the
timing of the presentation did not produce any measurable improvement in
how global publics perceived US foreign relations.

PROPAGANDA FOR PEACE

Propaganda is generally used as a pejorative concept in US circles, par-
ticularly given its 20th-century associations with Nazi Germany and Stalinist
Russia. It wasnt until 21st-century events renewed scholarly and public
interest in the topic of propaganda ours versus theirs that many of the
old negative associations were being replaced with a more balanced or at least
neutral use of the term. Robert Gass and John Seiter identify five key
characteristics associated with propaganda:

(1) It has a strong ideological bent and therefore does not serve a
purely information just the facts, maam function;
(2) It is agenda-driven and purposive; propagandists are not trying to
be strictly neutral or objective;
(3) It is institutional in nature; practiced by organized groups like

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corporations or government agencies, religious groups, terrorist cells,

social movements;
(4) It involves mass persuasion campaigns and targets a mass audience
and, therefore, relies on mass media to persuade audience;
(5) Its bad image is based mostly on the ethics involved with mass
persuasion methods used: the end results are primary and ethics merely
secondary.26

The first four characteristics position propaganda very much within the
realm of advertising, public relations, and strategic communication attempts
to influence a target group. The last characteristic is what gives propaganda
its bad name. Propagandists will always favour the side of the sponsor, even
if that position puts the sponsor in the most favourable light vis--vis the
target.
Debates across the political spectrum and inside and outside government
circles have emerged to identify, measure, and critique what both the
government and its surrogates are engaged in to inform, influence, and
engage international publics. The Pentagon, not the State Department, has
emerged as the leading agency in the propaganda wars. Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2006 that

for the most part, the U.S. Government still functions as a five and
dime store in an E-Bay world. Today were engaged in the first war
in history unconventional and irregular as it may be in an era of
E-mails, Blogs, Cell phones, Blackberrys, Instant Messaging, Digital
cameras, a global Internet with no inhibitions, Hand-held video
cameras, Talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, Satellite television.
Theres never been a war fought in this environment before.27

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorised an infor-

mation operations roadmap in 2003 to elevate the status of psychological
operations, or psyops (a term linked to Cold War covert operations), in the
War on Terror.28
While the Smith-Mundt Act prohibits foreign psyops from being operated
on the American people, this prohibition on paper has led to a puzzling
paradox in reality. The Bush administration very successfully used a form of
domestic psyops to market the invasion of Iraq as a front in the global War
on Terror. A majority of Americans polled in August 2003 believed that
Saddam Hussein had taken a personal role in the attacks on 9/11.29 To this
day, some Americans still believe that Saddam had some responsibility in
9/11, but now a majority believes that the war in Iraq was not worth it, even
if part of a global fight against terror. A global military strategy to defeat
terror is viewed increasingly as counter-intuitive to restoring Americas
prestige and reputation in the world as a leading light in human rights and

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democracy promotion. A prominent belief now in the US, widely held

across the globe, is that Saddam Hussein was used as a scapegoat in the War
on Terror when Bin Laden proved elusive, but this domestic conclusion
followed after years of failure to find any missing weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq or any intelligence that directly linked Saddam to
al-Qaeda. It also followed the re-election of President Bush in 2004.
The American President, the countrys chief persuader, chose to use moral
legitimacy to position the superiority of the universal appeal of the American
way of life and American freedom in contrast to the enemies of both led by
followers of militant Islam or violent extremism:

To confront this enemy, America and our allies have taken the offensive
with the full range of our military, intelligence, and law enforcement
capabilities. Yet this battle is more than a military conflict. Like the Cold
War, its an ideological struggle between two fundamentally different
visions of humanity. On one side are the extremists, who promise
paradise, but deliver a life of public beatings and repression of women
and suicide bombings. On the other side are huge numbers of moderate
men and women including millions in the Muslim world who
believe that every human life has dignity and value that no power on
Earth can take away ... The most powerful weapon in the struggle
against extremism is not bullets or bombs it is the universal appeal of
freedom. Freedom is the design of our Maker, and the longing of every
soul. Freedom is the best way to unleash the creativity and economic
potential of a nation. Freedom is the only ordering of a society that
leads to justice. And human freedom is the only way to achieve human
rights.30

So far, the communication gap between these competing sides of humanity

is growing larger, in part because what the US professes it is to the world does
not match what it does. There is no question that terrorism is a threat, but it
is a global threat that impacts all nations. Islam and terrorism are not
integrated at the core as all the worlds major religions have used terrorist
tactics and as Harvard professor Louise Richardson notes, many terrorist
groups have no particular religious identification. She suggests a more
sensible approach to combating terrorism through recognising the three
Rs of terrorism: revenge, renown, and reaction. The terrorist attacks of
11 September achieved the first two, revenge and renown, by making
al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden the Cold War equivalents of the Red Scare.
The US response military overreaction was a terrible blunder. In
declaring war on al-Qaeda, Americans opted to accept al-Qaedas language
of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond
to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and
capabilities.31

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Al-Qaeda now overwhelms the worlds leading superpowers foreign and

military policies. Though al-Qaedas core was taken out in Afghanistan
and its leadership secreted to the hinterlands of Pakistan, politically it has
inspired others to use similar terror tactics and empowered al-Qaedas
reputation in the propaganda wars. Instead of addressing any of the
underlying motives for anger against the US that lead to such violent tactics,
the President stated at the National Endowment for Democracy in 2005: In
fact, were not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed.
Were facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole
nations and intimidate the world. 32 So far the propaganda war is favouring
those radical ideologies advanced by al-Qaeda, despite US efforts to wage a
war of ideas based on moral superiority.
The United States continues to set itself apart as an exemplar of human
freedom but at what cost to global peace and non-violence? On 31 May 2007
the Los Angeles Times published a two-inch column wire report that the US is
among the least peaceful nations in the world, ranking 96th between Yemen
and Iran, according to an index of 121 countries.33 The Global Peace Index
consists of 24 indicators of peace such as involvement in wars, access to
small arms weapons, military expenditure as percentage of gross domestic
product, global arms sales, and rates of incarceration in all the US takes a
leadership role. More peaceful countries show higher levels of democracy,
open and more transparent governments, and higher levels of education and
material well-being. One report states that

while the US possesses many of these characteristics, its ranking was

brought down by its engagement in warfare and external conflict, as
well as high levels of incarceration and homicide. The nations rank
also suffered due to the large share of military expenditure from its
GDP, attributed to its status as one of the worlds military-diplomatic
powers.34

How then do we reconcile the propaganda of American rhetoric with the

reality of the nations or, at least, the governments deeds? Lamis Andoni
proposes a full inventory-taking of the place of the US in the world:

The collision of the hijacked planes with the twin towers was an ugly
metaphor of how violent confrontation has substituted for dialogue
and meaningful communication. Public policy, at least in theory, is
presumed to enable such communication. Yet, unless the United States
reexamines its foreign policies and goals, public policy will have been
reduced to propaganda that marginalizes and dehumanizes the other,
consequently precluding meaningful dialogue and communication.35

A fundamental error of attribution drives much of the propaganda rhetoric

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of the United States, particularly from its government leaders. It is a widely

held belief that non-US citizens who wish to live like Americans think as they
do. In other words, the world wishes to be more like the US than not. With
this comes a driving impetus, the nation carries out propaganda campaigns
that include sponsoring more favourable news stories in Iraqi media sources,
as if amplification of pro-US policies in a conflict region would alone turn
public opinion to its favour. In essence, what results is a sentiment that the
US must resort to undemocratic means (government-sponsored media) in
order to promote its democracy-building agenda in Iraq. This fundamental
attribution error led to the naive display that was the Shared Values Initiative.
It drives much of the Al Hurra and Radio Sawa broadcasting to the Middle
East where pop music and softer news are used as a backdoor means to
support US policies in the region. Global communication is not just about
advocating one side in a debate or delivering the best spun message of the
day to a target market overseas. It is also about what the best of higher
learning purports to be: to understand, to inform and to educate.

NOTES
1. Available at www.ohchr.org/english/law/pdf/ccpr.pdf.
2. As reported in the New York Times, 23 March 1991, A4; quoted by Herbert
Schiller, in Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner and Herbert Schiller (eds),
Triumph of the Image (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), p. 27.
3. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-
11.html.
4. Karen S. Johnson-Cartee and Gary A. Copeland, Strategic Political Communication
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), p. 195.
5. Ronald W. Reagan, Address to British Parliament, 8 June 1982.
6. Reagan address to the Annual Convention of the National Association of
Evangelical, 8 March 1983, http://www.ronaldreagan.com/sp_6.html.
7. Ronald W. Reagan, National Security Directive 77, 14 January 1983.
8. Cited in Wilson P. Dizard Jr, Inventing Public Diplomacy (Boulder, CO: Lynn
Rienner Publishers, 2004), p. 201.
9. Harry Truman, Speech before the annual convention of the American Society
of Newspaper Editors, April 1950.
10. Ronald W. Reagan, Address to the Nation on United States Assistance for the
Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance, 24 June 1986, http://www.reagan.
utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/62486b.htm.
11. Cited in Robert Parry, The Advertising Agency: how the CIA flouted the law
using Madison Avenue techniques to arm-twist for the contras, Washington
Monthly, 24, 11 November 1992.
12. Ibid.
13. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/06/20070605-6.html.
14. Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1997), p. 15.
15. Frank Newport, One-third of Americans believe the Bible is literally true: high

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inverse correlation between education and belief in a literal Bible, Gallup News
Service, 25 May 2007.
16. Albert L. Winseman and D. Min, Americans have little doubt God exists: belief
strong, but not monolithic, Gallup News Service, 13 December 2005.
17. Cited in Ewen MacAskill, George Bush: God told me to end the tyranny in
Iraq: President told Palestinians God also talked to him about Middle East
peace, The Guardian, 7 October 2005.
18. George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People, 20 September 2001.
19. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, p. 200.
20. Editorial, U.S.I.A.s Little List, New York Times, 20 February 1984.
21. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, p. 201.
22. Alvin A. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the
Winning of the Cold War (New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 1995), p. xiv.
23. For a history and critique of the US Information Agency, see Nancy Snow,
Propaganda, Inc.: Selling Americas Culture to the World, 2nd edn (New York, NY:
Seven Stories Press, 2002).
24. William Jefferson Clinton, International Public Information (IPI) Presidential
Decision Directive 68, 30 April 1999.
25. Unsigned Editorial, The Propaganda War, The Economist, 4 October 2001.
26. Robert H. Gass and John S. Seiter, Persuasion, Social Influence and Compliance
Gaining (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), pp. 1112.
27. Donald Rumsfeld, Speech Delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations,
Harold Pratt House, New York City, 17 February 2006.
28. For a background on psyops, see the online report by Major Ed Rouse (retired
U.S. Army) at http://www.psywarrior.com/psyhist.html.
29. Max Rodenbeck, How Terrible is it, The New York Times Review of Books, 53(19),
30 November 2006, 3.
30. George W. Bush, Remarks at Conference on Democracy, Security in Prague,
Czech Republic, 5 June 2007.
31. Rodenbeck, How Terrible is it, p. 6.
32. George W. Bush, Keynote Address at the National Endowment for Democracy,
6 October 2005.
33. America ranks low in Peace Index, Times Wire Reports, Los Angeles Times,
31 May 2007.
34. First Global Peace Index ranks 121 countries: Norway tops list, U.S. comes in
at 96, PR Newswire, Washington, DC, 30 May 2007.
35. Lamis Andoni, Deeds speak louder than Words, The Washington Quarterly,
Spring 2002, 86.

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PART 2
SOCIETY
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7. CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL
CRITICISM

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Alexis de Tocqueville, whose great work Democracy in America (183540)

captured with such intricacy and eloquence the hopes and dreams of the new
Republic just a generation after its founding, defined democracy as a habit
of the heart.1 Despite their important differences and shortcomings, the
founders communal spirit breathed life into the laws, governmental
structures, and social forms of the new nation, thus affecting the social,
cultural, political and intellectual experience of Americans down to the early
21st century. Including, but not reducible to, a particular political system or
set of social arrangements from enfranchisement and representative
government to rights, freedom, and justice the notion of a democratic
republic involved a sensibility, a disposition, or, one might say, a pre-
disposition.
Concerns arise daily from across the political spectrum about how
predisposed Americans remain to democracy. Observers point to a widening
gap between rich and poor unheard of since the Gilded Age, corporate
dominance of political campaigns and the airwaves, low levels of voting
and civic engagement, an ethos of extreme individualism that values self-
gratification over commitments to others, corruption in government and
business, the decline of the family and civil society institutions, a crisis of
morality and civility, and many other symptoms of a society at the breaking
point. What is more, while once reformers might have interpreted these
problems as cause for a renewal of ideals and efforts, many contemporary
thinkers, critics and commentators and politicians raise more funda-
mental questions about the ideals themselves. They ask: are we witnessing
the fall from greatness of this country and its aspirations? The perception of

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political exhaustion is palpable. Some conservatives raise doubts about

democracy itself and even on the political left traditionally the party of the
common person a sense of despair is apparent in the grumblings about
whether an elite might be necessary after all, given the political climate of the
early 21st century.
One cannot help but wonder whether the sense that the nation has
exhausted all possibilities is inextricably linked to the contemporary state of
American intellectual life. As other authors in this volume note, including
Kevin Mattson and Martin Halliwell, the crisis in contemporary intellectual
circles has been widely noted. Are we missing some crucial ingredient a
particular voice or set of voices that might help us face our current crises
and envision new, more promising ways to move on from here?
Russell Jacobys The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
(1987) argued most definitively in the mid-1980s that such was the case. In
this influential book, Jacoby raised a loud alarm over the failure of American
life to yield a generation of writers who had as much intellectual heft and
inclination to attend to issues of broad public concern as the one that had
come of age in the early and mid-20th century. Jacobys book has recently
drawn renewed attention as a flurry of commentators have addressed the
issue of whether we have lost touch with a vital tradition in the intellectual
culture of the United States.

GOLDEN AGE THINKING

Outrage, concern, alarm these can be easily dispatched today, nearly
regardless of the subject, often with charges of nostalgia. Even a hint at what
was valuable about an earlier practice gets summarily dismissed as golden
age thinking. Perceptions of moral or community decline, and other worries
about contemporary life, draw invective by those across the political
spectrum who cannot abide the idea that the current way of American life
may not represent progress. The charge of nostalgia defuses much current
social criticism by making it look the quaint and irrelevant musings of a
curmudgeon.
One of the more thoughtful salvos into the debate over the current state
of social criticism was a July 2004 essay The democratization of cultural
criticism in The Chronicle of Higher Education by the intellectual historian
George Cotkin. While worth taking seriously, his approach risks discounting
the very tradition he celebrates, thus raising some questions about the best-
intentioned defenses of the contemporary scene.
In this essay, which garnered much attention, Cotkin portrays critics of the
state of contemporary intellectual life as standing in a line of true designated
mourners pining for the glory days of criticism.2 Putting aside Wallace
Shawns 1997 play The Desingated Mourner to which the article refers, even the
most finely wrought arguments appear to Cotkin as merely more stock

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American narratives of declension. He calls such arguments misplaced,

self-serving, and historically inaccurate and concludes that they are difficult
to prove.3
Unfortunately, things that are difficult to prove can also be difficult to
disprove. Cotkin takes up this task anyway, mainly by mentioning the names
of prominent writers like Harold Bloom, John Updike and the late Susan
Sontag as well as still extant publications and forums, including Internet
blogs. This approach adds to the examination of the issue at hand by
providing a much-needed reminder that intellectual life continues, albeit
often in the interstices of the mainstream culture. Literary and political
reviews and magazines like The New Republic, The New York Review of Books,
Salmagundi, Commentary, Dissent, First Things, Raritan, Wilson Quarterly and
several others continue in the tradition of serious public discussion and
engaged debate. But their continued contemporary relevance often seems in
spite of the larger culture. The loss of the Partisan Review (19342003), for
instance, an organ of nearly unparalleled significance in the history of the
nations intellectual life, gives one pause, as does the closing of the shorter-
lived Public Interest (19652005). But here Cotkin thinks a longing for the
dynamism and community represented by the Partisan Review editors and
regular contributors simply marks one as hopelessly retrograde. He faults the
illustrious writers and critics gathered around that magazine for failing to
recognise what was new and exciting on the culture horizon in the 1960s and
after, becoming defensive and irrelevant in the face of new trends arising in
the 1960s such as Pop Art and happenings. In place of decline, Cotkin sees
democratisation, with new voices and intellectual energy in abundance.
The most glaring problem with this tack is that it does not engage the
points made by the original arguments Cotkin seeks to refute. Those who
lament the current state of intellectual life have clarified up front that they do
not mean there is no worthwhile intellectual work going on, but rather that
the larger framework of understanding in which the social critics vocation
made sense has nearly vanished. Changes have clearly occurred. The rise of
celebrity culture has altered notions of achievement as the legitimate source
of fame. Such developments in popular culture have tarnished attempts to
appeal to standards of morality and aesthetics as elitist. An orientation
toward self and individual identity lends much writing an overly idiosyncratic
or personal inflection, which often leads to writers sidestepping issues of
public relevance and importance.4 Academic and public policy culture
encourages hyper-specialisation, mystification and an arcane prose style.
Niche marketing the desperate urge to sell anything, anywhere, to anyone
appeals to all possible media consumers, no matter how abhorrent the
sought after content might be. Postmodern relativism, for many, makes
attempts to cultivate taste and judgment appear suspect or impossible.

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CRITICAL CONDITIONS
In The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby wrote that the proposition of a missing
generation [of intellectuals] does not malign individuals.5 Rather what
concerns him is tracing the variety of factors that compromised the vitality
of a public culture that gives public intellectuals a sense of vocation and the
basis of a relationship to readers. Suburbanisation, the expansion of colleges
and universities, and the rise of an obfuscating academic prose style
separated writers from a shared intellectual world rooted in a particular place
and cordoned off intellectuals from the public. Likewise, Sven Birkerts is
concerned with broad developments affecting intellectual life apart from the
achievements of particular writers. In a spring 2004 Bookforum article, Critical
Condition, Birkerts refers to Partisan Review as an emblem of the kind of
intellectual/cultural cohesion that was once possible, but he also detects in
the early 21st century a whole systemic ecology of things, by which I mean
the connections among writers, publishers, and readers, not to mention the
vast influence systems of academia on the one hand and entertainment
media on the other.6
By offering up names of writers who today still uphold ideals and practices
we associate with earlier intellectuals like Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and
Hannah Arendt, Cotkin bypasses these deeper critiques of the changed
structures and tone of intellectual life. One interesting dimension of this
approach is that it must ignore the actual views expressed by some who
function as exemplars in his happy tale. For instance, Harold Bloom offers a
drastically different rendition of the state of things when he writes of the
shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.7
Taking the debate as more than a shell game immediately raises two issues
which it might help us to separate, although they are fused in both Cotkins
essay and those he seeks to refute: intellectual community, institutions and
structures on the one hand, and the tone of criticism or nature and quality of
writing itself on the other. Briefly, it seems worth asking why there is an
outcry about the decline of intellectual community at this time. It is of at least
passing interest that Birkerts, contributor of scores of reviews in prominent
journals over the last 30 years, speaks of many intellectuals terrible vacuum
feeling of not mattering, not connecting, of not being heard and a dis-
piriting sense of isolation.8 Serious intellectuals are practically gasping for
air, living on the margins of academia or edged out altogether, often lacking
engaged editors who are interested in their books for more than potential
profits, falling between the cracks of the pre-programmed ideological
perspectives of various periodicals, or into the chasm between high-stakes
entertainment markets and esoteric special-interest scholarship. What
Birkerts describes as the lack of a sense that there is any gathering place
affects more than writers morale. The absence of a realm in which indepen-
dent standards of judgment might flourish apart from bureaucratic or market

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imperatives influences the whole culture. The university, at its best, has
traditionally provided such an alternative, but intellectual life within
universities has been compromised by the institutional capitulation to
business models, together with pressures for intellectual conformity (one
way or another) in an increasingly polarised political scene. Other such
traditions historically provided a counterweight to outside pressures, from
salons and lyceums to urban bohemias and private households and today
some Internet publications and informal communications spring from this
urge. But the lack of face-to-face contact limits the degree to which the
Internet can stand in for a real community.
Regarding the tone or quality of intellectual production, Cotkin has little
to say. He does finally point to one small blemish on his otherwise rosy
portrait, when he points to the confession of overly personal details by
recent commentators. Cotkin grants that there are excesses aplenty today,
but to see such confessional writing as a slip or an excess is far fetched.9
Interestingly, this propensity for first-person digression is one of the major
points novelist and critic Dale Peck levels at Sven Birkerts. In Critical
Condition Birkerts delivered a piercing critique of the tone of much social
criticism today, drawing an especially compelling contrast between an older
mode of writing about books and ideas the plain style in writing, narrative
confidence, steady assertion of judgment and the newer irony of
postmodernism that makes straightforward declaration seem old-fashioned
and exposed.10 Birkerts weakens what is otherwise a strong case for the style
of the literary moderns when he obsesses about what he thinks is a central
problem of criticism today, the gratuitous insult or snark. For one thing,
as Cotkin rightly points out, the New York Intellectuals of the mid-20th
century were hardly immune from harsh judgment and pointed attack to
say nothing of vicious infighting. For another, Birkerts has in mind Dale
Peck, graciously admitting in the Bookforum piece that he had heard that
Peck had a searing attack on him in the works. Pecks word choice is clearly
excessive but it is surely as much in the service of reading, writing and
thinking as Birkertss argument. As Peck points out in his book Hatchet Jobs
(2004), the most passionate criticism often originates from a basic level of
respect, from the notion that a work is worth taking seriously: Thus my
sharpest barbs and most inhospitable ad hominems tend to be directed at
writers I genuinely admire.11
ENGAGED CRITICISM
While Birkerts explains away open insult in psychological terms (the rage of
not mattering) and economic ones (a desperate bid for attention and thus
sales), it is also important to recall that great criticism comes in many forms
and in the most engaged work passions run high. The loss of the art of
argument, as social critic Christopher Lasch pointed out in The Revolt of the
Elites (1994), means that it is increasingly impossible to disagree and debate.

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Genuine attempts to put forth points of view that differ with the received
orthodoxy or even with our friends in casual conversation can draw
anything from defensiveness and ire to stony silence. We have lost the sense
of argument as something good. While ad hominems and other outright insults
should be ruled out of order in most civil and friendly debates (although such
insults have been common in the culture wars since the early 1990s, as Kevin
Mattson discusses in this volume), and it would be a tremendous boon to
contemporary intellectual exchange to retrieve the lost art of argument, if
forced to choose, Pecks searing assessment of the state of letters in this
country is preferable to nothing at all.
One last matter nearly always falls by the wayside in discussions of the
changed institutions and tone of intellectual culture: content. Here Cotkin
captures something troubling about the elegiac reminiscence its tendency
to cast the problems of intellectual life as inevitable, the result of a
permanent change. On his side though, the dismissal of concern speaks of
a similar inexorability. Both points of view show signs of complacency. On
the one hand, we get a sense of how writers used to gather and write in more
fruitful ways, and on the other, we learn that intellectual life is alive and well.
Neither is a call to action.
We could leave the debate at this point if it really did not matter or if it
only mattered to intellectuals themselves. But if we believe that the work of
social critics has broader public relevance, it becomes clear how pressing are
the issues involved. In the mid-1960s, Philip Rieff spoke of culture as the
system of symbols, held together by a common commitment and faith, that
makes our way of life intelligible to ourselves.12 If intelligibility was ever
needed, it is now. One of the most glaring differences between the Partisan
Review writers and so many contemporary critics is the current tendency to
shy away from the largest questions of politics and meaning. Part of what
made, and still makes, those 20th-century writers so compelling is that the
content of their work was irresistibly interesting and significant, having
ramifications for the understanding of issues beyond any one empirical
setting or individual. What was ultimately most distinctive about them was
not so much how they lived and wrote, but what they said. They are responsible
for taking a bold, dissenting stand against Stalinism before most people were
at all aware of why that was needed. Many of them continued to hold to
principle on other major issues, even when unpopular. This willingness to be
unpopular, to stand out, to be a lone wolf howling at danger, to dissent not
to be contrarian for its own sake but to dissent out of heartfelt conviction
based on observation is the very foundation of genuine intellectual activity.
Intellectual courage is the only thing that can restore credibility to a much-
distrusted vocation. The triumph of advertising and public relations, identity
politics and narcissistic confession to name just a few factors involved
have not only helped erode the art of argument and the publics trust in
writers, but the very language itself.

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The readers, finally, are a crucial part of the story. Public intellectuals
absolutely rely on an interested public. The readership for earlier writers was
comprised of educated individuals across the political spectrum and from
every walk of life, from law and medicine and beyond. The crisis in the
humanities means that college graduates have no longer read anything in
common. Some kind of shared body of knowledge or familiarity with works
and questions is an essential prerequisite for a public intellectual culture.
The increased dominance of the market in all aspects of life has brought
a fragmentation of the reading public. An ethic of individual self-interest
and emotional expression prevails and, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre
demonstrates, this means that the only claim to an arguments validity is
personal inclination.13 No common culture is possible under conditions in
which every statement is taken and meant personally.
Strangely, Cotkin reads a remarkably optimistic message into Wallace
Shawns play, The Designated Mourner (1997), suggesting that it is not all
lamentation, for not all of what has been lost is to be mourned.14 Even
taking Shawns play (adapted for film by the British dramatist David Hare in
1998) completely at face value shows us a terrifying scenario in which a way
of life characterised by intellectual sociability around the household of a
revered literary figure gives way to what appears to be government-
sanctioned violence and terror of such a magnitude that private life as well
as the life of the mind is abolished. The only mitigating source of hope is
to be found at very end of the play. The designated mourner realises that a
whole tribe had vanished: everyone on earth who could read John Donne
was now dead.15 Yet, the designated mourner revels in what is left, from the
light and the flowers to the sky and the breeze. It is an eerie celebration
indeed given what appears to be the total collapse of the social world.
Narratives of declension, yes, have been around since the Puritans. Far
from some kind of dispensable complaint, however, they have offered some
of the most piercing, sustained and heartfelt (one could say loving) critiques
of American ways. Against Cotkin, it could be argued that they are all that has
separated the nation from total collapse so far. Intellectual work matters;
ideas have consequences and live on in culture. In Cotkins terms, they may
be what help us rein in our worst excesses. Rather than calling on us to throw
up our arms in despair, they may be our only source of hope, the sole
indication that our ideals have not died.
Of the many problems faced by the nation, the loss of hope may be its
greatest. It is worth remembering Benjamin Franklins caustic reply to the
question of what kind of government we were to have: A republic, if you
can keep it. Together with their revolutionary ideals, the framers of the
Constitution expressed many reservations, worries and doubts. Their
enthusiasm was tempered by humility and awareness of human limitations.
In their notion of republicanism, self-government entailed active par-
ticipation, virtue and vigilance against corruption and tyranny. Franklin

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went so far in 1787 (just before the signing of the final draft of the US
Constitution) as to warn that the tendency is that the people shall become
so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any
other.16
A PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY
Social critics have played a crucial role thus far in this larger task of keeping
the American Republic. At their best, they tap into the practice of publicly
engaged scholarship in their dedication both to academic excellence and
innovative study and to outward-looking engagement in the public realm.
This interlacing of the high standards of intellectual activity and con-
sideration of matters of broader public concern characterises both the
prodigious contribution of the founding generation and the tradition of the
public intellectual, particularly in the 20th century, including thinkers such as
John Dewey, Walter Lippman, Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, Alfred
Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Hannah Arendt, to name
just a few examples. Several late 20th-century trends, including the tendency
of many academic scholars to address just one small professional subfield,
worked against this tradition, but there are many signs of a resurgence of
interest in the vital connection between scholarship and broader public
questions.17
The migr intellectual Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 that the perplexity
of laws in free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never
what one should do.18 Only by keeping alive the tradition of free and open
inquiry and deep learning, the ideal of the liberal arts education, can we
call on the cultural tradition as a resource to help us discuss, debate and
deliberate over the multitude of issues that we face. The larger question
how we live together, broadly speaking is the question of the public
philosophy. In Democracys Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
(1996), the political philosopher Michael Sandel has written: By public
philosophy, I mean the political theory implicit in our practice, the
assumptions about citizenship and freedom that inform our public life.19
Sandel and others worry that the loss of a sense of the nations underlying
commonalities makes disagreement threatening rather than fruitful. Mary
Ann Glendon, Amitai Etzioni and Jean Bethke Elshtain, among others, have
made a compelling appeal for moving beyond a rights-based ethos that
emphasises individual differences and entitlements to one based on a sense
of common commitments and shared principles.20 Their work is properly
seen as social criticism as well as public philosophy.
The richest works to appear in the last 20 years are those written by critics
whose ideas are not just billed as new and fresh, as per so many jacket cover
blurbs, but are in fact new and fresh. Writers such as Philip Rieff and Wendell
Berry, for instance, have offered sustained examinations of our times that fail
to fall neatly into the polarised, predictable, and simplistic left/right divisions

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that are such a glaring fact of todays political discourse. Perhaps their work
will inspire others to take on the kind of perspective that is at once more
nuanced and more all-embracing than most recent writing about society.
A revived social criticism is not a luxury but a need. Only the trenchant
work of serious intellectuals who devote themselves to appraising our
times in all of their complexity and import has the potential to renew
the discussion of the American public philosophy, resuscitate democratic
politics and public discourse, and retrieve as well as newly formulate the
ethical foundations of the nations common life. It can potentially nurture
independence of mind, classical standards of excellence, interdisciplinary
collaboration, and broad-minded perspectives and become a significant
presence, and even a force, in American intellectual and public life.
Here and there, even with just a small percentage of the ink being spilled,
there is piercing work going on in the early 21st century within and outside
of academe in many fields and on many topics. A vast resurgence of interest
in the Republics founding in particular and the meaning of democracy in
general has surrounded the heated debates around a range of issues, from the
concern over the proper role of the Supreme Court, originalism versus the
notion of a living constitution, the role of religion in the polity, communi-
tarianism versus liberalism to immigration and Americanisation, and many
others. The time is ripe for a renewal of social criticism as many seek a
renewal of the republican principles on which the nation was founded and a
revitalisation of democratic politics toward a sense of common purpose and
dedication to the decent and open society and the common good.
EL-Q
* * *
As one of the earliest and most influential European commentators on
American thought and customs, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote with real
excitement about the prospects of democracy in the new nation. Recent
commentators have tried to rescue the democratic possibilities that
Tocqueville detected both from the threat of postmodern relativism and
increased national security after 9/11. For example, in The American Evasion
of Philosophy (1989), the African American scholar Cornel West traces a
tradition of intellectual thought back to Ralph Waldo Emerson (who wrote
contemporaneously with Tocqueville) in Wests attempt to revive American
public philosophy at a moment of widespread disenchantment with the
traditional image of philosophy as a transcendental mode of enquiry.21 In
the same year that Francis Fukuyama expounded his end of history thesis,
West argued passionately for the need to write history and the subject back
into public discourse; the re-establishment of an Emersonian culture of
creative democracy might be a utopian goal, but West argues that it is one
that should stimulate us to rediscover moral and social value at a time when
public philosophy is in jeopardy.22 West saw himself as writing in the

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American grain, as did the late Richard Rorty who, three years before
September 11, in Achieving Our Country (1998) identified a similar need for the
renewal of public thought as a form of self-reflexive national pride: a
necessary ingredient if the promises of the early Republic are ever to be
fulfilled.23
As Wilfred McClay argues in the next essay in this section, another late-
20th-century thinker, Robert Bellah, revived Tocquevilles phrase habit of
the heart in the mid-1980s to renew moral vitality at the intersection of civic
and religious life. Within the context of post-secular America, McClay
explores both the possibilities and problems of civil religion in the last few
years, at a time when the separate functions of church and state have become
increasingly blurred. These secular trends are nowhere more apparent than
in debates about globalisation, as Howard Brick demonstrates in the third
essay of this section. Brick argues that globalising trends have been on the
rise since the 1970s, but it is only since 9/11 that the threat of globalisation
to national and local customs has been keenly felt. Debates about the
benefits and ills of globalisation shift our perspective on American social
thought onto a world stage, helping us to look beyond the nation state to
broader principles of cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism which cannot
be territorialised. While globalisation may have opened the door to a
postnational world, as both McClay and Brick demonstrate the rise of
nationalism in both its good and bad forms is a defining condition
of early 21st-century life.
The other three essays in this section turn our attention to the place
of science in contemporary American society, particularly debates about
whether science plays too large or too little a role in shaping political policy
and social values. George W. Bushs opposition to the development of stem
cell research, deriving from his Christian pro-life convictions, is explored in
Christopher Thomas Scotts essay on medical science. Scott looks to recent
medical trends in which ethical, scientific and civic threads have become
intricately woven, arguing that the price of halting medical research might be
a huge one. However, the risk that scientific breakthroughs can never be
unlearnt leads us to think about the place of technology as both the bane and
blessing of contemporary American life. In the last two essays in this section,
Carroll Pursell investigates these tensions between technology as an agent of
destruction dramatically illustrated in the multiple aerial attacks on 9/11
and the preserver of life as clean technologies counteract the pollution and
detritus that, as novelist Don DeLillo detected as early as 1984, are the dark
side of consumer consciousness.24 As John Wills elaborates, if there is one
pressing issue which stresses the need for a renewed public philosophy it is
the environment. Global warming is a planetary concern evident in the
devastation of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004. But it
is also a problem in the American grain, with violently erratic weather
conditions across the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico none more so than

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Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 calling both for long-term national

strategies and a series of hard international choices on fossil fuel and carbon
emissions. If American social criticism is under strain in the early 21st
century, this section indicates that in the fields of religion, globalisation,
medicine, technology and the environment are a set of contemporary
concerns that require our serious attention.
MH/CM

NOTES
Parts of this essay initially appeared in the State of American Intellectual Life,
response to George Cotkins The democratization of cultural criticism, H-IDEAS
Virtual Symposium, 289 April 2005.
1. Robert Bellah used Tocquevilles phrase habit of the heart for the title of his
widely read exploration of late 20th-century American values: see Robert N.
Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New
York, NY: Harper and Row, 1985).
2. George Cotkin, The Democratization of Cultural Criticism, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, 50(43), 2 July 2004, B8, http://chronicle.com/free/v50/
i43/43b00801.htm.
3. Ibid.
4. In literary terms, shortly after 9/11, James Woods criticised American writers
for abandoning their historical roots in social commentary. For Woods, what
was lacking in contemporary American writing in 2001 was the grander
ambition of the novel: the recording, extrapolation and diagnosis of social
reality. This tentativeness, an unwillingness to make up what cannot be known
or felt directly, might, suggested Woods, be forced into more combative open
ground by the events of September 11 through the recognition that whatever
the novel gets up to, the culture can always get up to something bigger:
James Wood, Tell me how does it feel?, Guardian Unlimited, 6 October 2001,
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,563868,00.
html.
5. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New
York, NY: Basic Books, 1987), p. 4.
6. Sven Birkerts, Critical Condition. Reading, writing and reviewing an old
schooler looks back, Bookforum, Spring 2004, http://www.bookforum.com/
archive/spr_04/birkerts.html.
7. Harold Bloom, Dumbing down American Readers, Boston Globe, 24 September
2003, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/
2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers/.
8. Birkerts, Critical Condition.
9. Cotkin, The democratization of cultural criticism.
10. Birkerts, Critical Condition.
11. Dale Peck, Hatchet Jobs (New York, NY: The New Press, 2004), p. 219.
12. See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York,
NY: Chatto and Windus, 1966).

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13. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1981) and Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
14. Cotkin,The Democratization of Cultural Criticism.
15. Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner (New York, NY: Dramatists Play Service,
[1996] 2003), p. 99.
16. Benjamin Franklin, On the Federal Constitution, 17 September 1787,
http://www.usconstitution.net/franklin.html.
17. For a discussion of the development of humanities scholarship since World War
II see David Hollinger (ed.), The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World
War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
18. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Schocken, [1951]
2004), p. 467.
19. Michael Sandel, Democracys Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (New
York, NY: Belknap Press, 1996), p. 4.
20. See, for example, Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political
Discourse (New York, NY: Free Press, 1993); Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule:
Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998)
and The Common Good (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Who
Are We? Critical Reflections and Hopeful Possibilities. Politics and Ethical Discourse
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000).
21. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 3.
22. Ibid., p. 239.
23. See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998).
24. Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1984), p. 258.

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8. RELIGION IN POST-SECULAR
AMERICA

Wilfred M. McClay

As with so much else in American society at the outset of the 21st century,
what one thinks about the present and future status of religion in American
life depends a great deal on what interpretive stance or narrative framework
one brings to the subject. Who would have imagined, even two decades ago,
the kinds of debates we would see roiling the post-9/11 world, at a moment
when the immense motivational power of religion has roared back into view,
as potent as a force of nature? At the dawning of the 21st century, the secular
worldview, whose triumph once seemed so inevitable, now seems stalled,
and even to be losing ground, or being superseded. Religion, in forms both
traditional and novel, both quietly civil and wildly revolutionary, seems
resurgent. The dream of a fully secularised public life, a condition that
Richard John Neuhaus memorably labelled as the naked public square,
seems to have lost whatever slender claims it may have had on the American
imagination.1
To provide a full account of the range of reasons for this post-secular
direction in American religious sensibility and commitment would take us far
beyond the concerns of this essay. It should be stated, however, that for
many western European observers the continuing American commitment
to religion is a matter of great perplexity, running counter to so many of
the most powerful secularising trends around the world. Perhaps, as the
American intellectual historian David Hollinger has suggested, this is one
sense in its ongoing commitment to religious belief and practice in which
the United States is unarguably an exceptional nation.2 But certainly one
central cause of the persistence of religion has been the perceived failure
of secularist modernism, specifically its inability to provide an adequate

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framework for the great mass of Americans to lead meaningful, morally

coherent lives.3 It is not just a matter of religions stubborn unwillingness to
go gentle into secularisms good night. Religions new lease of life stems from
the inability of its would-be displacers to fill its shoes.
Of course, merely to mention the events of 9/11 is, for many Americans
and Europeans, to present in the most vivid way possible the reasons to fear
this development, and seek to reverse it. The recent flood of polemical
popular works advocating an exuberant and unapologetic new atheism,
produced by writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and
Sam Harris, certainly are indicative of a counter-current to post-secular
developments.4 The critiques are nothing if not sweeping. Religion, declared
Hitchens, poisons everything. But for all the relative marketing success
of these pro-atheism tracts, they seem to have had only limited influence,
preaching to the already converted while stimulating a whole new generation
of Christian apologetics.5 For better or worse, they do not speak for or to
the outlook of the overwhelming majority of Americans, whose views and
commitments seem, for better or worse, to be far more tangled, ambivalent
and confused.
Indeed, one could make a far stronger case that in America it is secularism,
rather than religion, whose power is ebbing away and that this development
should not be regarded, prima facie, as a bad thing. Religious liberty, after all,
was the very first of the liberties enumerated in the Constitutions Bill of
Rights. Small wonder, then, that religion has responded to the challenge of
secularism with a vigorous defence of its place in life both public and private
a role that, whatever one thinks of it, shows no sign of going away quietly.
The militant secularists appear to have overreached. Atheists have always
had a compelling case to present to the American people when they argue
from the priority of the old Baptist commitment to soul liberty, meaning
individual freedom of conscience, over and against the coercions of any
religious establishment, formal or informal. Freedom from religion in that
sense is widely accepted. But when they take matters further, and insist that
because religion poisons everything its public expression should be
discouraged and ridiculed, if not actively suppressed, then their position
becomes eccentric and marginal, and pushes the mainstream back toward a
more religion-friendly centre.
But that is not all. There is a growing sense that religion may have new
roles to play in the years to come. In this view, it has become an indispensable
force for the upholding of human dignity and moral order in a postmodern
world dominated by voracious state bureaucracies and sprawling trans-
national business corporations, which are neither effectively accountable
to national law nor effectively answerable to well-established codes of
behaviour. In a word, it is a necessary corrective to the dehumanising effects
of technocratic modernity, an avenue of escape from the iron cage. As the
sociologist Jose Casanova argues, modernity runs the risk of being devoured

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by the inflexible, inhuman logic of its own creations, unless it restores a

creative dialogue with the very religious traditions it has so successfully
challenged.6 Perhaps no event in the past quarter-century has given more
credibility to this view than the profound influence of the Roman Catholic
Church in promoting the downfall of Soviet Communism in parts of the
former Soviet empire; and no modern religious leader was more keenly alert
to the public uses of his faith than the late Pope John Paul II.7 But even on
strictly American grounds, there is plentiful evidence that publicly vigorous
religious beliefs and practices have survived all efforts to suppress or
supersede them, and are now in the ascendant.
One can gauge the extent of this shift not only by recourse to Gallup,
Roper and Barna polls but by examining shifts in public discourse. Ever since
the election of Jimmy Carter as President in 1976, the taboos on public
expression of religious sentiments by American political leaders seem to
have been steadily eroding. The signs of desecularisation are amply reflected,
too, in a long list of developments in the realms of law and governance, too
many to rehearse for this occasion. The overwhelming support accorded the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, although it would later
be overturned by the Supreme Court, was highly significant in this regard. So
too was the landmark 1996 welfare-reform legislation during the Clinton
presidency, which includes an option for charitable choice, permitting
the contracting-out of public social-welfare services to openly religious
organisations. As always, a significant proportion of flashpoints have
clustered around issues relating to schooling, where there has been some
levelling of the playing field as regards the competition between religious and
non-religious schools and, as in the current court cases regarding posting
of the Ten Commandments or the sanctioning of student-led prayers at
graduations and football games, there has been movement toward a
reassertion of religious expression in public institutions. Not all these
measures succeeded. But the trend seems unmistakable.
And some things have never changed, even with secularisms impressive
victories in the federal courts and halls of government and academe. Prayers
are still uttered at the commencement of Congressional sessions. Gods
name appears on American currency and in the oaths Americans take in
court. Religion chaplains are still employed by the Congress and the armed
services. The tax-exempt status of religious institutions remains intact.
Avowed belief in God remains astonishingly pervasive, and church and
synagogue attendance rates remain high, at least relative to other Western
countries. Whatever one makes of these phenomena, the point is that the
United States is very far from being an entirely secular country, one sanitised
of any form of public sanction for religion.8

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RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS AFTER 9/11

This does not mean that Americans have come to any kind of agreement
about what forms of public expression they endorse. That fact became clear
in the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when Americans
suddenly found themselves faced with an unexpected choice between
radically different perspectives on the proper place of religion in modern
Western society. The alternative perspectives were not new. But the urgency
with which they were felt, and the intensity with which they were articulated,
were. Coming at a moment when Americans had been gradually rethinking
many settled precedents regarding religion and public life, the 9/11 attacks
seemed to give a sharper edge to the questions being asked.
For many observers, there was only one logical conclusion to be drawn
from these horrifyingly destructive acts, perpetrated by fanatically com-
mitted adherents to a militant and demanding form of Islam: that all
religions, and particularly the great monotheisms, constitute an ever-present
menace to the peace, order and individual liberty of modern Western civil
life. Far from embracing the growing sentiment that the US government
should be willing to grant religion a greater role in public life, such observers
took 9/11 as clear evidence of just how serious a mistake this would be. The
events of 9/11 seemed to confirm the contention that religion per se is
incorrigibly toxic, and that it breeds irrationality, demonisation of others,
irreconcilable division and implacable conflict. If we learned nothing else
from 9/11, in this view, we should at least have relearned the hard lessons
that the West learned in its own bloody religious wars at the dawn of the
modern age. The essential character of the modern West, and its greatest
achievement, is its secularism. To settle for anything less is to invite disaster.
If there still has to be a vestigial presence of religion here and there in the
world, let it be kept private and kept on a short leash. Is not Islamist terror
the ultimate example of a faith-based initiative? How many more examples
are needed?
To be sure, most of those who put forward this position were already
predisposed to do so. They found in 9/11 a pretext for restating settled
views, rather than a catalyst for forming fresh ones. More importantly,
though, theirs was far from being the only response to 9/11, and nowhere
near being the dominant one. Many other Americans had a completely
opposite response, feeling that such a heinous and frighteningly nihilistic act,
so far beyond the usual psychological categories, could only be explained by
resort to an older, pre-secular vocabulary, one that included the numinous
concept of evil. There were earnest post-9/11 efforts, such as the philos-
opher Susan Neimans thoughtful book Evil in Modern Thought (2002), to
appropriate the concept for secular use, independent of its religious roots.9
But such efforts have been largely unconvincing. If 9/11 was taken by some
as an indictment of the religious minds fanatical tendencies, it was taken with

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equal justification by others as an illustration of the secular minds

explanatory poverty. If there was incorrigible fault to be found, in this latter
view, it was less in the structure of the worlds great monotheisms than in
the labyrinth of the human heart a fault about which those religions,
particularly Christianity, have always had a great deal to say.
Even among those willing to invoke the concept of evil in its proper
religious habitat, however, there was disagreement. A handful of promi-
nent evangelical Christian leaders, notably the late Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson, were unable to resist comparing the falling towers of lower
Manhattan to the Biblical towers of Babel, and saw in the 9/11 attacks Gods
judgment upon the moral and social evils of contemporary America, and the
withdrawal of His favour and protection.10 In that sense, they were the mirror
opposites of their foes, seizing on 9/11 as a pretext for re-proclaiming the
toxicity of American secularism. But their view was not typical, and in fact,
was so widely regarded as reckless and ill-considered that, despite their later
apologies, its expression permanently damaged their credibility.
In any event, the more common public reaction in America was some-
thing different from either sides declaration of toxicity. It was something
much simpler and more primal. Millions of Americans went to church,
searching there for reassurance, for comfort, for solace, for strength, and
for some semblance of redemptive meaning in the act of sharing their grief
and confusion in the presence of the transcendent. Both inside and outside
the churches, in windows and on labels, American flags were suddenly
everywhere in evidence, and the strains of God Bless America wafted
through the air, along with other patriotic songs that praised America while
soliciting the blessings of the Deity. There was nothing gimcrack or phony
about this outpouring of sentiment.11 For most Americans, it was unthink-
able that the comforts of their religious heritage and the well-being of their
nation could be in any fundamental way at odds with one another. Hence,
it can be said that 9/11 produced a great revitalisation, for a time, of the
American civil religion, that strain of American civic piety that bestows many
of the elements of religious sentiment and faith upon the fundamental
political and social institutions of the United States.

CHURCH AND STATE

Such a tendency to conflate the realms of the religious and the political has
hardly been unique to American life and history. Indeed, the achievement of
a stable relationship between the two constitutes one of the perennial tasks
of social existence. But in the West, the immense historical influence of
Christianity has had a lot to say about the particular way the two have
interacted over the centuries. From its inception, the Christian faith insisted
upon separating the claims of Caesar and the claims of God recognising
the legitimacy of both, though placing loyalty to God above loyalty to the

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state. The Christian was to be in the world but not of the world, living as
a responsible and law-abiding citizen in the City of Man while reserving
ultimate loyalty for the City of God. Such a separation and hierarchy of
loyalties, which sundered the unity that was characteristic of the classical
world, had the effect of marking out a distinctively secular realm, although at
the same time confining its claims.
For Americans, this dualism has often manifested itself as an even more
decisive commitment to something called the separation of Church and
State, a slogan that is taken by many to be the cardinal principle governing
American politics and religion. Yet the persistence of an energetic American
civil religion, and of other instances in which the boundaries between the two
becomes blurred, suggests that the matter is not nearly so simple. There is,
and always has been, considerable room allowed in the American regime for
the conjunction of religion and state. This is a proposition that a great many
committed religious believers and committed secularists alike find deeply
worrisome and understandably so, since it carries with it the risk that each
of the respective realms can be contaminated by the presence of its opposite
number. But it is unlikely that in America the proper boundaries between
religion and politics will ever be fixed once and for all. Instead, their relation-
ship evolves out of a process of constant negotiation and renegotiation,
responsive to the changing needs of the culture and the moment.12
The US seems to be going through just such a process at present, as
the renegotiation of boundaries continues fast and furious. Consider, for
example, the case that has come before the Supreme Court involving
whether the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance violate the
establishment clause of the First Amendment.13 Or the many similar cases,
most notoriously that of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, involving the display
of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and other public buildings.14
Or the work of Bushs faith-based initiative, which extended an effort
begun in the Clinton administration to end discrimination against religious
organisations that contract to provide public services. Or the contested
status of the institution of marriage, which has always been both a religious
and a civil institution, a process that could lead not only to same-sex
marriages but to the legalisation of polygamous and other non-traditional
marital unions a development that would, in light of the religious pluralism
of America, be of far more than merely theoretical importance. A multitude
of issues are in play, and it is hard to predict what the results will look like
when the dust settles, if it ever does.
Experience suggests, however, that Americans are disposed to steer
between two equally dangerous extremes, which serve as negative landmarks
in their deliberations about the proper relationship between American
religion and the American nation state. First, they are likely to continue to
reject total identification of the two, which would in practice likely mean
the complete domination of one by the other: a theocratic or ideological

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totalitarianism in which religious believers completely subordinated them-

selves to the apparatus of the state, or vice versa. But second, and equally
important, they are not likely to aspire to a total segregation of the two, which
would in practice bring about unhealthy estrangement between and among
Americans, leading in turn to extreme forms of sectarianism, otherworldli-
ness, cultural separatism and gnosticism. Religion and the American nation
are inevitably entwined, and Americans have always been comfortable with
some degree of entwining, and even regard it as a good thing within limits.

THE ROLE OF CIVIL RELIGION

Perhaps we can shed further light on the matter by taking a closer look at
the concept of civil religion. This is admittedly very much a scholars term,
rather than a term arising out of general parlance, and its use seems to be
restricted mainly to anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and
historians, even though it describes a phenomenon that has existed ever since
the first organised human communities. It is also a somewhat imprecise
term, which can mean several things at once. Civil religion is a means of
investing a particular set of political/social arrangements with an aura of the
sacred, thereby elevating their stature and enhancing their stability. It can
serve as a point of reference for the shared faith of the entire state or nation,
focusing on the most generalised and widely held beliefs about the history
and destiny of that state or nation. As such, it provides much of the social
glue that binds together a society through well-established symbols, rituals,
celebrations, places and values, supplying the society with an overarching
sense of spiritual unity a sacred canopy, in Peter Bergers words and
a focal point for shared memories of struggle and survival.15 Although it
borrows extensively from the societys dominant religious tradition, it is not
itself a highly particularised religion, but instead a somewhat more blandly
inclusive one, into whose highly general stories and propositions those of
various faiths can read and project what they wish. It is, so to speak, a highest
common denominator.
The phenomenon of civil religion extends back at least to classical
antiquity, to the local gods of the Greek city-state, the civil theology of Plato,
and to the Romans state cult, which made the emperor into an object of
worship himself. But the term itself appears in recognisably modern form in
Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Social Contract (1762) where it was put forward as
a means of cementing the peoples allegiances to their polity.16 Rousseau
recognised the historic role of religious sentiment in underwriting the
legitimacy of regimes and strengthening citizens bonds to the state and their
willingness to sacrifice for the general good. He deplored the influence of
Christianity because of the way that it divided citizens loyalties, causing them
to neglect worldly concerns in favour of spiritual ones.
Rousseaus solution was the self-conscious replacement of Christianity

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with a purely civil profession of faith. Since it was impossible to have

a cohesive civil government without some kind of religion, and since
Christianity is inherently counterproductive to or subversive of sound civil
government, he thought the state should impose its own custom-tailored
religion, which provides a frankly utilitarian function. That civil religion
should be kept as simple as possible, with only a few, mainly positive beliefs
the existence and power of God, the afterlife and the reality of reward
or punishment and with only one negative dogma: the proscribing of
intolerance. Citizens would still be permitted to have their own peculiar
beliefs regarding metaphysical things, so long as such opinions were of no
worldly consequence.
Needless to say, such a nakedly manipulative approach to the problem of
socially binding beliefs, and such dismissiveness toward the commanding
truths of Christianity and other older faiths, has not attracted universal
approval, in Rousseaus day or since. In the 1950s, the American sociologist
Will Herberg lambasted civil religion as the sanctification of the society and
culture of which it is the reflection, and a spiritual reinforcement of national
self-righteousness.17 But it also had its defenders. One of them, the sociol-
ogist Robert Bellah, put the term on the intellectual map, arguing in an
influential 1967 article called Civil Religion in America that the complaint
of Herberg and others about this generalised and self-celebratory religion of
The American Way of Life was not the whole story.
American civil religion was, Bellah asserted, something far deeper and
more worthy of respectful study: a body of symbols and beliefs that was
not merely a watered down Christianity, but possessed a seriousness and
integrity of its own. Beginning with an examination of references to God in
John F. Kennedys inaugural address, Bellah detected in the American civil-
religious tradition a durable and morally challenging theme: the obligation,
both collective and individual, to carry out Gods will on earth. Hence,
Bellah took a much more positive view of that tradition, though not denying
its potential pitfalls. Against the critics, he argued that the civil religion at its
best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality
as seen in or ... revealed through the experience of the American people. 18
It provides a higher standard against which the nation could be held
accountable.
For Bellah and others, the deepest source of the American civil religion is
the Puritan-derived notion of America as a New Israel, a covenanted people
with a divine mandate to restore the purity of the early apostolic church, and
thus serve as a godly model for the restoration of the world. John Winthrops
famous 1630 sermon to his fellow settlers of Massachusetts Bay, in which he
envisioned their plantation as a city upon a hill, is the locus classicus for this
idea of American chosenness. It was only natural that inhabitants with such
a strong sense of historical destiny would eventually come to see themselves,
and their nation, as collective bearers of a world-historical mission. What is

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more surprising, however, was how persistent that self-understanding of

America as the Redeemer Nation would prove to be, and how easily it
incorporated the secular ideas of the Declaration of Independence and
the language of liberty. The same mix of convictions can be found animating
the rhetoric of the American Revolution, the vision of Manifest Destiny,
the crusading sentiments of antebellum abolitionists, the benevolent im-
perialism of fin-de-sicle apostles of Christian civilisation, and the fervent
idealism of President Woodrow Wilson at the time of World War I.
American civil religion also has its sacred scriptures, such as the Mayflower
Compact, the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettys-
burg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance. It has its narratives of struggle, from
the suffering of George Washingtons troops at Valley Forge to the gritty
valour of John McCain and Jeremiah Denton in Hanoi. It has its special
ceremonial and memorial occasions, such as the Fourth of July, Veterans
Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Martin Luther King Day. It
has its temples, shrines and holy sites, such as the Lincoln Memorial, the
National Mall, the Capitol, the White House, Arlington National Cemetery,
Civil War battlefields, and a great natural landmarks such as the Grand
Canyon. It has its sacred objects, notably the national flag. It has its
organisations, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion,
the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Boy Scouts. And it has its
dramatis personae, chief among them being its military heroes and the long
succession of presidents. Its telltale marks can be found in the frequent
resort to the imagery of the Bible and reference to God and Providence
in speeches and public documents, in the inclusion of Gods name in the
national motto (In God We Trust) on all currency, and in the patriotic songs
found in most church hymnals.
The references to God have always been non-specific, however. Since the
early days of the Republic the nations civil-religious discourse was carefully
calibrated to provide a meeting ground for both the Christian and Enlighten-
ment elements in the thought of the Revolutionary generation. One can see
this non-specificity, for example, in the many references to the Deity in the
presidential oratory of George Washington, which are still cited approvingly
today as civil-religious texts. There is really nothing specifically Christian
about such references, though they are entirely compatible with Christianity.
Civil-religious references to God have evolved and broadened since the
founding from generic Protestant to Protestant-Catholic to Judeo-Christian
to, in much of President George W. Bushs rhetoric, Abrahamic (that is
Muslim-inclusive) and even monotheistic in general. But what has not
changed is the fact that such references still always convey a strong sense
of Gods providence, Gods blessing on the land, and of the Nations
consequent responsibility to serve as a light unto the nations.
Every American president and serious presidential candidate, from Jimmy
Carter to Barack Obama to Ron Paul, has felt obliged to embrace these

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sentiments and expresses them in oratory. Some are more enthusiastic than
others. As political scientist Hugh Heclo has recently demonstrated, Ronald
Reagans oratory was especially rich in such references. But President Bush
surpasses even that standard, and puts forward the civil-religious vision of
America with the greatest energy of any president since Woodrow Wilson.
He echoed those sentiments in 2005 when he declared, speaking to the
National Endowment for Democracy, that

the advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our
country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech
at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle.
We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty
is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and
excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe
that freedom the freedom we prize is not for us alone, it is the right
and the capacity of all mankind ... And as we meet the terror and
violence of the world, we can be certain the Author of freedom is not
indifferent to the fate of freedom.19

In another speech to the Coast Guard Academy, Bush declared that the
advance of human freedom is a calling we follow, precisely because the
self-evident truths of the American founding are true for all.20 Anyone who
thinks this aspect of the American civil religion has died out has simply not
been paying attention.
That does not mean, however, that there is universal assent to such
sentiments. Precisely because George W. Bush has been, arguably, the most
evangelical president in American history, his use of such oratory has both
inspired and discomfited many sometimes even the same people. For
Herbergs general critique of civil religion still has considerable potency. It is
clear, given the force-field of tensions within which civil religion exists, that
it has an inherently problematic relationship to the Christian faith, or to any
other serious religious tradition. At its best, as Bellah noted, it provides a
secular grounding for that faith, one that makes political institutions more
responsive to calls for self-examination and repentance, as well as exertion
and sacrifice for the common good. At its worst, it can provide divine
warrant to unscrupulous and aggrandising acts, cheapen religious language,
turn clergy into robed flunkies of the state and the culture, and bring the
simulacrum of religious awe into places where it doesnt belong.
Indeed, if one were writing this account before 9/11, one might
emphasise the extent to which there has been a growing disenchantment
with American civil religion, particularly in the wake of the Vietnam conflict.
Robert Bellah himself has largely withdrawn from association with the idea,
and even seems to be slightly embarrassed by the fact that his considerable
scholarly reputation is so tied up in this slightly disreputable concept. For

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many serious and committed Christians, there has been a growing sense that
the American civil religion has become a pernicious idol, antithetical to the
practice of their faith. This has been true not only of, say, liberal Christians
who have opposed American foreign policy in the Middle East and Asia and
Latin America or changes in American social-welfare policy, but also of
highly conservative Christians who have grown startlingly disaffected over
their inability to change settled domestic policies on social issues such as
abortion and gay rights. On the religious right as well as the religious left, the
question was being posed, with growing frequency, of the compatibility of
authentic Christianity with the American regime.
Such multipolar disaffection found expression, for example, in the
remarkably wide influence of a 1989 book called Resident Aliens: Life in the
Christian Colony, by theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.21 As
sophisticated liberal Methodists writing in a broadly Anabaptist tradition,
the authors articulated a starkly separationist position that was strikingly
consonant with the current mood of many in the Christian community at the
end of the 1980s. The title came from Philippians 3:20: We are a
commonwealth [or colony] of heaven, and the authors urged that churches
think of themselves as colonies in the midst of an alien culture, whose
members should think of themselves as resident aliens in that culture in
it, but not of it. The culture-war aspects of the Clinton impeachment only
accentuated this sense among conservative Christians that the civil
government had nothing to do with their faith, and the President of the
United States, the high priest of the civil religion, was just another un-
redeemed male, indeed rather worse than the norm. The combination of
Clintons moral lapses with his conspicuous Bible-carrying and church-going
seemed proof positive that the American civil religion was not only false but
genuinely pernicious. With the controversial election of 2000 leaving the
nation so bitterly divided, with the eventual victor seemingly tainted forever,
the prospects for the civil religion could hardly have looked bleaker. Just
before the attacks occurred, Time magazine anointed Stanley Hauerwas as
Americas leading theologian, a potent sign of the state of things, ante bellum.22

RE-EMERGING DIVISIONS
The attacks of 9/11 changed all of that decisively, though how permanently
remains to be seen. The initial reactions of some religious conservatives to
the attacks, seeing them as a divine retribution for national sins, were
reflexive and unguarded expressions of the resident alien sentiment. But
they were out of phase with the resurgent civil religion, and their comments
viewed, fairly or unfairly, as a kind of national desecration.
Indeed, it is remarkable how quickly the ailing civil religion seemed to
spring back to new life, expressed especially through a multitude of
impromptu church services held all over the country, an instinctive melding

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of the religious and the civil. Perhaps the most important of these was the
service held at the National Cathedral on 14 September 2001, observing
a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, where President Bush spoke
to virtually the entire assembled community of Washington officialdom
Congressmen, judges, generals, cabinet officials, and the like and delivered
a speech that touched all the classic civil-religious bases. America had a
responsibility to history to answer these attacks. God is present in these
events, even though His signs are not always the ones we look for and his
purposes not always our own. But our prayers are nevertheless heard, and
He watches over us, and will strengthen us for the mission the lies ahead.
And, directly invoking Pauls Epistle to the Romans, Bush concluded:

As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor
principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor
height nor depth, can separate us from Gods love. May He bless the
souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He always
guide our country. God bless America.23

The speech was widely admired, but not by Robert Bellah. It was, he told
a reporter from the Washington Post, stunningly inappropriate, little more
than a war talk designed to whip up bellicose sentiments. What, he
complained, was it doing there? 24 Such a comment is indicative of the fact
that the civil-religious firmament was not quite so firm as it might have
seemed. Such a dissenting reaction was a clear indication that the initial surge
of civil-religious sentiment would not last, and the confusions and divisions
of the American populace would re-emerge, as they most certainly have.
Even years after the 9/11 attacks a substantial flow of visitors continues
to make pilgrimages to the former World Trade Center site in lower
Manhattan, now known forever as Ground Zero. It remains an intensely
moving experience, even with all the wreckage cleared away and countless
pieces of residual evidence removed or cleaned up. One still encounters open
and intense expressions of grief and rage and incomprehension, in the other
visitors and perhaps in oneself. It has become a shrine, a holy place, and has
thereby become assimilated into the American civil religion. Yet the single
most moving sight, the most powerful and immediately understandable
symbol, are the famous cross-shaped girders that were pulled out of the
wreckage, and have been raised as a cross. What, one wonders, does it mean
to the people viewing it, many of whom, one presumes, are not Christians
and not even Americans? Was it a piece of nationalist kitsch or a sentimental
relic? Or was it a powerful witness to the redemptive value of suffering and
thereby, a signpost pointing toward the core of the Christian story? Or did it
subordinate the Christian story to the American one, and thus traduce its
Christian meaning?
Much of what is powerful about civil religion, and much of what is

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dangerous about it, even at its best, is summed up by the ambiguity of this
image. Yet 9/11 reminded us of something that the best social scientists
already knew that the impulse to create and live inside of a civil religion is
an irrepressible human impulse, and that this is just as true in the age of the
nation state. There can be better or worse ways of approaching it, but the
need for it is not to be denied. As Bellah had always insisted, following in the
Durkheimian sociological tradition, the state itself is something more than
just a secular institution. Because it must sometimes call upon its citizens for
acts of sacrifice and self-overcoming, and not only in acts of war, it must be
able to draw on spiritual resources, deep attachments, reverent memories of
the past, and visions of the direction of history to do its appropriate work.
The trouble, of course, comes when there is no consensus about what
deserves to be remembered, and when the civil religion is no longer
sufficiently coherent and cohesive to command widespread respect. In
the 1940s and 1950s, differences were downplayed, and the American civil
religion saw to it that there was a powerful sense of the nations fundamental
meaning its legitimating myth, as sociologist Robert Wuthnow puts it.
Wuthnow has cogently argued that now the United States has not one but
two legitimating myths in its civil religion: one to which conservatives appeal,
and one to which liberals appeal.25 Religious conservatives are likely to point
to the providential destiny of America, its special place in human history and
the divine order, as validation of traditional American values and institutions.
Religious liberals are more likely to disparage patriotism, and to speak in
broad, universalistic tones of the countrys moral responsibility to use its
wealth to make the world a more just and equitable place; and they point for
justification not only to biblical sources but also to the egalitarian rhetoric
of the Declaration of Independence and the language of universal human
rights.
The emergence of this reflected a profound shift in the larger structure of
American religion. For most of American religious history, the chief lines of
division had been denominational and confessional: Congregationalists
versus Anglicans, new lights versus old lights, Protestants versus Catholics,
and so on. But for Wuthnow, one new factor seemed more important than
all others in explaining the evolution of post-war American religion: the
steady growth of the state. Most of the controversial issues that have roiled
this countrys spiritual politics in the past several decades school prayer and
other forms of public religious expression, abortion, tax-exemption for
religious organisations, the proper provision of social welfare, military
strategy have been responses to actions of the state, and have revolved
around the increasingly problematic boundary between church and state.
Hence, the crucial divisions in American religion are no longer denomi-
national ones; nor are they the divisions among Protestant, Catholic, and
Jewish identities once posited by Herberg. They are essentially political
divisions: conservative versus liberal, or, as James Davison Hunter phrased

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it, orthodox versus progressive.26 Hence the frequently encountered phen-

omenon that, say, a conservative Methodist may feel and have far more
in common with a conservative Catholic, or even a conservative Jew, than
with a liberal of his own denomination. Three decades ago such experiences
were exceedingly rare; now they have become commonplace. In the past,
denominationalism correlated neatly with ethnicity, region and class; today
the crucial distinctions are increasingly political, they exist within and across
denominations, superseding those former points of divisions to an extent
that takes ones breath away.

THE FUTURE OF POST-SECULAR AMERICA

So we return to where we began, to the lack of consensus about the larger
picture of American religion and about what the future may hold. This lack
of confidence is something new. For many years, the regnant assumption
among scholars was that the core achievement of modernity was the triumph
of instrumental rationality and the consequent disenchantment of the world,
which would entail the gradual disappearance of religion as a serious moral
or social agent. Such secularisation was viewed as an inevitable consequence
of the rise of modern science, the higher criticism of sacred texts, the
general decline of institutional authority and the rise of social equality, the
erosion of tradition, and other such acids of modernity.
Hence the dominant way of reading American religious history envisioned
it as a process of steady accommodation, in which the Puritan-Protestant
hegemony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually gave way
to a variety of challengers: first to more Arminian and evangelical forms of
Protestantism, then to an uneasy entente with Roman Catholicism, then to
the Judeo-Christian tradition of the mid-20th century, and finally to a sort
of quasi-Abrahamic theism, and even to the full range of theistic and non-
theistic faiths celebrated in the radically pluralistic ideal of scholars such as
Diana Eck.27 The evolution of religious thought and practice was seen as
a process of opening outward, moving steadily in the direction of more
tolerant, more inclusive and more theologically undogmatic practices.
But of course, as Wuthnows thesis indicates, that has not been what has
happened. Or rather, it has not been all that has happened, for surely some
part of that unfolding vision has in fact been realised. But it has been
accompanied at every step of the way by an equal and opposite development,
well anticipated by Dean Kelleys important 1972 book Why Conservative
Churches are Growing.28 The liberalising mainline Protestant denominations
have suffered catastrophic losses in membership and attendance, while
evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches have grown by leaps
and bounds. Issues such as abortion and homosexuality have galvanised a
set of responses from the state that reinforce the left-right polarisation that
Wuthnow described. Hard as it is to imagine now, it is not ridiculous to

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conjecture that even the social conservatism of Islam may eventually play a
role in fostering and extending this left-right division. Such a development
would not be much more historically surprising than the remarkably easy
alliance of evangelical Protestants and Catholics that makes up much of the
present-day religious right.
Will this division continue and even deepen? That is not clear either.
Further complicating the picture with regard to Christianity, which remains
culturally dominant in America, is the fact that the left-right conflicts have
increasingly spilled into the international arena, where they have become
involved in the deep divisions between the prosperous modernising North
and the impoverished global South. Perhaps the most fascinating example of
this change is the 77-million-member worldwide Anglican Communion, in
which the huge and very conservative churches of Africa and Asia, which
have come to dwarf the relatively tiny churches of the UK, Canada and
United States, are attempting to force a reversal of the Communions drift
toward acceptance of homosexuality and other departures from orthodox
moral and theological norms. Fascinatingly, a sizable number of American
Anglican churches, particularly in the American South, have put themselves
under the authority of African and Asian bishops rather than accept such
changes, an alliance that has no precedent in Anglican church history.29
Whether this surprising development is just a fluke of history or a leading
indicator for some more profound restructuring is impossible to know for
sure. But it is yet another indication of the many reasons one has for being
modest in predicting what will become of American religion in the years
ahead. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the paths taken by religious
faith are not always obvious ones. The only conclusions in which we can be
entirely confident of our extrapolations are conclusions that warn us of the
dangers of extrapolation. The prophets of inevitable secularism were wrong.
So may be the prophets of religious restoration. The rise of militant Islam
was anticipated by almost no one in the West. Neither was the role played
by the then-seemingly moribund and powerless Catholic Church in the
overthrow of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. These developments
should remind us that, whatever some individual Americans may think,
religion remains a powerful force that is not leaving the stage anytime soon.

NOTES
1. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).
2. David Hollinger, Jesus matters in the USA, Modern Intellectual History, 1(1), 2004,
13549.
3. For a secular agnostic perspective on this matter, see Guenther Lewy, Why
America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1996).

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4. See, for example, Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything (New York, NY: Hachette Book Group, 2007); Richard Dawkins, The
God Delusion (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Sam Harris, The End of
Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York, NY: Norton, 2004);
and Christopher Hitchens (ed.), The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the
Nonbeliever (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2007).
5. See, for example, Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism
and the Denial of the Divine (Wheaton, IL: IVP, 2007).
6. Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 339.
7. George Weigel, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of
Communism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003).
8. Among wealthy nations, the United States stands alone in its embrace of
religion, Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 2002, http://pewglobal.org/reports/
display.php?ReportID=167.
9. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
10. See http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/14/Falwell.apology/.
11. A striking exemplification is found in the title essay in Todd Gitlin, The
Intellectuals and the Flag (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005),
especially pp. 12530.
12. For a multipronged exploration of contemporary American religion and politics
see R. M. Griffith and M. McAlister (eds), Special Issue of American Quarterly,
59(3), September 2007.
13. Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, case no. 02-1624.
14. Glassroth v. Moore, 229 F. Supp. 2d 1290, 11th Circuit 2003, http://www.ca11.
uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200216708.pdf.
15. See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New
York, NY: Doubleday, 1967).
16. I have used the 1967 Washington Square Press translation by Lester G. Crocker,
pp. 13647.
17. Will Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New
York, NY: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 25472.
18. Robert Bellah, Civil Religion in America, Daedalus, 96(1), 1967, 121.
19. See http://www.ned.org/events/anniversary/20thAniv-Bush.html.
20. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030521-2.html.
21. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian
Colony (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989).
22. See Time magazine, 17 September 2001.
23. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010914-2.html.
24. War Cry from the Pulpit, Washington Post, 22 September 2001, B09.
25. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World
War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 24457 and The
Struggle for Americas Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1989).
26. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York,
NY: Basic Books, 1992).

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27. Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Has Become the
Worlds Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001).
28. Dean Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion
(New York, NY: Harper, 1972).
29. A useful introduction to this subject is in Philip Jenkinss extremely important
book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2002), especially pp. 191220. Also see Miranda K.
Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2007).

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9. THE US AND GLOBALISATION

Howard Brick

The theme is centuries old and it has risen to consciousness at several points
over the course of US history, but the precise term globalisation crystallised
at the centre of American consciousness in the mid-1990s. Globalisation
concentrated the elements of a discourse that had been thickening since
the late 1970s, forming those elements into a kind of master concept that
has now largely supplanted such predecessors as post-industrial society or
postmodernism. The claims adhering to the term are diverse, and even the
simplest definition is bound to be very partial; basically, it asserts that the
bonds of world connection have grown dramatically in range and depth over
recent decades and that all societies are now, to a large extent, shaped by their
embeddedness in a global context. The events begun on 11 September 2001
brought about a brief pause in globalisation talk, for it was hard to say
whether terror and war ruptured the drift toward world connection or
demonstrated the extent of global reach in startlingly perverse ways. Soon,
however, the discourse of globalisation picked up again, and it has continued
to yield a mounting body of books and articles throughout the first decade
of the new century.
Nonetheless, globalisation and its penumbra of meanings and conno-
tations have taken on a new cast since the election of George W. Bush, the
2001 terrorist attacks, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However varied were
the meanings and evaluations of globalisation, its centre of gravity in the
1990s lay in some proximity to Francis Fukuyamas famous forecast of an
end of history a long-awaited resolution of historic conflicts and a
settlement on the universal applicability of liberal democratic capitalism.1 It
implied a convergence of world societies that, even amidst the somewhat-
unanticipated burst of ethnic, civil and sectional strife in places like the

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Balkans and Rwanda, sustained expectations that general standards of

political morality would come to prevail in world affairs. Moves toward
organising social and political affairs not merely in international but
in supranational terms appeared to have momentum in the late 1990s,
suggesting the diminishing sway of nation states. Yet, by a sharp turn, events
following 2001 have once again brought the state back in. Now, any venture
in global analysis must address somehow the position of the US in the world,
the character of its world leadership, and the question of its rising or falling
fortunes. Today, imperial force, resistance and retaliation, crisis and chaos
appear just as potent as the themes of growing global coherence appeared
merely a decade ago. In other words, not only the trends toward global
integration but also the forces and relations that striate and disturb world
contexts demand attention. The latter call into question neither the reality
nor the salience of a new range of world connections among peoples,
nations, economies and cultures; rather, they cast doubt on whether there is
in fact a single, whole process that guides the making of those connections
and determines their effects.

THE ROOTS OF GLOBALISATION

The proximate sources of globalisation discourse are recognisable in the late
1970s and early 1980s, when social, economic and political thought in the US
started to undergo a wide-ranging reorientation. Increasingly, writers
claimed, issues facing these fields could no longer be adequately understood
within national boundaries; instead, relations stretching across the surface
of the world set the unavoidable frame of analysis. Over two decades, these
convictions mounted and shaped a widespread sensibility, broader than
advocacy of any particular policy or analysis, that accepted globalisation as
the name for a state of affairs deemed profoundly new.
How new was this trend from the 1970s to 1990s? From the early Republic
on, tension between insularity (an exceptionalist claim for utterly unique
national traits, neatly coinciding with the practical avoidance of foreign
entanglements with the great powers of the Old World) and a cosmopolitan
appeal to the world had marked American culture. The growth of American
power, particularly in the wake of 1898, was registered conceptually by more
explicit attention to world contexts, even an eagerness to understand the
American experience in terms more alike than different from that of other
peoples and countries.2 There may be no better expression of this mood than
W. E. B. Du Boiss claim that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the
problem of the color-line a world problem, that is, of which American Jim
Crow was only one instance, a manifestation of that crazy imperialism of the
day which treats people as resources.3 Successive intellectual turns toward
global awareness kept coming: after World War II, political scientist Louis
Hartz claimed the happy arrogance shared by the US and Europe alike was

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bound to end when the big wide world rushes in on them.4 Worldwide
events of 1968 gave a strong impression of simultaneity. Around that time, a
few post-industrial prophets, radical internationalists, and liberal theorists of
global conflict-resolution recognised a new age and a new consciousness
marked by declining powers of the nation state or a new form of social
analysis investigating the nature of world systems. 5 Yet the conditions of the
Cold War and the power of the US in a bipolar world never let thought stray
too far from the primacy of the nation state and the projection of force by
self-interested governments.
A distinctive world turn in thought whereby the press of global contexts
was perceived to cut into the privileged terrain of the national state and
nationally distinct societies commenced after political setbacks to
American power (most notably in Vietnam) and the economic crisis of the
mid-1970s revealed some slippage of American geopolitical and market
standing.6 To be sure, responses to this slippage took varied, contradictory
forms: the Reaganite reply was to reinvigorate the Cold War, hike old-
fashioned patriotism to shrill levels, while also claiming to whittle away at the
strong state. It was the alternative pole the liberal industrial-policy writers
who made some of the most vigorous early globalising arguments: that a
new order of multipolar worldwide competition thrust the hitherto shielded
American economy into a new framework requiring a global consciousness
as well as a reinvigoration of state activism.7 Thus Robert Reich followed up
his diagnosis of the 1970s economic shift, The Next American Frontier (1983),
with his 1991 book, The Work of Nations, which cleverly alluded to Adam
Smiths more famous title while examining the status of labour, the pressure
of world economic imperatives and the enduring need for macroeconomic
management by nation states. The last claim would not have been necessary
had the mounting clamour in favour of a global free market not suggested
that national economic regulation had lost its raison dtre or its efficacy.
Left-wing social and cultural theory also moved toward a broad trans-
national perspective in the 1980s. In a widely discussed 1984 essay, Fredric
Jameson attributed the mood of disorientation and the method of pastiche
in postmodern arts to the rise of a multinational capitalism, whose social
relations, splayed out over the globe, eluded our critical grasp.8 His call for
new cognitive maps to navigate this terrain was one of the early signals of
the world turn in American thought. Similarly, David Harveys The Condition
of Postmodernity (1989) argued that the development of a global capitalism
had forced a quantum leap in space-time compression that paradoxically
both brought the world closer together and made it more elusive than before,
experienced more as fragmentation than wholeness. Harveys emphasis on
the contrariety within space-time compression the odd combination of
organisation and communication, on the one hand, and incoherence on
the other emphasised the intrinsically contradictory character of these
phenomena, which later disputes over globalisation often failed to grasp.9

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Still, the term globalisation and the debates associated with it did not
emerge fully into visibility until the early and mid-1990s. The collapse of the
East European Communist bloc in 1989 and the effective end of the Cold
War with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 celebrated by Fukuyama
as the achievement of a world-historical plateau in universal human reason
and followed in the same spirit by George H. W. Bushs declaration of a new
world order gave a needed boost to the idiom. At the same time came a
heightened emphasis on dramatically reducing tariffs, from the 1986 com-
mencement of the Uruguay round of negotiations widening the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the emblematic organisation
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Three other trends
contributed as well:

(1) The advance of environmentalism from local, regional, and

national concerns with pollution to more world-oriented perspectives,
in quasi-mystical, holistic conceptions of Earth as Gaia, or in the
identification of large-scale issues such as ozone depletion or the
greenhouse effect.
(2) The trend of multiculturalism moving (a) beyond concerns with
intranational racial and ethnic diversity to address experiences of cross-
border, cross-cultural experiences defined in terms of postnational
or hybrid identities, and (b) to embrace indigeneity, a generic stance of
fourth world peoples defending traditional cultures against encroach-
ment by Euro-American industrial and post-industrial ways.
(3) Growth in nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) around the
world, best symbolised by the explosion in the early 1990s of new
national affiliates of the French service organisation Mdecins Sans
Frontires (Doctors without Borders), signalling a new wave of
humanitarianism.

Such diverse moves in thought and practice fostered an image of the world
remade as one.
A quick look at catalogues and bibliographies reveals a sudden spike by the
mid-1990s of publications devoted explicitly to globalisation. One of the
early noted contributions to its discussion (at least in American academic
circles) dwelt not primarily on free trade but on the experience of cultural
hybridity and new, transnational worldviews in Arjun Appadurais Modernity
at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). Still, free trade was bound
to become a keynote of globalisation, especially after President Clintons
endorsement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
drawn up by his predecessors administration, making neoliberalism the
consensus of the American political establishment.10 Meanwhile, popular
counter-movements emerged to challenge the free-trade agenda and the
force of economic integration. Global indigeneity made itself known with

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the counter-commemoration by native peoples of the Americas amidst the

Columbus quincentenary in 1992. In 1995, the campaign slogan Fifty Years
is Enough united groups opposed to the policies of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Founded in 1945 as liberal institutions
intended to secure the international stability of markets and promote
economic development, both agencies were now assailed as a financial
establishment that worsened living conditions in poor countries by imposing
policies of privatisation and social service cuts as preconditions for re-
scheduling onerous Third World debt.
The late 1990s boom, coming after more than 20 years of economic
malaise, was the final ingredient needed to seal the conviction that a new age
had opened in human history: globalisation, pictured either as a triumphant
achievement or pervasive threat.11 Impulses to herald (or decry) the new
age helped obscure the sheer multiplicity of thoughts and experiences that
had contributed to this mounting world-oriented sensibility. Indeed, the
discussion of globalisation from this time onward was to become so troubled
and so confusing because the term meant many different things to different
people. It denoted a programme or policy in terms of free trade or neoliberalism,
which could be promoted or criticised, advanced or reversed. It implied a
process, more or less given, that added to degrees of interconnection among
different societies, states and regions, whereupon one might debate whether
the trend was really new or whether a recent qualitative change in such
developments really altered human experience. And it simply identified a
range of diverse phenomena that highlighted one way or another the per-
spective of the world.12 In 1992, National Public Radio reviewed a new four-
CD set of music entitled Global Meditation, recording the sounds of religious
traditions notably non-Western and indigenous traditions around the
world. Such field recordings had been the province of ethnomusicologists
for over a century.13 Did the intention to bring all these sounds together in
one popular compilation mark an innovation creating a field now to be called
world music? How meaningful would it be to ask whether one was pro
world music or anti world music?

GLOBALISATION BEFORE 9/11

The literature of globalisation blossomed, particularly from 1995 to 1999,
the latter date marking a culmination in some sense. The American boom
and stock-market bubble reached new heights, while the financial upheaval
of the East Asian currency crisis in 19978, however devastating on the
ground, was apparently contained without a catastrophic breakdown in
world trade. The deposition of Indonesias Suharto in its wake offered
further evidence of a global march toward democracy, and the brief Kosovo
war (MarchJune 1999) took shape as an international venture in so-called
humanitarian intervention. The year ended with the vast surprise of massive

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demonstrations in Seattle (29 November2 December), disrupting the

annual World Trade Organization meeting and marking the coming out of
an anti-globalisation movement. By then globalisation was on almost every-
ones lips. The first major academic survey in the field, Global Transformations
by British political theorist David Held and his collaborators, appeared
then too.14
Quickly apparent in the popular literature on the topic, however, was a
keen sense of unease accompanying the announcement of a new age. For the
fundamentals that kicked off the new sensibility the end of the Cold War,
the ascent of a neoliberal consensus, the onset of the 1990s boom had not
in fact issued in an end of history, a plateau of achievement, a new era of
worldwide stability and collaboration. For most of the Western world, the
new Balkan wars signalled an unanticipated phenomenon: the resurgence,
once bipolar geopolitics loosened its grip, of apparently old national and
ethnic conflicts that could be vastly destructive. If, in turn, the Rwandan
genocide of 1994 failed to engage the attention of the West as the Bosnian
War had, it remained a blot on the modern cosmopolitan conscience, a
lesson that excited anxiety and stimulated calls for a greater degree of global
humanitarian vigilance.
Two bellwethers of US globalisation discourse in this first period
Benjamin Barbers Jihad vs. McWorld (1995) and Thomas Friedmans The
Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) were both preoccupied by this paramount
indicator of strain and disproportion in the new order: the tension between
integrative and fissile forces at large in the world. Both chose to frame their
sense of the strain by reference to the Middle East. Barbers decision to name
localist, traditionalist or nationalist movements by allusion to jihad in the
Muslim world was a misleading and unfortunate one. The most salient
example of the forces Barber regarded as intolerant, reactionary and
exclusivist was Bosnian Serb nationalism, and the root of his allusion to
Islam (a reference to Iranian fundamentalism) did not in fact suggest to
Barber that there existed a generic Islamic threat to Westernisation. His main
point was the incompatibility of either of the main trends he saw border-
crossing global business summed up as McWorld and regressive ethnic,
religious and nationalist inwardness with the need for better forms of
genuinely democratic governance in a global world. Barber had long been
an advocate of robust civic engagement and thus a kind participatory
democracy: strong democracy in an earlier formulation. The globetrotting
managements of large corporations, intent on evading economic regulation,
eviscerated true civic politics, and so did the traditionalists who, as they
sought to escape modernist intrusions, could never imagine an inclusive and
diverse political community. There was no question Barber was a strong
state advocate, though he recognised the limited purview of nation states in
dealing with both world business and ethnic rivalries. His was a kind of
classic liberalism, not in the neoliberal vein of deregulated economic

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practices but in the modernising sense that hailed an increasingly cosmo-

politan field of action. The blunt contradiction between the antithetical
forces of business and ethnos called for new innovations in transnational
forms of governance that engaged and protected the free citizen.15
Thomas Friedman, on the other hand, was a tireless advocate of free trade
as a brave new world of economic growth and material prosperity for all,
in the mould of Bill Clintons moderate liberalism. Here was the key theme:
the move away from the strong state of New Deal liberalism, welcomed by
these new Democrats, should not evacuate all the capacities of national
government. A New York Times reporter who had graduated from Middle
East correspondent to foreign-affairs commentator and then to jet-setting
coverage of global business, Friedman remained both an American patriot
insistent on US leadership in world affairs and a self-professed religious man
conscious of the need for traditions that gave individuals a place at home
in the world. He admired the Japan-made Lexus automobile that rich
entrepreneurs in Indias computing industry drove (while discounting all
arguments that free international trade weakened developing economies)
even as he recognised the appeal of home (that is, the olive tree), which
might, but need not, be a divisive localising force. With such economic
confidence and disarming piety, Friedman ended with vague appeals to
balance and proportion between the global and the local, while voicing
no doubt about the beneficence of worldwide economic flows in goods,
services and investment.16
This first phase of globalisation discourse raised the question of what
place and function the national state had in an emerging order of global scale.
The more conservative American policy-makers advocating free trade never
doubted that economic deregulation fit perfectly well with assertive US
power on a world plane, just as everyone knew in the nineteenth century
that free trade was the policy of the dominant force, Britain. Meanwhile,
American liberals, who were eager to maintain some kind of active
government, presented themselves as far-sighted modernisers open to the
world at large. When pressed, the liberals were ready to accommodate new
initiatives in multilateral international institutions, but they were no more
eager to see the decline of the nation state than their partisan opponents.
Nonetheless, the new global discourse had come to contemplate just that,
whether in fear (as when critics of laissez-faire and free trade claimed these
trends dismantled the civic obligations of national regulatory regimes) or in
anticipation (as exponents of the new humanitarianism argued that
traditional definitions of national sovereignty ought to give way before a
growing cosmopolitan consciousness of human rights). To be a citizen of
the world the old ideal of universal human ethics, perpetual peace and
world federalism stirred a measure of idealism among a wing of American
intellectuals, especially those who considered themselves most open to
European trends, manifested in the NGO image of Mdecins Sans

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Frontires and in the steady moves toward transnational organisation in the

European Union.
Globalisation was to become a hot issue in more ways than one. Insofar
as free-trade advocates adopted the term as a flag for their neoliberal
assumptions, the word named a programme that could be debated as its
consequences were deemed beneficial or injurious. As part of a broad world
turn in consciousness, however, globalisation always suggested something
more than those specific policies. Perhaps it said too much and thus too little,
for while it might have indicated merely the appearance of any particular
phenomenon on a world scale (for example, the globalisation of AIDS),
turning it into a self-standing substantive noun globalisation conceived as
a process working on unidentified objects skirted hard questions of what
exactly had changed and precisely which causal elements explained the
change.17 Nevertheless, theorists went to work trying to determine whether
or not some generic heightening of world-spanning relations, interactions,
exchanges and resemblances had in fact recently emerged, either as a wholly
new stage of development or a qualitatively new step forward in long-term
changes that now reached a critical stage. David Held and his collaborators
summed up the debate as one between hyperglobalizers who insisted
that the world frame of social, economic, political and cultural relations
had entirely eclipsed prior divisions, particularly of the national sort, and
sceptics who denied that any profoundly new trend had ruptured prior
practices and the conduct of affairs.18 For the latter, the current keen
enthusiasm (or anxiety) amounted to globaloney.19 The sceptics had a
number of arguments to mobilise, including the claim that trends toward
integration had been growing steadily rather than by sudden rupture, that old
and resilient modes of local, regional and national difference showed no near
prospect of withering away, or that older concepts for grasping worldwide
ties such as capitalism, modernisation, imperialism or cultural diffusion
worked just as well if not better to capture events.20
These analytical disputes seemed tame compared to the public uproar that
hit the headlines in Seattle and stayed there as large street protests at the sites
of international economic and diplomatic meetings continued to mount until
the Genoa G-8 summit in summer 2001. These unwieldy demonstrations,
lacking clear steering committees, platforms or lists of demands, befuddled
most observers. Newspapers assumed the dissenters distaste for global-
isation (in this context, usually taken to mean neoliberalism and corporate
leadership of international exchange and investment) implied a preference
for old-fashioned nationalism and protectionism, as when American steel-
workers marched to save their jobs. The same could not be said about
the world-minded environmentalists who campaigned against maritime
practices endangering sea turtles. Strident defenders of neoliberalism
responded simply by denouncing both sorts, steelworkers and friends of sea
turtles, as Luddites, backward-looking opponents of economic growth and

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modernisation. Very shortly, however, a respectable critique emerged as

former World Bank officer Joseph Stiglitz penned a sharp rejoinder to those
IMF programmes that demanded fiscal austerity and financial deregulation
in all its recipient countries, under the title Globalization and Its Discontents
(2002).21 Now the issue was rendered legitimately debatable.
About the same time, hyperglobaliser discourse received a shot in the arm
from an unlikely source: a book published to much acclaim in 2000 called
Empire, written in an idiosyncratic Marxist and postmodern vein by the
imprisoned Italian revolutionary Antonio Negri and his young American
colleague, comparative literature professor Michael Hardt. The title referred
to a new kind of sovereignty, beyond nation state and old-style imperialist
power, that had begun to show itself in a distended and inchoate form of
supranational authority. Taking their distance from anti-globalisation forces
in the streets who may have favoured the virtues of small communities and
traditional cultures, Hardt and Negri seemed almost to welcome the new
order. Yet they regarded this peculiarly amorphous and decentred form of
world power as the ultimate postnational form of hierarchical government,
doomed to face an equally amorphous and decentred popular revolt Hardt
and Negri identified with the Multitude. There stood an increasingly
mobile, variegated and plastic body of the worlds peoples whose power was
evident in transnational labour migrations and bold new forms of com-
munication and empathy; they possessed the capacity to create a genuinely
world-spanning, post-industrial communism of popular and stateless self-
government. In a new smooth-surfaced world of fluid interactions, the
struggle between traditional sovereignty and communal self-rule became
acute.22

GLOBALISATION IN THE NEW CENTURY

Suddenly, however, the attacks on US targets by al-Qaeda operatives in the
fall of 2001 changed a great deal. Among other things, the wave of anti-
globalisation protests more or less abruptly ended. The grand violence of
taking down skyscrapers made publics nervous about even the traffic
disruptions and petty property damage wrought by Seattle and Genoa
protesters; at least, the current anxiety gave governments a pretext for
cracking down on street crowds. Of course, the 9/11 events could be
another sign of a postnational world: the attackers were stateless terrorists
whose animus appeared aimed broadly at the global system. A few voices
held on to cosmopolitan, humanitarian and supranational principles of the
late 1990s in arguing that terrorism must be addressed by some sort of world
police force and judiciary, an endeavour to be understood as crime-fighting
instead of President Bushs War on Terror. They carried little weight.
Pundits, most notably Thomas Friedman, rushed to declare the onset of
World War III, portrayed as a blunt conflict between modernity and fanatical

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wreckers, or as the conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington had

earlier called it, a clash of civilizations between the West and a medieval
Islam.23 Yet the most evident blow struck by al-Qaeda was to the pre-
eminence of globalisation as such, not only because terror became an issue
more pressing than the terms of international trade, but also because the War
on Terror (even if it were viewed as a supranational civilisational struggle)
brought the state back into the frame. National security, national powers of
military defence and offence, tightened borders, suspicion of foreigners, and
new modes of surveillance and control achieved a renewed, nearly absolute
priority in public discourse. That the events coincided with the bursting of
the 1990s economic bubble and emboldened the Bush administration in its
disinclination to take part in international multilateral agreements, meant
that globalisation had to be rethought all over again.
Much of the world, not to speak of American citizens, accepted the US
definition of national defence as justification for an attack on the al-Qaeda-
allied Taliban government of Afghanistan. Yet the rapid slide from that
venture to the US invasion of Iraq, notwithstanding loud worldwide oppo-
sition, reinforced the rapid shift in public discourse away from prospects of
building one world toward attempts at understanding the meaning and scope
of US coercive power. By 2003 and 2004, a good deal of scholarship turned
to address the history of American foreign relations and the US projection
of force. Was the new Bush unilateralist doctrine of pre-emptive war an
epoch-making break in American foreign relations, or was it consistent with
practices since the inception of the Cold War of wielding preponderant
power on the world stage, with or without the consent and support of
allies? 24 Was promotion of democracy a valid exercise of the humanitarian
intervention only yesterday legitimated by the Kosovo War or had disregard
for sovereignty taken a dangerous new turn? What aspects of the current
crisis had been established by the practices of old empires the Ottomans
and British and were American practices understandable as imperial
themselves?
Not a few proponents of the war made themselves known as advocates of
imperial power, which cast a new world order of global governance in the
shade unless it was understood that the great empire was the legitimate face
of global governance. Critics, of course, complained that US national
arrogance as global policeman had refurbished old imperialist projects with
a new degree of recklessness or revealed an unexampled form of single-
power hegemony. In any case, the globalisation debate had shifted radically.
By the time Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published their anticipated
sequel to Empire, the counterpart volume focused not on the ultimate system
of hierarchical sovereignty but on the forces that emerged as its popular
reflection and antithesis, Multitude (2004), the issue of concerted violence had
risen to prominence. The authors acknowledged that big government is
back and their prescription for a popular struggle against war had a clearly

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defined target in a particular state, namely the US engaged in an endless

avenging of 9/11.25
The collapse of the stock market bubble and economic slump that
followed closely on the heels of 9/11 led to two years of declines in world
trade and investment, compounding the sense that the globalising tide was
running out.26 Nonetheless, after a breather (and an economic rebound in
world trade and investment by 2004), the globalisation discourse resumed in
robust fashion. Whatever names are applied, it is clear that many forms of
global economic interaction have shown dramatic growth since the 1980s,
indicated by the dispersion of industrial production; the enormous volume
of money channelled around the world in investment and currency
exchanges; the proportion of economies devoted to manufacturing and
export trade in those developing countries that have experienced growth;
the vast extension across the world of chain merchandisers such as
McDonalds in just the past fifteen years; the logistics revolution that has
made far-flung manufacturing facilities and fleets of container ships into
highly rationalised global supply chains feeding Wal-Mart and other chain
retailers; and the speed and scope of communications that facilitate the
movement of money, goods, business information and services. One scholar
in the field of global studies, Manfred Steger, now claims the breach between
hyperglobalizers and sceptics has been overcome in common recognition
of globalisations reality, a process crossing boundaries and making com-
munication and exchange much more fluid. That is surely going too far;
sceptics continue to argue, at a minimum, about whether particular
transnational phenomena indeed add up to genuinely global formulas having
some degree of integral unity. Yet the discourse has indeed developed apace.
Radical critics of neoliberalism, for the most part, no longer describe
themselves as anti-globalisation; by and large they have adopted different
locutions, such as the anti-corporate globalisation movement, affirming
their attempt to locate alternative principles of global organisation and
development, signalled by the annual World Social Forum, usually convened
in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
At the same time, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman returned
in 2005 with a new instalment in his world economic reportage, entitled The
World is Flat: a Brief History of the 21st Century. He claimed to have discovered
that while I was sleeping (a coy reference to his preoccupation with World
War III, which ended in the disgrace of a messy, prolonged US occupation
of Iraq that he repudiated in summer 2006), globalisation had taken a new
leap forward. The epoch of Globalization 3.0 had begun, in which fibre-
optic communication channels and software for shared projects established
a new platform for work and innovation that was genuinely dispersed across
multiple sites around the globe.27 As software development and call centres
boomed in Bangalore, India, Friedman trumpeted the confidence of post-
colonial entrepreneurs convinced that the field of competition in produc-

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tion, exchange and innovation had been radically levelled or flattened. Now
the whole world was engaged in mutual interaction, and the speed of change
and demand for adaptability left no secluded space; primarily, the job of
governments was to prepare their citizens to make the most of opportunities
for personal advancement and leave no one outside the private race for
wealth. In Friedmans view, steeling the competitive individual for the
unending race (and hence perpetual insecurity) appeared as a profoundly
liberating move toward a world of steady economic progress. The flattening
of the world was a thesis much like the Hardt and Negri claim that the Earth
had become smooth-surfaced. For them, the claim seemed to mean that no
non-capitalist sectors remained unincorporated in the world market, but in
their own way, they too dwelled in the romance of the whole world imagined
as a grand post-industrial idyll. Obscured by this image is the practical matter
of how industrial operations have spread to far-flung locations, whether
Bangladeshi ship-breaking yards or low-wage (and low-tech) Chinese
electrical appliance assembly plants, leaving behind deadly swaths of dirty
work and refuse, and belying the portrait of ever-widening circles of qualified
workers in Web-based services.28
Some of the current debate remains focused on the virtues of reduced
trade barriers and estimating the aggregate statistics of economic growth as
evidence of progress in reducing poverty. Jagdish M. Bhagwati, a colleague
of Joseph Stiglitz in Columbia Universitys Economics department and
clearly a humane man, wrote In Defense of Globalization (2004) as if the key
question is: are you for or against it? 29 No matter that yet another Columbia
professor, Thomas Pogge, could easily document the appalling rise of global
inequality over centuries and with no sign of abating: an ever-growing gap
between the worlds richest and poorest that shames any simple defence of
globalised modernity.30 Meanwhile, the sense that globalising developments
are not merely subject to opposed assessments but carry within themselves
conflicting meanings is lost on all too many observers. The popular left-wing
Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, an early supporter of the anti-globalisation
demonstrators at the turn of the millennium, has captured this aspect of its
character well when she notes simply that the reduction of tariff walls
dividing nations has been often allied with the ongoing privatisation of
public resources that erects new fences between the rich and the poor.31
The best scholarship regarding globalisation has indeed reached a new
level of sophistication, recognising that not only is a simple yea or nay
response infeasible but also that the phenomena of global reach are not all
one. Multi-scalarity is the term some observers use to capture this theme:
that is, that in different places and different endeavours, social practices
unfold on a local, regional, national or world scale; that these varied contexts
overlap with each other, yielding a range of cumulative or contradictory
effects. The most successful figure in this vein is the University of Chicago
sociologist Saskia Sassen, who cogently argues that new world-spanning

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processes have indeed emerged in recent decades to mark a qualitative

change in social affairs, while those processes intersect with, and cannot be
put into effect without, resources and commitments made at the national
level. Thus it is far from clear that the ascendance of a new order necessarily
means the end of the old order.32 Once this kind of complexity comes into
view, it becomes evident that the surface of the world as a social field is far
from smooth-surfaced or flat but instead profoundly uneven, and as a
result a range of globalising tendencies do not necessarily assume the shape
of a single or holistic process. Indeed, some of the best new work in the
field surrenders generalisations about globalisation and settles for the
more modest and unfinished notion of ubiquitous global connection. Thus
anthropologist Anna Tsing has written an extraordinary ethnography of
foraging peoples in the Kilamantan region of southern Borneo, who are
locked in struggle with foreign and Indonesian investors intent on plun-
dering their forests. They are aided by a group of Jakarta-based nature lovers
whose cosmopolitan environmentalism is equally alien to the locals tra-
ditionalism. In such awkward encounters of global connection the
watchword for Tsing is friction.33
This simple word insists that profound degrees of unevenness, inequality
and conflict are unlikely to depart the field of global relations very soon. All
the familiar issues remain painfully present on the global terrain: the vying
for hegemony on the world stage, the persistence of economic competition
and its geopolitical echoes (including US anxiety over the rise of China),
yawning gaps of wealth that have consigned much of sub-Saharan Africa
globalising trends notwithstanding to the status of forgotten and receding
economic wastes.34 Devising a viable world programme for the achievement
of peace, justice and shared prosperity will remain a daunting task. In this
pursuit, the inadequacy of the modern nation state too small to address
problems that cross borders, too large to satisfy popular demands for cultural
belonging and political self-determination will remain as evident as it has
been to far-sighted analysts for over a century.35 Perhaps the theme of
globalisation, measuring the acceleration of trends that both integrate and
fracture experiences in the world, reminds us that the demand for a world
programme of radical change seeking peace, justice and prosperity remains
inescapable. But any reification of globalisation as a single, coherent and
internally uniform process, bringing the world inexorably together, is never
likely to help much in fashioning such a programme or in realising it.

NOTES
1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?, National Interest, 16, Summer 1989,
318.
2. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: Americas Place in World History (New
York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006), pp. 1113.

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3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: NAL, 1969), pp. xi, 69.
4. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1955), p. 27.
5. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: Americas Role in the Technetronic Era
(New York, NY: Viking Press, 1970), pp. 38; George Modelski, Principles of
World Politics (New York, NY: Free Press, 1972); Immanuel Wallerstein, The
Modern World-System (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1974).
6. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist
Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 19452005 (London: Verso, 2006).
7. See Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic
Change (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1980); Robert Reich, The Next American
Frontier (New York, NY: Penguin, 1983); Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Solution:
Building a World-Class American Economy (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985);
Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
(New York, NY: Vintage, 1991).
8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, New
Left Review, 146, JulyAugust 1984, 5392.
9. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
10. Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the US Gained and Wielded Global
Dominance (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp.
28992.
11. See Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy
(London: Verso, 2002).
12. I borrow the phrase from that hallmark of the initial world turn circa 1980,
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th18th Century, vol. 3: The
Perspective of the World, trans. Sin Reynolds (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1984).
13. See Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
14. See David Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
15. See Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York, NY: Times Books, 1995).
16. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, rev. edn (New York, NY: Anchor
Books, [1999] 2000), pp. 433, 46873.
17. See Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory: Polemical Essays (London:
Verso, 2000).
18. Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 37.
19. See Michael Veseth, Globaloney: Unraveling the Myths of Globalization (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
20. Grahame Thompson, The Limits to Globalization: Questions for Held and
Wolf , in Anthony Barnett et al. (eds), Debating Globalization (Cambridge: Polity,
2005), pp. 528. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), pp.
4979.
21. See also Dani Rodriks, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, DC:
Institute for International Economics, 1997).
22. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000).

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23. See Thomas L. Friedman, World War III, New York Times, 13 September 2001.
24. See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman
Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992)
and Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the US Gained and Wielded
Global Dominance (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
25. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004), pp. 1767.
26. David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds), Globalization Theory: Approaches and
Controversies (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 3.
27. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,
rev. edn (New York, NY: Picador, [2005] 2007), p. 9.
28. See the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky in the film
Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada, 2006).
29. See Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004).
30. See Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities
and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
31. Naomi Klein, Fences of enclosure, windows of possibility, in David
Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor (eds), Writing the World: On Globalization
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 195200.
32. See Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
33. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
34. See John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great-Power Politics (New York, NY:
Norton, 2001).
35. This problem of scale has been noted by 20th-century writers as diverse as Leon
Trotsky and Daniel Bell.

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10. THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE

Christopher Thomas Scott

Ailing President George W. Bush to undergo stem

cell therapy in London
Daughter Jenna donates cells in hopes of curing
his deadly disease

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS SCOTT

London Correspondent, World Press International
August 9, 2016

British authorities, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair, greeted a

gravely ill George W. Bush, aged 70, as he arrived on a hospital gurney to
a subdued gathering at Heathrow International Airport. Bush suffers from
Guillain-Barr (ghee-yan bah-ray) Syndrome (GBS), an immune system
disorder that mercilessly attacks the bodys nervous system.1 In its severe
form, it causes paralysis of the legs, arms, breathing muscles and face. GBS
affects thousands of Americans every year. In acute cases such as Mr.
Bushs, the pulmonary complications can be deadly.
Bushs sickness came on suddenly after suffering a bout of u at his
ranch in Crawford, Texas. As his condition worsened, family members
consulted with specialists at Washingtons newly rebuilt Walter Reed
Medical Center. Within hours, he was rushed to London on a specially
equipped plane staffed with medical personnel. He entered the prestigious
Kings College Stem Cell Therapy Institute, where treatments for auto-
immune diseases such as type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and GBS
show great promise.

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A Grim Anniversary
The news comes exactly fteen years after Bushs controversial proclam-
ations on embryonic stem cell research. From his Texas ranch on 9 August
2001, he announced that from that day forward, not a single dollar from the
$28 billion budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) could be used
to make new embryonic stem cell lines (some funding was still possible
for research with a handful of pre-existing embryonic cell lines). His pro-
nouncement prompted outrage from scientists, citizens, doctors and
patients, who objected to a policy based on the beliefs of a powerful
political minority. Advocates stepped into the breach, supporting a hand-
ful of private and state-funded programmes, including Californias
multibillion-dollar bond measure for embryonic stem cell research, which
awarded its rst grants in 2007. Congress scrambled to write, and then
successfully voted to enact laws to overturn his policy.
But the legislative efforts were in vain. In 2006, Bush scuppered the
rst Congressional action his rst veto ever. In conservative quarters, his
open religious views and uncompromising moral certitude prompted other
political gambits, including the passage of the Embryo Protection Act,
authored by then-senator Sam Brownback, a religious conservative. Under
the sweeping provisions of the Act, any American scientist, clinician or
patient found using stem cells made from unwanted, two-day-old frozen
embryos obtained from in vitro fertilisation (IFV) clinics is subject to
criminal penalties of $1 million and ten years in prison.2
The result of the embryo legislation was swift and immediate. Senior
biomedical stem cell researchers abandoned their laboratories. Young
university scientists, who use government funds to establish their research
programmes, chose other careers. A chill descended on American capital
markets, which rely on steady and unencumbered transfer of technology
and talent from academic and non-prot institutions into the for-prot
sector. A new term entered the investment lexicon: founder ight.
American inventiveness, long a trademark of NIH investment in frontier
medicine, began to slow. Countries such as England, Norway, Israel,
Australia, China and Singapore stepped into the breach, developing novel
therapies to benet their citizens. The result: an epidemic of offshore
interventions as sick Americans travelled abroad for embryonic stem cell
treatment, risking imprisonment once they returned home.

A Bitter Irony
The therapy sought by Bush began its journey in the United States.
Researchers announced in 2002 that they could cure mice mimicking
human forms of autoimmune disease using embryonic stem cells.3 Fine-
tuning the treatment came thanks to a second type of laboratory mouse with
a brain partially comprised of diseased human neurons. Thousands of drug

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candidates were screened in these animals. One of these compounds will be

administered to Mr. Bush.
Use of the special mice, called neural chimeras, is also illegal in the US.
After they were rst developed in California, Bush stated in his 2006 State
of the Union address: Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the
most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms,
creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal
hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Brownbacks
embryo protection act also outlaws neural chimeras.4 As a result, the
valuable rodents were smuggled to Singapore, where they are used to
discover drugs for a wide range of dementias, including Parkinsons and
Alzheimers.

A DNA Donor: Dont Leave Home Without One

Bushs treatment is becoming standard care for Europeans but is virtually
unknown in America. Clinicians will begin by using a technique called
nuclear transfer also known as therapeutic cloning. Using a very ne
glass needle, the nucleus containing genetic material or DNA is gently
suctioned from a skin cell donated by Bushs daughter, Jenna. The nucleus
is transferred into a human egg stripped of its DNA. A small pulse of
electricity prompts the egg to divide. After a few days, a clump of cells
from the inside of the egg are removed and put into a plastic dish where
they begin to multiply, forming an immortal line of embryonic stem cells.
The cells made from his daughters DNA, while not genetically iden-
tical, must be used because the elder Bushs cells are defective. Doctors
rst will attempt to x his faulty immune system by replacing his
rampaging white blood cells with healthy, specialised stem cells made from
the Jenna line. The procedure involves a mild dose of chemotherapy and
drugs to prevent rejection of the new cells. Once he has stabilised, a
different chemical cocktail will induce the embryonic line to produce a
fresh supply of neural stem cells. They will be injected into his brain to
replace motor neurons damaged by the disease. Drugs discovered using the
outlawed chimeric mice will stabilise Bush while he recovers. Thanks to
the new technologies, thousands of patients suffering from autoimmune
disease now lead vastly improved lives.

Banishment
News of Bushs sickness and treatment sent shock waves through
Washington. Religious conservative Pat Robertson, the keynote speaker at
a Tennessee conference for geologists studying intelligent design, called
for Bushs immediate imprisonment upon his return to Texas. Former
senate majority leader Bill Frist, now president of a health management
company, said he had reviewed a video feed of Bush shortly after he arrived
in London. Frist, a heart surgeon and social conservative, enraged moderate

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voters in 2005 with his push for federal intervention to maintain life support
for Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman. As a medical doctor,
I see nothing wrong with him, he declared. Its clear that his facial
expression and labored breathing is just excitement at the prospect of
seeing his old friend Tony Blair.
Meanwhile, Congress called a special session to discuss the issue of a
pardon for the former President. When asked, after considering Bushs
grave condition, if the cloning act ought to be amended to allow therapies
using embryonic stem cells, Senate Majority leader Brownback said: No.
God is punishing him for the sins he committed during college. His family
can be forgiven for trying to make him well. But we must think of all the
cloned human beings the walking, talking embryos reaching out to us
with their little hands that were murdered as a result of this therapy. We
must respect their lives more than the life of suffering humans, even
humans that are former American presidents. I wish him good luck during
his long convalescence in England.

How likely is this drama that befalls a fictional American president? The
events recounted up until the present day are true. Routine cures or
treatments for diabetes, dementias and spinal injuries may be years away, but
researchers have cured mice mimicking a form of diabetes with stem cells
and tissue transplants.5 In other experiments, spinal injured rats can walk
again after given a transplant made from human embryonic stem cells. A
clinical trial using the method in human subjects is planned for 2008 (the
research has had to be funded by private sources).6 In an experimental trial in
Oregon, children with a deadly neurodegenerative disease are being injected
with stem cells taken from foetal brain tissue.7 Mice with brains partially
comprised of human neural cells may help companies discover new drugs
for dementias. But nuclear transfer, a method that might one day produce
custom-matched lines of cells, tissues and rudimentary organs for the sick
and infirm (including future statesmen and women), has not yet been
successfully developed using human cells.
While the science struggled, the political winds were momentous. To the
outrage of the scientific and medical communities, Kansas Senator Sam
Brownback introduced legislative acts that would criminalise the use of
embryonic stem cells (hESCs) for research and medical use, along with mice
made with bits of human brain tissue. The legislation contained a particularly
onerous provision, mandating the same penalties for researchers on any
American who provides or receives medical treatments developed in another
country. It also meant that patients and doctors could go to jail, too.
The consequences of the legislation raised the mind-bending prospect that
American parents travelling to the UK (or anywhere else where the research
was permitted) to treat a diabetic child with an embryonic stem cell therapy

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would risk the familys imprisonment once they attempted to return home.
Yet Bush was steadfast. Eight months after his 9 August 2001 pro-
nouncement that no federal funds could be used for any research using stem
cell lines made from newly destroyed embryos, he said:

I strongly support a comprehensive law against all human cloning. And

I endorse the bill wholeheartedly endorse the bill (S. 658) sponsored
by Senator Brownback and Senator Mary Landrieu. This carefully
drafted bill would ban all human cloning in the United States, including
the cloning of embryos for research.8

In a 2006 State of the Union address, he painted animal-human chimeras

with the same moral brush: Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit
the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its
forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-
animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos.
Bush neatly seized a rhetorical trick used early on by religious con-
servatives, a triangulated moral position atop which the debate pivoted. At
base level, everyone agreed that any attempt to clone a human being (so-
called reproductive cloning) was abhorrent. But to Bush and his supporters,
cloning cells for research and medicine was portrayed as equivalent to
cloning human beings. Intersecting cloning was another trope with a long
and fractious political history. Neoconservatives had declared an embryo
proxy war: a conflagration encompassing the issues of abortion, in vitro
fertilisation and embryo research. To them, the embryo is a human being,
and destroying it is murder.
The first embryo war began in 1973. The Supreme Court ruling in Roe v.
Wade legalising abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy opened a
Pandoras Box of worst-case scenarios. Religious leaders and a vigorous anti-
abortion movement claimed the decision would result in the black-market
sale or barter of fertilised eggs and indiscriminate use of embryos for
laboratory experiments. Even more worrisome to the pro-life supporters was
the possibility of the unregulated use of aborted foetal tissue. An alarmed
Congress halted federally funded embryo research until guidelines could be
established. The 1974 action had surprising staying power. With one short-
lived exception, the temporary moratorium has passed its 30th anniversary
no government funds are allowed for embryo research, a policy that
swept essential questions about infertility, reproductive medicine, prenatal
diagnosis and embryonic stem cell research beyond the reach of most
American clinicians and scientists. Bushs 2001 policy tightened the noose,
and Brownbacks bill upped the ante: use any embryo, donated or otherwise,
and go to jail.
The actions boiled over a long-simmering controversy about embryo
research and the spectre of human clones. Eighty Nobel Prize winners, led

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by Stanford Universitys Paul Berg, wrote a letter to the President

condemning his policy and the actions of Congress, arguing that it was
crippling their research. Others pointed out the moral inconsistency of a
policy that permits thousands of unused in vitro fertilisation embryos to be
dumped down the drain yearly while disallowing their use to treat disease.
Berg, a man who has spent a career at the forefront of science policy,
understands how important it is to measure words. He described how he felt
when he first read the legislation: I couldnt believe the arrogance of a bunch
people in Congress saying to 290 million Americans, sorry folks, youre not
going to have the therapies to cure your disease because we are offended by
this technology. 9 Two of Brownbacks bills passed the House of Represen-
tatives by wide margins but never came before the Senate. Countermeasures
to overturn the Bush policy were passed by the House and Senate in separate
sessions of Congress, but neither vote was enough to override a presidential
veto. In the end, Bushs tenure was marked by his uncompromising moral
stance: he vowed to fight any threat that would kill Americans foreign
terrorists flying planes into buildings or scientists destroying embryos for
research. In late 2006, Bushs final veto count: one against withdrawing
troops from the Iraq War; two against embryonic stem cell research.

NOW AND THEN

The stem cell debate is perhaps the most visible fracture between religious
and social conservatives and the scientific community, yet the fault lines
reach deep into the natural sciences, touching genetics, evolution,
reproductive biology and climate change. Taking their cues from Bush (and
vice versa), neoconservative commentators regard science, scientists and
academics with suspicion, calling into question the foundations of empirical
thought laid out by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The scientific method
and hard evidence was out. Metaphysics and argument for arguments sake
was in.
Nowhere was this more apparent than the ruckus about creationism and
its sidekick, intelligent design. Conservatives jettisoned the notion that in
order to compete as a credible theory, intelligent design should have
scientific merit. In a nod to discourse as an academic value, teaching
creationism and intelligent design alongside evolution seemed only fair.
Every idea was worth debating, proof or no. As the literary theorist Stanley
Fish notes, intelligent designers lifted a page out of liberalism (and em-
piricism) to make their case.10 The nineteenth-century philosopher John
Stuart Mill insisted that knowledge is nothing without repeated challenge
the process of debate is more important than the end product itself. Teach
the controversy became the battle cry. Bush echoed this position at a White
House roundtable: Part of education is to expose people to different schools
of thought youre asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed

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to different ideas, and the answer is yes. 11 This academic cross-dressing, as

Fish acerbically puts it, subverts the values of truth and accuracy for a
supposedly nobler cause of public and political debate.
The conservative push against science moved deep into secondary
education. The New Republic asked Weekly Standard editor William Kristol if he
believes in evolution and whether it should be taught in public schools. He
said, Im not a scientist Its like me asking you whether you believe in the
Big Bang I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia,
schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks. 12 Kristol and
other conservative commentators know the American cultural winds favour
scepticism of science, especially in the American South. Movie theatres
there, fearing backlash from conservative Christians, refused to show the
IMAX film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea (2003) because of a brief mention of
evolution. In Tennessee, a new creation museum asks its employees to sign a
statement of faith that says they believe dinosaurs and man once co-existed.
The $27 million, 60,000 square foot facility, built by a Christian publishing
company called Answers in Genesis, establishes the earths age as 6,000 years
and depicts dioramas of humans ambling alongside dinosaurs.
Public acceptance of evolution in the United States is among the lowest in
the world. A true or false answer to the question Have human beings, as we
know them, developed from earlier species of animals? ranks America
32 out of 33 countries in making a false claim; Iceland, Denmark, Sweden,
France, Japan and the UK round out the top six. Digging deeper into the
reasons for the opinion, researchers correlated pro-life, fundamentalist
religious and conservative partisan views with the low score.13 A 2006 poll of
Americans shows only a third believe that evolution is supported by hard
evidence. Half believe in the biblical account of creation, and that
creationism should be taught in science class. A recent study by the National
Science Teachers Association finds that three out of ten teachers feel
pressure from students and parents to include non-scientific alternatives to
evolution in the classroom.14 And in a case that garnered international
attention, the Kansas Board of Education approved standards critical of
evolution-based science in 2005, after considering 23 pages of revisions from
the states intelligent design chapter. The vote was an embarrassment for
Kansas, which repealed the guidelines in 2007. But the conservative state
wasnt alone: during 2005 and 2006, 18 other states considered anti-evolution
legislation.
The conservative-driven anti-science backlash is not just limited to stem
cells and teaching evolution. Scientific journals, newspapers and legislators
published essays and reports detailing political interference in a number of
science agency appointments, including the NIH, NASA, EPA and the FDA.
The most damning of these came from the 200,000-member Union of
Concerned Scientists, an advocacy organisation based in Washington. In
early 2004, it issued a report backing a statement signed by over 60 scientists,

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including Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science recipients. The

statement accused the Bush administration with widespread and un-
precedented manipulation of the process through which science enters
into its decisions. The document contained a litany of abuses, including
manipulation of scientific data, suppression of evidence about climate
change, and stacking advisory committees with political appointees.15
The meddling was especially acute on the Council on Bioethics, an
appointed commission advising the President on ethics and science policy.
Accusations abounded that the administration used political litmus tests to
screen prospective commissioners. After the councils deliberations on stem
cell research, members opposing the Bush policy were fired or asked to
resign. The eighteen-member group produced four major reports, consistent
with longstanding opinions of the councils conservative majority. The
recommendations overwhelmingly reflect the Brave New World philos-
ophy: left unchecked, big science, stem cell research and biotechnology
threaten the humanity of Americans. One of the sacked councillors,
Elizabeth Blackburn an award-winning and internationally known cancer
expert remarked that Leon Kass, the first council chair and Bush
appointee, had a nausea for diversity and added later that she considered her
removal a result of Bush stacking the council with the compliant.16
This isnt the first time Americans have fretted about science run amok.
The world faced a similar quandary 30 years ago amid widespread concerns
about the dangers of recombinant DNA research. The federal government
came breathtakingly close to criminalising biomedical research in those days,
too. Finally, on the heels of a meeting held by 150 scientists, government
officials and others in a sun-drenched retreat in Asilomar, near Monterey,
California, the National Institutes of Health adopted a framework that
included regulation, oversight and review by the newly formed Recombinant
DNA Advisory Committee. This body monitored laboratory research that
was recognised for transforming science and creating a new industry. The
policy became an example of how scientists put the brakes on an area of
research with unknown consequences, and how the recommendations were
embraced and promulgated by a national agency.
There are important differences between the recombinant DNA story of
the 1970s and now. Concerns then were primarily focused on environmental
safety. The worry was that unethical or inattentive genetic engineers would
release mutant organisms into the environment, which could infect humans,
disrupt ecosystems or destroy agricultural crops. The Asilomar meeting
produced a series of rationally conceived checks and balances to prevent
these hazards and other abuses. In contrast, embryonic stem cell research
invokes individual and cultural values: both non-rational constructs. Values
can be based on deeply held moral beliefs. A rational approach, such as the
use of unwanted frozen embryos for research purposes, can be challenged by
a persons moral belief. For example, in a clinical setting, an ethics committee,

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along with the treating physician, can recommend that a dying woman in an
intensive care unit be removed from costly, sophisticated equipment that will
not save her and instead be made as comfortable as possible during her final
days. These are carefully reasoned arguments, based on an application of
ethical theory and a history of similar medical cases. But the family, when
confronted with the decision, may believe in miracles. The discussion can
proceed no further. The moral arcs of the stem cell debate produce the same
irresolvable conflict. Though a numerical minority, many Americans believe
the obligations to an embryonic iota of 100 cells trump the obligations to
living persons.
The second difference is the steady erosion of public trust in science and
medicine. Scientists are no longer perceived exclusively as guardians of
objective truth but as smart promoters of their own interests, argue one
pair of commentators.17 The academy itself has come under attack from
watchdog groups and its own members. Two books from 2003, Sheldon
Krimskys Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical
Research? and Jennifer Washburns University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of
Higher Education, enumerate the ways in which biomedical scientists and their
institutions have become hostage to the filthy lucre offered by the private
sector. And even a past president of Harvard University frets about how the
drive to find money to expand biomedical research has eclipsed the more
noble pursuits of academic inquiry and teaching the liberal arts.18
The fears are not limited to the US. In 2000, a House of Lords select
committee confirmed a crisis of trust in science after polling 1000 citizens,
especially with respect to gene therapy, genetically modified food, animal
experimentation and xenotransplantation.19 The stateside crisis is in part due
to a growing disinterest in science education. Bushs verbal slip to school-
children about the nerd patrol those unpopular kids adept in science
and mathematics betrays a conspicuous, postmodern slide towards anti-
intellectualism. Rigor, thoroughness, a commitment to consistency,
intellectual honesty, exactness, or a sensibility to small differences are all
generally undervalued in this milieu, warns one political philosopher.20 But
a rigorous education does not always translate into a keen appreciation of
evidence and argument. We believe things because we trust experts
including religious authorities, politicians and parents who say it is true. In
this way, intuitive pseudoscientific or metaphysical explanations can clash
with the long-held doctrines of the biological sciences.
As if on cue, this mistrust turned into an unwavering I told you so by
stem cell opponents during the early days of 2006, when two papers
published by a team of South Korean embryonic stem cell researchers were
revealed to be fakes. The discoveries were considered the first important step
called nuclear transfer to produce custom therapies like the one described
above for our fictional and suffering former President. When the dust
settled, the scandal went down as the worst scientific fraud in recent memory.

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Destined for textbooks, it featured a basketful of misdeeds, ranging from

venal sins, shameless falsehoods, and treading on the rights of women
researchers who donated their eggs for the research.
While media coverage of the fraud was brief, the South Korean event
bolstered the moral high ground seized by opponents: scientists cant be
trusted and scientists who work on embryos commit murder. Embryos
made by transferring a nucleus and then destroyed to make specialised,
compatible cells for a sick person through therapeutic cloning (even a former
president) was as wrong as embryos destroyed to investigate, say, the
developmental complexities of infertility. Political conservatives used the
event as a new weapon in old armamentarium that had successfully
interfered with three decades of embryo research. In 1979, one year after the
UK announced the birth of Louise Brown, the worlds first test tube baby, a
national ethics advisory board recommended that federal dollars be spent
investigating the safety of assisted reproductive technologies. But because
of political wrangling, no authority was ever granted to review research
proposals, and few laws were written to oversee the procedures in private
clinics.
Predictions are that stem cell research will eclipse by orders of magnitude
the impact of recombinant DNA. What would the world be like if the
US government had banned recombinant DNA research back in 1976?
Assuming the prohibition persisted during the subsequent decades, and no
other research filled the void, the world would be without the Human
Genome Project, without the identification of 1,500 disease genes, and
without DNA fingerprinting. The US would also be $16 billion poorer in
research and investment, $35 billion poorer in revenue and lacking some
200,000 jobs. In addition, 325 million people would not benefit from over
130 drugs, including vaccines for influenza and hepatitis B.21

NATIONAL FRACTURE
What has this moral fracture wrought for America? For research and
medicine, the impacts are profound.
US stem cell policy is oddly incoherent when compared to other countries
that support embryonic stem cell research. Though a presidential procla-
mation is not law, it carries the force of law. Bushs mandate prohibiting
funding of new lines of embryonic stem cells delivered from his ranch in
Texas was never debated or voted on by Congress. Conservative lawmakers
linked bans on reproductive cloning (on which there was unanimous
agreement among scientists, lawmakers and citizens) to bans on embryonic
stem cell research. The hybrid bills divided the Senate and were never passed.
The result: America has no laws banning human cloning. Because of the
federal governments regulatory silence, the research community turned to
other institutions for guidance. The National Academy of Sciences Guidelines

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for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research (2005) is used at both the state and
local levels.22
The federal vacuum has prompted a patchwork of state legislation. About
a dozen states expressly encourage the research, including California, New
Jersey and Wisconsin. But in 2006, South Dakota criminalised it. In
Michigan, researchers must contend with laws that would jail scientists for up
to 10 years and fine them $10 million for using embryos to make cell lines. In
Virginia, the stem cell statute is so obscurely written that it isnt clear if using
an embryo made by nuclear transfer is legal or not. But two dozen states are
silent on the issue, meaning embryonic stem cell lines might be made there,
but only with non-federal dollars.
Funding follows the same pattern, with a half-dozen states putting their
money on the table. Chief among these is California, which in 2004 passed a
$3 billion, ten-year measure to support all types of stem cell research. The
sheer size of the California initiative not only sends a message about the
promise of embryonic stem cells but also underscores how expensive
biomedical research can be and how distant therapies are from human use.
The measure is designed to outlast several administrations and to insulate
California from the vagaries of Congressional politics, but the money only
began to flow in the summer of 2007.
The legislative thicket and spotty funding could cause a perilous backwash.
Interstate and international collaboration may be thwarted, hamstrung by
discontinuities in law and resources. Capital markets, sensitive to risks both
scientific and political, are reluctant to venture into territory darkened by
political whim and uneven sources of intellectual capital. Sensing an oppor-
tunity to trump a technological colossus, other countries aggressively recruit
senior American researchers. One study finds senior American stem cell
scientists are more than five times more likely to receive international job
offers than those in other fields.23 In another, the US rate of publishing
seminal embryonic stem cell papers in peer-reviewed journals has begun to
slow, while other countries step up the pace.24 In a foretelling of Americas
place in a global race for the first tools and treatments, embryonic stem cell
lines made here are shipped offshore more often than they are used in our
own laboratories.25 Nobel Prize winner Berg complains that America will
become experts in mouse stem cell biology. Irving Weissman, an inter-
nationally recognised stem cell biologist who has testified in front of
Congress echoes the sentiment: America may very well buy the first stem cell
treatments from China. 26
There is hand wringing in Washington too. A National Science
Foundation executive said:

Collectively, India, China, South Korea, and Japan, have more than
doubled the number of students receiving bachelors degrees in the
natural sciences since 1975 and quadrupled their number earning

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engineering degrees. Since the late 1980s, the EU has produced more
natural science and engineering PhDs than the US.27

Others maintain the US faces a Sputnik moment similar to the fears

engendered by the space race of 50 years ago. They warn that globalisation
threatens its technological dominance. Americans have become users, not
inventors, of new technology.

INTERNATIONAL HEALING?
In Rising Above the Gathering Storm (2007), a report commissioned by the US
Congress, a committee of leading engineers, scientists and educators warns:
Thanks to globalization, driven by modern communications and other
advances, workers in virtually every sector must now face competitors who
live just a mouse-click away in Ireland, Finland, China, India, or dozens of
other nations whose economies are growing. 28
Until now, there has been little challenge to American biomedical
hegemony. But the moral fissures caused by the debate have forged a new
global socio-political landscape. Does it matter that the US takes a central
role in the discovery and development of new medicines? Can we settle as a
bit player in the stem cell supply chain? What is more important: American
technological dominance or a speedy route to a treatment for the worlds
infirm? After all, discovery and development of biotechnology is modular
and decentralised, linking together like a chain of toy beads. It is quite
possible that countries and their governments, scientists and institutions
will figure out which link they can most readily provide. The markets for that
technology, product or service will surely follow. Will the globalisation of
medicine, exemplified by Thomas Friedmans flattened earth, be more
saviour than villain, helping to span what has become this centurys greatest
moral divide? Or will it produce a new set of ethical concerns? Answering
these questions demands a closer look at the national actors in the race for
the worlds first new medicines made from embryonic stem cells.
Consider Singapore. This tiny Asian nation is a financial juggernaut, luring
Western pharmaceutical companies to the Pacific Rim by fronting a third of
their building costs. At least thirty companies have taken the government up
on the offer, building research facilities at Biopolis, a glistening new $8 billion
research park. The country also has recruited a well-regarded contingent of
American and British stem cell scientists with hefty salaries and lavish new
laboratories. Singapore was among the first countries to forge guidelines for
embryonic stem cells so the research could move quickly.
Across the Bay of Bengal lies India. Its pharmaceutical industries are
among the biggest in the world. A large and sparsely monitored assisted
reproductive technology industry with political clout means it has eggs and
embryos scarce resources required for stem cell research. There is also

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human capital willing subjects to enrol in experimental clinical trails. But

there are concerns about the countrys ethical readiness: As stem cell science
moves from the laboratory into the clinic and the experimental treatment of
patients, it does so in a governance vacuum, states one report.29 Indias
clinical trials expertise is underdeveloped, and the agency in charge of
oversight, The Drug Controller General, is reported as understaffed and
overly influenced by the countrys pharmaceutical industry. Western com-
panies remain wary about locating there, because of patent infringement.
China, an economic giant with a massive workforce and market, could take
a deep bite out of Western dominance in high technology. Its manufacturing
and technical strengths are seemingly limitless. However, its reputation for
playing fast and loose with intellectual property, human rights and experi-
mental medicine cause concern that it will become the Wild, Wild East of
modern medicine. Safeguards for the use of embryos and human research
subjects are largely missing and poorly enforced.30 Part of Chinas approach
is due to its cultural norms: the embryo does not have a significant moral
status, the root cause of ethical rupture in the West. The regulatory gradient
between overly permissive and non-permissive jurisdictions has caused some
Americans to travel long distances to China to undergo risky and expensive
treatment for maladies such as spinal cord injury and ataxia.
But China has a way to go before it can assert itself in any meaningful way
in one of the most complicated and fraught fields of modern biology. Its
commitment to stem cell research is small, only $2 million per year from
20005.31 Like India, China trains thousands of its scientists in American and
European laboratories. But nearly three quarters of them never return,
surpassed only by Indias chronic brain drain.
Finally, note the country treating our ersatz President. In contrast to the
US, the UKs Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)
oversees IVF clinics, and laboratories making embryonic stem cells may
only do so under a government licence. In contrast to the US, the British
government fully embraces the future possibilities of the science. In 2005,
the UKs Stem Cell Initiative set out a ten-year strategy for research and
development, raising the governments commitment of $100 million per
year.32 London is home to the UK Stem Cell Bank, a facility that catalogues,
stores, characterises and distributes hESC lines to researchers around the
world. In the future, the bank will likely serve as a source of cells for
therapies. The cultural differences between the two nations on this issue are
profound. The former head of HFEA, Baroness Ruth Deech, remarked
during a recent speech in the US that the British seem mystified that frozen
embryos are given so much religious and political importance.33
But like California, the UK sits in isolation to some of its EU neighbours.
The production of human embryonic stem cells is a punishable offence in
Germany, though lines made prior to 2002 may be imported into German
laboratories. Joining Germany, restrictive countries include Ireland, Austria,

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Denmark, Italy and France. Reflecting an opposed set of national values,

permissive nations include Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Greece.
The moral wrangling across the EU has produced a peculiar pairing, one
with staggering consequences for stem cell research: patent law and ethics. In
1998, the European community adopted the European Directive on the
Legal Protection of Biotechnological Inventions to remove legal obstacles
arising from differences in national law among the EU member states.34
Deep within the directive lies a list of technologies to be excluded from
patentability on the grounds of ordre public or morality. This has led to the
rejection of crucial embryonic stem cell patents the coin of the realm for
any company hoping to commercialise medicines for human use for moral,
rather than technical reasons. The directives interpretation has caused legal
gridlock among European member states, which attempt to reject or accept
patents based on national ethical norms. The evidence so far is that the focus
on the moral exclusion policy on uses of human embryos by the European
Patent Office (EPO) is thwarting the ability to patent at the national level.
Germany overturned a stem cell patent granted to a German neuroscientist
on the grounds it was immoral.35 The dithering in other jurisdictions means
that the EU isnt the safe haven for stem cells it was thought to be. In fact, it
is possible the morality clause might be invoked for any technology using any
kind of cell made from embryonic stem cells, turning entire stretches of the
EU into a wasteland for companies and capital markets with expertise in
regenerative medicine.

BORDER LINES, CELL LINES AND THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE

As the Bush legacy ends in 2008 so the Bush administrations restrictions will
likely end too and religious conservatives will lose the political clout to pass
laws that would imprison a suffering American president or any other
citizen trying to return home from an offshore treatment. However, it is far
from certain whether globalisation can work with morality guarding the
borders. But globalisation may make the difference between having some
new therapies or none at all. A future therapy for an autoimmune disease
such as GBS or diabetes, rather than developing naturally and swiftly among
those nations most qualified, may instead have to navigate a torturous,
inefficient and expensive route consequences borne from politics claiming
the moral high ground.
The human costs of a world fractured by religion and politics are ethical
as well as economic. Political, legal and moral gradients among nations now
mean increases in medical tourism for untested stem cell treatments. Clinical
trials initially deemed too risky (or too politically fraught) have moved into
countries with lower regulatory thresholds. In one case, stem cell injections
in humans with heart disease started in South America, Thailand and Asia
before being rigorously tested in Europe. Only then was the first US trial

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approved. Years later, a public registry lists dozens of such clinical trials
worldwide.
In our future scenario, the therapy sought by Mr Bush could have been
first tested on humans in China. With its porous regulatory framework and
plentiful research subjects, China may indeed find a place in translating
discoveries made elsewhere into clinical practice. The company developing
the technology could be Singaporean, bankrolled by a government-backed
venture capital firm. A similar treatment for diabetes would yield a multi-
billion dollar blockbuster for the company and for Singapore, which would
use the money to lure more investment and more Western-trained re-
searchers to the island. The human egg into which daughter Jennas DNA
was transferred might have been procured from a woman frequenting an in
vitro fertilisation clinic in rural India. The company may have emerged from
a costly set of lawsuits with Saudi investors backing a competing group
of scientists and entrepreneurs working in Germany. Because patents on
embryonic stem cell therapies are not enforced there, Germany could
become home to biotech pirates, infringing on inventions claimed and
practiced elsewhere in Europe and the US. The costs of winning the suit
would be passed along to patients and to the healthcare system, providing
such a system even paid for such early-stage therapy.
Shortly after the 2001 Bush proclamation, National Medal of Science
winner Robert Weinberg wrote:
In the end, politics will settle the debate in this country about whether
human therapeutic cloning is allowed to proceed. If the decision is yes,
then we will continue to lead the world in a crucial, cutting edge area of
biomedical research. If it is no, US biologists will undertake hegiras to
laboratories in Australia, Japan, Israel, and certain countries in Europe
an outcome that will leave American science greatly diminished.36
Politics could settle the debate in a very different way, after the first cures
using embryonic stem cells are discovered and made available on a distant
shore. No American politician can defend a position that would place
political expediency above the medical needs of his or her constituents. No
politician would dare refuse a sick or suffering person care and treatment.

The vote will be swift and the message clear: let science proceed.

NOTES
1. This is a hypothetical scenario set in 2016. Everything referenced prior to the
publication date is based on reported events and published research.
2. Brownback introduced legislation in 2002 and 2005 that would criminalise use
of embryos for research and for using human stem cells to make animal models
of disease; the penalties: $1 million fine and up to ten years in prison for

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scientists, caregivers and patients. Neither bill has passed.

3. Recent research foreshadows a time when embryonic stem cells may treat
diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, among them: see Yuichi
Hori et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 2002, 1610510.
4. A mouse with 1 per cent human neural cells was produced at the Salk Institute
in 2005: see A. R. Muotri et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102,
2005, 186448.
5. See J. A. Shizuru et al., Prevention of type 1 diabetes in nonobese diabetic mice
by allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, Diabetes, 54(6), June 2005, 17709.
6. Human embryonic stem cell-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cell trans-
plants remyelinate and restore locomotion after spinal cord injury: see H. S.
Keirstead et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 25(19), 11 May 2005, 4694705.
7. Stem Cells Inc., a biotechnology company based in the San Francisco bay area,
is developing a treatment for Batten Disease. The first clinical trial commenced
in 2006.
8. See White House press release, President Bush calls on Senate to back
human cloning ban, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/
20020410-4.html.
9. Christopher Thomas Scott, Stem Cell Now: A Brief Introduction to the Coming
Medical Revolution (New York, NY: Plume, 2006), p. 165.
10. Stanley Fish, Academic Cross-dressing: how intelligent design gets its argu-
ments from the left, Harpers Magazine, December 2005, pp. 702.
11. A transcript of Bushs remarks can be found at: http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080200899_5.html.
12. Ben Adler, Conservatives and Evolution: The Evolutionary War, The New
Republic, 7 July 2005, https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=w050704&s=
adler070705.
13. J. Miller et al., Public acceptance of Evolution, Science, 313, 11 August 2006,
7656.
14. National Science Teachers Association, Survey indicates science teachers feel
pressure to teach nonscientific alternatives to evolution, 24 March 2005,
http://www.nsta.org/pressroom&news.
15. Scientific integrity in policymaking: an investigation into the Bush adminis-
trations misuse of science, Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2004,
http://www.ucsusa.org/.
16. See Timothy Noah, Leon Kass, you silly ass: please stop denying you tilted the
Bioethics Panel, Slate, 8 March 2004, http://slate.msn.com/id/2096848/; and
Rick Weiss, Bush ejects two from Bioethics Council: changes renew criticisms
that President puts politics ahead of science, Washington Post, 28 February 2004.
17. B. Haerlin and D. Parr, How to restore public trust in science, Nature, 400,
5 August 1999, 499.
18. Sheldon Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted
Biomedical Research? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Jennifer
Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York,
NY: Basic Books, [2003] 2006); and Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: the
Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2003).

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THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE

19. See http://www.parliament.the-stationery office.co.uk/pa/ld199900/ldselect/

ldsctech/38/3801.htm.
20. M. North, Chastened, not Stirred: The secret agents of literature departments
reap what they sow, Telos, (37)1, 11839.
21. Christopher Thomas Scott and Thomas Maeder, The consequences of the
restrictions of human stem cell research, Acumen Journal of Sciences, 1(1), 2003,
3645.
22. National Research Council, Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
(2005).
23. A. D. Levine, Research policy and the mobility of US stem cell scientists,
Nature Biotechnology, 24(7), 2006, 8656.
24. J. Owens-Smith and J. McCormick, An international gap in embryonic stem cell
research, Nature Biotechnology, 24(4), 2006, 3912.
25. Preliminary data gathered by the authors research at Stanford University.
26. Personal communication, August 2004 and September 2005.
27. See http://www.nsf.gov/news/speeches/olsen/05/ko051009_pkal.jsp.
28. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter
Economic Future (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2007), p. 1.
29. B. Salter et al., Stem cell science in India: emerging economies and the politics
of globalization, Regenerative Medicine, 2(1), 2007, 7589.
30. B. Salter et al., China and the global stem cell bioeconomy: an emerging political
strategy?, Regenerative Medicine, 1(5), 2006, 67183.
31. F. Murray and D. Spar, Bit player or powerhouse? China and stem cell research,
New England Journal of Medicine, 355(12), 21 September 2006, 11914.
32. Report and Recommendations of the UK Stem Cell Initiative, November 2005,
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Policyandguidance/Healthandsocialcaretopics/
Stemcell/index.htm.
33. Ruth Deech, Women, Ethics and Embryos, unpublished talk at Stanford
University, 2 May 2007.
34. Downloadable directive at: europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/1998/l_213/
l_21319980730en00130021.pdf.
35. See Aurora Plomer et al., Challenges to embryonic stem cell patents, Cell Stem
Cell, 2, January 2008, 1317.
36. Robert Weinberg, Of Clones and Clowns, Atlantic Monthly, June 2002,
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200206/weinberg.

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11. TECHNOLOGY IN THE

21ST CENTURY

Carroll Pursell

Any attempt to discuss the technology of the 21st century, based on the
record of the first five to ten years, demands a caveat. Futurology, so popular
30 years ago, has all but disappeared, perhaps because in so much of the
United States fortune telling is illegal. Even the easy prediction that change,
however unclear in its details now, will continue, is no doubt true but
misleading. Technologies change, but not because they must. Technologies
change because people with the power to make it happen want it to.
While change will no doubt take place over the remainder of the century,
many technologies will not change at all. In his important book The Shock of
the Old (2007), David Edgerton asserts that time was always jumbled up, in
the pre-modern era, the post-modern era and the modern era. In what
he calls use-centered history technologies do not only appear, they also
disappear and reappear, and mix and match across the centuries. He also
calls attention to what he terms creole technologies, those transplanted
from their place of origin finding uses on a greater scale elsewhere. 1 As in
the past, old technologies and those transplanted will continue to be at least
as important as those newly invented and rushed to market.
Over the years, those who have yielded to the temptation to predict the
future on the basis of those new technologies seem always, as Joseph Corn
has pointed out, to make the same mistakes: what he calls the fallacy of total
revolution, the fallacy of social continuity, and the fallacy of the techno-
logical fix, all of which contribute to the extravagant and often utopian tone
of technological prediction. 2 The first of these errs in believing that the new
wipes out the old and sweeps all before it. At the same time, the second
fallacy mistakenly believes that when a new and improved technology

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replaces an old and inferior one, the social context remains the same: an
autogiro may replace the car for taking commuters to work, but it will still
be Dad making the trip while Mom and the kids stay at home and await his
return. And finally, the last fallacy assumes that new technologies only fix
things, they never create new problems or make existing situations worse.
If we try to avoid these fallacies then, and keep in mind Edgertons notion
of creole technologies and the persistence of the old mixed in with the new,
what can we guess as to the shape of 21st-century technology? And here it is
helpful to keep in mind another of Edgertons admonitions: stop thinking
about technology, but instead think of things. Thinking about the use
of things, rather than of technology, connects us directly with the world we
know rather than the strange world in which technology lives.3

9/11 AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX

The continuity of technologies is well demonstrated in the specific reactions
to the destruction of New Yorks World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.
For one thing, the technologies involved perfectly reflect the technological
vanguardism and hubris of 20th-century America. The hijacked Boeing 767
used in the attack was designed to carry up to 255 passengers and to fly as far
as from New York City to Beijing. Fully loaded it carried 23,980 gallons of
aviation fuel. Like all Boeing civilian jetliners, its design had evolved in close
conjunction with decades of military aircraft development and was the direct
descendent of the bombers that had carried out the terror bombings of
German and Japanese cities during World War II. The simple box cutter, the
hijackers weapon of choice, had been used in perhaps most American
homes for generations. The skyscraper, probably the architectural signature
of New York City, has been a fixture of the skyline for a century.
Even the nightmare of American vulnerability had been a feature of
American Cold War popular culture since 1945, when the US used atomic
bombs, those most dramatic of Weapons of Mass Destruction, against
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over a hundred thousand people, nearly all
civilians including women, children and the elderly. Only a few years into the
Atomic Age the major powers, including the US, had written off their own
civilian populations as essentially unsaveable in a nuclear exchange. There
is every reason to believe that the American people knew that they were
helplessly vulnerable, despite backyard bomb shelters and duck-and-cover
instruction for school children.
It hardly comes as a surprise that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have
attracted no single, fixed meaning. Perhaps in part this was because it was
all so familiar, as a part of Edgertons Shock of the Old. Not only were the
jetliner, the skyscraper and the box cutter all perfectly familiar, but even the
dramatic image of the 9/11 destruction, that played endlessly on more than
30 television channels, was already old. Scores of motion pictures since 1945

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had staged something similar. A whole genre of entertainment had been

created around the spectacle of great structures collapsing into themselves
through the technology of controlled implosion. Indeed, the implosion of
the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St Louis in 1972 is often heralded
by architectural critics such as Charles Jencks as the start of the postmodern
era, and members of the demolition firm most responsible for implosions
sometimes referred to themselves (pre-9/11) as terrorists.4 The date of
11 September had itself marked an earlier (though largely unacknowledged)
dark moment in American history when, in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet,
with the tacit support of the US government, overthrew the democratically-
elected President Salvador Allende of Chile, with the killing of many more
than three thousand civilians.
The twin World Trade Towers themselves were showcases of aggressive
American capitalism. The Japanese designer of what were then the worlds
tallest structures was specifically instructed to emphasise sheer scale and the
result was what he called a swagger building.5 The towers were a success not
only as beacons of American capitalisms global reach but also in terms of
maximising profit within its own bounds. In response to cost pressures, a
series of construction techniques and materials were used to free-up an
unprecedented 75 per cent of each floor for office rentals. The techniques, in
at least some cases untested, included a curtain of exterior steel columns,
cutting the number of vertical girders, supporting the floors on bridge-like
trusses rather than steel beams, and an innovative elevator plan which cut the
number of shafts that ran through all 110 floors. Additionally, elevator shafts
and stairwells were enclosed with wallboard rather than concrete. The aggre-
gate cost-saving and profit-maximising measures helped turn the towers into
a death trap for its thousands of employees.6
The reaction to these events, at the time of writing, tells us a great deal
about the ways in which technologies are human intentions made material.
The twin towers are to be replaced with a Freedom Tower 1,776 feet tall, a
height dictated by the desire to build patriotism (the date of American
independence) into the very dimensions of the building. The construction
design for the new building includes air intakes with chemical and biological
filtering systems; a central core with water-resistant elevators; pressurised
fire-escape stairs and a separate staircase for emergency workers; extra-
strong concrete casings for the core, sprinklers and emergency risers;
multilayered glass curtain walls; and setback from the sidewalk to protect
against car bombs. In a final act of bravado, the structure will be 408 feet
higher than the towers destroyed on 9/11.7
The technological fix was applied to airplanes as well. Cockpit doors were
immediately reinforced to prevent forced entry and in 2006 the SAFEE
(Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment) Project unveiled
plans for the terror-proof plane of the future. In this plan, the cockpit door
will be fitted with a fingerprint reading device and any unauthorised entry

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will activate a computer that will fly the plane away from sensitive targets.
Hand-held sniffer devices will check passengers at the door for dangerous
chemicals, recording devices in toilets will listen for questionable noises,
and tiny cameras will scan passengers faces for nervous tics.8

GREEN TECHNOLOGIES
A much more significant example of the technological fix is provided by
attempts to produce clean energy in the face of a now acknowledged and
rapidly worsening environment of global warming. The basic problem is that
the burning of fossil fuels, whether coal to produce electricity, petroleum to
power cars or any other such activity, produces greenhouse gases. A wide
range of technologies, from wood-burning fireplaces to jet engines, are em-
ployed in producing the problem, and an equally wide range of technological
alternatives are available to help relieve it. The choices made by governments,
corporations and individuals in the United States are instructive.
The cleanest technologies are probably those which are hardly seen
as technologies at all. Wearing warmer clothing in winter and cooler in
summer, for example, or double-glazing windows, planting shade trees
and insulating the walls and roofs of buildings would all contribute to a
diminution of energy consumption, as would a greater use of bicycles and
public transportation.
Next might be the technologies of solar and wind power production.
These were widely publicised in the US, especially in California, during
the 1970s as part of the Appropriate Technology Movement but largely
abandoned once energy prices dropped following the end of the OPEC fuel
crisis. A generation later they are being touted again, but again mainly in
California. Such technologies which require a change in lifestyle or might
challenge entrenched economic interests (and their political allies) are the
least likely to become public policy and therefore be made available to
citizens at large in forms both economical and convenient.
Instead, panaceas both old and new have been put forward. Nuclear
power, with its potential for catastrophic accidents and certain problems of
decommissioning and waste disposal, has been reborn in the new millen-
nium as clean and green. The administration of George W. Bush, while
opposing increasing standards for automobile fuel efficiency, and even siding
against California regulations being challenged in court by automobile
manufacturers, committed itself in 2003 to spending $1.2 billion to help the
auto industry develop hydrogen fuel-cell technology for powering cars. Such
cars, it was agreed, would produce only water as exhaust.
But technologies exist in systems, not in isolation. Fuel cells would be
clean only if the hydrogen they used were itself produced in a clean manner:
using solar energy for example would keep hydrocarbon production to
a minimum. The Bush administration however declared that Americas

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abundant coal resources offer an attractive mid-term option for producing

the large quantities of hydrogen that will be required to fuel the nations
energy needs. 9 Indeed, the administrations National Hydrogen Energy
Roadmap drafted in 2002 projected that 90 per cent of all the necessary
hydrogen would be extracted from oil, natural gas, coal and other fossil fuels.
The remaining 10 per cent would be produced using nuclear energy.10
Early in 2007, President Bush travelled to Detroit to join car manufac-
turers in touting flexible fuel vehicles that could run on either ethanol or
biodiesel blends. The manufacturers claimed they could have half their
production converted to flexible engines by 2012, although it was noted that
only 1,100 of the nations 170,000 fuelling stations offered ethanol blends.
The chairman and CEO of General Motors admitted that they and the
President spent very little time talking about increased fuel efficiency,
perhaps the technology which would make the greatest and fastest impact on
petroleum consumption.11
Those countries, like Australia and the US, which have large reserves of
coal, have looked to 21st-century technologies to help avoid the necessity of
damaging the mining industry in the drive to combat global warming. The
American industry-sponsored group CARE (Coalition for Affordable and
Reliable Energy) predicted that the demand for electricity would go up
53.4 per cent in the first 25 years of the new century, and that since coal will
remain the largest single source of electricity, 65 coal-fired power plants
each generating 300 megawatts would need to be built in each of those years.
It was claimed this could be done with zero emissions if the plants used the
electricity to produce hydrogen and at the same time sequestered their own
greenhouse emissions.12
The US Department of Energys Office of Fossil Energy in January 2006
was managing over 500 research projects, including 90 that were perusing the
most publicised of the potential new technologies, carbon sequestration, the
object of which is to capture and permanently store the greenhouse gases
produced when coal is burned.13 Bushs Presidents Committee of Advisors
on Science and Technology (PCAST) called for a large programme to
provide a science-based assessment of the prospects and costs of CO2
sequestration. This is very high-risk, long-term R&D [research and
development] that will not be undertaken by industry alone without strong
incentives or regulations. The cost at the time was between $100 and $300
for treating a tonne of coal but the goal was to get that cost down to $10 per
ton by 2015.14
Despite the high cost, high risk and long time-frame, sequestration
along with hydrogen (equally high cost, high risk, and also with a long time-
frame) seemed to be Bushs favourite technology. During his campaign for
the presidency in 2000 he pledged to commit $2 billion over ten years to
develop clean coal technology. In June 2001 he singled out carbon capture,
storage and sequestration as particularly promising, and in February 2003

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announced that he would spend $1 billion on FutureGen, slated to be

the worlds first coal-fueled prototype power plant to incorporate carbon
sequestration technologies.15 Six years later, the international coal lobby
group, the World Coal Institute, estimated that even if the nine sequestration
experiments underway around the world stay on schedule, they will only be
able to dispose of carbon generated from the equivalent of about four large
coal-fired power plants.16
Yet another favourite clean energy source is ethanol to be used as a
fuel additive for internal combustion engines. This technology had been
advocated in the US since the 1930s, in part because ethanol is made from
corn and its mandated wide use would be economically attractive to farmers
and politically attractive to their Congressional representatives. In his 2007
State of the Union address, Bush called for a mandatory fuels standard to
require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 and
mentioned ethanol specifically. However, studies dating back as far as
1980 by President Carters Department of Energy Gasahol Study Group
estimated that a gallon of ethanol took more energy to produce than it
provided. In 2001, the former chair of that group revisited the subject and
figured that it took 131,000btu (British thermal units) to produce a gallon of
ethanol, which then gave about 77,000btu in fuel energy. The study was
attacked by the industry, which claimed that the energy used to grow the corn
should not be counted in the equation, because the residue, after the starch
had been removed, was fed to livestock.17
A truly speculative technology surfaced in January 2007 when the Bush
administration, responding to a draft United Nations climate change docu-
ment, advocated the importance of undertaking research and development
on methods of reflecting sunlight back into space. Modifying solar radiance,
it stated, may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails. Doing
the R&D to estimate the consequences of applying such a strategy is
important insurance that should be taken out. The methods suggested to
deflect sunlight were giant orbiting mirrors, releasing thousands of tiny,
shiny balloons, or pumping microscopic sulphate droplets into the high
atmosphere. The response of the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change was that such schemes were speculative, uncosted and with
potential unknown side-effects.18
While the Bush administration cast about for long-range, expensive,
and sometimes far-fetched technological fixes, other nations were surging
forward to become providers of more proven green technologies. In 1992, a
report by the Office of Technology Assessment urged American manu-
facturers to design their products and production methods in such a way that
environmental protection was a goal rather than a constraint and cited cases
of profitable results flowing from such a priority. Perhaps inevitably the
National Association of Manufacturers reaffirmed its belief that regulatory
programs tend to stifle innovation.19 Two years later it was charged that the

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growing need for environmentally friendly technologies amounted to a

second Industrial Revolution, but that because in America both the federal
government and major corporations continued to see environmental
constraints as a problem to be avoided rather than an opportunity to be
seized, the country had lost its leadership in the area. According to this
argument, the countrys decades of spending on defence and space
technologies has produced an impressive array of devices that were finding
civilian application by the late 1980s. A 1994 book charged that the worlds
best gas turbines, wind turbines, solar cells, fuel cells, and antipollution
scrubbers everything from on-board car computers to advanced light bulbs
was housed in Americas technological arsenal.20 Instead of making these
and similar technologies the basis of American industrial innovation and
leadership into the 21st century, they were frittered away, picked up especially
by Japan and Germany.
In 2005, the Japanese firm Sharp produced 27 per cent of the worlds
photovoltaics, making it the world leader for the fifth year in a row. Second
in terms of production was the Japanese firm Kyocera. Photovoltaic cells
were first developed by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Toyota, which was
poised to pass General Motors as the worlds leading automobile maker,
was a leader in producing clean cars, with its hybrid gasoline/electric Prius
consistently surpassing other regular production models in terms of both
low emissions and high mileage per gallon.21
It is precisely in the area of global warming, and attendant technologies,
that American science has most come under pressure in the new century
a topic that John Wills develops in the next chapter. As policies shifted
from pollution abatement to pollution prevention, some chemists sought
recognition as environmental chemists. Not surprisingly scientists within
the chemical industry, which was hit during the 1980s by such public disasters
as Union Carbides Bhopal gas leak (1984) that killed thousands and the
discovery of the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic (1986), were
marshalled to help the industry literally clean up its act. At the same time,
academic chemists, who tended to see environmental science as rather soft
and not quite academic enough, were slow to respond.22
Even when science was focused on these new problems, the results were
often contentious, not least because careers, reputations and large sums of
money invested in older technologies were at stake. In 1998, the government
classified CO2 as a pollutant and therefore subject to provisions of the Clean
Air Act. In 2003, the Bush administration reversed that decision, thus lifting
the obligation of mitigation by automobile manufacturers and power plant
operators. The justification was that CO2 was a naturally occurring gas
necessary for plants to carry out photosynthesis. Indeed one lobby group,
The Greening Earth Society, sponsored by the Western Fuels Association,
went so far as to claim that data in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) report on increased levels of CO2 supported the

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notion that this was making the worlds plants grow better.23 The propensity
of the Bush administration to muzzle government scientists and edit
scientific reports to support administration policies and protect old
technologies led to the issuance of a statement, signed by 10,000 scientists
(including 52 Nobel Laureates) protesting political interference.24

MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES
If the US was slow off the mark with green technologies in the 21st century,
it continued to follow the familiar path of innovation in military hardware.
Indeed, in 1991, after its apparent success in the first Iraq War, the Pentagon
announced a revolution in military affairs (RMA) based on the creation of
massive technologically-oriented support structures which would allow it to
establish dominance over the enemy with fewer troops in the field. The result
is part of the reason that, between 2003 and 2005, the US spent an annual
$466 billion on defence, almost seven times as much as its nearest rival,
China.25
Among the backers of RMA there are different schools of thought, which
emphasise different technologies. As identified by one scholar, the system of
systems group concentrates on computers and communications systems
as well as smart weapons. The dominant battlespace knowledge school of
thought builds onto this the extensive use of sensors to create a tactically
transparent battlefield. The global reach, global strike group emphasises
new ships, aircraft and space weapons capable of quickly projecting
American dominance anywhere in the world. Finally, the vulnerability
school worries most about protection rather than projection, and seeks new
technologies to provide better defence to American forces.26
Critics of RMA, including current and former military officers, identify
four reasons why it is, in the words of one, doomed to fail: first, because the
chosen technology is focused only on a narrow range of missions, none of
which are typical of those most commonly undertaken; second, because the
technological infrastructure of any system of computers and other electric
devices, including sensors, is vulnerable to ordinary breakdowns, let alone to
enemy action; third, because countermeasures can easily be undertaken, even
by less technically sophisticated enemies; and, lastly, because of institutional
impediments, including sheer inertia, which often are highly resistant to
change.27 In 2002, some two-thirds of the Armys Special Forces were
distributed between more than 85 countries around the world. Concern was
voiced that the Pentagon visions of empire were focusing attention on new
technologies while any real empire-building required more personnel
instead, and a greater emphasis on people rather than machines.28
Nevertheless, Iraq, like the late 20th-century wars before it (Vietnam,
Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo, Haiti,
Sudan, and Afghanistan, for example) was a proving ground for new or

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improved weapons. The 21,500-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast super-

bomb (MOAB) arrived too late to be part of the Shock and Awe campaign
against Baghdad and the giant Bunker Buster was not due for testing in
Nevada until mid-2006. Some other weapons designed in part for use in Iraq
were also in the testing stage. Since very few American troops could speak
Arabic, a Voice Response Translator (VRT) was developed that could be
attached to a megaphone to translate a prescribed set of English phrases into
Arabic: examples cited included Thank you for cooperating and We have
to detain you. Early in January 2007 a ray gun was demonstrated on
volunteers that, while not painful, emitted 130 Fahrenheit radiant heat that
penetrated garments and made the targets think their clothing was on fire. It
was said to be a non-lethal crowd-control device that would be ready for
production by 2010. Development of cyborg insects (implanted with a tiny
microcomputer system when they are still pupa) to gather battlefield data was
being forwarded by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency). By 2006, robot soldiers (Special Weapons Observation Recon-
naissance Detection Systems, or SWORDS) were thought to be already
under test in Iraq and it was planned to replace the computer screens,
joysticks and keypads with Gameboy-style controlled and virtual-reality
goggles.
More importantly, the development of the Predator, a drone aircraft used
already in the Balkans during the mid-1990s to collect information, was
continued in both Afghanistan and Iraq. From 2001 on, it not only collected
information but acted on it, being equipped with Hellfire laser-guided
missiles. In 2002, one famously searched out, discovered and destroyed
a vehicle travelling in Yemen with six occupants, identified by the US as
al-Qaeda terrorists.

GLOBALISATION AND EMPIRE

Immediately after World War II, the American federal government created a
complex and well-funded system to foster technological progress through
the support, in both public and private venues, of technical and scientific
research and development. Based on the putative success of such efforts
during the war itself, the nation took enormous pride in what it took to be
American leadership in such activities. From Nobel prizes to a cornucopia of
new military and civilian technologies, American science and technology was
the world standard, leading European nations to decry a technology gap
and developing countries to worry about the brain drain of their brightest
and best.
At the beginning of the 21st century, that leadership was a critical
underpinning of US global hegemony. As David Harvey observed, much
of the worlds research and development is done in the US. This gives it
a sustained technological advantage, and biases the global paths of

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technological change towards its own interests (particularly those centered

in the military-industrial complex). Furthermore, it generates a flow of
technological rents from the rest of the world into the US economy.29
From the mid-20th century on, however, voices in the country raised
periodic concern that this proud vanguardism was threatened both by
progress being made abroad and by alleged lack of support at home. The
Soviet success in building an atomic bomb much earlier than expected, and
beating the US into space with an orbiting satellite, the famous Sputnik 1,
were worrisome but so was the rapid recovery of its former enemies
Germany and Japan, which, having been disarmed, were free to devote all
of their technical and scientific resources to meeting civilian needs and
desires.
This anxiety has continued into the 21st century. In 2007, a report by the
World Economic Forum found that by its Networked Readiness Index, the
United States has slipped from first to seventh place among nations, trailing
such countries as Denmark (the new leader), Sweden, Singapore, Finland and
Switzerland in its ability to participate in and benefit from developments in
information and communication technology. Such American groups as the
American Electronics Association confirmed the perception, blaming a host
of factors including falling numbers of engineering graduates, insufficient
funds for research and development, and a general low level of numeracy
and scientific literacy generally. Other critics pointed to the fact that the
technologies of information and communication were firmly in the
hands of large corporations in the cable and telecom industry, which were
more interested in protecting their market shares than in pushing new
technologies.30
The 2006 report of the National Science Foundation on science and
engineering showed a mixed picture. The European Unions dominance in
high-technology manufacturing between 1980 and 1995 had been turned
around in 1996 and figures for 2003 showed that the US produced 40 per
cent of global value added in high-technology, compared with only 18 per
cent from the EU and 12 per cent from Japan. The US continued to be
a strong exporter of manufacturing technological know-how sold as
intellectual property, the technological rents to which Harvey referred. On
the other hand, in 2002, for the first time, American imports of advanced
technology products exceed exports with the deficit growing to $37 billion
in 2004.31 In an attempt to keep the good times rolling, a White House press
release titled The United States and the European Union Initiative to
Enhance Transatlantic Economic Integration and Growth (20 June 2005)
listed twelve initiatives in the area of technological innovation, designed to
increase synergies across the Atlantic as we become more knowledge-based
economies.
Europe, however, was not content simply to integrate its efforts with
those of the US. In 2005, the EU launched its first satellite for its own Galileo

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global-positioning system, designed to make it independent of the American

system and therefore more sensitive to European military needs. That same
year the EU moved to end the long-time American control of the Internet.
Perhaps more importantly, the EU parliament began discussions of
establishing a European Institute of Technology in a clear effort to match
the potential for technology and science innovation demonstrated by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The reality of American
dominance was joined, in the planners mind, by the rising spectre of Indian
and Chinese competition. Already in 2006, China was producing each year
more graduates in technology, science and mathematics than all the countries
of the EU combined.
The problem is as serious at the worksite as it is in the laboratory. The
doctrine of Globalization through Free Trade, which has driven American
economic policy for the past generation, was based on the faith that it would
produce a win-win outcome. What is becoming increasingly apparent,
however, is that the out-sourcing of not only American investment but
cutting-edge technologies is producing gains overseas in the very labour
efficiency that was largely responsible for American prosperity in the first
place. A Chinese or Indian worker with a shovel does not need an
engineering degree to become more productive; he or she needs a backhoe
instead.
In the homeland itself, American technological prowess is often
eccentrically applied and unevenly enjoyed. The tendency to save old
technologies by inventing specific fixes for specific problems can be seen in
small as well as large instances. If automobile congestion continues in the
21st century, robot garages will help ease the problem. Increasingly popular
in other countries, the US got only its second early in 2007 when one opened
in New York Citys Chinatown. Cars driven onto a pallet are then auto-
matically moved vertically and horizontally into vacant spaces. When
checked out by their drivers, they are retrieved and presented always facing
the exit door. In this garage, the new system allows 67 cars to be parked in a
space that would normally accommodate only 24.32
At MIT a One Laptop per Child project is trying to develop a cheap
laptop computer (the price was down to $150 each in 2007) that could be
distributed to all poor children around the world. Its sponsors were said to
believe that allowing poor children access to modern technologies would
give those who dont have access to teachers and schools the ability [to] teach
themselves.33 And this is despite the fact that the appalling conditions under
which many of those children live hardly seem to provide the necessary
environment for such high-tech fixes.
Even within the US, the adoption of electronic gadgets was less than
one might have expected. In 2006, for example, mobile phone use was well
behind the world leader, Hong Kong, where there were 1,184 phones for
every 1,000 people. The US, with 630 Internet users per 1,000 people, trailed

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Australia, which had 646. New Zealand, Iceland, Sweden and Malta were also
more networked than the US. The giddy elaboration of picture phones and
iPods, and computer games as alternative worlds continues apace however,
and the only surprise would be if it suddenly stopped.
At the same time, the American space programme, that technological icon
of the 1960s, had apparently lost its power to stir the hearts of the American
public (and the purse strings of Congress). A survey conducted in 2006
found high levels of indifference among 18-to-25 year olds toward manned
trips to the moon and Mars.34 NASA was properly alarmed of course,
realising like any great industrial corporation, that it made little sense to
proceed with technological products that it could not sell.
Just as World War I had been called the chemists war, World War II had
made heroes out of the physicists, who along with electrical engineers had
played a major role in developing some of the most spectacular new weapons
of the conflict: radar, proximity fuses, jet propulsion, and of course the
atomic bomb itself. During the years of the Cold War, physicists continued
to play a leading role in setting technological (especially military) priorities
and generally advising the federal government on matters of what was called
science policy, but was mostly about which technologies should be pursued
with research and development spending.
Before the end of the century, however, the life sciences had begun to
forge past physics as the glamour field, and while the latter continued to get
and spend a very large part of the nations science budget, biotechnology was
increasingly the area where bold new breakthroughs were expected. The
description of the fundamental structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in
1953 is a convenient marker for the beginnings of this change and, during
the 1960s, three universities in the San Francisco Bay Area (the University of
California at Berkeley, the UC San Francisco medical school and Stanford)
led in converting a swelling stream of federal research funds in the life
sciences first into a rapidly growing body of fundamental knowledge about
the science of life, then, with additional help from academic entrepreneurs
and venture capitalists, into what is now called the biotechnology industry,
encompassing such marvels as genetic engineering, recombinant DNA,
cloning and stem cell research.
Although agriculture in the US did not experience its Industrial
Revolution until well into the 20th century, in the years after World War II
it had largely accomplished the ideal advocated decades before of having
Every Farm a Factory. At the turn of the 21st century, such military
technologies as the Global Positioning System (GPS) were being applied
by farmers to pinpoint areas under cultivation that needed particular
applications of fertilizers or pesticides as well as to map terrain prior to laying
out dikes for flooding fields. Tractors equipped with lasers were used to help
level land for the same purpose.
More dramatically, however, the new century saw the adoption of spin-

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offs from the science of life research and development, first with the
introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops. GM soy beans and corn,
for example, were spreading at a rapid rate around the world, marketed
to increase yields and cut the need for pesticides, but also useful for
concentrating the world supply of seed crops in the hands of a few large
American corporations. The inclusion of a new suicide gene made such
crops suitable for food stock, but incapable of growing the next crop when
planted and thereby requiring farmers to buy new seeds each year. Health
concerns joined with fears of economic peonage and the endangerment of
biodiversity to fuel worldwide protests against such GM crops.
Similarly, designer hens and new ways of pharming have been intro-
duced, again in the face of protest. The hens were given human genes that
made them capable of laying eggs with anti-cancer proteins in their whites,
thus making possible the more efficient and cheaper production of a wide
range of drugs. In another laboratory, tobacco has been genetically modified
to produce a protein that fights HIV. This last example of pharming,
especially, also raises the spectre of such genes escaping into the natural
gene pool of the country and producing unanticipated, but potentially
devastating, effects. There can be little doubt that with the potential of
miracle cures for a whole range of diseases, not to mention enormous
profits, there will continue to be great pressure to expand this area of
technological development.

The eclipse of the American Empire (as critics such as Tom Engelhardt and
Niall Ferguson are calling it) in the 21st century is perhaps more likely than
not, and technology will be a critical element of that decline. Overblown,
overpriced and morally dubious weapons that do not, in the end, serve the
purpose will be one factor. A mismatched set of government priorities,
incentives and no-go zones in research and development will be another. The
wholesale export of jobs to overseas workers, along with the technology to
increase their efficiency, will make its own contribution. For a nation that
relies so heavily on its supposed technological vanguardism for not only its
prosperity and global reach but its very self-definition as well, the prospect is
fraught.
NOTES
1. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. x, xii.
2. Joseph J. Corn (ed.), Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 219.
3. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, p. xv.
4. Charles Jencks cited in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 39.
5. Quoted in Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and

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Americas Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006),

p. 390.
6. Ibid., pp. 38991.
7. Rebecca Morelle, Building a skyscraper after 9/11, BBC News, 9 April 2006.
8. Molly Moore, Future aircraft designed to put terrorists out of action, Sydney
Morning Herald, 18 January 2007, reprinted from The Washington Post.
9. Hydrogen & clean fuels research, US Department of Energy, http://
fossil.energy.gov/programs/fuelss/index.html.
10. Barry C. Lynn, Hydrogens dirty secret, Mother Jones, MayJune 2003, http://
www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url+http.
11. CNN.com, 27 March 2007.
12. CARE, Cleaner environment, http://www.careenergy.com/cleaner_
environment/clean-coal-technology.asp.
13. US Department of Energy, http://www.fossil.energy.gov/fred/feprograms.
jsp?prog=Carbon+Sequestration.
14. US Department of Energy, Carbon sequestration R&D overview, http://
www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/overview.html.
15. US Department of Energy, Clean coal technology and the Presidents
clean coal initiative, http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/
cleancoal/. US Department of Energy, Key R&D programs and initiatives,
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/index.html.
16. Wendy Frew, Slow burn for carbon capture technology, Sydney Morning Herald,
23 December 2006.
17. Farhad Manjoo, Ethanol guzzles gas, study says, Wired News, 2003,
http://www.com/news/politics/0,1283,46045,00.html.
18. Quoted in David Adam, US answer to global warming: smoke and giant space
mirrors, The Guardian, 27 January 2007.
19. Quoted in Manufacturers urged to make environmentalism a goal, New York
Times, 29 September 1992.
20. Curtis Moore and Alan Miller, Green Gold: Japan, Germany, the United States, and the
Race for Environmental Technology (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 1, 2, 11.
21. Japanese firms embrace green technology, Taipei Times, 6 April 2005. Deborah
Cameron, Rising sun turns green, Sydney Morning Herald, 2223 October 2005.
22. Ivan Amato, The slow birth of green chemistry, Science, 259, 12 March 1991,
153841.
23. Roberta C. Barbalace, CO2 pollution and global warming: when does carbon
dioxide become a pollutant?, 7 November 2006, EnvironmentalChemistry.com,
http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/environmental/200611CO2global
warming.html. Roberta C. Barbalace, Sorting out science from junk science: is
it really science?, 3 August 2006, http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/
environmental/200608junkscience.html.
24. Jonathan Amos, US scientists reject interference, BBC News, 14 December
2006.
25. John A. Gentry, Doomed to Fail: Americas blind faith in military technology,
Paramaters, 88, Winter 20023. Sydney Morning Herald, 1112 February 2006.
26. Taken from Michael OHanlon, High technology and the defense budget, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 February 2003, B12.

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TECHNOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

27. Gentry, Doomed to Fail, pp. 889.

28. Jason Vest, The armys empire skeptics, The Nation, 276, 3 March 2003, 27.
29. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
p. 221.
30. SFGate.com, 29 March 2007.
31. National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006.
32. Pack em in New Yorkers get a robotic garage, http://www.cnn.com/2007/
TECH/01/30/robotic.garage.ap/index.html.
33. The Age (Melbourne), 12 January 2007.
34. See http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space.youth.apathy.ap/index.html.

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12. AMERICA AND THE ENVIRONMENT

John Wills

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth, Henry
David Thoreau pondered at his Walden retreat near Concord, Massachusetts
in the late 1840s. The rise of industrialisation, commerce and materialism
offended the sensibilities of a man dedicated to intellectual contemplation
and transcendental nature. Thoreau struggled with the enterprise of nation-
building going on about him. On some days, the sounds of the Fitchburg
Railroad penetrated his forest surroundings, an iron horse that made the
hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and
breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils. On other days, Thoreau managed
to sit in his sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amid the
pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while
the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house. 1 One hundred
and fifty years on air flight is a common practice, with the waste products
of the aviation industry a growing contributor to global warming, and
industrialisation, commerce and materialism continue to shape American
priorities at the beginning of the 21st century. At the same time, the United
States is regarded by many as the birthplace of the national park idea, and
respected for its history of environmental activism and legislation. Thoreaus
beloved rural idyll of Walden Pond has been designated a National Historical
and Literary Landmark and entertains thousands of visitors each year. No
longer a perfect place of solitude, Walden is nonetheless protected.
This sense of America as a place of extremes and contradictions provides
the inspiration for this chapter. Especially in terms of its international
reputation, the country desperately lacks green credentials. Due to the failure
of the Bush administration to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, an international
framework designed to combat climate change, America is oft considered

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one of the countries least likely to endorse global environmental law.

According to popular hyperbole, the USA represents a nation of gas-
guzzling automobiles, oil magnates-cum-politicians, and a McDonalds-like
supersize greed when it comes to consumption. America serves as the
worlds new eco-villain. Yet this harsh stereotype ignores the diversity of
opinion held across the nation. Many citizens support environmental causes
by recycling, contributing to wildlife charities and attending annual Earth
Day events. States (such as California) continue to pioneer green technology
initiatives and enact strict pollution legislation. The four sections in this
chapter provide an insight into recent environmental dilemmas, disasters and
challenges in the United States. There are stories of green optimism and
green pessimism. Hurricane Katrina and global warming are discussed, along
with the California energy crisis, going green as a mainstream agenda, and
shifting notions of what nature means in contemporary American culture.
Collectively, these discussions posit the idea of a nation with a choice at the
beginning of the 21st century: to continue to react with ambivalence to an
unfolding climate crisis or aspire to a new position in the world as a green
republic.

HURRICANE KATRINA AND GLOBAL WARMING

In late August 2005, just four years after the 9/11 terrorist attack, another
unexpected disaster hit the United States. A category-5 hurricane moved into
the Gulf of Mexico. Storm surges devastated the Louisiana coastline. Worst
hit was New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina caused a surge of water that
breached several canal banks on the morning of 29 August. Lower Ninth
Ward, St Bernard Parish, City Park and Lakeview immediately flooded. Over
50 levee breaches followed. Within two days, approximately 80 per cent of
the city had flooded. Routes out of New Orleans disappeared amidst water
and wreckage. Over 700 people lost their lives.2
In the light of 9/11, the United States was meant to be capable of
responding effectively to any new catastrophe on home soil. Hurricane
Katrina suggested otherwise. Events had initially proceeded smoothly.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco announced a state of emergency on
the Friday before Hurricane Katrina hit. The same weekend, city mayor
C. Ray Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. By Monday
morning, 80 per cent of residents had left the city. However, adequate plans
had not been made for those unable to flee due to travel costs or ill health.
Some 26,000 huddled in the Louisiana Superdome, a huge sports facility in
the Central Business District set aside as a refuge of last resort for those
who could not leave. While the city flooded, federal authorities downplayed
the catastrophe, and proved slow to commit resources. The Superdome
suffered roof damage and supplies failed to reach refugees in sufficient
quantities. Elsewhere, survivors struggled to find assistance. Growing cases

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of dehydrated and stranded residents pointed to broad mismanagement

of the relief effort. In particular, the work of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) and the Bush administration received
widespread criticism, with the predictable epithet of Katrinagate entering
the popular lexicon. Heavily televised, the incident shocked the world.
National confidence was fractured by stark images of urban poverty and
floating dead bodies, disorganised relief efforts, and instances of looting
(poor social behaviour proved especially significant given the portrayal of
American heroes in 9/11). More akin to a city in a Third World country,
the devastated New Orleans seemed out of place in 21st-century Americas
affluent, middle-class landscape. Long-term problems included one million
homeless and an $80 billion price tag, placing Hurricane Katrina as the
costliest natural disaster in America on record.
The racial dynamics of the story proved hard to avoid. New Orleans
denoted a troubled city. As historian Kent B. Germany explained: in the
mid-1960s, this city of almost 650,000 residents was one of the most
impoverished, most unequal, most violent, and least educated places in
the United States. 3 By the 1970s, War on Poverty programmes and Total
Community Action (TCA) had partially rectified a historic, Jim Crow-
fostered imbalance in the city, but economic decline, the withdrawal of
federal support, and an exodus of white and black middle classes left the
place vulnerable by the late 1980s. During the course of Katrina, television
cameras elucidated the dramatic urban poverty and ethnic inequality that
haunted the city. The high number of destitute, homeless African Americans
indicated that not all of America lived the American dream. Lack of progress
in the post-civil rights era suggested that black Americans continued to
represent third-rate citizens. World Watch journal reported: Poor and black
= low, wet, and maybe dead.4 The slow response of FEMA and President
Bush was taken by some as proof of institutional racism still at work in
America. How would federal authorities have responded to a hurricane
hitting a rich, white and Republican city, rather than a poor, black and
Democratic one? Internet sites aired a photograph of African Americans
looting supplies from flooded stores, leading to accusations of racial bias in
the media (by comparison, white residents were merely finding supplies in
another captioned image).5 While the National Guard and federal troops did
move in to patrol streets, onsite reports of murders and rapes were later
discredited. Many elements of media coverage failed to portray the scene
with accuracy. Claims that white residents lived only in higher elevations and
thus avoided catastrophe proved erroneous. Environmental analyst Richard
Campanella suggested that Katrina had a roughly proportional impact on
black and white residents. Of the population of New Orleans, 67 per
cent was black, with 76 per cent affected by the disaster. White residents
accounted for 28 per cent of the city population, and 20 per cent emerged as
flood victims. However, Campanella remained adamant that those who were

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stranded in the inundated city and suffered excruciatingly long lays in

rescue were overwhelmingly African American and poor.6 Media attention
noticeably shifted away from New Orleans in the months that followed. The
hopes of President Bush that we will not just rebuild, we will build higher
and better may not be easily fulfilled.7 Land-use wrangles, threats to historic
neighbourhoods, problems of homelessness and a questionable market-
driven approach to urban renewal suggest a slow recovery for the be-
leaguered city.
The environment proved the other obvious story of Hurricane Katrina.
Natural sediment levees dating back millennia provided the material foun-
dations for New Orleans. The course of the Mississippi River gave the city
its bowl-like shape. Engineered canals, artificial levees, pumping stations
and reclaimed wetlands all facilitated urban growth in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. By the time of Katrina, nearly 50 per cent of streets were
below sea level. While usually strong enough to withhold stormy weather,
water defences failed on several occasions in the 20th century. In 1927, New
Orleans flooded due to drainage problems, while in 1965 Hurricane Betsy
caused a storm surge that overwhelmed parts of the city for seven days. The
building of New Orleans on a floodplain ultimately made it vulnerable to
water fluctuations, regardless of whatever technological fixes came along.8
Some media commentators interpreted the scale of disaster at New
Orleans as a sign of dramatic climate change ahead. The Boston Globe
connected Katrina with a spate of other ecological events around the world,
from wildfires in Spain to torrential rain in Bombay. The newspaper declared
the real name of Katrina to be global warming and recommended that
Americans make themselves familiar with the term.9 ABC News reported
that global warming had increased the intensity of major storms in the recent
period, claiming: if Katrina had struck the Gulf Coast just three decades
earlier, the results might have been quite different.10 Scientists wrangled over
the root cause of stronger, more frequent hurricanes. A record 33 hurricanes
in the Atlantic basin between 1995 and 1999 seemed connected to rising
global temperatures and heat-trapping pollutants, but some climatologists
claimed a natural climatic cycle to be the principal culprit.11
Scepticism over the relationship between Hurricane Katrina and global
warming reflected broader US doubts over climate change. The Bush
administration proved consistent in its opposition to labelling global
warming a manmade malady. Chief reservations included the reliability of
scientific data, the prospect of significant damage to the national economy
by enforcing strict pollution targets, and the need to involve China and India
in global environmental legislation initiatives. Despite early declarations of a
willingness to work on the issue (Bush noted in a speech in June 2001 how
the earths well-being is also an issue important to America), the govern-
ment compromised international strategies for change. Most cited was
the failure of the United States to ratify the Kyoto Treaty.12 Along with

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involvement in the Iraq conflict, US reticence over global warming

significantly contributed to a decline in prestige for the country on the world
stage. Contributing 5 per cent of the world population, but 25 per cent of
world carbon dioxide production, America remains a necessary player in
debates over world pollution targets. Any serious attempt to combat climate
change will depend on a more positive relationship between future American
presidents and world leaders.
The reticence of the Bush administration to combat global warming
nonetheless galvanised individual states to act on the issue. In August 2006,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, met with British Prime-
minister Tony Blair to agree to share scientific research and economic
mechanisms designed to curb global warming. Schwarzenegger committed
California to stringently cutting its greenhouse gas emissions. The Anglo-
American relationship no longer depended on world leader-to-leader
dialogue. At the beginning of 2008, USA Today reported a boom in state
legislation designed to reduce global warming by the implementation of
greenhouse-gas reduction targets. Seventeen states also set about suing
the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bush administration over a
controversial veto of state-led strict car emissions standards (the targets
proved considerably tighter than those set out in the federal energy bill of
2007).13 Frustration over the lack of leadership on the global warming issue
heralded from all sides, including business. As the LA Times reported in 2006,
the United States, which has always risen to scientific and technological
challenges, is in danger of sitting this one out.14

SUPERSIZE KILOWATTS
While animal and human power, firewood and coal provided the United
States with energy in the 19th century, by the 20th century fossil fuels
dominated the energy market. In particular, national growth became
strongly associated with petroleum use. Throughout the period, demand for
petroleum rose as the automobile became the favoured mode of transport.
During the 1950s, America found itself unable to meet fuel needs from
internal sources. Importing oil became a necessity. In the 1970s, US depen-
dence on foreign energy reserves was brought home with dramatic effect
during the OPEC crisis. The mainly Arab-based Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries punished the Nixon administration for US backing of
Israel in the Yom Kippur War. OPEC banned shipment of oil to America as
a response. Soon after, barrel prices rose 400 per cent. Fuel shortages left
Americans queuing at the pumps. Conservation measures included national
55mph speed limits to increase car engine economy and rationed fuel sales
for odd-numbered last-digit licence plates on odd days of the month, even
numbers for even days. The OPEC crisis highlighted the globalisation of the
fuel industry and the precariousness of oil dependency. However, in the long

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term, it failed to result in significantly better fuel consumption rates in

American-produced vehicles or a clear long-term strategy for energy
conservation. If anything, by the 1990s, gasoline seemed a cheap commodity
again. The popularity of the Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) encouraged mass
acceptance of poor fuel efficiency. The Hummer, a large 4 4 vehicle
employed by military personnel in the 19901 Gulf War and promoted for
sale to the rich and famous from 1992, averaged just ten miles per gallon.
It served as a suitable symbol of US decadence, everyday environmental
ignorance, and a supersize me attitude to consumption. At the close of the
century, the US imported a record 11 million barrels of oil every day.
Confirming this idea of the United States as a foremost oil nation, the
Bush administration of 20018 garnered a reputation as a strong ally of the
petroleum industry. In part, this reflected personal links with energy
providers. National Security Advisor (later Secretary of State) Condoleezza
Rice had an oil tanker named after her in recognition of her directorship at
Chevron. Several attempts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(ANWR) in Alaska to oil drilling were narrowly seen off. As oil supplies
diminish over the course of the 21st century, further pressure will come on
remaining national reserves. The escalation in gasoline prices from just over
$1 per gallon in 1998 to over $3 per gallon in 2008 suggests a crisis ahead.
Meanwhile, problems in electricity supplies have already had dramatic
effect in the opening years of the 21st century. Long considered a pioneer in
energy production thanks to technological innovation, the state of California
underwent dramatic power outages in 20001. The first blackouts hit San
Francisco in June 2000. During the winter, operating reserves regularly fell
below just 5 per cent. Worrying over the power consumed on the Capitol
Christmas tree, beleaguered Governor Gray Davis turned the lights off early.
To make matters worse, the major state provider, Pacific Gas and Electric
Company (PG&E), filed for bankruptcy. Californias energy crisis was
brought on by a number of factors: (1) poorly thought out restructuring
and deregulation of state energy provision in the 1990s; (2) rising natural
gas prices; (3) out-of-state supply problems (including price manipulation);
(4) environmental factors, including storm damage to production facilities;
and (5) old, and maintenance heavy, facilities. PG&E (along with other state
providers) was capped on its charges to consumers, but suddenly found itself
unable to meet the costs of buying in power and fixing plants. The market
experiment in state energy proved disastrous. At root, however, it all came
down to the demands put on the energy landscape. The population of
California had risen from 10.5 million in 1950 to 33.9 million by 2000. State
growth proved similarly impressive. No governmental authority, corporation
or citizen group had really thought out a sustainable plan on how to meet the
rise of the Golden State.15
Crises unfolding in both oil production and electrical supply threaten to
undermine historic associations of the United States with abundance. Ever

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since European settlement, America has been cast as a bounteous land-

scape capable of fuelling myriad economic enterprises. The sheer scale of
the country aided visions of limitless wealth, resources and land on the
19th-century trans-Mississippi frontier before it closed in 1890. Unfettered
capitalism and materialism shaped the mindset of the 20th-century entre-
preneur. This heady myth of abundance cannot automatically survive the
21st century. The United States might not be able to compete with India
or China in terms of economic growth or energy resources. Green, virtual
and high technology businesses may succeed, while large scale, traditional
industries flounder. A supersize mentality might prove neither feasible nor
desirable in the decades ahead. Losing competitiveness and targeted by
health groups, McDonalds phased out its supersize meal options in 2004.
The wise option may be to follow in the footsteps of Ronald McDonald.

A GREEN REPUBLIC?
Although a radical proposition, the notion of a 21st-century green republic
is firmly rooted in American soil. President Thomas Jefferson proved a
great advocate of a green and agrarian nation. Writers such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir connected cultural national-
ism with American wilderness. Ignoring for the moment Native American
earth practices, modern conservation dates back over one hundred years.
The Sierra Club, a gentlemans hiking club founded in 1892, championed the
preservation of national park landscapes, in particular Yosemite in northern
California. In the 1960s and 1970s, citizens embraced a new environmental
consciousness, and hosted the first national display of environmental
concern, Earth Day, on 22 April 1970. In the later decades of the 20th
century, the environmental movement broadened to include social justice
campaigns and urban reform movements. While successes proved rare in the
so-called anti-environment climate of the Bush administration (and some
animal rights protesters and eco-radicals found themselves branded eco-
terrorists), activism remained strong on behalf of the planet.
Annual Gallup polls from 2000 to 2007 indicated that around 60 to 70 per
cent of Americans either felt sympathetic towards green issues or actively
participated in the environmental movement.16 Many US citizens considered
themselves to be green on some level, whether by virtue of their home
recycling efforts, support for national parks, or purchasing of organic food.
In a phone survey by GFK Roper conducted in December 2007, 49 per cent
of those interviewed announced that their new years resolution for 2008 was
to be greener, with especially the younger generation eager to commit
to lifestyle changes. Being green seemed eminently fashionable.17 Elle
magazine carried a green issue in May 2006. Guest edited by Laurie David,
green activist (and wife of Curb Your Enthusiasms Larry David), the womens
magazine included features on The Hot Environmentalist Robert F.

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Kennedy Jr, how to go about a green detox, eco-friendly celebrity advice

and fashion tips. Vanity Fair published a similar green issue the same month.
In it, Editor Graydon Carter declared, Green is the new black.18
The rising popularity of green-branded commerce attested to this new
fashion trend. Purveyor of premium natural and organic foods, Whole
Foods Market first opened in Austin, Texas in 1980 and seven years later
Wild Oats Market, another organic food chain, started life in Boulder,
Colorado. By acquiring smaller independent stores and expanding into new
markets, both Whole Foods and Wild Oats grew rapidly in the 1990s. On
merging in 2007, the companies boasted a combined total of over 250
stores across 38 states. Green supermarkets gained a reputation for ethical,
rewarding employment schemes. However, the retail prices of some eco-
friendly products dictated a level of exclusivity, with unintended ethnic
and class repercussions. Few people on low incomes could afford a $7.99
takeaway salad.
Green branding also expanded beyond its traditional fold of organic
food and small-scale, localised production. Large multinational corporations
embraced ecological sensibilities. Japanese automakers found a new market
for their economical vehicles in the USA during the 1970s OPEC crisis. At
the outset of the 21st century, the Toyota Prius became a green status symbol
in America. Capable of between 50 and 60 miles per imperial gallon, the
Prius marked a fresh direction for the automobile in smog-heavy locations
such as Los Angeles. Sales rocketed thanks to escalating oil prices and
Hollywood celebrity endorsement (Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz
proved speedy converts to hybrids). The Prius also benefited from an early
lead in the eco-car market. According to 2007 press reports, sales slowed a
little as other clean cars, including BMWs MINI and Hondas Civic Hybrid,
increased competition.19
The commitment of all major auto manufacturers to green technology
suggests a major revolution in transport is emerging. Cognisant of growing
pressure from consumers and legislators alike for maximum highway miles,
Ford and General Motors both recently committed to alternative fuels. Ford
announced at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November 2007 its blueprint
for sustainability featuring smaller but more powerful engines and new
technological developments.20 Critics might argue this is merely a resurgence
of green-washing tactics dating back to the environmental revolution of the
1970s. While the Sierra Club rated British Petroleum a top of the barrel
performer in January 2007 for, amongst other things, promising an $8 billion
investment in alternative energy, has the oil corporation advanced its
Beyond Petroleum agenda significantly enough when hydrocarbon
revenues hit over $285 billion in 2004 alone? 21 Produced in a hasty fashion
for the very first Earth Day, The Environmental Handbook (1970) included a
chapter entitled Eco pornography or how to spot an ecological phony. The
opening paragraph read: Now that the environmental crisis is in the daily

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news and maturing in political sex appeal, panaceas are coming from curious
sources the ad agencies of the major industries that created the crisis.
The article highlighted in its discussion green advertisements by motor
manufacturer Ford and the Shell Oil Company.22
The green revolution of the 1970s also had an impact on national politics.
Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), a revised
Clean Air Act (1970) and the Endangered Species Act (1973), but in the
1980s the Reagan administration resisted environmental pressure for more
reform. Secretary of the Interior James Watts had few qualms over putting
economic development before wilderness protection on public lands. In
both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, candidates shrank from
green campaigning. Democratic hopefuls with eco-credentials shied from
environmental debate for fear of alienating corporate America. Advisors for
2000 hopeful Al Gore, author of green tome Earth in the Balance (1992),
recommended that he play down his ecological sympathies. That said,
in 21st-century California, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
demonstrated that going green could serve as a vote winner. An early fan of
the Hummer, Schwarzenegger converted his 4 4 to run on bio-fuel, and
called for the green movement to beef up its image and get environmentally
muscular (an apt phrase given Schwarzeneggers muscle-building back-
ground). With issues of climatic change and resource scarcity likely to
increase in severity, the broad political spectrum needs to embrace green
issues to win votes in the 21st century. As Schwarzenegger warned any
politician who failed to go green: You will become a political penguin on a
smaller and smaller ice floe, drifting out to sea. Goodbye, my little friend. 23

NATURE THREATENED
Such images of shrinking ice caps borrowed from the hugely successful
documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), presented by
Al Gore. For his efforts, Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize and the film
received a Hollywood Oscar. If An Inconvenient Truth emerges as the pro-
duction to springboard a new level of mass consciousness over climate
warming in the United States, the movie follows in the footpath of an earlier
work that revolutionised American attitudes toward the environment, Silent
Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson. Former US Fish and Wildlife Service (at that
time the Bureau of Fisheries) biologist, Carson challenged the unquestioned
dominance of chemical-based pesticides such as DDT in the post-war era,
or as she put it at the time: the current vogue for poisons. Rather than a
mark of technological progress and sophistication, Carson presented widely
popular agricultural control programmes of the 1950s and 1960s as crude
a weapon as the cave mans club.24 While facilitating a rise in crop manu-
facture, pesticides contaminated the environment. Carson documented a
range of follies, including milk poisoning in Long Island (1957) and birdlife

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losses in Duxbury, Massachusetts (1958). Silent Spring proved a damming

indictment of the corporate-scientific elite behind the large-scale use of
pesticides. The strong backlash against the title proved remarkable by its
fervour. The agri-chemical industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
in character assassination bids and legal claims. One Newsweek editor
described the scene: thanks to a woman named Rachel Carson, a big fuss
has been stirred up to scare the American public out of its wits. 25 Historian
Paul Brooks contended that perhaps not since the classic controversy over
Charles Darwins The Origin of Species just over a century earlier had a single
book been more bitterly attacked by those who felt their interests
threatened. 26
A nationwide bestseller, Silent Spring remains for many the title that sparked
the modern environmental movement in the United States. In 1992, Al Gore
provided an introduction to the 30th-anniversary edition of the book. Gore
remarked how Silent Spring could not be stifled. Solutions to the problems it
raised werent immediate, but the book itself achieved enormous popularity
and public support.27 The title prompted a Science Advisory Committee (set
up by President John F. Kennedy) to investigate pesticide use, and DDT was
banned from domestic application in 1972. More importantly, many people
spoke out about environmental problems for the first time. Carson high-
lighted growing concern over invisible manmade threats to the environment.
A fable for tomorrow, the opening chapter of Silent Spring, described
fictional small-town America silenced by a mystery force, later revealed as
pesticides, but equally referencing the atomic threat in Cold War America.
Ultimately, the chain of living organisms seemed at risk from all kinds of
pollution, atomic fallout and chemical pesticides included. Carson worried
over the irresponsibility of industrial society, calling for more democratic,
popular input into science and technology. On a more philosophical level,
she fretted over the control over nature exercised by modern man: only
within the moment of time represented by the present century has one
species man acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. 28
Gore raised a similar mixture of science and sentiment in An Inconvenient
Truth. On a basic level, both Silent Spring and An Inconvenient Truth succeeded
in getting the message out. Gore explained, after several decades of eco-
talk, that I think Im finally getting a little better at it.29 Critics disagreed,
portraying his film as more a disaster movie than a documentary. Along with
questions over scientific accuracy, debates ran over its appropriateness as an
educational tool in schools.30 Despite the popular appeal of An Inconvenient
Truth (as the following chapter on Contemporary American Culture
discusses), whether the movie can become the Silent Spring for its generation
remains open to conjecture.
The invisible threat that Carson documented did not end with the
banning of DDT. In the 1990s, concerns grew over genetically modified
crops and genetic mutation. An even greater doomsday seemed on the

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horizon. American eco-journalist Bill McKibbens bestseller The End of

Nature (1989) captured such alarm. In it, McKibben described the sense of
reassurance in knowing that one creosote plant in the American Southwest,
11,700 years old, continued to thrive as if nature remained immutable.
McKibben went on to detail the impact of carbon dioxide gases, ozone holes,
acid rain and global warming on the natural world, leading to his prediction
that no part of nature could escape the coming storm. The ancient creosote
bush seemed in imminent danger of keeling over. Nature, as something
distinct from mans influence, no longer existed.31
Despite the warnings of Carson and McKibben, experimentation with
nature proved irresistible in the 21st century. The British cloned a sheep in
1996 that they nicknamed Dolly after the country singer Dolly Parton.
Relatively harmless experiments included allegedly engineering the first
hypoallergenic cat by genetic screening and selective breeding. Allerca, a
California biotechnology company, released kittens for sale from 2006 at a
cost of $3500 each.32 The pet Glofish, a fluorescent, genetically modified
zebrafish caused more controversy due to the common relation between fish
and human diet. Of course, humans have always manipulated nature. Native
Americans employed fire to clear areas for planting. European colonists
introduced exotic plants that overwhelmed native ones, reshaping the
American landscape in the process. National Park Service wildlife rangers in
the late 19th century shot wolves to manufacture deer havens, then in 1996
brought the animals back to Yellowstone National Park to restore a natural
predatorprey alliance. And in Hollywood, celebrity Paris Hilton dutifully
carries her Chihuahua, Tinkerbell, while shopping, the tiny dog a distant and
very engineered cousin of the grey wolf. The scale of manipulation has
increased in recent decades. On a fundamental level, nature in the 21st
century is literally being remade. The temptation to tinker seems too much
to resist.
At the same time, it is important to remember that ecology itself is fluid
and ever changing. The discovery of wild species at landscapes long thought
ruined proved one of the more exciting stories at the beginning of the 21st
century. At decommissioned American nuclear sites such as Hanford, Trinity
and even Nevada Test Site, all connected with US atomic bomb testing
in the 1940s and 1950s, wildlife biologists discovered endangered plants
and animals prospering. Areas conceived in the popular imagination as
apocalyptic, irradiated and, by their sheer function, diametrically opposed to
nature, were reborn as wilderness enclaves. Hanford Reach, in Washington
State, where plutonium for the first atomic weapons was produced, became
a registered National Monument in 2000. There is cause for optimism in the
21st century. At the very least, we should not write off the American
environment for a few years yet.33

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NOTES
1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), in George Palmer Blake (ed.) Henry David
Thoreau: Three Complete Books (New York, NY: Gramercy, 1993), pp. 260, 257.
2. The total death toll for Hurricane Katrina is estimated to be over 1,000 people.
See Katrinas official death toll tops 1,000, CNN.com, 21 September 2005,
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/09/21/katrina.impact/.
3. Kent B. Germany, The Politics of Poverty and History: Racial inequality and
the long prelude of Katrina, Journal of American History, 94(3), December 2007,
744.
4. Eric Mann, Race and the high ground in New Orleans, World Watch: Vision for
a Sustainable World, 19, SeptemberOctober 2006, 1.
5. Tania Ralli, Whos a looter? In storms aftermath, pictures kick up a different
kind of tempest, New York Times, 5 September 2005.
6. Richard Campanella, An ethnic geography of New Orleans, Journal of American
History, 94(3), December 2007, 715.
7. President discusses hurricane relief in Address to Nation, Office of the Press
Secretary, The White House, 15 September 2005, http://www.whitehouse.gov/
news/releases/2005/09/20050915-8.html.
8. See Ari Kelman, Boundary Issues: Clarifying New Orleanss murky edges,
Journal of American History, 94(3), December 2007, 695703.
9. Ross Gelbspan, Katrinas real name, The Boston Globe, 30 August 2005.
10. ABC News, Did global warming boost Katrinas fury?, 14 September 2005.
11. Jeffrey Kluger, Is global warming fueling Katrina?, Time, 29 August 2005;
Joseph B. Verrengia, Katrina reignites global warming debate, USA Today,
1 September 2005.
12. President Bush discusses global climate change, Office of the Press Secretary,
The White House, 11 June 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/
2001/06/20010611-2.html.
13. Paul Davidson, States combat global warming, USA Today, 20 January 2008;
John M. Broder and Felicity Barringer, E.P.A. says 17 states cant set emission
rules, New York Times, 20 December 2007.
14. Editorial, Welcome hot air from Arnold and Blair, Los Angeles Times, 2 August
2006.
15. For more on the California energy crisis, see John Wills, Conservation Fallout:
Nuclear Protest at Diablo Canyon (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2006),
p. 183.
16. Riley E. Dunlap, The state of environmentalism in the U.S., Gallup
News Service, 19 April 2007, http://www.gallup.com/poll/27256/State-
Environmentalism-US.aspx.
17. See Tillers Nationwide Green Survey, 17 December 2007, http://www.
tillerllc.com/cgi-bin/tillerinthenews.pl?record=9.
18. ABC News, Vanity Fair hails green the new black on eco-unfriendly paper,
24 April 2006.
19. Alex Taylor III, The birth of the Prius, Fortune, 6 March 2006; Chris Isidore,
Prius new option: incentives for buyers, CNN Money, 8 February 2007.
20. Scott Burgess, Going green: Ford charts course for fuel efficiency as carmakers

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get eco friendly, The Detroit News, 15 November 2007.

21. Sarah Ives and Robynne Boyd, Pick your poison: an updated environmental-
ists guide to gasoline, Sierra Magazine, JanuaryFebruary 2007, http://www.
sierraclub.org/sierra/pickyourpoison/.
22. Thomas Turner, Eco Pornography or how to spot an Ecological Phony, in
Garrett De Bell (ed.) The Environmental Handbook (New York, NY: Ballantine,
1970), p. 263.
23. Schwarzenegger pumps up green movement, CNN.com, 12 April 2007,
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/12/arnold.green/index.html.
24. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, [1962] 1987),
p. 297.
25. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental
Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), p. 85.
26. Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (New York, NY: Houghton
Mifflin, 1993), p. 293.
27. Al Gore, Introduction, in Rachel Carson, Silent Spring 30th Anniversary Edition
(New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), text available online at: http://
www.uneco.org/ssalgoreintro.html.
28. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 5.
29. William J. Broad, From a rapt audience, a call to cool the hype, New York Times,
13 March 2007.
30. Blaine Harden, Gore film sparks parents anger, Washington Post, 25 January
2007.
31. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 37.
32. Penni Crabtree, Allerca promises sneeze-free cats, San Diego Union Tribune,
8 June 2006.
33. For more on the resurgence of nature at post-nuclear landscapes, see John
Wills, Welcome to the Atomic Park: American Nuclear Landscapes and the
unnaturally natural, Environment and History 7(4), November 2001, 44972.

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PART 3
CULTURE
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13. CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN

CULTURE

Martin Halliwell

Late 20th-century American culture is often characterised in terms of its

plurality and eclecticism. The diversification of cultural forms, particularly in
visual and digital media, and broader horizons about what constitutes
cultural production have contributed to an environment in which being
black, poor, female or gay (at least in theory) no longer stands in the way of
talent or strength of vision. Young graduates are finding showcases for low-
budget movies in the burgeoning film festival circuit; many new authors
are being published, helped by the promotion of new fiction on the Oprah
Winfrey Show, particularly writing by young black women; and multimedia
performance and installations have extended the boundaries of what art is
able to represent. Although the attempt to link cultural production to
national politics can often be reductive, one framework for understanding
cultural diversity in the 1990s is in terms of President Clintons final State of
the Union address. In January 2000, Clinton stressed that never before has
our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so
little crisis and so few external threats.1 Clintons vision was both pluralist
and centrist: he saw enormous potential of communities from Appalachia to
the Mississippi Delta, from Watts to Pine Ridge Reservation, but wanted to
link this closely to a restoration of the vital center, replacing outmoded
ideologies with a new vision anchored in basic, enduring values. In early
2000, Clinton called for the 21st century to be one of big dreams, driven by
an American revolution of opportunity, responsibility and community.
As the essays in the third section of this book demonstrate, diversification
of cultural forms is still very much part of American and global culture. But

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Clintons predictions (we will make America the safest big country on earth;
we will reverse the course of climate change; we must strengthen our gun
laws) have to be set alongside an ossification of ideological, economic and
cultural lines after 9/11, as evident in Clintons Dimbleby Lecture of
December 2001 where he worried about the marriage of ancient hatreds and
modern weapons and barely spoke about culture, aside from the Internet
revolution.2 The culture industry in the US has been expanding for 60 years,
with national and international agendas becoming ever more closely inter-
twined and a global market blurring the demarcation between national
cultures. Despite suspicions from the left that big business in America
controls filmmaking, publishing and broadcasting, no longer is the culture
industry the monolith that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer detected
in 1944. But, equally, in the climate of the years following 2001, no longer is
the commercial undertow of American culture offset by the nation being
held in high esteem across the globe.
Indeed, one might argue the reverse. Although American Ivy League
universities consistently top opinion polls as the worlds best, the Public
Policy expert Richard Florida has posited that over the last few years the
creative class has been leaving the US in a global talent flow to countries
with stable or shrinking populations.3 Contrary to Clintons twenty-first
century revolution serving to open new markets, start new businesses, hire
new workers right here in America in our inner cities, poor rural areas, and
Native American reservations, the outsourcing of labour to Asian and South
American countries and the attractiveness of job opportunities for US
college students in Europe and Australasia have coincided with the
intensification of wealth in the North East and on the West Coast and a
closing of minds to both home-grown and immigrant talent. Added to this
is a widespread suspicion that in the years after 9/11 any cultural expression
that does not tally with core national values is in danger of being seen as
subversive. Rebecca Tillett argues in the next essay that these fears are not
new, but a term that many thought had been consigned to Cold War history
un-American has re-emerged alongside the national trauma of 9/11.
The fact that Democrat John Kerry was vilified by Republicans during his
2004 presidential campaign for flip-flopping on crucial issues, and for being
a commie in respect of his anti-Vietnam stance during his student days, led
Kerry to be treated with suspicion by some voters and the negative counter-
part to President Bushs homely values.

INTELLECTUALS AND THE CULTURE WARS

As Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn argues in the opening essay of Part 2, one of the
most significant trends in recent and contemporary cultural thought is
the decline of potent intellectual voices in America. The death of two
generations of intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and

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Jean Baudrillard in France and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, John Rawls, Edward
Said, Susan Sontag and Richard Rorty in America, and the waning of interest
in theory in the academy has led to what many are calling an intellectual
impasse in the US and Europe. Perhaps the flourishing of postmodernism in
the 1980s and 90s, and with it the weakening of grand narratives that can
explain historical and cultural phenomena, has led to a fragmentation of the
vital center that Schlesinger was recommending in the late 1940s. Twenty
years later, amidst the student protests of the late 1960s, a transatlantic cross-
section of thinkers Derrida and Sontag amongst them were calling for the
decentralisation of culture, fearing that Schlesingers vital center could easily
degenerate into a dead center presided over by a power elite. While
Schlesinger was worried early in the Clinton presidency that pluralism had
actually led to a disuniting and decomposition of national identity, there is
a sense that without a firm critical position the public intellectual has lost
direction in a late-capitalist global landscape, or has been made obsolete
through the growth of mass media.4
It is the loss of an intellectual community that worried the Penn National
Commission on Society, Culture and Community, which first convened in
1996. The Commission concluded three years later that the thinning of
public discourse was getting worse, wedded to the suspicion that universities
since the late 1960s have been aiding and abetting the breakdown of
precisely those notions of community that have justified the universitys
existence as the model for the larger community.5 The Commissions
recommendation was to thicken and widen public debates, bringing into
dialogue museums, libraries, schools, colleges and universities, professional
sports, the military, and even the Internet. But the contributors added a
note of pessimism, commenting that professionals and leaders of these
institutions are unprepared for their new civic responsibilities.6
Perhaps, then, it is to individuals rather than institutional structures to
which we should look for intellectual hope 9/11 saw the public re-
emergence of the Canadian political theorist Noam Chomsky, while the likes
of Fredric Jameson, Martha Nussbaum and Cornel West continue to refine
their cultural perspectives at the interface of the academy and public life.
Nonetheless, the dearth of strong public voices outside of party politics has
left journalists and television pundits to fill the void. Attacks on the academy
are frequent, such as David Horowitzs attempt in The Professors: the 101 Most
Dangerous Academics in America (2006) to unearth, to his mind, potentially
subversive thinkers in universities and talk-show host Laura Ingrahams
assault on the old left-wing guard at elite universities.7 And it is not just
professional thinkers that have come under fire. Intellectual politicians have
long been vulnerable for being too cerebral, such as Democrat candidates
Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, Al Gore in 2000,
and John Kerry in 2004. The upshot is that the loss of intellectual bite in the
academy and public life has led to a restricted culture in which journalists and

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pundits are taking the lead on the issues of leadership, immigration and
climate change.
The left continues to accuse the right of abdicating responsibility for
dealing with contemporary affairs outside narrow self-interest and for
cosying up to big business, even abusing political power in the name of self-
aggrandisement, while the right accuse the left of treason and siding with the
nations enemies. As Dominic Sandbrook notes in the opening essay of Part
1, the culture wars are often traced back to Pat Buchanans speech at the
1992 Republican National Convention in which Buchanan identified a
cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself,
for this war is for the soul of America.8 Although Buchanan framed it in
religious terms, culture wars became a touchstone for public debate in the
1990s, with the left and right at loggerheads with each other a struggle
which, as Kevin Mattson discusses, continues into the current decade. The
aggressive voices of Ann Coulter, Russ Limbaugh, Michelle Marvin and
Bill OReilly on the right criticise the left for being un-American and even
treasonous, to take the title of Coulters 2003 book Treason: Liberal Treachery
from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. Always a polemicist, Coulter has
even tried to rescue the indispensable Joseph McCarthy as a responsible
conservative during the early Cold War, but her real goal is to attack liberal
mythmaking and deceit, while talk-radio host Michael Savage calls liberalism
a mental disorder.9
Coulter and Savage are extreme cases, but the problem with the culture
wars is that, rather than constructing debates across political lines, the
warring factions often resort to the kind of propaganda which recalls the
anticommunist strategies of the 1950s, demonising the opposition before
accusing them of sedition and immorality.10 Responses from the left can be
equally extreme, with conspiracy theories rife about the Bush administration
colluding with al-Qaeda ahead of 9/11 and being partly responsible for the
World Trade Center attacks, such as the claims made by the 9/11 Truth
Movement and the Internet film Loose Change (2006).11
This is not so much a symptom of the loss of the political centre, or a
debate about where arts funding should go (with heated arguments about
who should be awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants in the
1990s), but a divided political landscape where debates about the countrys
role in global affairs have split the nation. Two film comedies, Meet the Fockers
(2004) and The Break-Up (2006), use this idea that political outlooks have
irreversibly diverged to emphasise rifts between families. In Meet the Fockers,
Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) suffers at the hands of an oppressive ex-CIA soon-
to-be father-in-law who resorts to surveillance to investigate Gregs past,
played by Robert De Niro as the Republican counterpoint to Gregs
Jewish parents (Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand) with their new age
philosophy and hippie passion for meditation and massage. And The Break-
Up stages a scenario where the effete brother of art gallery curator Brooke

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Myers (Jennifer Aniston) launches into a hilariously camp acapella version of

rock band Yess 1983 song Owner of a Lonely Heart at the dinner table,
deeply disturbing her fianc Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughan) and his blue-
collar family.
Despite the appealing snapshots that these two films offer of families
riven by irreconcilable belief systems, there is more substance to it than that.
A book such as Letters to a Young Conservative: the Art of Mentoring (2002) by
Bombay-born Dinesh DSouza, for example, tries to rescue one version of
classical liberalism concerned with social and civic virtue from the
liberal politics of the late 1960s that attacked the moral consensus as narrow
and repressive.12 While DSouza (former policy advisor for President Reagan)
sees some overlap in the moral vocabulary of liberal and conservative
views they both speak of equality and morality even though they mean
different things by each he returns to classical political theory in believing
that the fundamental rift revolves around opposite notions of human
nature. Side-stepping the postmodern argument that human nature is just
another cultural construct, DSouza concurs with other conservatives like
Francis Fukuyama in Our Postmodern Future (2002) in basing his philosophy
on the essentialist notion that human nature is fixed and immutable.
Against what DSouza sees as the naive liberal belief in inherent human
goodness, he outlines a realistic conservative understanding of the warring
factions of good and evil in individuals, nation states and governments alike,
leading him to endorse personal responsibility and the use of force in
international relations to keep at bay those destructive or evil impulses.
Written in reasonable and dispassionate language in the form of a series of
letters to Chris, a young conservative, DSouza still falls into the trap of the
culture wars. He ends his first letter to Chris by claiming:

liberalism has become the party of anti-Americanism, economic plun-

der, and immorality. By contrast, conservative policies are not only
more likely to produce the good society, they are also the best means to
achieve liberal goals such as peace, tolerance, and social justice.

A book that begins by promising the reader a nuanced account of political

and cultural identity in the 21st century, ends up driven by the same polemic
that inspires Coulter and Savage, and concludes with the reminder to all
young conservatives that truth is on our side and that it is a very powerful
weapon. With truth as our guide and courage in our hearts, we will not only
endure, we will prevail.13
Another book that takes the form of letters offers a neat counterpart
to DSouzas conservative lessons. Written as a collective, Letters from Young
Activists (2005) offers a very different cultural vision, not in terms of a
political ideology of truth, right or force but the complex intersections of the
children of the 1960s generation united by concerns about the early-century

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climate. The writers included in the volume are not professional authors
or thinkers; selected only by their youth (between the ages of 10 and 31),
by their transnational diversity (we are Black, Puerto Rican, Chicana/o,
Salvadoran, Palestinian, White, Haitian, Chinese, Indian, Tamil, and Native
American), and their discovery of politics at a young age through friends
and music scenes; our negative experiences with politics, parents, or teachers;
or because we couldnt stand by and watch the injustices that surround us.14
Seeing themselves in a movement that is inclusive and transcends national
and ethnic boundaries, the contributors pitch themselves against the neo-
conservative imperial project they identify with the Bush administration, but
they dont wish to replace it with polemic or antagonism.15 Rather, through a
series of letters addressed to the past, present and future, the 48 contributors
attempt to bridge the generational gap by carving out identities in which
diversity and value are not opposing terms and where celebration and
critique can function dialectically.
Given the youthful age of the contributors, it is not surprising that some
of the responses are limited by personal experience, but the book provides
evidence that grassroots cultures from college campus activism, to the
revival of the radical spirit of the Students for a Democratic Society, to global
anticapitalist protests are stimulating meaningful responses to international
pressures and perceived inequalities at home.16 While these two books
indicate that cultural thought is most obviously embodied in written form, it
is also useful to trace these ideas through other cultural modes. In music and
film two 20th-century cultural forms political battle lines have been
clearly demarcated in the first decade of the 21st century.

MUSICAL PROTEST
One pressing dilemma for socially conscious musicians is how to counter the
growth of music corporations since the 1980s that have the financial weight
to determine both sales and substance. The popularity of reality television
and talent competition shows such as American Idol and The Swan (both hits
shows on Fox) are evidence that the media space in which ideas can flourish
has been restricted by the entertainment demands of network radio and
television. The public forum for debate is also severely limited, with channels
focusing only on headline news or offering skewed debates, and chat shows
such as advertising executive Donny Deutschs The Big Idea on CNBC
promising topical discussion but invariably delivering lifestyle interviews.
The erosion of public debate is bemoaned by Al Gore, among others, in his
2007 book The Assault of Reason, and there is some truth in it, with Edward R.
Murrows claim in 1958 that television often serves to insulate the viewer
from the surrounding world. Potentially the most democratic of media
has, in an age of massive cable choice, been compromised by corporate
ownership and the flattening of cultural value.

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But this theory about the decline of a democratic culture overlooks the
way in which music continues to be used in agonistic and questioning ways,
particularly since the outbreak of war with Iraq in spring 2003. The support
for John Kerry in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election was very strong
within the music fraternity. The result, the Vote for Change concerts that
took place in October 2004, was a series of inter-generational events held
in strategic states across the country that brought the established voices of
Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, John Mellencamp, Michael Stipe and
James Taylor together with younger groups such as The Dixie Chicks.
The twin aims of the concerts were to heighten public awareness of politics
and to raise money for widespread voter education in swing states. But
despite raising nearly $10 million for America Coming Together a get out
and vote organisation funded by labour unions the fact that none of the
states in which the concerts took place were actually lost by the Republican
Party in the 2004 election suggests an unbridgeable divide between culture
and electoral politics, or a climate in which this kind of protest is now
ineffectual.
The Vote for Change concerts were an attempt to revive the spirit of the
1960s counterculture and the way in which peoples songs were mobilised by
the Civil Rights Movement, but critics would argue that cultural expression
should never be wedded so closely to political campaigns. Charity music
events that began in the mid-1980s with Live Aid and USA for Africa
continue to have currency, such as the series of Concerts for Darfur since
February 2005 to raise money for humanitarian crisis in Sudan, the
Hurricane Katrina relief concert From the Big Apple to the Big Easy held
in Madison Square Gardens in September 2005, and the transcontinental
Live Earth events in July 2007. While the connections between the
charitable causes of the mid-1980s and the present are evident in the U2 and
Green Day collaboration The Saints Are Coming the two groups perform
in a spoof video in which US troops mobilised in Iraq come to the aid of
Katrina victims there is also a clear link between the 1960s counterculture
and the present moment. Stars of the mid-1960s Simon and Garfunkel
reformed to play at the From the Big Apple to the Big Easy concert, Bob
Dylans 2006 tour had a distinctly anti-war sensibility with a new arrangement
of his 1963 song Masters of War, and Joni Mitchells multimedia Flag
Dance exhibition in winter 20067 had an anti-war theme. While the
reformation of the late 1960s supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young for
their Freedom of Speech tour of 2006 could be seen as jumping on the
political bandwagon, it is better understood as a realisation that the icons
of the 1969 Woodstock Festival were once more living through a seismic
moment of change.
This direct repoliticisation of music was also a feature of albums written
by two stalwarts of the music scene: Neil Youngs 2006 release Living With
War and John Mellencamps 2007 album Freedoms Road. Even though Young

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appeared to endorse Bush policy straight after 9/11, Living With War
captured the widespread feeling five years later that war had become a
permanent condition.17 But Young faced a great deal of criticism for his
single Lets Impeach the President largely because Young is Canadian
(despite living in California) and his lyrics are too direct: Lets impeach the
President for lying / And misleading our country into war / Abusing all the
power that we gave him / And shipping all the money out the door.18 Living
With War was joined a year later by The Eagles first album for nearly three
decades, Long Road Out of Eden (2007); both albums bemoan the loss of the
garden, a 1960s ideal of innocence and freedom quashed by a climate of
suspicion and fear. In contrast, Bushs voice is incorporated in Lets Impeach
the President as a series of sound-bites, espousing views on Saddam
Hussein, September 11, Iraq and US intelligence, while The Eagles on the
title track of their album lament the bloody, stupid waste of taking the
political highway to empire.
After suffering a brain aneurysm in Spring 2005, Young wrote Living With
War swiftly and angrily an embattled mood on display in a CNN interview
of April 2006 where Young charged Bush of robbing a 9/11 mentality from
American people. It is also an explicitly anti-consumerist album: first released
in a free downloadable format and presented in a grungy brown paper cover
in its CD form, many of the tracks use heavy guitars to attenuate Youngs
critique of consumerism, political mismanagement and loss of leadership.
Although its political theme is constant and didactic, musically it is eclectic:
for example, Youngs use of a gospel choir and an elegiac bugle on Shock &
Awe inflects the needless waste of life that war has precipitated: Thousands
of bodies in the ground / Theyre holding boxes to a trumpet sound. Shock
& Awe considers the way that historical lessons of the past have been
overlooked in favour of power politics; history has become the cruel judge
of overconfidence and the hard-nosed militarism that followed 9/11.
But it was not just established voices that were producing musical
messages. The patriotic and militaristic sentiments of country singer Darryl
Worleys 2003 hit Have You Forgotten? (in which those towers, Bin
Laden and our Pentagon are all name-checked) led to massive radio airplay;
Detroit rapper Eminem joked about the search for Bin Laden in his 2002
video Without Me; the non-partisan punk band Bad Religions 2004 album
The Empire Strikes First targeted ire at the Bush administration; and, in the
UK, Radioheads 2003 Hail to the Thief album was a direct attack on Bushs
narrow election win three years earlier. Even though the appearance of
Barbara Bush at a New York Radiohead gig in 2006 complicates the neat
battle lines of the culture wars, the biggest furore in the music industry in
recent years occurred when, ten days before the deployment of US troops in
Iraq in March 2003, singer Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks announced
in a London concert that she was ashamed to come from the same state as
President Bush. Rather than just annoying fellow Texans, the band received

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hate mail, long-term fans boycotted their gigs, and they were dropped from
radio playlists across the country. Despite being snubbed by the Nashville
country music awards, ironically this incident helped to propel The Dixie
Chicks to a broader international audience and gave them subject matter for
their 2006 single Not Ready to Make Nice about the bands unwillingness to
compromise. The direct sentiment of Not Ready to Make Nice mirrored
other bands, both young and old, in an indignant response to what many
perceived as the oligarchy of the White House. The neo-punk band Green
Day, for example, had a hit with American Idiot, from their eponymous
2004 album, which featured on its cover a hand clutching a grenade-cum-
bleeding heart. On first listen, the title track seems little more than a rant
against Bushs redneck agenda, oppression of gay rights and media control,
but there is a subtlety to the lyrics, offsetting the ennui of an alien nation
with a bleak vision of idiot America.
The Iraq War and the 2004 election were not the only events that marked
a musical sensitivity to social issues or an attempt to impose a meaningful
symbolic pattern a new grand narrative on contemporary events. For this
we have to go back to 9/11 and the America: Tribute to Heroes telethon
(organised by George Clooney) of 21 September 2001 and the Concert for
New York City of 20 October (organised by Paul McCartney) for the New
York Fire and Police Departments. Neil Youngs version of John Lennons
Imagine on Tribute to Heroes and McCartneys anthemic song Freedom
encapsulated the need to cut through the ideological complexities of 9/11,
but also a transatlantic sympathy with the plight of the US in the immediate
aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Arguably the most sensitive response to 9/11 came in the guise of Bruce
Springsteens 2002 album The Rising. This was seen by many as Springsteens
return to form, in terms of its musical range, the reformation of the E Street
Band, and its aim to deal with the heightening of national identity in the
aftermath of 9/11. However, it is easy to skew a reading of the album
through this prism and forget that its most evocative song My City of Ruins
was written the previous year about Asbury Park in New Jersey, evoking the
title of Springsteens first album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973). The
elegiac tone of the song is offset by the use of a black gospel backing-group;
the intonation on the repeated refrain with these hands evokes both
working-class solidarity (recalling the 1950 union film With These Hands) and
multicultural striving. In shifting the topography from New Jersey to Man-
hattan, 9/11 provided a fresh context for My City of Ruins, and Springsteen
appropriately used the song to open the Tribute to Heroes telethon ten days
after the World Trade Center attacks. Loss, pain and emptiness are constant
themes on the album: the chasm between lovers separated across ethnic lines
in Worlds Apart; the void of Empty Sky in which the songwriter wakes up
one morning to an empty sky that eerily echoes the loss of blood in the
streets; Into the Fire told from the perspective of an unnamed fire-fighter;

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and in the last track on the album the sense that Paradise itself is empty.19
Critics applauded the album for its depth of tone, linking the despair of
9/11 to a collective rising, countering grief with optimism on tracks like
Into the Fire with its gospel choir: May your strength gives us strength. /
May your faith give us faith. / May your hope give us hope. 20 A review in Time
magazine points out, though, that despite the liberal humanism and cross-
faith spirituality of the album, it lacks an authentic political voice, favouring
an emotive rather than an explanatory register.21 Despite his endorsement of
John Kerry in 2004, Springsteens defence is based on the nature of the
musicians art; he claimed in a Nightline interview of August 2004 that
I stayed a step away from partisan politics because I felt it was always
important to have an independent voice. I wanted my fans to feel like they
could trust that perhaps leading him to deal with political themes at
a further remove on his 2007 album Magic.22 Artistic independence has
arguably been jeopardised by recent social trends, but it is affirmed in the
ways that music continues to cut between debates and to reconnect people
in disparate places and with differing belief systems.

HOLLYWOOD RECONNECTED
Like the music industry, the most significant year for the re-emergence of a
socially conscious film culture was 2004, the year in which Michael Moores
Fahrenheit 9/11 won a Palme dOr and an Academy Award, and in which
George Clooneys film Good Night, and Good Luck symbolised what many
liberal journalists were calling the New McCarthyism of that year. In
revisiting CBS journalist Ed Murrows successful campaign in early 1954 to
expose Joseph McCarthy, Good Night, and Good Luck also tapped into the
threat of censorship from the Federal Communications Commission that
followed the exposure of Janet Jacksons breast whilst performing live with
Justin Timberlake at the Houston Superbowl earlier that year. The reaction
to this climate of censorship was stridency, particularly among film actors.
But there were earlier signs that Hollywood was reconnecting with broader
social issues: Halle Berry and Denzel Washington had won best female and
male lead roles at the Academy Awards in 2002, the first time that two black
actors had done so; the release of a host of feature-length documentaries
dealing with contemporary issues from 9/11 to the Iraq War to the fast food
industry; and the increasing popularity of grassroots film festivals such as
Sundance, Sansevieria, Austin, Ann Arbor, Portland and Seattle.
But if one takes a brief look at the highest-grossing films of the early 21st
century there is scant evidence of change; the world market was saturated by
US products and there is very little variation of the Top 20 films in terms of
North American and global box-office successes.23 In the world box-office
Top 20 in 2006 there were fourteen US films; the other six were US co-
productions. The top ten films in this list are dominated by Hollywood

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sequels: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest at number one, and X-Men:
the Last Stand, Mission: Impossible III and Superman Returns at six, seven and
eight, with Buena Vista, Sony Columbia, 20th Century Fox and Warner
Brothers dominating production and distribution. Only Martin Scorseses
Oscar-winning The Departed (fourteen in the world list, sixteen in the North
American list), a reworking of the Hong Kong crime thriller Internal Affairs
(2003), could be said to be an art-house product, and even that had the major
box-office draws of Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson in
the lead roles. The phenomenal success at the box office of the DreamWorks
animation Shrek The Third in its first weekend in May 2007 (taking $122
million in North America), following Spider-Man 3 three weeks earlier, which
took $148 million nationally and $227 million globally in its first weekend,
reveals a market driven by precisely targeted products with lucrative spin-off
franchises.
These statistics do little to shake the perception that Hollywood is deca-
dent, wedded to advertising, fashion and cosmetic industries and stimulated
only by the dollar. However, there is a different story to tell, which suggests
a more creative synergy between business and culture. Undoubtedly, 2006
was a good year for film business; 599 films were released in the US, up 64
from 2005, but, of these, 396 were independent films. This coincided with a
significant increase in cinema attendance, moving back to the level of 2000,
and revealing a market in which the distinction between independent and
Hollywood film has become increasingly blurred. Filmmakers such as
Martin Scorsese, Joel and Ethan Coen, David Lynch, Richard Linklater,
Steven Soderburgh and Quentin Tarantino quite often work on the margins
between studios and independents, while, as Peter Biskind argues, the rise of
Miramax and the success of Robert Redfords Sundance Festival have
created a more variegated film culture than in previous decades.24 Only first-
time, non-narrative, underground or extremely experimental films can be
seen to occupy a truly independent space, such as Jonathan Caouettes
Tarnation (2003), using Super-8 film, answer-machine messages and video-
diary footage on a $218.32 budget to document the story of his schizo-
phrenic mother, and Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005), marking the
directorial and acting debut of art school student Miranda July. Such young
talent Caouette was born in 1973, July in 1974 reveals a grassroots movie
culture far away from the media glare of Beverly Hills, with films echoing the
style and interests of established indie directors Todd Solondz and Gus van
Sant who work at arms length from the industry.
The realignment of film culture has coincided with Hollywood becoming
a place where left-liberal politics sits easily alongside big business. In his 2006
Academy Awards speech, George Clooney proclaimed he was proud to be
part of an industry self-consciously out of touch with dominant social
values and committed to explore the complexities of current issues. While
some films are explicitly politicised in drawing parallels between the present

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and earlier cultural moments, many try to avoid the simplistic heroes and
villains view of history to which Hollywood is prone. For example, rather
than CBS journalist Ed Murrow simply vanquishing the corrupt Joseph
McCarthy in Good Night, and Good Luck the moral polarities are not that clear:
Murrow is in danger of losing his professional objectivity and McCarthy is
left to undermine himself through the use of extensive archival footage.
Questionable heroes, ambiguous morality and lack of neat resolutions
were all common in feature films released between 2004 and 2006: from the
troubled superhero of the Spiderman films (played by Tobey McGuire) to
Steven Spielbergs Munich (2005), which examines the aftermath of the
Munich Olympic bombings of 1972 when eleven Israeli athletes were killed.
Leading a team of Mossad agents hired by the Israeli government to avenge
the athletes murderers, the family man Avner (Eric Bana) becomes cor-
rupted by the seemingly endless series of killings that ensue. While Spielberg
and screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth wanted to critique the
dangers of all forms of extremism in Munich, its layering of stories suggests
a world without resolutions in which plots and plotting are inseparable, as
novelist Don DeLillo detected in his novels Libra (1988) and Mao II (1991).
This interconnected (sometimes described as hypertextual) linking of
stories and lives was a strong feature of films, both on the local level as for
the Oscar-winning film Crash (2004) which exposes prejudice and racism on
all social levels in Los Angeles or on a global level in the case of Syriana
(2005) and The Kingdom (2007), which focus on CIA and FBI agents
respectively to explore the many levels in which stories, beliefs and political
interests come into friction within US-Middle East relations. Using a global
cast of actors and striving for cultural accuracy, director Stephen Gaghan
stated that his intention in Syriana was to reflect the visceral complexity of
the contemporary world and to embrace it narratively, explaining: there are
no good guys and no bad guys and there are no easy answers the stories
dont wrap up in neat little life lessons, the questions remain open.25
Open questions within wider narrative patterns are also explored by
eco-conscious films, such as Sunshine State (2002) which examines the clash
between ordinary lives and business opportunities in northern Florida and,
on a global scale, in the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth
(2006), which has become the third-highest grossing documentary in the US.
The figurehead of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, is a long-term advocate of
ecological causes, whose extended lecture mixes hard scientific data, satellite
photography and audience-friendly visual technology to push home his
message about the reality of global warming and the need to change habits.
Criticised for being aloof and impersonal during his 2000 election campaign,
An Inconvenient Truth shows the former Vice-President in a more relaxed
mood, joking with his audience and displaying a very personal connection to
the natural world. Viewed by some critics as a cynical attempt to re-engage
with the public before the run-up to the 2008 election campaign (even

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though he declared early on he would not be running in the Democrat

primaries), Gore is careful in the film not to play party politics. It would
have been easy to target the eco-sceptics or wag his finger at the Bush
administration for ignoring environmental threats (or bungling the federal
response to Hurricane Katrina, as Spike Lee does in his 2006 documentary
on the devastation in New Orleans, When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four
Acts), but the global issues addressed by Gore are seemingly more important
to him than jostling for the political high-ground. Pointing out that US
carbon emissions have been higher than those of any other nation for
decades, Gores call is for all Americans to be personally responsible for
environmental issues.
This call for action was taken up in 2007 the year in which Gore was the
co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work but with
more urgency. This urgency was stimulated by scientific claims that the next
ten years are critical for radically reducing carbon emissions, and industry
player Lawrence Bender (producer of An Inconvenient Truth) has claimed that
global warming is the greatest issue facing us in our lifetime.26 In response,
Warner Brothers released The 11th Hour which examines the state of current
ecosystems and future prospects, using for its publicity an image of a big
footprint deeply impressed on the globe. Starting life as a small-scale inde-
pendent film, directors Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners worked
with A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio, who part-financed the project, to balance
a critique of corporate effluence with a strident proposal about the reduction
of the carbon footprint. The film assembles a mixture of experts to analyse
the extreme weather conditions experienced since the Boxing Day 2004
tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Focusing only partly on Hurricane Katrina, The
11th Hour aspires to be a transnational film that prompts all viewers to
become eco-activists. Narrated by DiCaprio, The 11th Hour is another
example of a movie-length documentary that tries to offset what a panel of
directors at the Greening of America talk at the Cannes Film Festival in
2007 see as the failure of television to give an adequate public forum for
discussing environmental change. The difference between a film like The 11th
Hour and other state of the nation films, is that it does not just deal with
national conditions, but balances these with a global sensibility and an
emphasis on the importance of local and personal politics.
* * *
Although a number of films released in autumn 2007 that dealt directly with
global terrorism and the Middle East (The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah and
Rendition) received a lukewarm reception from American audiences (perhaps
because they were too close to the bone), the links between politics and
culture appear to be stronger than ever in the first years of the 21st century.27
This is in part due to the cultural vanguard that has formed in response to
the Bush presidency, but it also cuts across ideological lines in the wake of

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9/11. If cultural thought appears to be in crisis because of the lack of public

intellectuals in the early century, then American cultural practice is never-
theless vibrant and, in many ways, ahead of cultural thought in its assessment
of the contemporary world.
In early 2008, it seems that the protest culture of the last few years might
well ebb following the autumn 2008 presidential election, whilst environ-
mental and demographic themes are liable to become stronger as the years
go by. Some current cultural practitioners may seem in a few years un-
fashionably earnest, such as Michael Moore, who has faced unbounded
criticism (not only from the right) for exaggeration in his social critiques of
gun culture, the Bush presidency and medical insurance companies in his trio
of documentaries Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and
Sicko (2007). While the culture wars of the 1990s were still strong in 2004,
battle lines have started to blur in the second half of the decade. A glimpse
of this is evident in Matt Groenings The Simpsons Movie of 2007, which
lampoons both the right (the residents of Springfield face the bullying tactics
of Hometown Security and a malicious presidential advisor) and the left
(Maggie Simpson presents a talk in the town hall with the parodic title
An Irritating Truth), but the film still manages to deal with serious
environmental and social issues.
Richard Crockatt has recently argued that the discussion of culture in
relation to politics is bedevilled by a preoccupation with polarities
conflicts are driven either by dimly remembered but highly potent and
symbolic historical memories or by urgent present needs.28 It is easy to
duplicate these polarities either by eliding culture too readily with party
politics, or by focusing on culture as responding only to present economic or
political needs rather than a driving force in its own right. As the following
five essays demonstrate, a cultural perspective is as crucial for understanding
the contemporary nation and trends that go beyond the nation state as
the two other sections of this volume. In the next essay, Rebecca Tillett
provides a historical context for understanding the issues surrounding
immigration, ethnicities and the clash of civilizations (earlier discussed in
this volume), while the other essays focus on specific cultural forms.
Catherine Morley looks at the way in which words and narratives have
become fraught with meaning following 9/11: a worry that stimulated Toni
Morrison in her memorial poem The Dead of September 11 (2001) to
claim: I have nothing to say no words stronger than the steel that pressed
you into itself .29 This blurring of boundaries between words and images is a
theme within photojournalism following 9/11 as Liam Kennedy develops
in his essay on American ways of seeing. Lynn Spigel and Max Dawson
follow this by exploring the ways in which television and digital media
complicate notions of cultural production, while Paul Wells concludes the
section by discussing the re-emergence of animation as a cultural bridge
between old and new media. It is tempting to see contemporary cultural

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production as a stark rupture with the past, but these essays also reveal clear
lines of development from 20th-century cultural trends.

NOTES
1. President Clintons State of the Union address, 27 January 2000, www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/states/docs/sou00.htm.
2. Bill Clinton, The Struggle for the Soul of the 21st Century, BBC Richard
Dimbleby Lecture, London, 14 December 2001.
3. See Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for
Talent (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007).
4. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, [1949] 1998) and The Disuniting of America: Reflections
on a Multicultural Society (New York, NY: Norton, [1991] 1992).
5. Don M. Randel, The Myth of the Academic Community, in Judith Rodin and
Stephen P. Steinberg (eds), Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community
in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2003), p. 227.
6. Rodin and Steinberg (eds), Public Discourse in America, p. xiv.
7. Laura Ingraham, Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics and the Media
are Subverting America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003), p. 16.
8. Pat Buchanan, 1992 Republican National Convention Speech, 17 August 1992.
9. See Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
(NewYork, NY: Crown Forum, 2003) and Michael Savage, Liberalism is a Mental
Disorder: Savage Solutions (New York, NY: Thomas Nelson, 2005). For a dis-
cussion of the revisioning of 1950s thought in the early 21st century see Martin
Halliwell, American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), pp. 22544.
10. Richard Bolton (ed.), Culture Wars (New York, NY: New Press, 1992), p. 15.
11. Christopher Hayes, 9/11: the Roots of Paranoia, The Nation, 25 December
2006, 1114.
12. Dinesh DSouza, Letters to a Young Conservative (New York, NY: Basic Books,
2002), pp. 5, 4.
13. Ibid., p. 223.
14. Dan Berger et al., Letter from Young Activists: Todays Rebels Speak Out (New York,
NY: Nation Books, 2005), p. xxvi.
15. Ibid., p. xxxi.
16. See Christopher Phelps, The new SDS, The Nation, 16 April 2007, 1114.
17. Reebee Garofalo, Pop goes to war, 20012004: U.S. popular music after 9/11,
in Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry (eds), Music in the Post 9/11 World
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), p. 9.
18. See Neil Youngs CNN interview on 18 April 2006.
19. Springsteen has become closely linked to 9/11 as evidenced in Mike Binders
film Reign Over Me (2007). The films protagonist Mike (Adam Sandler) is
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder five years after his wife and
daughters were killed aboard one of the planes that crashed into the World
Trade Center. Retreating into a childlike world of denial, Springsteens 1980

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

album The River is a touchstone for both Mikes retreat into the past and an inter-
textual reference to the events of 9/11.
20. See Kevin M. Cherry, Come on up for the Rising, National Review Online, 29 July
2002, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21800832-1702,
00.html.
21. Josh Tyrengiel, Bruce Rising, Time, 5 August 2002, 529.
22. Bryan Garman, Models of Charity and Spirit: Bruce Springsteen, 9/11, and the
War on Terror, in Ritter and Daughtry (eds), Music in the Post 9/11 World, pp.
7189. Bruce Springsteen in conversation with Ted Koppel, Nightline, ABC
News, 4 August 2004, http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2004_08_
07_bruce_springsteen_supports_john_kerry.asp. Springsteens song The
Rising was used in the presidential nomination campaigns for both Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton, with Springsteen endorsing Obama in April 2008.
23. Statistics taken from Focus 2007: World Film Market Trends (Paris: March du
Film, 2007), pp. 9, 39.
24. See Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of
Independent Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
25. Stephen Gaghan, Final Production Notes for Syriana, Warner Brothers Press
Pack, 2005.
26. The Greening of America, American Pavilion, Cannes Film Festival, 20 May
2007.
27. Ann Donahue, Dont mention the war, Los Angeles Times, 7 November 2007.
28. Richard Crockatt, After 9/11: Cultural Dimensions of American Global Power
(London: Routledge 2007), p. 49.
29. Toni Morrison, The Dead of September 11, in Judith Greenberg, Trauma at
Home (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 1.

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14. CULTURAL PLURALISM AND

NATIONAL IDENTITY

Rebecca Tillett

Fundamental concerns about cultural pluralism are evident in Americas

continued emphasis upon the principle of e pluribus unum. The notion of one
nation under God, indivisible remains a crucial aspect of a united American
identity, with ethnic and cultural differences assimilated to ensure a homo-
geneous Americaneity based primarily on the enduring worldview and
ideologies of the original white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant pilgrims. In the
context of immigration, the primary source of American cultural pluralism,
this remains of extreme importance in the 21st century, as millions continue
to emigrate to the US each year. While immigration numbers rose so that
10 per cent of all Americans are foreign-born at the turn of the millennium,1
projections for 200760 suggest that immigration figures could rise by a
further 63 per cent or 105 million.2
Yet in the wake of 9/11, both public opinion and government policy has
begun to react not only to external attacks upon and criticisms of American
national identity, but also to the rise in the numbers of immigrants to the US
and their ability and/or desire to assimilate to a single homogeneous
American identity. The result has been a tightening not only of Americas
national borders but also of the boundaries of national cultural identity,
evident in the passing of legislature such as the Patriot Act of 2001. Respond-
ing to the need for greater national security after 9/11, the very name of the
Patriot Act suggests Americas increasingly nationalist focus, and responds to
widespread anxieties over ever more diverse definitions of American cultural
identity. As a result, what it means to be American is becoming inextricably
entwined with concepts of nationalism and patriotism, and with the re-
assertion of a universal Americaneity, while cultural pluralism is being

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viewed with greater suspicion and mistrust. In both national and inter-
national contexts, such developments are potentially far-reaching.

EARLY CULTURAL ANXIETIES

While the events of 9/11 are clearly unprecedented, it is significant that the
reassertion of a universal Americaneity in response to a perceived foreign
threat has a very lengthy history, during which it has played a decisive role
in defining American national identity. Indeed, the reaction to cultural
pluralism after 9/11 can only be fully understood within the historical
context of a long philosophical and political debate. However, it is a debate
that is highly complex and often deeply paradoxical and self-contradictory,
displaying what Eric Kaufman has identified as a pervasive dualism.3
America is, therefore, celebrated for its ethnic and cultural diversity, particu-
larly in terms of freedom, religion and tolerance, often in direct comparison
to the oppressive climate of Europe, and yet also bitterly and even fearfully
critiqued for the very same reasons. In 1782, the naturalised American
J. Hector St John de Crvecoeur celebrated America as a receptacle for that
strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country,4 while
some 50 years later, in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville compared America
favourably to Europe and praised

a society formed of all the nations of the world people having

different languages, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a society without
roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without
common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times
happier than our own.5

What is remarkable in these comments is that both writers also para-

doxically suggest the lack of any hegemonic national American character in
the early years of the new Republic, deriving primarily from the diversity of
immigrant cultures. From its emergence as an independent nation, America
was thus interpreted as a the worlds first universal nation.6 While this
concept continued to be applauded by American citizens, it also caused them
increasing concern and contributed to the expression of a range of deep-
seated fears about the loss of an essential European heritage evident in
a range of Anglo-Saxon cultural markers such as language, customs and
cultural values. Notably, such fears and concerns were fed by an increasing
public perception of the apparent contradictions between cultural homo-
geneity and the compelling notions of American freedom and individualism.
As a result, Americas engagement with cultural pluralism has long been a
cause for comment if not apprehension, especially from an Anglo-American
perspective.
Alongside the positive interpretations of Crvecoeur and Tocqueville,

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concern was therefore also publicly expressed over the ability of recently
arrived immigrants to assimilate and even their intentions regarding assi-
milation. In his essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind
(1751), Benjamin Franklin queried the reluctance with which German immi-
grants adopted the English language, and expressed what he considered
to be justified Anglo-Saxon fears over the increasing Germanification of
Pennsylvania:
Why should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm
into our Settlements herding together [to] establish their Language
and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania,
founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly
be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them.7
Franklins choice of terminology exposes a response to cultural hegemony
that continues to pervade the national and international debates on cultural
pluralism in the 21st century. Accordingly, the newly arriving German
immigrants are suspected not only of having little inclination to assimilate,
but of actively establishing German cultural customs and language as a viable
alternative to the traditional Anglification of immigrant groups. A crucial
problem is clearly the sheer weight of numbers: by the 1750s, mass immi-
gration caused the German-speaking population of Pennsylvania to rise to
between 60,000 and 100,000, or between one-third and three-fifths of the
total population of the colony.8 This mass migration (paralleled in the 21st
century by increasing concerns over Spanish-speaking immigrants) is clearly
interpreted as one of the dangers of cultural pluralism.
Franklins concerns over American culture and the effects of cultural
pluralism illustrate internal tensions within American cultural thought, which
became more fully expressed in the early 19th century by the Nativist
movement. What is perhaps most significant are the ways in which
previously sociocultural and even philosophical responses were actively
translated into the political arena, both in terms of national debates and of
specific policies and legislation. Notably, such political developments
occurred alongside Americas growing economic power, and mounting
popular interest in Social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific discourses on
race.

LEGISLATING AGAINST UNWELCOME STRANGERS

Similar reactions were equally evident within the US legislature. Congress
responded to popular concerns by regulating immigration and, in 1875,
passed legislation that effectively excluded specific lower-class social groups,
including convicted criminals and prostitutes. As David M. Reimer argues,
these immigrant groups became identified as unwelcome strangers, and
were soon joined by other social and racial groups popularly considered to

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be exerting a damaging moral and cultural influence upon American society.9

In this context, the vast growth in numbers of Chinese immigrants after the
Californian Gold Rush of 1849, followed by a sudden influx of non-Anglo-
Saxon Europeans in the latter years of the nineteenth century, caused a series
of social upheavals and, in turn, provoked a range of oppressive legislation
that attempted to control the social, national, ethnic and racial origins of
immigrants to America.
If, as Daniel J. Tichenor suggests, nations define themselves through the
official selection and control of foreigners seeking permanent residence on
their soil, then perhaps the single most significant piece of American
immigration legislation was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which excluded
Chinese (and later wider Asian) immigration to the US for over 60 years.10
The Exclusion Act is momentous: an instance of unprecedented regulatory
authority that linked national state-building to the preservation of existing
orders of ethnic, racial and religious hierarchy.11 Indeed, the act marks the
beginning of an era of increasingly punitive immigration legislation based
upon race, ethnicity and political ideology, evident in the subsequent
19078 Gentlemans Agreement which restricted Japanese immigration.12
Such exclusion was considered warranted in racial terms: in 1909, Theodore
Roosevelt commented that, not only would Americans not permit the
Japanese to come in large numbers among them, but that such opposition
was entirely warranted, and not only must be, but ought to be, heeded by the
national government in the interest of our people and our civilization.13
Accordingly, ever increasing restrictions to wider Asian immigration became
evident in the first half of the 20th century, with the introduction of further
legislation including the 1921 Emergency Quota Act (limiting immigration
numbers) and the 1924 Immigration Act, which identified specific racial
and ethnic groups as undesirable, particularly those from Asia, and from
Southern and Eastern (non-Anglo-Saxon) Europe.14 As a result, the act
reflected not only popular fears concerning race but also those concerning
religion, and clearly acted to forestall cultural diversity by reinforcing a
homogeneous Americaneity.

RENEWED DEBATE IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The early years of the 20th century saw a renewal of the philosophical debate
surrounding cultural pluralism. Popular nativist opinions were crystallised in
Israel Zangwills 1908 play The Melting Pot, which asserted that America is
Gods Crucible the fusion of all races, drawing a response in Horace
Kallens influential essay Democracy Versus the Melting Pot (1915).15
Kallen proposed that the key paradox at the heart of American concepts of
democracy and equality was a mistaken belief that only things that are
alike in fact and only men that are alike in origin and in spirit can be
truly equal. Kallens alternative was harmony and a democracy of

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nationalities where, as Sidney Ratner suggests, Americanization involved

not the destruction of all the distinctive cultural group traits but rather the
cherishing and preserving of every ethnic groups cultural heritage.16
Kallens direct challenge to popular concepts of immigration and
assimilation sparked further debate. In 1916, Madison Grants The Passing
of the Great Race clearly laid out widespread popular fears and provided
the single most influential nativist viewpoint. Grants approach illustrated
developments both in scientific racism and in eugenics, an increasingly race-
and class-centred discussion of genetics.17 As Grants title suggests, his
concern was the degeneration and disappearance of an authentic American
culture due to the proliferation of cultural pluralism. By contrast, Randolph
Bournes essay Trans-national America (1916), responded to Kallen in
a much more positive manner, proposing a radical reinterpretation of
American freedom and arguing that all immigrants come to America with an
identical purpose: to get the freedom to live as they wanted.18 Significantly,
enforced assimilation overrode those same desires and needs. What is
especially notable about this re-emergence of the debate on cultural
pluralism is the ways in which polarised viewpoints became inflected within
American immigration policy throughout the rest of the century.
As with American reactions to 9/11, American fears over cultural
pluralism in the early 20th century also responded to the outbreak of a
series of external political hostilities. With increasing German immigration
throughout the 19th century, a proliferation of German language schools,
churches, publications and communities, and the outbreak of World War I
in Europe, many German Americans began to progressively identify
themselves with Germany and German concepts of nationalism. The
involvement of the United States in the war from 1917 caused the loyalties
of German Americans to be called into question and identified as a cause for
concern. Indeed, Theodore Roosevelts 1915 speech demonstrates that the
concerns expressed by Franklin more than 150 years earlier remained at the
forefront of national anxieties:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism a

hyphenated American is not an American at all Americanism is
a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to
the United States.

For Roosevelt, cultural pluralism threatened national ruin: American society

as a tangle of squabbling nationalities each preserving its separate
nationality that would preven[t] all possibility of its continuing to be a
nation at all.19 Roosevelts concern was subsequently reflected by American
internment policies during World War II when Japanese immigrants and
naturalised citizens alike were forced into internment camps and imprisoned
if they refused to prove their allegiance to the US. Significantly, the

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experiences of both German and Japanese Americans prefigure the

immigration and security policies that resulted from fears over national
security after 9/11.

A MORE LIBERAL ERA

While events of the early 20th century bear an uncanny resemblance to those
of the early 21st century, American ideas about and responses to cultural
pluralism did change throughout the later years of the 20th century, resulting
in the eventual repeal of the restrictive legislation of 1924. Although
restrictions on Asian immigration were relaxed by the Chinese Exclusion
Repeal Act of 1943, immigration controls were subsequently reiterated by
the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which established new restric-
tions based upon labour requirements, and responded to the popular
fears and concerns over communism by enabling subversive behaviour and
allegiances to be identified as a reason for exclusion. Significantly, as with
earlier immigration policy, public fears and concerns over cultural pluralism
informed this legislation: a key feature of the act was the identification of
communist ideology as specifically un-American. However, the far less
exclusionary amendments of 1965 relaxed restrictions on undesirable
countries of origin and enabled much wider immigration into America,
notably from Asia and Eastern Europe. In this context, the 1965 Immi-
gration Act responded to a much more liberal era and changing popular
perceptions of cultural pluralism in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
Prominent African American political activists such as Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X, and Mexican American labour rights activists such
as Csar Chvez had achieved unparalleled success in making minority
cultures highly visible to Anglo-America, with the result that popular
responses to cultural pluralism and to concepts of American identity
acknowledged greater diversity and so became far more inclusive. Again,
popular opinion was clearly reflected in the legislature: the 1965 act removed
restrictions on immigration for the purposes of family reunion, and heralded
an unprecedented rise in immigration figures. In spite of Lyndon B. Johnsons
assertion that [the] bill [would] not affect the lives of millions, the act
prefigured a mass immigration that would transform American society
through the introduction of multiple diverse cultures.20 Ultimately, the 1965
Immigration Act would cause both consternation and a further reassertion
of a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americaneity.
Campaigns for civil rights in the 1960s had seen a range of wider
successes: non-Anglo-Saxon cultures had become more visible and exposed
the diversity and plurality of American culture; the processes and even the
desirability of assimilation had been thrown into doubt; and the failure to
apply cultural ideals such as democracy and equality to all American citizens
had been critiqued and interrogated. However, in the wake of unprecedented

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and unanticipated mass immigration, popular opinion and legislation again

became more reactionary and restrictive. Once again, politics, popular
opinions and philosophical debates converged with the result that restric-
tions were evident not only within conceptions of American culture, but also
within immigration policy. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act
criminalised Americans who knowingly employed illegal immigrants. While
the legislation attempted to curb illegal migration to the US, it also gave
illegal aliens within America the chance to apply for naturalisation. Signifi-
cantly, this legislation dealt with a new and increasing problem: immigration
and migration from within the Americas. Increasing public concern over the
matter, especially in those states bordering Mexico, influenced the creation
of a Task Force on Immigration, and marked the beginning of growing
hostility towards and punitive policies directed at Spanish-speaking migrants
and immigrants.
While the 1990 Immigration Act allowed larger numbers of immigrants
into the US, more restrictive measures were introduced. As with the policies
of many previous administrations, legislation engaged with popular opinion
and ongoing debates surrounding the increasingly inseparable issues of
immigration and cultural pluralism. As a result, the 1996 Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act responded to a resurgence of
nativism in California that Michael Alvarez and Tara L. Butterfield suggest
is evidence of the cyclical nature of American nativism.21 Additionally,
the pervasive dualism within both philosophical debates and government
policies was demonstrated by two specific policies: the One America
Initiative (1997) and Operation Gatekeeper (1994). On the one hand, the
One America drive actively and publicly embraced growing diversity by
advocating bilingual education, promoting better race relations, and ensuring
the appointment and visibility of culturally diverse individuals at the heart
of American government. Yet, simultaneously, Operation Gatekeeper
responded to illegal immigration by transforming the US-Mexico border into
a militarised zone, by doubling the Border Patrol, and by fortifying the area
with a high steel fence, now popularly referred to as the Tortilla Curtain.22

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES AND CONTROVERSIES

Reflecting the events of almost a century earlier, contemporary government
policy and public opinion has engaged with the ongoing philosophical
debate surrounding cultural pluralism. American intellectuals at the end of
the 20th century have increasingly begun to publicly debate not only the
threats posed to homogeneous Americaneity by immigration, but also the
inability and unwillingness of immigrants to assimilate to, or even recognise,
a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon American culture. As a result, the contem-
porary philosophical debate has increasingly tended to reiterate Roosevelts
1915 criticisms of hyphenated Americans. It is notable that two of the main

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theorists in question the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Samuel Huntington

served as presidential advisors (to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), and
so combined their role as leading academics with the direct shaping of
government policy. Both were/are also respected Harvard academics, adding
weight and influence to their opinions. Significantly, both have also been the
most vocal critics of mass immigration and cultural pluralism in recent years,
and the most active proponents of contemporary nativism, publishing
best-selling books on the topic that demonstrate their engagement with
popular opinion: Schlesingers The Disuniting of America (1991), and a series
of critiques from Huntington including The Clash of Civilizations (1996),
The Hispanic Challenge (2004) and Who Are We? The Challenges to Americas
National Identity (2004).
For Schlesinger, the threat is clearly to a white, male, heterosexual,
Protestant, capitalist America; he argues that when a visible minority
pledges primary allegiance to their groups it presents a threat to the brittle
bonds of national identity.23 The dangers posed by cultural pluralism are
therefore multiple, and the threat evident not only from many established
immigrant and settler groups but also from those formerly forcibly
relocated. Schlesingers perceived threat includes African Americas drive
for civil rights, increased immigration from Asia and the Hispanic world, and
the rising power of non-Christian religions such as Islam. Huntington, by
contrast, is more focused on specific examples: the cultural threat posed by
Spanish-speaking immigrants, the religious threat of Islam, and economic
and political threat of China. For both Schlesinger and Huntington, however,
the threat has been worsened by Americas liberal immigration laws after
1965 and by the refusal of newly arrived immigrants to assimilate to
traditional notions of American identity. The dangers of cultural pluralism
are clearly laid out in Huntingtons work; his concern is not only with the
threat posed to American national identity, but also with challenges to
Americas status as the sole global economic superpower and its role as a
profoundly Christian nation. As a result, Huntington anticipates that all
future national conflicts will be driven by cultural interests, that cultural
differences will be the battle lines of the future.24
Huntingtons theories have proved both influential he is widely credited
with having predicted the events of 9/11 and highly damaging to popular
understandings of American cultural pluralism.25 Clearly, popular and
political discussions of concepts such as national culture and citizenship
have become increasingly evident in many Western countries since 9/11, and
so the debate over terrorism has become inextricably linked to culture and
culture clash. Contemporary popular, political and philosophical questions
regarding cultural pluralism are increasingly re-focusing upon the ability and
desire of immigrants to adopt the culture and cultural values of their new
countries of residence. This is a key problem that Huntington identifies
among Spanish-speaking migrants and immigrants at the start of the 21st

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century, who pose special social and cultural problems. For Huntington,
the major threat to American identity is the massive growth in numbers of
Spanish-speaking immigrants: identified as the largest minority group in
2005 with 14.5 per cent of the population (compared to 12.8 per cent for the
former largest group, African Americans).26 In this context, Huntingtons
concern is that the persistent inflow of these new groups is effectively
transporting entire communities and social groups, resulting in a segregation
of immigrant groups into Spanish-speaking Catholic areas where there is no
need to learn English.
To Huntingtons mind, this represents the most serious cleavage in
American society of recent years, problematised by the high fertility rates
of such social groups. Huntington argues that a contempt of [American]
culture demonstrates irreconcilable [cultural] differences and can lead only
to the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries.
His solution is not only blunt, but also intolerant of cultural pluralism:

There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream

created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share
in that dream only if they dream in English.27

This is clearly also the public perception of the situation; a series of

interlinked articles for the Washington Post on The myth of the melting pot
(1998) presented a snapshot of immigrant America and suggested a rise in a
white flight, the migration of Anglo-Americans, from areas so inundated
with Spanish-speaking immigrants that they seem like another country.
Presenting a deeply critical portrait of Miami, which is described as having
an exotic, foreign feel and where white Americans are in the minority as a
result of massive Cuban immigration, this piece suggests that American
cultural hegemony is not merely under attack but perhaps already defeated.28
Significantly, Huntingtons two-pronged attack also identifies Islam as
damaging to concepts of American national cultural identity, and specifies
Islam as one of the battle lines of the future. Written in the wake of the
first Gulf War (19901), Huntingtons thesis on the clash of American and
Islamic cultural values is perhaps not so dramatically prescient, yet the
problem is complicated by a growth in the numbers of Muslim Americans at
the end of the 20th century, and by fears of further terrorist activity since
9/11. Like concerns over Japanese Americans during World War II, the
popular concern has become one of loyalty, and Muslim Americans are
increasingly questioned as to whether they place loyalty to their country
above that for their religion and culture. Problematically, Huntingtons thesis
extends the range of the external cultural threat to ally the Islamic world
with China, to predict the next pattern of conflict, and to play on popular
fears of Chinas communist regime, growing economy and population,
emergence as a new superpower, and the long-established tensions over

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Americas Asian immigration legislation.29

Given the perceived external threat since 9/11, Huntingtons nativist
argument has become part of the public debate and, more problematically,
has fed into government policy. The implications of this translation of
a philosophical debate into actual legislation after 9/11 are far-reaching,
primarily because an academic thesis is only an intellectual theory, and one of
many. One of the key aspects of Huntingtons popular success has been his
active engagement with deeply held public anxieties. As Amitai Etzioni
argues, this is best characterized as a theory of fear.30 This clearly has been
more profoundly influenced both by the events of 9/11, and by the sub-
sequent policies of the Bush administration such as the 2001 Patriot Act
and the 2005 Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration
Control Act. What has become more evident are the ways that American
cultural perception has been reoriented: how immigration control has
been transformed into border protection, and how illegal immigrants
have merged with and become inseparable from popular constructions of
terrorism and terrorists. Congress has also, in the years after 9/11, begun
investigating higher education policy, and questioning whether the teaching
of Middle East Studies is itself un-American, with the result that Middle
East Studies in America has identified itself as under siege.31
Perhaps the most significant recent addition to the debate in the 21st
century is Walter Benn Michaelss The Trouble With Diversity (2006). Michaels
argues that the overwhelming nature of identity politics in the 21st century
has effectively erased social and economic inequalities. The problem, as
Michaels sees it, is simply economic: differences between us present a
problem: the need to get rid of inequality or to justify it.32 For Michaels,
cultural pluralism has emerged as a justification of social inequality, where
the concept of social class is transformed into a version of race, and rich
and poor are conceived of as different races.33 The crux of Michaelss
argument is that, while race as a category has long been scientifically
disproved, our reliance upon the concept of cultural pluralism ensures that
we can continue to think (and act) in terms of race, with cultural pluralism
adopted as the easiest route to a colour-blind society (colour-blind was a
term frequently used, sometimes ambivalently, to characterise the tone of
Barack Obamas presidential campaign of 2008, perhaps prompting Obama
to make his A More Perfect Union speech in Philadelphia on 18 March in
which he explicitly framed the 21st-century race debate).
Michaelss argument is highly significant, not only because it addresses the
extreme economic differences within contemporary America and seeks to
produce a class-based assessment, but also because he argues that we have
learnt to think of inequality as a consequence of our prejudices rather than
as a consequence of our social system.34 However, Michaelss argument
not only over-simplifies a highly complex issue but is, in places, deeply self-
contradictory. The definition of cultural pluralism as either socially con-

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structed or based on actual biological distinctions is highly simplistic. More

problematically, Michaelss either/or argument either culture/race or
economics fails to identify or fully discuss the links between social categories
such as race, culture, poverty and/or wealth. This contradiction is most
evident when Michaels speaks specifically of the legacy of the slave trade
where we cant plausibly deny that the economic circumstances of African
Americans today are importantly a consequence of slavery and past racism
but then paradoxically suggests that the 21st-century world is one in which
most of us are not racist [and] where, on the humanities faculties of our
universities, we might more plausibly say not that racism is rare but that it is
extinct.35 As a result, although Michaels raises a range of highly pertinent
questions about the relationships between contemporary social inequality
and cultural pluralism, his contention that racism has been eliminated is, as
Scott McLemee comments, simply bewildering. In this context, Michaelss
premise that cultural pluralism is itself an obstacle to pursuing the real
politics of social justice is an interesting development in the ongoing
philosophical debate.36

RECENT CHALLENGES TO AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY

The ongoing tensions between cultural diversity and national identity are,
perhaps appropriately, best illustrated by a recent case from the second Gulf
War: the media interest in and frenzy surrounding Private Jessica Lynch.
Lynch was one of a group captured by Iraqi forces in March 2003 during
an ambush of an American military convoy. Lynch subsequently became a
symbol both of American identity and of the American struggle in Iraq.
Accordingly, much media attention was devoted to the plight of the blond
19 year old from Palestine, West Virginia, with the effect that the story took
on the heroic elements of the colonial captivity narrative, complete with a
growing equation of Lynch with American national and cultural identity.37
This equation of individual and nation is of crucial significance: as Stacy
Takacs comments, the vested interests of the military and commercial media
coalesced around the need for a good story to clarify the moral stakes of the
war in Iraq.38 Accordingly, the subsequent media focus on Lynchs survival
in spite of her own feminine physical frailty, her gallant attempts to fight her
attackers in spite of her wounds, her abuse (reportedly both physical and
sexual) at the hands of her Iraqi captors, her mistreatment while lying
defenceless in an Iraqi hospital, and her filmed rescue by American troops,
all acted to emphasise Lynchs newly pivotal role as an icon of American
national and cultural identity. This pivotal role is perhaps most evident in the
number of documentaries that subsequently emerged, all of which focused
on Lynchs pioneering American spirit, while stripping away her military
status to present a highly feminised vulnerability.
Private Lynch was thus effectively transformed into a global media

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phenomenon. However, in the months that followed it became clear that

Lynchs story was far less heroic and far more mundane than the publicised
version: Lynch was not wounded in action, never managed to fire a shot at
enemy forces, and was treated well by Iraqi doctors. In this context, Lynchs
mythologising as an American icon exposes the complex relationships
between cultural and national identity. Quite simply, Lynch is physically
representative of the kind of American national identity that the US wanted
to promote: she is young, blonde and white. Indeed, the debate surrounding
the Lynch affair has raged around the specific choices made by the Bush
administration as to which captured American soldiers within Lynchs group
were representative of American nation and culture. Significantly, Lynch
was not the only choice available, there were two further wounded female
American soldiers in the unit: Specialist Shoshana Johnson, who was
wounded in action and became Americas first black female prisoner of war,
and Private Lori Ann Piestewa, a member of the Hopi nation who was the
first Native American woman to die in combat for her country. Notably,
neither Johnson nor Piestewa matched the desired criteria for American
cultural and national identity: both were single mothers; both were wounded
in combat, with Piestewa later dying from her wounds; and, most im-
portantly, neither fitted into the heroic American captivity narrative either
as it has traditionally been constructed or as it was reconstructed around
Lynchs experiences. Moreover, although both were awarded Purple Hearts,
neither was white.
As John Howard and Laura Prividera argue, the pervasive cultural forces
that structure Lynchs story also therefore act upon the stories of Johnson
and Piestewa, reducing them to secondary characters in terms of their
relationship to Private Lynch.39 This reduction in cultural and national status
is equally evident in the events since Lynch and Johnsons return to the US.
Lynch returned to a heros welcome from a crowd of thousands in West
Virginia, was awarded an honourable discharge and a substantial disability
pension, and benefited financially from a book deal. By contrast, the
honouring of Piestewas memory has been left primarily to local tribal
groups, who campaigned successfully for a local Arizona peak to be renamed
in her honour; and, ironically, to Lynch who has devoted time and energy to
emphasising Piestewas pivotal role in her own survival. Johnsons experience
has been perhaps even more complex and controversial, and debate has been
exceptionally fierce since it was revealed that her disability pension (for
wounds suffered in combat) had been set at a fraction of the disability
pension awarded to Lynch (for wounds suffered in an accident). Given the
absolute emphasis placed by both the military and the media upon Lynchs
own racial and cultural background, it is therefore exceptionally difficult to
assess the experiences of Piestewa and Johnson outside of racial and cultural
categories and their cases are, therefore, deeply significant for considerations
of American cultural pluralism in the 21st century.

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Such conceptions of American cultural diversity are equally significant

to the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. As John Wills discusses in this
volume, in August 2005 Katrina devastated entire areas of New Orleans,
causing widespread death and destruction in what was to become a globally
televised humanitarian crisis. Recent figures estimate that more than 1,100
drowned, thousands more remain unaccounted for, and more than one
million have been displaced.40 The Bush administrations failure to act
immediately to provide relief, coupled with the profound impact of televised
images of innumerable drowned bodies and of desperate pleas from poor
communities trapped in flooded areas, provoked enormous public outcry
and laid bare deeply entrenched divisions within American society. While the
aftermath of Katrina relates to a range of complex inter-related social issues,
there is little doubt that the incident marks a crisis point in recent American
social relations. In this context, Katrina exposes the ways in which popular
American culture identified cultural diversity as a significant contributing
factor for those most affected: the African American community of New
Orleanss Ninth Ward.
Given Louisianas history as a slave-holding state, it is not surprising that
subsequent critical interpretations have traced this legacy amongst those
most affected, the descendents of freed slaves who continue to earn well
below the national average and to experience few chances for social or
economic advancement. Estimates suggest that, at the time of the hurricane,
New Orleans was the 12th poorest city in America, with a population
almost 70 per cent African American, and 30 per cent of all residents living
below the federal poverty line. Moreover, those areas most devastated had
a 98-percent black population and poverty and unemployment rates of over
40 per cent.41 What was perhaps most evident from the media coverage of
the Katrina disaster was the continued entrenched racism of American
society. Pleas for aid from poor black communities were repeatedly ignored,
as was the economic inability of the poor to actually leave the area: many
poor black families simply lacked the financial means to evacuate.42 In
conjunction, the media ran lurid stories (later widely disproved) of New
Orleans blacks committing widespread murders, sexual assaults, carjackings,
and terroristic shootings at rescue workers. As Manning Marable argues, the
racist subtext of such news stories suggested that New Orleans blacks were
not worthy of being saved.43
While the individual costs of Hurricane Katrina continue to be counted,
there can be little doubt that the institutional and cultural costs are being
thoroughly assessed, with Katrina offering evidence of the inextricable links
between race and class, of institutional discrimination [and] individual
racism, and even of global apartheid.44 The lack of government action has,
concomitantly, been interpreted as a complex response to race and class
where, as Henry Giroux argues, the entrenched ideological hostility of the
Bush administration towards supporting those most socially in need exposes

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the social crisis at the heart of American cultural diversity that can be directly
related to a deeper set of memories of racial injustice and violence that
suggest a link between an apartheid past and [an] utter disregard for
populations now considered disposable.45 In the context of cultural
pluralism in the 21st century, it is notable that the institutional response to
Katrina derives directly from long-standing historical and contemporary
orientations towards Blacks in the United States that shaped responses
without overt antipathy or intention.46 City decisions in the wake of the
catastrophe smack of social opportunism, with the chance to rebuild New
Orleans as it could be rather than as it was leading potentially to
the permanent exclusion of poor black communities, and fuelling the
ongoing debate surrounding the values and dangers of American cultural
pluralism.
TRENDS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
If, as the 2005 Census suggests, minority American cultural groups have
become the majority in 10% of U.S. counties, then the implications for the
future might suggest a cause for concern.47 In terms of national implications,
the tightening of immigration policies and borders reverses the more liberal
policies of the 1960s. Additionally, the tightening of cultural boundaries
reiterates a restrictive conceptualisation of American cultural identity that
fails both to accommodate new immigrants, and to recognise the massive
transformation of American culture through immigration in the last years of
the 20th century. In this context, African American communities continue to
suffer institutionalised racism even while their status as the largest minority
culture is lost to growing numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants.
In terms of international implications, the increasing polarisation of the
world in terms of religion and politics is problematic and highly divisive,
and the reinforcing of binary divisions between Islam and Christianity and
between America and China/Asia reintroduce and rework a range of
complex and negative historical relationships. With the War on Terror far
from concluded, it seems safe to assume that restrictive border controls and
negative attitudes towards the Islamic world are likely to remain part of
American policy for some years to come. Additionally, given Chinas
increasing economic and political power, and development of nuclear
technology, it might also be reasonable to assume a transformation in
American-Chinese relations in the near future.
However, the future is not all bleak. In his critique of Huntingtons thesis,
Edward Said commented that the clash of civilisations thesis is a gimmick
better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding
of the bewildering interdependence of our time.48 Saids comment, which
illustrates the dangers of reactionary attitudes and suggests the need for
a more engaged analysis of contemporary American identity, exposes the
connections between current concepts of cultural pluralism and a very

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lengthy American debate dating back to the 18th century. Indeed, contem-
porary understandings of American cultural pluralism, along with responses
to 9/11, only make sense within this lengthy cultural debate.
Nonetheless, positive interpretations of the situation are evident. In the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, some commentators have suggested that
the exposure of ongoing entrenched racism marks a turning point for
American cultural pluralism, with the potential for positive change evident
in the wave of activism in New Orleans since 2005.49 While Charles
Hirschmans contribution to a series of academic articles entitled Border
Battles: The U.S. Immigration Debates recognises a deep ambivalence
about future immigration within America, he nonetheless notes that the
demographic challenges faced by the US in the 21st century are not
unique. More importantly, not only do current debates echo throughout
American history, but Hirschman notes that almost all popular fears about
the negative impact of cultural pluralism and immigration have been
proved false by history. American culture has, by contrast, been positively
broadened by pluralism.50

NOTES
1. Figures from The Population Profile of the United States: 2000, May 2002,
http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/profile2000.html.
2. Steven A. Camarota, 100 Million More: Projecting the Impact of Immigration
on the US Population, 20072060, Centre for Immigration Studies, August
2007, http://www.cis.org/articles/2007/back707.html.
3. Eric Kaufman, Nativist Cosmopolitans: institutional reflexivity and the decline
of double-consciousness in American nationalist thought, Historical Sociology,
14(1), 2001, 48.
4. J. Hector St John de Crvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of
Eighteenth Century American Life (New York, NY: Penguin, [1782] 1981), pp.
6970.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: David Campbell, [1835]
1994), pp. 1734.
6. Kaufman, Nativist Cosmopolitans, p. 47.
7. Benjamin Franklin, Observations concerning the increase of Mankind, in
Leonard W. Labaree et al. (eds), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, [1751] 1999), vol. 4, p. 234.
8. John B. Frantz, Franklin and the Pennsylvania Germans, Pennsylvania History,
65, Winter 1998, 21.
9. David M. Reimer, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against
Immigration (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999).
10. Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 1.
11. Tichenor, Dividing Lines, p. 88.
12. Also known as the Root-Takahira Agreement.
13. Theodore Roosevelt, The Threat of Japan, The Papers of Theodore Roosevelt,

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/trjapan.htm.
14. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act.
15. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908), Act I, http://beatl.barnard.
columbia.edu/wsharpe/citylit/Melting1.html.
16. Horace M. Kallen, Democracy versus the melting-pot: a study of American
nationality, The Nation, 25 February 1915, http://www.expo98.msu.edu/
people/Kallen.htm. Sidney Ratner, Horace M. Kallen and cultural pluralism,
Modern Judaism, 4, 1984, 187.
17. Grants text is currently only available online on white supremacist websites.
18. Randolph Bourne, Trans-national America, Atlantic Monthly, 118, July 1916,
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Bourne.html.
19. For the full speech, see T. R. Theodore Roosevelt: Quotes, Sayings and
Aphorisms, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trquotes.html.
20. Lyndon B. Johnson, 3 October 1965 http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/Johnson/
archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp.
21. R. Michael Alvarez and Tara L. Butterfield, The resurgence of Nativism in
California? The case of Proposition 187 and illegal immigration (1997), Social
Science Quarterly, 8(1), March 2000, 167.
22. See Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the Illegal Alien and the
Making of the US-Mexico Boundary (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), passim.
23. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural
Society (New York, NY: Norton, [1991] 1992), p. 64.
24. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs, 72(3),
Summer 1993, 22.
25. See the interview with Huntington, Five years after 9/11: the clash of
civilizations revisited, 18 August 2006, http://pewforum.org/events/
index.php?EventID=125.
26. The Associated Press, Diversity Growing Across the U.S., http://www.
msnbc.msn.com/id/14348539/print/1/display.1098/.
27. Samuel Huntington, The Hispanic challenge, Foreign Policy, MarchApril 2004,
3045.
28. William Booth, A white migration north from Miami, Washington Post,
11 November 1998, A1.
29. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, pp. 29, 22.
30. Amitai Etzioni, The Real Threat: An essay on Samuel Huntington,
Contemporary Sociology, 34(5), 2005, 477.
31. Joan W. Scott, Middle East Studies under siege, The Link, 39(1), JanuaryMarch
2006.
32. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity (New York, NY: Henry Holt,
2006), p. 6.
33. Ibid., p. 9.
34. Ibid., p. 20.
35. Ibid., pp. 126, 73.
36. Scott McLemee, Liberty, equality diversity?, Inside Higher Ed, 20 September
2006, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/09/20/mclemee.
37. Stacy Takacs, Jessica Lynch and the regeneration of American identity and
power post-9/11, Feminist Media Studies, 5(3), 2005, 301.

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CULTURAL PLURALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

38. Ibid., p. 297.

39. John W. Howard and Laura C. Prividera, Rescuing patriarchy or saving Jessica
Lynch: The rhetorical construction of the American woman soldier, Woman
and Language, 27(2), 2004, 96.
40. Kristin E. Henkel, John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner, Institutional
discrimination, individual racism, and Hurricane Katrina, Analyses of Social Issues
and Public Policy, 6(1), 2006, 105; Henry A. Giroux, Reading Hurricane Katrina:
Race, class, and the biopolitics of disposability, College Literature, 33(3), Summer
2006, 183.
41. Giroux, Reading Hurricane Katrina, p. 183; Manning Marable, Race, class, and
the Katrina crisis, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 9(2), 2006, 156.
42. Henkel, Dovidio and Gaertner, Institutional discrimination, individual racism,
and Hurricane Katrina, p. 108.
43. Manning Marable, Race, class, and the Katrina crisis, Working USA: The Journal
of Labor and Society, 9(2), 2006, 1556.
44. Henkel, Dovidio and Gaertner, Institutional discrimination, individual racism,
and Hurricane Katrina; Giroux, Reading Hurricane Katrina; Marable, Race,
class, and the Katrina crisis, p. 159.
45. Giroux, Reading Hurricane Katrina, pp. 1845.
46. Henkel, Dovidio and Gaertner, Institutional discrimination, individual racism,
and Hurricane Katrina, p. 100.
47. CNN, Minorities become the majority in 10 percent of U.S. counties, 9 August
2007, http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/08/09/minority.counties.ap/index.
html.
48. Edward Said, The Clash of Ignorance, The Nation, 22 October 2001,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011022/said.
49. Henkel, Dovidio and Gaertner, Institutional discrimination, individual racism,
and Hurricane Katrina, p. 119.
50. Charles Hirschman, The Impact of Immigration on American Society: Look-
ing Backward to the Future, Social Science Research Council Issue Forum:
Border Battles, The U.S. Immigration Debates, http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/
Hirschman.

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15. WRITING IN THE WAKE OF 9/11

Catherine Morley

For the literary scholar, one of the most revealing things abut 9/11 was the
great public interest afterwards in what writers would have to say: how could
the writer respond to such a catastrophic event, an event that seemed so
cinematic that, according to Kathryn Flett in The Observer, it mocked all
power of description? 1 Yet there seemed an overriding need for words in the
wake of 9/11. As Ulrich Baer has pointed out:

In the first days after the attack, the astounding efforts by the rescue
workers found a symbolic echo in the poems postered on walls and
fences: first in makeshift memorials, then delivered to inboxes all over
the globe. This spontaneous burgeoning of poetry responded to a need
a need for words that then took the form of written scrolls hung on
fences and walls along with donated pens and markers, allowing anyone
to offer the language of poetry where little could be said.2

Responding to this public desire for words of explanation or elucidation,

in the immediate aftermath of the attacks the weekend supplements were
flooded with confessions of diminished power from authors across the
globe. Jay McInerney, Arundhathi Roy, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan all
wrote of their sense of the futility of the act of writing, the inconsequential
nature of the writer and the inability of language to encapsulate or represent
the reverberations of the attacks. One of the most interesting responses
came from Martin Amis, who commented upon the figurative nature of the
acts:

The Pentagon is a symbol, and the World Trade Center is, or was, a
symbol, and an American passenger jet is also a symbol of indigenous

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mobility and zest, and of the galaxy of glittering destinations It was

well understood that an edifice so demonstrably comprised of concrete
and steel would also become an unforgettable metaphor.3

Amiss emphasis on language and symbolism aligns the terrorist with the
artful, plotting writer and, as Alex Houen has pointed out in Terrorism
and Modern Literature (2002), Osama Bin Laden also read the 11 September
attacks figuratively.4 In extracted interviews and transcripts of television
messages Bin Laden described the attacks as targeted at the icons of military
and economic power, stating that it is thanks to God that what America
is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted.5 Indeed, for Terrorism
Studies scholars such as Houen, on many levels September 11 amounted
to a monumental collision of symbols, metaphors and shadowy figures.6
The conflation of the writer and the terrorist is taken further by Margaret
Scanlan in her book Plotting Terror (2001), which argues that much terrorist
literature presents writers and terrorists as remnants of a romantic belief in
the power of marginalised persons to transform history with recent fiction
offering an increasingly pessimistic account of the novels social power, a
pessimism that some recent novelists extend to the revolutionary impulse
itself .7 Because, as Don DeLillos Bill Gray in Mao II (1991) puts it, writers
know how reality is created, fiction that deals with terrorism elucidates the
process whereby militants, the media and politicians construct terrorism as a
political reality.8 The links between television and terrorism have been well-
rehearsed, but the links between the terrorist and the writer have come under
much closer scrutiny in the wake of 9/11.9 On consideration, terrorist-
inspired fiction does indeed complicate the distinction between writers and
terrorists, between stories and real acts of violence. After all, the fiction
writer, in making use of the terrorist atrocity in the construction of fiction,
is in some way channelling some of the power of the terrorist act, converting
violence into a spectacle, and appropriating the narrative of the victims.10
According to Scanlan, novels which deal with terrorism often force a writer
to assess his or her own political commitments, actions and failures the
terrorist novel opens itself up to the more general questions about the
writers ability to understand, respond to, and influence politics. 11 Indeed,
this might account for the widespread public soul-searching of authors
across the globe in the wake of the attacks.
However, few American writers have overtly addressed the figure of the
other or the terrorist, preferring instead to retreat to the domestic interiors
of American lives. One thinks, for instance, of Ken Kalfuss A Disorder
Peculiar to the Country (2006), McInerneys The Good Life (2006) or Claire
Messuds The Emperors Children (2006), each of which deals with the impact
of the attacks on individual families and couples. There are, of course,
exceptions to this. John Updikes Terrorist (2006) takes the reader into the
mind and the world of a would-be, home-grown jihadist, Ahmad Mullaway

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Mulloy. Mohsin Hamid, albeit ironically and through parodic inversion, takes
on the terrorist in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2006) whereby the Pakistani
fundamentalist resists the fundamentals of the corporate New York life-
style. Needless to say, writers outside the borders of the US have taken on the
Muslim subject more willingly, and according to Pankaj Mishra much more
successfully, than their American counterparts.12
Amongst American writers, however, the themes that emerge most
strongly from the literature that self-consciously responds to 9/11 are the
seeming redundancy of language and the resultant possibilities for literary
art, the will to understand or make sense of the other, and domestic discord.
Although a whole raft of literature has been produced, for reasons of space
this essay will focus on prose fiction, mainly the novel, rather than poetic or
dramatic responses. This allows the inclusion of the work of writers like
DeLillo and Updike, who have come to occupy almost titanic positions in
the canon of contemporary American letters and whose responses to the
September 11 events were most keenly anticipated. Emphasis on prose
fiction also facilitates the inclusion of New York-based writers such as
Lydia Davis and Jenefer Shute, who offer shorter, more immediate, prose
responses to the events.13

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE DOTCOM GENERATION

Writers such as Messud and McInerney use New York City as a backdrop for
their vast and, in the former instance, multigenerational stories of familial
discord and adultery. Both, along with former brat-packer Bret Easton Ellis
in Lunar Park (2005), use 9/11 as a means of examining the complacency
of the dotcom generation and their resultant confusion in the fallout;
McInerney and Ellis consider the attacks in terms of an assault upon
American masculinity. Philip Roth responded with the provocatively titled
The Plot Against America (2004), which belied its titular promise to unpick the
conspiracies against the nation by presenting the plot against America as
coming from within the nation itself in the historically reconfigured election
of Charles Lindburgh as President in the 1940s. Rather than take on the
vagaries of terrorist plotting, Roth takes the long view and presents a novel
that forces Americans to address their history and, perhaps, their own
complicity in the fortunes of the future. Moreover, Roth presents a wilfully
playful book, a book which continually draws attention to its own status as
artifice and fictional construction due to the melding of his usual perceptive
historical realism with the telltale marks of Borgesian magic realism. For
Roth, the terrorist attacks provoke not a sustained meditation on the status
of the other, but on the self, the American self, and the processes of writing
and fictional plotting.
One might argue that this is a typical reaction on the part of the American
writer, a breed that has almost incessantly been obsessed with the self, the

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AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

individual and the tenets of individualism, which lie at the heart of American
myths of exceptionalism.14 However, the post-9/11 meditations on the self
and on the national psyche are of a distinctly different flavour from their
precedents, offering less ebullience than uncertainty. Messud taps into this in
her portrayal of three successful 30-year-old New Yorkers, emotionally and
physically scarred by the gap in the landscape. The optimism of the dotcom
generation gives way to a questioning of the self, of values and ideology,
the gaping hole in Manhattan reflective of a wound in the psyche of the
young Manhattanites. Ellis, meanwhile, presents a pseudo-autobiographical
account of the authors descent from the glitter of his New York heyday to
the freakish world of the suburbs, as well as his loss of confidence and
potency as a writer.
Accompanying this psychological uncertainty, writers present a reassess-
ment of familial and emotional ties. Most recently, Don DeLillos Falling Man
(2007) explores the fractured fragments of a marriage in the wake of the
attacks. Messud, McInerney, Updike, Kalfus, DeLillo and Ellis all examine
the theme of adultery and its repercussions for the American family. Given
this intense literary focus on the American family and the consequences of
the attacks for a series of white middle-class males, it might be argued that
the expressions of 9/11 amplify tensions existent before the attacks. Stephen
Shapiro argues that the prevailing concern of American literary fiction,
which is evident in various narrative recurrences, is the de-establishment of
the American middle class and the rise of poverty in the United States. For
Shapiro, the imperial fantasy of American dominance is itself a fiction,
a response to the fact that in the decade preceding the attacks, the middle
class had been severely squeezed by economic factors such as debt and the
increasing cost of higher education.15 Total consumer debt, after all, had
increased from some $797 billion in January 1990 to more than $1,000 billion
five years later and a staggering $1,820 billion by September 2001: a reflec-
tion of the economic expansion of the Clinton years, no doubt, but also a
considerable source of national self-searching and individual anxiety.16
Shapiros thesis may not be universally applicable but it is certainly evident,
for instance, in the work of Ellis whose Lunar Park is a novel of credit, debt
and indebtedness to Robert Ellis (the father of the protagonist) who, though
economically successful, dies owing millions of dollars in back taxes. Indeed,
the debt to and death of the father are intricately connected to the con-
ception of Elliss son, Ashton (reminiscent of the ashes of New York City in
the fallout), and all lead back to the empty vault at the Bank of America, to
which the various debts are owed. Updike, too, picks up on middle-class
anxieties and encroaching poverty in his depiction of a formerly prosperous,
predominantly white, mill town, New Prospect, which rests on the outskirts
of New Jersey. Now populated by the descendents of the African American
mill-workers, the town has become something of a ghetto for African
Americans and other racial minorities. Money (and the evaporation of it) and

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class also recur as anxieties throughout McInerneys novel, linked mainly (as
in the cases of Updike and Ellis) with attacks upon the masculine role as
provider and protector of family and nation.17

WORDS FAIL ME
In keeping with such concerns regarding economic capital and class, the
widespread response to the events of 9/11, both literary and cultural, was
that the attacks heralded a new political order, a different America; as Paul
Auster put it: so the twenty-first century finally begins.18 Coinciding with
this new millennium, this newly transfigured America, is the problem of
language and linguistic response. In his essay of December 2001 In the ruins
of the future, DeLillo writes of 9/11 as contributing to the failure of
metaphor, the impossibility of a figurative language which could articulate
the event in all its cultural and subjective enormity. The response of DeLillo
was shared by many of his contemporaries and extended beyond the borders
of the US. This response to trauma is not unprecedented. After the atrocities
of the Holocaust and the World War II, Theodor Adorno stated (in 1951)
that he considered writing poetry after Auschwitz barbaric. In later
modifications of this point, Adorno stressed the necessity of literary art to
avoid the aestheticisation of the horror of the camps. For Adorno, literary
art after Auschwitz was faced with the problem of potentially conferring
meaning upon something that was ultimately meaningless. Siri Hustvedt
takes up this point in her short story The World Trade Center which
reminds the reader of other crimes against humanity, listing place names
synonymous with massive loss of life as words engulfed by the unspeakable.
Hustvedt elaborates on the impossibility of matching the reality of the
situation to the words that conjure the image: It might be easy to say,
Burning bodies fell from the windows of the World Trade Center, but it
isnt easy to embrace the reality of the sentence. For Hustvedt, the truths of
the day are more subjective than language can ever be. The true manifes-
tations of September 11 are to be found in the changed habits of New
Yorkers and their children, those who have come to scream in sleep, to wet
the bed or imagine skeletons in the streets of the city:

These are the translations of horror when it enters the mind and the
body, and when they seem to speak more directly to the truth than the
elegant phrases we have been hearing lately, both political and literary.
We have to talk, but we should be careful with our words.19

Freighted with meaning, yet also meaningless, the words World Trade
Center have become the unspeakable. Hustvedts acknowledgement that
people will continue to and need to speak reminds one of DeLillos sense of
a necessary counternarrative to the attacks.

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For DeLillo, the attacks on September 11 represented a seizure of the

global narrative by terrorists against which the writer must pitch his narrative,
must regain his power over words:

The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We

have to take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not
diminished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to
us But language is inseparable from the world that provokes it. The
writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately.
Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror.
People falling from the towers hand in hand. This is part of the
counternarrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in the crush
of meshed steel. In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the
event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. The
writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling
space.20

The notion of counternarrative is not new to DeLillo. It is an approximation

of a term he uses in his 1997 article The Power of History, in which he
elucidated on the methodology informing Underworld (1997) as the com-
position of counter-history.21 Then, as now, his notion of counternarrative
was that which slipped past the governing, official narrative of history, the
stories that go untold, obliterated by the dominant narrative of the attack.
Counternarrative is the writers attempt, through words, to wrestle power
from the actions of the terrorist. All that breaks from the overwhelming
narrative of the attacks and the hole in the landscape is counternarrative: the
hundreds of stories criss-crossing New York City on the day, the memories
real and imagined, the photographs of missing people, the fragments and
shards of strewn personal belongings. For DeLillo, the writer must seize on
these smaller, multiple stories, these individual moments and possessions,
and pitch them against the massive spectacle of the attacks that seems to defy
normal frames of response.
Ulrich Baers edited collection of short stories, 110 Stories: New York Writes
After September 11 (2002), is a clear example of counternarrative in the DeLillo
sense. A collection of subjective stories and memories in the aftermath of
the attacks, the book is pitched as a model for New Yorks perpetual self-
reconstitution through metaphor and language that will prove as significant
as the construction in concrete and steel around us. 22 The stories range from
meditations on children through to Muslim experiences in New York after
the attacks. Frequently, the book presents stories that address the inability
of language to fit the new world order. Avital Ronell in This Was a Test
scrutinises the language of George W. Bush in his statement that the attacks
were a test, asking How does his language usage work here? She questions
the new rhetoric of justification invented for military action and cites

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Nietzsche in exploring the meaning of the word test as a crisis in the

relationship of experience to interpretation.23 Jane Tillmans story Save me
from the pious and the vengeful begins and ends with the assertion that
Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and
everything, and goes on to explore the manifold ways in which the author
attempts to create a story that might in some way offer meaning to the
events. Ending with recourse to Margaret Fuller, Tillman claims to leave the
imagining of the newly configured America, the stories, to others.
Lydia Daviss story Grammar Questions deals obliquely with 9/11
through the precise attention to the laws of grammar and language in a
monologue about a dying man (the father of the narrator). Scrutinising every
verb tense and grammatical configuration, the narrator is preoccupied with
life, death, existence and the body. In the face of death, the narrator also
considers the accuracy of pronouns in describing the dying man: he, it, my
father, the body. Daviss story confronts the inadequacy of language in the
face of trauma, linking the unspeakability of her impending loss with
incomprehension; without the language to articulate crisis it is impossible
to understand that crisis. This is connected with Hustvedts sense of the
unspeakable, that which is heavily burdened with meaning but also
meaningless. As Daviss narrator gropes for the grammatical terminology to
describe her dying father, she evades the reality of the situation the fact of
his imminent death. The direct thematic parallel to this, her failure to directly
address the events of 9/11, represents a real and subjective trauma in her
retreat from the gravity of the situation.
Jenefer Shutes story Instructions for Surviving the Unprecedented
(Break Glass in Case of Emergency, if Glass Not Already Broken) is a
nineteen-paragraph, fictional protocol supposedly directed at those who live
alone. Ostensibly, the various paragraphs list the actions of a traumatised
New Yorker gripped with panic. But each, ultimately, is interested in the
salvage of language as a means of communication and as a way to make sense
of the situation. Each paragraph of the story charts the failure of language
and the failure of communication, with the television stories delivering news
of what is occurring just a few blocks away, with the dead phone lines, the
radio reporter stumbling incredulously over his words, and the need of the
trauma victim to be part of a narrative.24 Listing the subjects responses,
Shutes instructions emphasise incomprehension and disbelief, a cognitive
insufficiency which, in turn, is linked with the linguistic insufficiency
experienced by the subject as she is faced with composition. As the story
progresses, each attempt at communication or representation fails: the
elderly neighbour in shock is unresponsive, the phones remain dead
throughout, as does email, and the immigrant superintendents hanging of
an American flag on the front of the speakers apartment building seems
like a misrepresentation of her feelings. These various attempts at linguistic
communication culminate in the moment when the speaker is presented with

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the marker pen and enjoined to write a poem or a message to commemorate

the victims. She writes Words fail me. Finally part of a narrative, she is
overwhelmed by the failure of words to articulate her trauma. The story,
however, is not bleak in its final outlook. The speaker concludes in the final
paragraph that words, in the coming months, will regain their redemptive,
communicative power. Indeed, the text itself is testament to the survival of
words.

INFILTRATING THE INFIDEL

Shutes ultimate faith in language, in the power of words, confirms DeLillos
sense of the necessity of the counternarrative the subjective stories which
diverge from the narrative inscribed by the terrorist. Falling Man, DeLillos
novel, deals with fragments of lives. The book opens with Keith, a man
emerging from the Twin Towers on September 11 with minor injuries, who
in his dazed state ends up on the doorstep of his estranged wife, Lianne. The
novel cuts between their stories and impressions of events, their transitory
resumption of a married existence and Keiths initiation of an affair with
Florence, a fellow worker at the World Trade Center. Interspersed with the
narrative of Keith and Lianne are smaller stories. Lianne, a book editor,
teaches a creative writing class to Alzheimers sufferers and their stories and
memories, as well as those of Keiths poker friends, appear intermittently
throughout the more dominant narrative. The eponymous Falling Man is
a performance artist who stages falls in public, wearing a safety harness
beneath his suit; a routine intended to remind New Yorkers of images of
businessmen falling or jumping from the Twin Towers. Subjugated to
shorter, peripheral sections is the story of the terrorist, Hammad, whose
story enters the narrative at three stages, at the edge of each chapter. Indeed,
he too is the falling man of the title, dangling dangerously at the sidelines of
the narrative.
Though strongly criticised for his portrayal of Hammad and his emphasis
on the local and the domestic by Mishra in his essay on 9/11 writing, the
narratives relegation of Hammad to its periphery is less a slight against the
other than a formal embodiment of the ostracism of minority groups in
current-day America. DeLillo used the same formal strategy in bringing
forgotten African American histories to the forefront in Underworld. There,
the story of Cotter Martin and his link to a celebrated white baseball was set
apart from the rest of the narrative, physically indicative of his erasure from
dominant cultural history. Here, it is unclear whether DeLillo deliberately
sets Hammads story apart in a gesture at wrestling the predominant
narrative of 9/11 from the terrorist or whether his intentions are to indicate
the failure of American culture to integrate its citizens within the parameters
of its national discourse. Bearing in mind the narrative strategy of Underworld,
one might argue the latter. On the basis of DeLillos depiction of terrorist

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factions and their antagonism of the writer in Mao II, as well as the authors
comments throughout In the ruins of the future, one might argue the
former. However, in the conclusion of DeLillos 2001 essay the author
relates how he recently made his way through the Canal Street area of the
city, the site of Ground Zero, and came upon a Muslim woman facing east in
prayer among the street vendors. DeLillo describes an epiphany of sorts, a
recognition of a universal humanity, an understanding of all the 9/11 victims
not in terms of nationality but as their own nation and race, one identity,
young or old, devout or unbelieving a union of souls. 25
This union of souls, the unification of victim and terrorist, is presented at
the conclusion of Falling Man, throughout which both falling men invoked by
the title, Keith and Hammad, come to resemble each other physically in the
growth of their beards, psychologically in their retreat into themselves and in
their admiration of male compatriots. In the weeks after the descent of the
towers Keith is haunted by the phrase organic shrapnel, a term used to
describe the means whereby the body of a suicide bomber can become
lodged within the flesh of the victim. By the end of the novel, which swings
back to the start of the book and to the morning of September 11, Hammad
in the hijacked plane metamorphoses into Keith in the towers like a piece of
organic shrapnel lodging itself within a body, intimating the relation between
the terrorist and the terror survivor. While on the surface DeLillos novel
of domestic discord is a parable of wider domestic dissonance, on a deeper
level it is a story of the simultaneous interconnection and disconnection of
communities and ethnic groups in contemporary New York City. As the
hijacked plane collides with the tower and the stories of Keith and Hammad
are enmeshed, DeLillo reveals the likeness between West and East, between
us and them, and the necessary interdependence in the new globalised
world of terrorist and terror-survivor narratives.
This affinity between worlds is also taken up by John Updike in Terrorist.
Since his critically problematic portrayal of a young male African American
in Rabbit Redux (1971), John Updike has steered clear of unknown ethnic and
geographical territory, preferring instead (to invoke the title of one of his
non-fiction collections) to hug the shore of his commonplace terrain: East
Coast, white, male mid-life and old-age crises. His latest book, however,
seems to have broken the mould and Updikes much awaited post-9/11 book
infiltrates the mind of a home-grown, would-be Islamic terrorist. Ahmad is
the progeny of a freckle-faced mick mother and a long absent Egyptian
Muslim father. The setting of New Prospect, as Jonathan Raban observed
in his review of the book for the New York Review of Books, shares much
the same geographical coordinates as Paterson, New Jersey where the 9/11
bombers based themselves.26 Thus Updike, from the outset, observes that
the cradle of jihad rests not in the Middle East but in those crumbling,
peripheral and immigrant-laden cities of the West.
Since the age of eleven, we are told, Ahmad Mulloy has dedicated himself

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to the Straight Path of Islam and finds friendship and refuge from the
excesses of his contemporary and multicultural community in the ummah
the Internet-based community of the Muslim faithful. Ahmad, however,
looks out on the world with distinctly Updikean eyes: his observations, his
judgements and his reflective musings are those of his creator:

Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All day long, at
Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies
and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs
and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see?

This is about the height of Ahmads jihadist rage against America. And, as
the reviewers pointed out, if we are to consider the merits and authenticity
of the portrayal, it seems too measured, too balanced and too reasoned to
come from a young man whose destiny (as prescribed by both the author and
his imam) is to become the terrorist of the novels title, the man who will
drive a truck laden with four thousand kilos of ammonium nitrate into
Lincoln Tunnel.
In one of his discussions with his imam, Ahmad seeks to extract from the
images in the Qurans Arabic some hint of the Mercifuls relenting at some
point in time, and calling a halt to Hutama Here is the divisive seed of
doubt, the hope within Ahmad that he will not have to drive to his death in
a truck full of explosives. This conversation with the imam is mirrored at
various stages throughout the book. Ahmad engages in a lengthy conver-
sation on the nature of jihad and his heavenly rewards with the Lebanese
American (and perhaps CIA mole) Charlie Chehab in which the latter likens
Osama Bin Laden to George Washington and the mujahideen to the 1776
American revolutionaries. He attends a Christian service to hear a high-
school friend sing and listens to an effusive pastor sermonise on salvation
and Moses who led the chosen people out of slavery and yet was denied
himself admission to the Promised Land. Later still, Jack Levy (the man who
thwarts the terrorist plot) likens many of Ahmads beliefs lifted from the
Quran with the repulsive and ridiculous stuff in the Torah. When they
discuss Sayyid Qutbs concept of j-a hilliyya, Levy describes it as sensible: Ill
assign him as optional reading, if I live. Ive signed up to teach a course in
civics this semester.27 Throughout the book, Ahmads faith in the Quran
and his faith in God is set comparatively alongside American patriotism,
secularism, Christianity and Judaism.
This alignment seems deliberately designed to highlight the comparative
elements of the American and the Muslim other, to show us how closely
aligned both really are. Levys quip that hell assign Qutbs Milestones, the
primary sourcebook of the modern jihad, as optional reading on his civics
course reinforces the sense, impressed at the outset by the mundane
American setting, that this is now the reality of American identity; it is against

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this that post-Cold War Americans define themselves. Thus, Ahmads diluted
rage, his hope for the end of Hutama, is not so surprising. By choosing a
jihadi foot-soldier born and raised in New Jersey, Updike seeks to make his
terrorist a knowable and recognisable entity, an enemy of the state conceived
and bred within it and who is not so unlike his adversaries.
Critics, of course, have found this contentious. Jonathan Raban, for
instance, writes that in his portrayal of Ahmad Updike robs him of the last
surviving shred of Islamist conviction. 28 Writing in the Times Literary
Supplement, Stephen Abell takes a contrary view, with the same end point,
viewing Ahmad as an unnaturally reductive portrait he is allowed to stand
for nothing but his religion, is no more than a Muslim metonymy.29 Other
critics have been similarly hostile. Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times,
exclaims: John Updike writing about terrorism? The bard of the middle-
class mundane, the chronicler of suburban adultery and angst, tackling
Islamic radicalism and the call to jihad? 30 But one might argue that by
outlining affinities with Ahmad and comparing his fervour with that of other
religious faiths, Updike, in fact, avoids the clichs and stereotypes of ranting
mad suicide-bombers that abound in the American media. By empathising
with Ahmad, by offering a sympathetic portrayal of faith, doubt and con-
fusion, the keenly Protestant Updike offers his readership a more complex
terrorist, and a much less reductive picture than that which the critics decry.
Levy speaks directly out of the ideology of contemporary, post-9/11
America, asking how the detonation of the bomb will be a glorious victory
for Islam and seeking clarification on the seventy-two virgins who will
minister to [him] on the other side. Levy is quick to deflate much of Ahmads
mystic, self-aggrandisement and, perhaps tellingly, it is Levy who prevails.
By the end of the narrative, the young man acknowledges in mournful loss
that, indeed, the devils have taken away his God. All that remains is the
nothingness so feared by Ahmad as he peers upward, insect-like in the face
of the godly Manhattan skyscrapers, divested of hope and power.
The struggle of words, of rhetoric, between Levy and Ahmad in the truck
as they drive through New Jersey and eventually into Manhattan is clearly
a battle of ideas, an exchange on the nature of life, death and faith. But it
is also a struggle for power, ending, at a superficial level at least, with the
ultimate victory of the white-haired sexagenarian. Terrorist, by extension of
its dialectic on faith, explores the nature of power and the idea of the act of
terror as a fictional construction: not only has Ahmad succumbed to the
metaphors and symbols woven by his imam, it seems he has also been duped
by a CIA trap, he has been taken in by a plot. His whole endeavour to blow
up the tunnel was orchestrated not by a true believer in the Straight Path but
by Charlie Chehab, an infidel, the enemy. Updike clearly conceives terrorism
as a constructed phenomenon, and his role as a writer in the face of
something which seeks to puncture a hole in the everydayness of existence
must be to admit the futility of his enterprise or use his medium to regain

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some power, to reassert control over the everyday which Updike has claimed
as his artistic domain.
Terrorist offers no clear-cut answers. It is an ongoing dialectic on the nature
of faith, destiny and existence. It deliberately blurs the boundaries between
religious denominations, and between us and other by presenting an
American boy, naive and sympathetic, as the source of fundamentalist
Islamic violence. It is perhaps telling that the potential disaster is thwarted by
a typical Updike hero: Jack Levy directs Ahmad along a straight path, a path
not unlike the straight path the boy thought would lead to paradise.
Ironically, therefore, one might say that through Levy, an over-sexed
(under-laid), white male in his 60s, a man who yearns for the 1950s and is
the epitome of the quotidian banal, Updike strikes one last blow for the
writer.

NOTES
1. Kathryn Flett, Images that mocked all power of description, The Observer,
16 September 2001.
2. Ulrich Baer (ed.), 110 Stories: New York Writes After 9/11 (New York, NY: New
York University Press, 2002), p. 2.
3. Martin Amis, Fear and loathing, The Guardian, G2, 18 September 2001.
4. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
5. Quoted in Hamid Mir, interview with Osama Bin Laden, Muslims have the
right to attack America, The Observer, 11 November 2001; quoted in Audrey
Gillan, Bin Laden appears on video to threaten US, The Guardian, 8 October
2001.
6. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
7. Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001), p. 7.
8. See Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 41. Here, Bill Gray,
the novels protagonist elucidates further: Theres a curious knot that binds
novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books
lose the power to shape and influence Years ago I used to think it was
possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers
and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human conscious-
ness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
9. Houen, Scanlon, Crenshaw, Douglass and Zulaika, to name but a few, spend
much time on the subject.
10. Indeed, DeLillo does this quite deliberately in Falling Man (2007), where the
eponymous performance artist, in his act, mimics the fall of a man agreed to be
Jonathan Briley, who in his descent appeared to plummet straight, upside down
with one leg bent and his shirt whipping in the breeze.
11. Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror, p. 7.
12. Pankaj Mishra, The End of Innocence, The Guardian, 19 May 2007. According

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WRITING IN THE WAKE OF 9/11

to Mishra, Loraine Adamss Harbor, Nadeem Aslams Maps for Lost Lovers and
Laila Lalamis Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits adequately describe the divided
selves of Muslims: There are no simple oppositions in these books between
Muslims and the west. They simply assume that for many Muslims the west
is inseparable from their deepest sense of themselves, and that most people
from societies that western imperialism cracked open long ago cannot afford to
see the west as an alien and dangerous other; it is implicated in their private
as well as public conflicts. Also, Mishra contends that writers of non-fiction
such as George Packer, Thomas Ricks and Rajiv Chandrasekaren offer more
insightful glimpses into the realities of post-9/11 America.
13. I am grateful to Alison Kelly for introducing me to Shute and Davis and for
ideas raised by her unpublished paper, Words Fail Me: 9/11 and its After-
math in Stories by Linda Davis, Jenefer Shute and Lorrie Moore, presented at
the British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of
Leicester, 20 April 2007.
14. See, for example, Mishra, The End of Innocence, The Guardian, 19 May 2007.
15. Stephen Shapiro, Biopsies: the etiology of resentment in the era of middle class
collapse, unpublished paper presented at British Association for American
Studies Annual Conference, University of Leicester, 22 April 2007.
16. See Federal Reserve Statistical Release G.19, 7 June 2007, at http://www.
federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/hist/cc_hist_sa.txt. See the Demos Report
Generation broke by Tamara Draut and Javier Silva (available at www.demos-
usa.org), which charts the growth in credit card debt among young Americans
between 1992 and 2001. See also Teresa Sullivan et al., The Fragile Middle Class:
Americans in Debt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
17. Throughout the latter part of the 20th century, one observes a dramatic increase
in the number of dual-income families in the United States. In 1967, the labour
force participation of married mothers was 27.9 per cent; by 1997 it had reached
59.2 per cent. For statistics and overview see Mark Evan Edwards, Uncertainty
and the rise of the work-family dilemma, Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(1),
February 2001, 189.
18. Paul Auster, Random Notes September 11, 2001, 4.00 P.M.; Underground,
in Baer (ed.), 110 Stories, p. 35.
19. Siri Hustvedt, The World Trade Centre, in Baer (ed.), 110 Stories, p. 158.
20. Don DeLillo, In the Ruins of the Future, Harpers, December 2001.
21. Don DeLillo, The Power of History, New York Times Magazine, 7 September
1997. Counter-history is not unlike the authors conception of counternarrative,
insofar as both seek to deliver a narrative of either the past or present that
deviates from the governing narrative or version of events. For DeLillo,
interestingly, it is through language and words that hegemonic discourses and
accounts can be dismantled: Language can be a form of counter-history Let
language shape the world. Let it break the faith of conventional re-creation.
Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the
thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from historys flat, thin, tight relentless
designs, its arrangement of stark pages and that allows us to find an uncon-
straining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate.
22. Baer (ed.), 110 Stories, p. 1.

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23. Avital Ronell, This Was a Test, in Baer (ed.), 110 Stories, pp. 2513.
24. Jenefer Shute, Instructions for Surviving the Unprecedented (Break Glass in
Case of Emergency, if Glass Not Already Broken), in Baer (ed.), 110 Stories, pp.
2712.
25. Don DeLillo, In the Ruins of the Future, Harpers, December 2001.
26. Jonathan Raban, The good soldier, New York Review of Books, 53(12), 13 July
2006.
27. John Updike, Terrorist (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 3, 77, 589, 302.
28. Raban, The Good Soldier.
29. Stephen Abell, John Updikes simplifications, Times Literary Supplement, 26 July
2006.
30. Michiko Kakutani, John Updikes Terrorist imagines a homegrown threat to
homeland security, New York Times, 6 June 2006.

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16. AMERICAN WAYS OF SEEING

Liam Kennedy

In 1936 Henry Luce, the founder of Life magazine, famously articulated the
magazines purpose:

To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the
faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things
machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon;
to see mans work his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things
thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms,
things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many
children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to
see and be instructed; thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and
new expectancy of half mankind.1

The truth of Luces emphasis on a new way of seeing and a new will to see
refers to a visual history of America and of its interactions with the rest of
the world that stretches well beyond the history of the picture magazines.
What Luce celebrated and Life illustrated in the mid-20th century was an
American way of seeing: that is, a way of seeing the world that is visually
codified and thematised by the national concerns of the United States. This
American way of seeing is at once democratic and imperial: democratic, in
that it seeks to represent the diversity of humanity, to see and to show the
activities, hopes and fears of ordinary peoples, and bear witness to their
sufferings; imperial, in that it privileges and distinguishes an American point
of view that is commensurate to Americas powerful role in world affairs.
The American visualisation of the nations expansion and of its foreign
relations yokes together the democratic and imperial impulses the will to

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see is sublimated in a will to power and this visualisation bears with it an

epistemology of American geopolitical thinking.
The imperatives of the will to see that Luce celebrated were an important
frame for American citizens understanding of national and international
concerns in the Cold War period. With the end of the Cold War and more
particularly the onset of a War on Terror in the 21st century, this will to see
has become both attenuated ideologically (it is more difficult to identify an
American way of seeing) and dispersed technologically, due to the emer-
gence of new communications technologies and the disintegration of
discrete categories and genres of visual information in the digital age. There
is an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between news and entertainment,
between media and public diplomacy, between professional and amateur
journalism, and between modes and genres of photographic representation.
This blurring of boundaries characterises the instability of contemporary
visual fields and also renders the visualisation of US foreign policy a more
volatile representation.
American photojournalism, which bears a long and complex relationship
with the production of national identity and its international extensions,
provides a useful focus for analysis of the close yet shifting relationship
between visual media, the mythos of the nation, and the geopolitical visions
of the state. This chapter will focus on the role of photojournalism in the
framing of US foreign policy, sketching the history of this framing and
looking in some detail at ways in which the photojournalistic image has
mutated in the 21st century to both support and challenge the states
geopolitical visions. In particular, we will consider imagery of the attacks on
the World Trade Center and of the American military presence in Iraq.

PHOTOJOURNALISM AND THE END OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photojournalism has been instrumentally involved in the visualisation of US
foreign policy and more broadly the representation of Americas geopolitical
visions from the mid-19th century onwards. In part, this is due to the
historical connection between the evolution of photography and the
development of a young nation. The origins of photography in the US are
tied up with the documenting of westward expansion, and with internal and
external conflicts that defined the boundaries of the nation and the role of
the state. From the 1840s, photographs were used to inform the public about
events, people and places in the news, and the roots of modern photo-
journalism are evident in these uses.2 As the nation grew, a process that was
not organic but determined, political and bloody, photography recorded,
documented and celebrated this growth. It developed conventions and
frames, a way of seeing that conjoined the democratic and imperial impulses
of an emergent American worldview.
By the end of the 19th century photography was already well established

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as the leading medium of national record and with the invention of the half-
tone process in the mid-1880s it took on an even more prominent role in the
representation of domestic and foreign news, as photographs could now
be more easily produced and disseminated. The photographic roots of
photojournalism were established as a key media in linking Americas
growing will to power to a new landscape of international relations and
communication systems. In the 20th century, the triumph of American
modernity on a global scale ushered in an increasingly confident perspective
on international affairs, framed by domestic ideals and ideologies. The
golden age of American photojournalism was from the mid-1920s to the
mid-1960s, a period in which picture magazines and news magazines came
to the fore as the premier conveyors of photojournalistic imagery. As picture
magazines such as Life articulated narratives of national identity, photo-
journalism took on a leading role in representing the intersections of national
and international affairs.3
Coverage of the Vietnam War is often cited as photojournalisms last great
historical moment of record and relevance. During the war, photojournalists
moved into a more adversarial relationship with the military, as they
questioned the management of the war, and in the work of many photog-
raphers the tensions held within the conjunction of democratic and imperial
impulses in the American worldview began to visually erupt. The visual
legacies of the Vietnam War are still being played out within American
popular culture and the myth that the imagery of the war contributed
to defeat has haunted a generation of military and political leaders. The
management of news media intensified during the conflicts involving the US
in the 1980s for example, there were bans on media access to the military
invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. The visual reportage of
international affairs was also affected by the broad changes in American
media production in the 1970s and 1980s as the mass circulation, general
interest magazines went out of business and photojournalism lost a key
foundation and forum. Television had come to dominate the visualisation
of US foreign affairs and the golden age of photojournalism was at an end.
Documentary and news photography was entering a period when the
fracturing of the American worldview would be reflected in the fragmenting
of media publics and of visual genres and stylings in American media and
popular culture more generally.4
Since the 1970s, photojournalism has continued to dwell under a sense of
diminished strength and relevance, a poor second to televised ways of seeing.
What seemed a litmus test of its status and potential came with the first Gulf
War, which was also a major test of the post-Vietnam relations between the
military and the media. But this was not ostensibly a photographers war. On
the one hand, it was CNNs war, the first war to be covered live by satellite
television feeds. On the other hand, it was a war in which visual production
and representation was tightly controlled and choreographed by the

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American military. For many photojournalists, the Gulf War was a major
nail in the coffin of documentary photography. Fred Richtin, photo-editor
at the New York Times during the war, wrote an article titled The End of
Photography as We have Known It, in which he observed:

Never has spin control and photo opportunity been so easily

embraced in the world, nor so successfully. The tradition of the war
photographers was circumvented and very likely ended with another
first pictures seen from a bombs point of view. The world of Robert
Capa and W. Eugene Smith and Don McCullin begins to fade next to
the technological wizardry of a smart bomb taking its own images 5

A significant concomitant of this control of imagery was the near invisibility

of bodily violence during the Gulf War there were very few images of
corpses or injured bodies in the American press.6
Richtins polemic on the end of photography as a documentary medium
of warfare has proved premature but the Gulf War was certainly a turning
point in the visualisation of US foreign policy. This was due in part to military
news management but also to broader determinants of a new technological
order in which photojournalism has struggled for relevance. There seems
little doubt that in the digital age photojournalism has lost its privileged role
as the definitive medium of events, understood as moments frozen by the
camera. In the last fifteen years, the conception of events (already sub-
stantially ceded to television) has been supplanted by video and digital image-
making and dispersal. During the same period, professional photojournalism
was seriously undermined due to budget cuts and the increased media use of
agency and stock images. Not surprisingly, there have been many mournful
declarations about the decline or death of photojournalism in this period.
But these jeremiads tend to too readily conflate aims and means and lament
photojournalisms loss of status as a privileged medium of national record.
Photojournalism is only in decline to the degree that it is still perceived as
a late modern, pre-digital form of image-making. In truth, it too is mutating
in relation to the broader conditions of globalised image warfare and in the
21st century it has begun to find some new energies and outlets.

FRAMING SEPTEMBER 11
The most interesting, most successful, and most imaginative response to
[September 11] within all the visual arts came from photojournalism, claims
Peter Galassi, curator of photography at Manhattans Museum of Modern
Art.7 Galassis statement is something of a valedictory, acknowledging that
the roles of photojournalists and photojournalism had been diminished
in recent years. Through coverage of events of September 11, however,
photojournalism did come to the foreground of mass visual communication

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in a striking fashion. Among photography professionals there was a

notable concurrence that photographys documentary integrity had been
significantly rejuvenated, that post-September 11 photography had got its
job back.8 Such statements propose that September 11 ushered in not only
a new period in American history, but also a new way of seeing and a renewed
belief in the photographic image as an index of democratised reality.9
The major photo agencies and many leading photojournalists took
advantage of their renewed relevance. Magnum, Reuters and Associated
Press all produced testimonial volumes, designed to display what photo-
journalism can do and to advertise what their particular agency had done.
The Magnum volume, titled New York September 11, carries the greatest weight
in terms of the legend of the agency, the fame of the photographers, and
the quality of the production and design. The book references the legend
of Magnum in its presentation of imagery. It is broken into sections, most
of which are defined by the work of an individual photographer, signal-
ling respect for auteurism. With much of the imagery elements of the
photographers style is recognisable Susan Meiselas using trees to frame a
shot of the burning towers, Larry Towell focusing on human activity and
faces and often brilliant compositions lend a compelling visual power to
individual images. Steve McCurrys opening images have the greatest
coherence in that they show very open vistas of the burning World Trade
Center from the relatively unobstructed view on top of his apartment
building and meticulously (in terms of fine detail) chart the implosion of one
of the towers and the monstrous billowing smoke it emits. Thereafter,
individual images strike the eye the empty lobby of the Two World
Financial Center, the statue of a man seated on a bench covered in ash
and surrounded by debris, two firefighters looking disorientated as one
trails an empty stretcher not because of their relation to surrounding
images but because they seem to reach beyond documentary representation
to a symbolic realm, triggering connotations well beyond the subject
of representation. Several images seem to make reference to the act of
photography or the role of the photographer, such as an image by Larry
Towell that shows a man holding a missing poster up to camera, and an image
by Alex Webb that is a close up of a portion of a street memorial in which
votive candles are set in front of a photograph of the pre-September 11
World Trade Center.
The weightiness of meaning in the Magnum imagery is part of the burden
of representation they acknowledge through their own traditions. A note at
the end of the book states that an idiosyncratic mix of reporter and artist
continues to define Magnum, emphasising not only what is seen but also the
way one sees it.10 This mix is certainly present in New York September 11
though it is constrained in the view of Thomas Hoepker (chief editor on the
project), who notes that some images under consideration emphasized the
artistry in photography rather than telling the story. We didnt put those

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pictures in this book, and goes on to stress the purpose of the book is to
bear witness.11 But the book does much more than this because of the
artistry of the work displayed and its high quality production. The artistry
may at times be most marked in composition, in the scaling of human figures
against brutal, devastated landscapes, but is ever-present in the use of light
and colour. The admixture of sunlight, gloom and ash is used to potent visual
effect in many images. Alex Webbs description of what he saw is suggestive
of this:

I meandered through the powder-filled streets of the financial district:

a strange, whited out, monochromatic scene When Building 7
collapsed the sky turned a dark ochre. People became dusty silhouettes,
the sun a dim fireball.12

The camerawork of the Magnum photographers inevitably aestheticises

what it depicts, (re)producing an element of sublimity, of horror and beauty,
in representation of the attacks and their aftermath. The artistry of these
images has the viewer mentally browsing connections from distinct genres
and photographic traditions, from landscape photography to street photog-
raphy to war photography. This is not unusual in looking at the work of
Magnum photographers. What is unusual and perhaps lends the issue of
aestheticisation a new sensitivity is that the site and subject of the imagery is
American.
It is not surprising that one of the bestselling tribute books based on
photojournalistic imagery was produced by Life, entitled One Nation: America
Remembers September 11, 2001. The events of September 11 offered Life an
opportunity to do what it once did best, and One Nation offers diverse
snapshots of a nation under attack and the heroism of ordinary Americans.
Mayor Rudolph Giulianis introduction spells out the key narrative com-
ponent of the stories One Nation tells: We have met the worst of humanity
with the best of humanity.13 The books cover image is indicative of this,
a photo mosaic of September 11 victims by Robert Silvers, it presents
hundreds of faces on a grid pattern upon which is superimposed the image
of the American flag. This is an evocative image that hints at the history
of Lifes ideological unconscious, the conviction that America represents
humanity itself.
The design of One Nation is a curious balance of news, photo essay and
magazine formats. In keeping with Lifes approach to communicating current
history it is often educative in tone and styling, using text, imagery and
graphics to inform its audience of the what and how of events though only
rarely investigating the why. It begins with a photo essay on the construction
of the World Trade Center, and then moves to a detailed timeline of events
on September 11. The timeline runs across 59 pages, with the times and brief
details of key events accompanied by images. It begins with an image of

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terrorists passing through an airport security check in Portland at 5.45 a.m.

and ends at 10.21 p.m. with President Bush calling an end to a security
meeting. The visual chronicle is striking, due in large part to the shrewd
selection and editing of images, drawing on the work of leading photo-
journalists such as Magnums Steve McCurry and Susan Meiselas, but also
some of the most compelling amateur photography (such as that taken by
people evacuating the towers) and video footage (Evan Fairbankss remark-
able sequence of Flight 175 crashing into the south tower). The sequencing
and layout lend the imagery a narrative momentum that few other visual
tellings of this story have managed to present. The rest of the Life
volume seeks to supplement this telling with a range of interpretations and
presentations, including portraits of courage and heroism, reflections from
leading writers, and images of Americans returning to work; it closes with a
photograph of a pilot climbing into the cockpit of an F-18 as it readies for
takeoff in the Arabian Sea.
The Magnum and Life projects seek to restore or rejuvenate their
reputations for documentary integrity and their claims to bear witness for a
nation. But do they usher in or reflect a new way of seeing, a new role for
photography? In certain respects this seems very doubtful. With the work of
these photographers, as with countless others recording the events of
September 11, we find the use of standard generic photographic conventions
and the repetition of visual tropes and motifs. Certain scenes recur again and
again: the towers burning, people running ahead of dust clouds, the remains
of the tower faade still standing, rescuers at work in Ground Zero, dust-
covered objects and people. Of course, the very repetition of these scenes is
suggestive of the use of photography to make trauma bearable. Andy
Grundberg, the New York Timess photography critic, reflected that people
needed to keep looking at the images because they freeze-frame a calamity
so great that the mind struggles, even months later, to comprehend the data
being sent by the eyes.14 The idea that people could not believe their eyes
may be clichd yet suggests that the issue of a new way of seeing goes beyond
the use of genre conventions: it implicates an emergent visual culture in the
wake of September 11, one that both defines and is defined by public
memory and trauma.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of this was the extended functions
evidentiary, testimonial and mnemonic the still image took on within the
visual history of September 11. As well as the professional image-makers,
anyone who had a camera trained it on the destruction and amateur imagery
began to appear in public spaces. The New York Times ran a daily gallery
of portraits of people dead or missing. Impromptu, makeshift shrines and
memorials, many adorned with photographs, appeared throughout the city.
Posters advertising missing persons were pinned or plastered to street
furniture the pathos is pronounced as smiling faces look out from contexts
of intimacy to one of public trauma and grief. All of these uses of the still

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image evidenced its instrumental role in communicating the trauma of a

citizenry. A now famous example of this is the exhibition Here Is New York
(2004), which invited anyone with images connected to the attacks to submit
them to a Soho gallery. Over 4,000 photographs were scanned and digitally
printed (8 10) and taped to wire lines strung from the gallery ceiling.
Charles Traub, one of the exhibition organisers, observed that people
photographed the destruction of the World Trade Center because they
needed to verify what they saw. I think theyre bringing their pictures here
to give testament to history 15 The exhibition represents democratic
and therapeutic ideals long associated with the act of photography and
historically resonant with the humanist core of American photography.
This intensive tribute to photographys testimonial role was remarked on
by several commentators at the time. The organisers of Here is New York
stated their belief that the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath has
ushered in a new period in our history, one which demands that we look at
and think about images in a new and unconventional way.16 Brian Wallis,
Chief Curator of the International Center of Photography in New York,
restated this view:

Without question, the photographs of September 11 have changed the

way we look at the world. It is imperative to examine what photography
means in the wake of these seismic shifts, how what occurred has
altered or re-ignited our sense of what photography can achieve, both
as document and as personal vision.17

Photographys elevated testimonial role in relation to 9/11 was more

temporary and local than these comments suggest. Yet, there were significant
features of the photographic coverage that suggest that, to the extent that
documentary imagery was reanimating the democratic impulses in American
photography, it was doing so beyond the usual conventions and channels of
photojournalistic production and display. The amateur and vernacular surge
in the photographic coverage of 9/11 has since become a common feature
of the digitalised image world of the 21st century.
There is another sense in which the photographic responses to 9/11
were indicative of an emergent visual culture. Although 9/11 did not simply
usher in a new way of seeing for Americans, it did disrupt the visual field and
with it the correlates of national identity it introduced a new sense of
vulnerability into American culture in which the imperatives of precarious
life would begin to shape how Americans see themselves and others.18

FRAMING THE WAR IN IRAQ

The advent of digitalisation has affected the production and dissemination
of war images by American media but the results, within the more main-

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stream media channels at least, have neither been a more plural nor a more
investigative visual repertoire. In the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
American photographers have had the opportunity to be embedded with
military forces near the front lines, a scenario that led to speculation that
photographers would have access to the raw realities of warfare. But despite
the claims of real time and spontaneous coverage, photographs from the
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have been characterised by a narrow range
of recurrent motifs and routinised scenarios. Several recent studies of the
range of photographic imagery of the Iraq War in American newspapers and
magazines show that the great majority of images fall into a highly restricted
pattern of depiction limited largely to a discourse of military technological
power and response.19 This was perhaps most clearly evident in the early
days of the conflict when a great deal of imagery focused on military
hardware and the media reproduced the shock and awe produced by this
hardware. But it has remained the norm of coverage even as the organising
news narratives of the war have become more confused or attenuated
in framing the meaning of depicted events. To be sure, the embedded
photographers have produced a greater ratio of combat images than in the
Gulf War but this is still a small number out of overall coverage, and
photographs of wounded or dead bodies remain rare.20
The embedded system promises real time and transparent imagery of life
on the front lines of the war, but restricts the visual coverage to comply
with security requirements and produces an American-centred vision of the
conflict. This is not to say the embedded reporters are happily complicit
with the system, rather the system produces a frame that regulates their
visual productions. This frame, as Judith Butler points out, is always already
charged with interpretation:

the mandated visual image produced by embedded reporting, the one

that complies with state and defense department requirements, builds
an interpretation We do not have to have a caption or a narrative
at work to understand that a political background is being explicitly
formulated and renewed through the frame. In this sense, the frame
takes part in the interpretation of the war compelled by the state; it is
not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting,
actively, even forcibly.21

While it is useful to consider the embedding system as a form of framing,

it is also important to acknowledge that there are many other elements
contributing to the sanitised imagery of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The restricted visual repertoires, embargoes on images of graphic violence,
and American-centred viewpoint are due to a complex mix of political,
editorial and practical considerations. When editors make decisions about
the reproduction of images, notions of professional ethics, public account-

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ability, privacy and taste are invoked and sometimes intensely discussed. But
these notions are inextricably tied up with political and economic moti-
vations and considerations. Not surprisingly, this area of decision-making
has become a target of political backlash as editors are charged with both
doing too much and too little to censor war imagery. For all the constraints,
many American photographers have been producing imaginative work,
some of them pushing at the boundaries of the frame even as they work
within it. However, very little of this more imaginative and investigative
visual journalism has made it into mainstream American media.
While digital technology has revolutionised photographic practice, the
framing devices of mainstream media remain very powerful controls on
the production of imagery. However, in large part due to the effects of new
digital technologies, the mainstream is becoming a more volatile and porous
sphere and new sites and uses of visual journalism have emerged to challenge
or supplement official modes and messages. Perhaps most significant of
these are the Internet blog sites that track the mainstream news media. One
of many examples is a blog titled crisispictures.org, which first became
well known in late 2004, when the assault on Fallujah led to claims and
counterclaims about the levels and targets of violence. The site released
many striking images of life in the city; it posted many graphic shots
and tended to point the finger of blame for civilian suffering at the military.
Many of the photographs are far more graphic than are usually carried in
newspapers, showing decapitated bodies, dead and bloodied troops, and
wounded women and children.22 It shows scenes that are more similar to
what Iraqis, and many in the Arab world, see on their satellite news channels.
Significantly, many of the images are drawn from the wire services, that is to
say they are photographs taken by established photojournalists in Iraq, many
of them with American media accreditation, but the images have not been
used by the American media a reminder that not only are the published
images filtered but they are a very small number of those submitted.
Blogging by both professional and amateur photographers is an erratic
business but it has opened up new possibilities for photojournalism that has
not otherwise found outlets in the American media and there are signs that
it is starting to shape the menus of mainstream news outlets. At the same
time the very proliferation of images of global conflicts and traumas,
exacerbated by digitalisation and new media, is challenging conventional
visualisations of American foreign policy. Whatever the attempt to fix them
as representation or evidence, images slip and slide and float in and out
of contexts.23 The promiscuity of the image can cause leaks that escape
and challenge even the most powerful of political and media frames of
interpretation. The most famous example of such leakage to date is the
production and dissemination of images of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib
prison. More than 1,800 images were digitally produced and many of these
have been circulated on the Internet, despite early efforts by the government

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to prohibit their publication and ongoing legal attempts to prevent more

being published. The threat this leakage posed to US government and
military efforts to control the visualisation of the war in Iraq was palpable
in Donald Rumsfelds comments to a Senate Armed Services Committee
hearing: People are running around with digital cameras and taking these
unbelievable photos and passing them off, against the law, to the media, to
our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.24
The Abu Ghraib photographs visualised the War on Terror as a spectacle
of bare life, of bodies stripped of rights and liberties, and positioned the
viewer as a complicit audience whose gaze reinforces the terror as such,
they are a visceral reflection of the biopolitical power exercised by the US in
the name of national security. And yet, important as the Abu Ghraib images
are to questioning US conduct of the war against terror, they are but one
famous example of the visual blowback emanating from Iraq and many
other areas where visual technologies and techniques, crafted in and by the
US, are being used to question or challenge the authority and activity of US
foreign policy. This is also to suggest that the promiscuous image signifies
the operations of what Walter Benjamin termed unconscious optics in the
act of photographic seeing. Writing about photography in 1936, Benjamin
observed: It is through photography that we discover the optical uncon-
scious, just as we discover the psychic unconscious through psycho-
analysis.25 Benjamin perceived the optical unconscious as a dimension of
the material world that is normally filtered out by trained ways of seeing,
thus remaining invisible, but which can be made visible using techniques of
photography and film. The optical unconscious refers us to the supplements
of conventionalised ways of seeing or residues of alternative ways of seeing.
In the digital age, the convergence of technologies (for example, of the
camera and the mobile phone) extends our understanding of the optical
unconscious into once hidden or barely visible areas of private and public
life, of domestic and foreign environments. It is a perverse extension of what
Henry Luce celebrated as the human will to see things thousands of miles
away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to
come to.
It is important to add that the optical unconscious of US foreign policy
is not simply a question of what is hidden, occluded or overlooked by
conventionalised ways of seeing, but also of how these conventions are
redistributed by new technologies. An excellent example is the photoblogs
posted by serving American soldiers in Iraq.26 In these sites much of the
content is mundane and everyday from the soldiers point of view, yet these
images suggestively trace the optical unconscious of US foreign policy in the
domesticated and institutionalised activities of American soldiers in foreign
lands. Certain visual tropes and categories of photograph are apparent. Many
images have a touristic focus on smiling soldiers posing in the desert or in
front of ancient sites, others centre on military hardware and soldiers on

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patrol, while others depict soldiers relaxing in barracks. The everydayness of

much of the imagery both belies and accentuates the extraordinary
conditions being depicted, most apparent in the many images of soldiers
whiling away time in barracks playing electronic games, watching DVDs,
playing cards or posing in their bedrooms, often surrounded by imagery
of American popular and pornographic cultures. The images have varied
functions: some record army life for friends and family, others are created
primarily to share among the unit in the first instance, including imagery of
memorials to dead comrades. Few would seem to fit the conventional frames
of visual journalism, yet the urge to document and to disseminate the
material is strongly expressed by those posting the images.
These images have a distinctive visual language, blending the genres of
institutional, touristic, pornographic and war photography into a very new
genre of soldiers photographs. This form of visual communication in real
time and communal is new in the representation of warfare; in earlier wars
soldiers took photographs, but these were not immediately shared in the
way websites can disseminate images globally. Digicams, cameraphones and
photoblogs are the media that have proved visually commensurate to the war
in Iraq, though the visual styles and genres produced by these media are
mutating at a fast pace, drawing on established analogic forms and melding
them into new visual formations. These images should also be understood as
part of the widespread interest in voyeuristic and documentary imaging that
has millions of people photographing or filming their lives for Internet or
other media dissemination. This is also to say that in creating, posing for and
disseminating these images the soldiers are responding to conventions of
American visual culture.
I do not mean to suggest that the soldiers photographs and photoblogs
provide us with the real image of the American military in Iraq, not least
because there are very serious issues of attribution and authenticity sur-
rounding this sort of image production. For example, many of the soldiers
photoblog images reappear under different names and with alternative
tags on the context of their production; in some cases soldiers have lifted
professional photojournalistic images from the Internet and sought to pass
them off as their own. Nor do I suggest that exposure to more and more
images will guarantee any meaningful knowledge of US foreign policy or
sympathy for others if anything, the War on Terror may mark the
emergence of the banality of images.27 However, the digitalisation of war
imagery has introduced a fascinating uncertainty into the rationality of
perception that mainstream visual media offer American audiences. And
there is no doubt that the Internet is playing a role in redesigning and
redistributing visual understanding about international relations and US
foreign policy and that it is becoming a central battleground of information
and image warfare.
Throughout much of the 20th century, American photojournalism was a

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privileged medium for the American worldview. It lost this privileged role in
part due to the emergence of new technologies of news communication
and in part because its core conventions did not keep pace with changing
geopolitical concerns of the US leadership and military. However, the
frequent claims that photojournalism is dead are premature. As the
American worldview has shape-shifted so photojournalism has evolved.
Today, its status remains somewhat diminished and yet its mutations in
relation to the new technologies of seeing and the new global scenes it
represents have provided the photojournalistic image with an afterlife. The
advent of digital photography, of cameraphones, and of photoblogging has
introduced new relations between photographers, the medium and the
audience the emerging culture of DIY media and of citizen journalism
is going to become more and more important in the representation and
shaping of the news and of the ways in which Americans see the world
beyond America.
The will to see that Henry Luce identified with growing American
confidence in the mid-20th century has become a more troubled relationship
with the global image world of the 21st century. It has been both exacerbated
and attenuated by the visualisations of a War on Terror that projects
national fears and desires onto the international landscape. The democratic
and imperial impulses of the American worldview remain in tension in these
visualisations, echoing the historical tensions between universalism and
exceptionalism at the ideological heart of the American experience. The
democratic energies are recodified in the new technologies and extensions of
seeing, while the imperial will to power is now so preponderant that it
creates a global imperium in the name of national security. It is likely these
tensions will continue to characterise and to test the American will to see in
the 21st century.

NOTES
1. Henry Luce, quoted in Robert T. Elson, Time, Inc.: The Intimate History of a
Publishing Enterprise, 19231941 (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1968), p. 278.
2. See Susan Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat
(New York, NY: Basic Books, 1989).
3. See Wendy Kozol, Lifes America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994).
4. This was a period when the status of the photographic image itself was under
much intellectual and critical scrutiny; it was burdened by formal, ethical
and historical questions that contributed to the crumbling authority of its
evidentiary forms. Susan Sontag, in her mid-1970s writings on photography,
provided what was probably the most challenging and influential critique,
arguing that photographs cannot tell us political truths and that the humanistic
strain in American photography was exhausted. See Susan Sontag, On
Photography (London: Penguin, 1977).

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5. Fred Richtin, The End of Photography as we have known it, in Paul Wombell
(ed.), Photovideo: Photography in the Age of the Computer (London: Rivers Oram
Press, 1991), p. 11.
6. It was not until after the event that a few, belatedly, began to appear, perhaps the
most famous of which was the photograph by Kenneth Jarecke of an Iraqi
soldier inside his tank, burnt to near dust. See Kenneth Jarecke and Exene
Cervenka, Just Another War (Joliet, IL: Bedrock Press, 1992).
7. Blake Eskin, Getting the Big Picture, ARTnews, February 2002, 101.
8. Ingrid Sischy, Lasting Images, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/
stories/s487406.htm.
9. See Sontag, On Photography, pp. 2930 and Alberto Manguel, Reading pictures,
Index on Censorship, 191, NovemberDecember 1999, 1012.
10. Magnum Photographers, New York September 11 (New York, NY: PowerHouse
Books, 2001), p. 142.
11. Ibid., p. 67.
12. Ibid., p. 74.
13. One Nation: America Remembers September 11 2001, p. 6.
14. Andy Grundberg, Photography, New York Times Book Review, 2 December
2001, 35.
15. Creative Responses and Cautious Retractions, Art on Paper, JanuaryFebruary
2002, 24.
16. Marianne Hirsch, The Day Time Stopped, Chronicle of Higher Education,
25 January 2002, 6.
17. Brian Wallis, Aftermath: Photography in the Wake of September 11,
http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/aftermath/.
18. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso, 2004).
19. Michael Griffin, Picturing Americas War on Terrorism in Afghanistan and
Iraq, Journalism, 5(4), 2004, 383.
20. While there are pictures of Iraqi dead there are very few images of dead
American soldiers. A major survey carried out by the Los Angeles Times found
that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died,
almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action appeared
in the mainstream print media. See James Rainey, Unseen Pictures, Untold
Stories, Los Angeles Times, 21 May 2005, http://www.latimes.com/news/
nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-iraqphoto21may21,1,5741110.story?
coll=la-iraq-complete.
21. Judith Butler, Photography, War, Outrage, PMLA, 120(3), 2005, 823.
22. See www.crisispictures.org.
23. See Susan Buck-Morss, Visual Studies and Global Imagination, 2004,
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal2/acrobat_
files/buck_morss_article.pdf.
24. Robert Plummer, US Powerless to Halt Iraq Net Images, BBC News, 8 May
2004, http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:Di6Ei6P_lN0J:news.bbc.co.uk/
2/hi/americas/3695897.stm+rumsfeld+people+are+running+around+
cameras&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=15.
25. Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography, in Edmund Jephcott and

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Kingsley Shorter (trans.) One Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979), pp.
24057.
26. Photoblogs are websites on which people post and share their photographs.
They emerged as a popular phenomenon around 2000 with the convergence of
digital cameras and broadband, and growing access to these technologies.
27. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture
(London: Routledge, 2005), p. 67.

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17. TELEVISION AND DIGITAL MEDIA

Lynn Spigel and Max Dawson

In February 1941, when publisher Henry Luce dubbed the 20th century
the American Century, his magazine empire was about to fall prey to an
even more dazzling media attraction: television. In May of that year, the
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) procured government-sanctioned
technological standards for its television receivers and eagerly planned for a
consumer boom. Although commercial TV was delayed by World War II,
in the 1950s television would become the signature technology of the
American Century that Luce described, functioning both as a central fixture
in the home and as a symbol (for better or worse) of the state of American
democracy and culture. The growth of the new medium at mid-century was
part of, and also helped precipitate, fundamental transformations in everyday
life, and it also contributed to shifts in consumer habits, political campaigns
and civic engagement, and society more broadly. While sociologists have for
many years debated the nature and degree of these changes, almost everyone
has some opinion on just what television has done to them, their nation and
the world more generally.
Television penetrated American homes faster than any previous domestic
technology. While in 1948 less than 2 per cent of US homes had a television
set, by 1960 almost 90 per cent of US households had one or more TV.
Yet, despite its popularity, television was prone to a wide range of anxious
speculation, most of which belied more profound hopes and fears about
technology, culture, and the social and political uncertainties of the post-war
world. Would TV destroy the literate culture of reading? Would it make
children weak and husbands lazy? Would women stop doing the chores, too
embroiled in the daytime soaps to get the wash done or the roast baked?
Would TV interfere with romance or perhaps, on the brighter side, could it

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help bring the family together around a shared sense of pleasure? 1 Might
it, as many African Americans hoped, allow for greater opportunities than
cinema had before it by showcasing African American talent in dignified
roles both in front of and behind the cameras? Or would it, as other African
Americans feared, perpetuate racial stereotypes and misunderstandings?
Would TV foster international peace as NBC President Sylvester Pat
Weaver suggested or did it (as the Vietnam telecasts so dramatically
demonstrated) merely document a theatre of war? Would TV offer
Americans (rich and poor) opportunities to see ballet, theatre, and the
visual arts in the comforts of their living rooms? Or had it, as Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Newton Minow claimed in
1961, become a vast wasteland? 2
If these hopes and fears seem old fashioned today, it is nevertheless
the case that television continues to be a central medium not just for
entertainment or information, but also for speculations about the present
state of gender roles, family life, race relations, international conflict, and the
general prospects for art in media culture. At the millennium, televisions
future and its possible influences on social and political life are embroiled
in a new set of developments related to its convergence with digital
technologies, the rise of multichannel TV systems, and the growth of
multinational media conglomerates like Viacom and News Corporation.
Television is also responding to and helping to facilitate changing patterns of
global economic and cultural flows, as well as larger transformations in work
and leisure in a post-Fordist world. All of these developments have already
changed the old TV culture. Nevertheless, as a symbolic force for con-
structing an imaginary American public somewhere out there, as the
saying goes, in TV Land television still functions to define the nation,
sometimes in exceedingly nationalist ways.

FROM NATIONAL BROADCASTING TO NARROWCAST NATION

At the turn of the 21st century, the ABC network, CNN and PBS offered
day-long New Year celebrations featuring footage from New Yorks Times
Square, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles
and Londons Millennium Dome, as well as glimpses of New Years Eve
experienced in cultures worldwide (on ABC Dick Clarks annual ball-
dropping party from Times Square had a one world theme). This form
of televisual cosmopolitanism was an extension of century-old dreams for
televisions role as a unifying force among nations. Bringing the world live
into the living rooms across the nation, TV has historically promised to bind
places together in simultaneous viewing rituals experienced by people across
the globe. The world, as Marshall McLuhan put it, would be retribalized
and turned into a global village through this new media environment.3 Yet

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despite dreams of global connectivity, at the millennium, television ironically

became one of the central vehicles for patriotic and even isolationist
sentiments following the attacks of 11 September 2001.
Televisions almost week-long uninterrupted coverage of the attacks
reminded the nation of televisions role in creating a symbolic citizenship
by constructing an image of Americans as a unified national public.4 The
footage of the World Trade Center falling down, coupled with newscasts that
anchored its meaning for the nation, took over the airwaves. Worried about
the apparent tastelessness of movies, sitcoms, serials and advertising on
these sombre days, the networks and advertisers pulled entertainment series
and commercials from the airwaves. This not only meant a devastating loss
of advertising revenue for the networks, it also meant that televisions
familiar functions in the daily routine of the nation had dramatically changed.
The everydayness of television, its daily rhythms and programming flows,
were curtailed and replaced with 24/7 news coverage without commercials.
When President Bush famously instructed the nation to return to normal,
by flying on planes and even taking their families to Disneyland, televisions
return to commercial entertainment and its ritualised daily programming
flows became part of the national mission. In short, on television, as in the
nation more generally, the return to normal meant the return to normal levels
of consumption.
By 15 September, the television networks began the transition back to
commercial entertainment with programmes that upheld the industrys
concerns with projecting an image of good taste by evoking themes of
national unity and patriotism. The quality series The West Wing devoted an
entire episode to a teach-in about US-Middle-East relations that nevertheless
rehearsed familiar Orientalist themes about Islam and its various anti-
modern customs. Meanwhile, event television shows like America: A Tribute
to Heroes in October 2001 presented a bevy of stars singing the national
anthem (although many of them seemed not to know the words). Indeed, on
television, grand narratives of national unity were everywhere. Americans
were compelled to perform belief in these narrative myths or else be marked
somehow as bad Americans. When comedian Bill Maher famously remarked
on the bravery of the suicide attackers, his comments created a national
uproar, resulting in the loss of sponsors for and eventual cancellation in 2002
of his programme Politically Incorrect.
Nevertheless, despite the nationalist sentiments, if the US was really going
to return to normal, at least on television normal was no longer really
constituted through national unity. Whereas television was historically a
three-network broadcast medium playing to large national audiences, by
the millennium television had become a narrowcast medium that plays
to smaller niche audiences on a range of some 500-plus channels. Not
surprisingly, in this respect, televisions role in spreading a myth of national
unity after 9/11 was very short lived. On television, as in US politics, the

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return to normal meant a return to the deep divisions of the red state versus
blue state logics of American regionalism. In this mythos, the coasts are
represented as the urbane centres of progressive liberalism (despite the
many conservative sections of the regions) while the states in between are
conceived as a vast wasteland of anti-modern farmers, Bible-belt hillbillies,
and generally uncultured, unfashionable people. Reality television pro-
grammes like Wife Swap (the US version) and The Simple Life (with Paris
Hilton) trade on this mythos while cable stations like PAX (now Ion) have
organised themselves around the appeal to midwestern Christian values.5
Other programmes, such as Entourage, The Housewives of Orange County and
Sunset Tan, present spectacles of vacuous Southern California lifestyles
complete with Botox injections, nasty divorces, ruthless agents and hot pink
bikinis on simulated sun-toned skin. Meanwhile, news stations have divided
up the pie in the red versus blue logic, with the Fox Network staking its
appeal squarely on the former, so that 24/7 news now has become a matter
of taste as opposed to the 20th-century ideal of objective reporting.6
More generally, in its economic logics, the contemporary television
industry thrives more on the vagaries of taste than it does on the politics of
nation. In this post-broadcasting system, viewers are joined together
through consumer identity formations measured by market researchers in
demographic profiles. In the current US cable mix, Lifetime is the womans
network; Bravo is the gay network; BET is the black network; while other
networks (such as the Food Network or the History Channel) adhere to
lifestyle formations and specialised tastes. Configured as brands by the
media conglomerates that own them, these networks operate on what
John Caldwell calls tiered programming strategies, whereby programmes
targeting specific demographics are aired on special, themed narrowcasting
channels.7 In large part this new TV marketplace is a function of funda-
mental shifts in televisions political economy, particularly since the
deregulation climate of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. The FCCs
deregulation (or more accurately put, re-regulation) of broadcasting, which
culminated in the 1996 Communications Act, loosened restrictions on
station ownership. In turn this allowed media conglomerates like the Walt
Disney Company and Viacom to amass greater numbers of television and
radio stations, while also owning (or part owning) cable networks, news-
papers, magazines, movie studios, record labels, syndication companies,
search engines, and a host of other corporations. Although, as Robert
McChesney notes, the Communications Act of 1996 used the rhetoric of
democracy and choice to justify corporate conglomeration, by 1997 the
preponderance of US mass communication [was] controlled by less than two
dozen enormous profit-maximizing corporations.8 In 2003, Congress and
the FCC considered loosening the rules even more, resulting in a series of
disputes over media ownership that now are still up for debate.9 While media
conglomerates and pro-deregulation government officials argue that the

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new cable marketplace has a robust diversity of channels and that media
conglomerates often provide programmes or whole networks that cater to
diverse tastes, critics like McChesney worry that media conglomeration
leads to anti-democratic tendencies with too few companies controlling the
airwaves.
To be sure, the new marketplace raises important questions about the
medias role in the new century. Whereas the American broadcast system had
been predicated on the 1934 FCC mandate that individual broadcast stations
had to operate in the public interest of their local markets, it was never
exactly clear how to measure performance in that area, or even what exactly
the public interest was in a system that ultimately relied on the private
interests of advertisers and broadcast barons. Insofar as cable stations and
their parent corporations are not regulated by these same FCC standards,
the problem of the public interest and televisions role as public servant is
evermore vexing today. As Herman Gray and Beretta E. Smith-Shomade
argue, television tends to level all differences and internal struggles in
communities of colour and to address racialised groups as homogeneous
consumer types: for example, the African American audience is imagined as
one block rather than a group composed of different social, political and
class interests.10 In the multi-channel universe, this kind of homogenisation
of various publics has become a way to target smaller niche demographics
of cable, but the end result isnt always diversity of point of view.
Considering the entire US television landscape, Smith-Shomade observes
that even though we tend to think that the current multi-channel system
offers a multitude of black-cast programmes, this perceived abundance is
not borne out by the numbers, which demonstrate (percentage-wise) an
actual lack of people of colour both in front of and behind the camera.11
Meanwhile, according to a study recently conducted by the UCLA Chicano
Research Center, the statistics are particularly skewed when it comes to
Latino populations. Latinos make up only 4 per cent of regular prime-time
characters on network television, even though they are the largest minority
group in the US.12 While by no means endorsing media monopolies or the
lack of diversity on television, other critics point to some inroads that new
cable channels can make. For example, Charlotte Brunsdon shows how
reality lifestyle programmes in Britain opened up new representations of gay
and lesbian partners sharing households, something not previously seen
(at least as ordinary) on television, and a trend that also appears in the
homemaking shows on US cable networks. Similarly, Lisa Parks observes
that the Oxygen Network (which uses interactive digital platforms) was not
only founded by women (including Oprah Winfrey) but also addresses
female audiences as technologically savvy viewers who can use the Oxygen
website to search for information on healthcare, legal aid and other issues
affecting womens lives.13
To compete in the new media marketplace, the old broadcast networks

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have turned to new genres and formats most vividly with the introduction
of Reality programmes. First associated in the late 1980s and early 1990s
with magazine-format programmes like NBCs Unsolved Mysteries, CBSs
Rescue 911 or Foxs Cops, and then mutating into docu-soaps like MTVs Real
World and the BBCs The Living Soap, Reality television is now a broad generic
label used to describe unscripted (although edited-for-drama) programmes
that recombine the old genres of broadcast television (from game shows to
soaps to beauty pageants to documentaries) into a relatively low cost, high
rating, and internationally marketable alternative to traditional prime-time
series. Although some advertisers have been reluctant to associate their
products with them, Reality programmes often outperform traditional
fiction series and news magazines, at least among the much-desired 1849
and 1834 demographics.14
Immediately upon its inception (particularly with the success of Survivor
in 2000), Reality television spawned a new series of debates about the state
of American culture. Did millions of Americans flock to see people eating
worms (Fear Factor) because our culture had finally plummeted to its fall of
the Roman Empire decline? What did it mean that just as many (if not
more) well-educated high-income groups chose Joe Millionaire over Masterpiece
Theater? Who could predict the state of things to come when more people
voted for their favourite wannabe on American Idol than they did for George
W. Bush in the last election? Is Reality television, as Laurie Ouelette has
argued, the epitome of a neoliberal culture where TV magistrates like Judge
Judy and self-help gurus like Dr Phil give dime-store advice to people (many
of whom are struggling single moms or out-of-work dads) at a time when
social welfare programmes that might actually benefit these people have all
but disappeared? Or is Reality television, as Henry Jenkins claims, proof of
the medias participatory and democratic potential as people converse about
the shows (and also make media productions of their own) on Internet chat
rooms, blogs, websites, YouTube and the like?15
As Jenkins and other critics also point out, the culture of media con-
vergence is not limited to entertainment; it is also changing political life as
both grassroots groups and elected politicians now use a combination of old
media (like TV) and newer media (like blogs and websites) to get their
message out. Most dramatically, in this regard, after HBO aired its much-
awaited final episode of The Sopranos, Hillary and Bill Clinton offered up a
parody of it on Hillarys 20078 presidential campaign website. In a playful
spoof on Carmela and Tony Soprano, the celebrated politicians restage the
last Sopranos scene as they sit in a diner choosing pop songs from a jukebox.
To be sure, this is just the most recent instance in a much longer history of
mergers between politics and media entertainment; but it does demonstrate
that the convergence between television and digital media is playing an
increasingly significant role in 21st-century political culture. Whether this is
a good or bad turn of events is a source of much anxious speculation, but it

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remains the case that in a society where less than half the eligible population
votes, the electronic media are one of the keys means of creating public
culture.
LABOUR, LEISURE AND DIGITAL CONVERGENCE
Underlying these transformations in media culture are fundamental shifts
in daily life, and in particular changing relations of work and leisure.
Orchestrated like trains to run on schedule, broadcasting was a hallmark
medium of modernity, keeping the public attuned to the clocks of capitalist
labour schedules and leisure time. The television schedule was historically
organised in ways that meshed with the work hours and life cycles of its
sponsors target audience: the middle-class family consumer. From their
breakfast news programmes to their late-night talk shows, broadcasters
entrained their daily and weekly schedules to the timetables of work and
recreation, the schedules of bourgeois domesticity, seasonal advertising
cycles, and annual civic and religious calendars.16 Assumptions about who
was available to view at specific points in the day and week resulted in
familiar programming forms such as the daytime soap opera, the dinnertime
network newscast, and weekend coverage of live sporting events.
But all this is changing. In the new century, television networks are
refashioning their schedules to reflect the social arrhythmia of the new
24/7/365 post-industrial information economy.17 In contrast to the eight-
hour work shifts of the industrial economy of which broadcasting is a
product, the information economy is characterized by the breaking down
of the rhythms, either biological or social, associated with the notion of a
lifecycle.18 Nowhere is this more evident than in the growing desyn-
chronisation of traditional patterns of work and leisure. By the late 1990s, the
portion of the American workforce working a traditional 40-hour week had
dropped to just over 54 per cent. Meanwhile, contingent and part-time
employment and flexible scheduling policies have grown more common,
rendering the 9-to-5 workday a relic of Americas industrial past.19 And
whereas the middle-class family of post-war America was predicated on the
assumption of commuter suburbs where Dad worked downtown while
Mom stayed at home, today only a minority of households are composed of
nuclear families and most families contain either single or two parent workers
who multitask across a spectrum of labour and leisure activities.20 The
compartmentalised bundles of free time that were the hallmarks of the
20th-century consumer society have now given way to neo-leisure, or
snatches of time interspersed irregularly throughout the extended workday
and workweek.21 Just as David Harvey speaks of flexible labor as a symptom
of post-industrial capitalism, we can speak of flexible leisure as a con-
stitutive part of the 21st-century media environment.22
Televisions changing scheduling patterns have both reflected and
contributed to this shift in work and leisure time. Niche cable outlets like

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SoapNet, CNN, and ESPN have built sizeable followings by re-running a

limited menu of soap operas, news and sports coverage around the clock,
allowing viewers to tune in to their favourite programmes on a catch-as-
catch-can basis. Gradually, the traditional broadcast networks followed suit.
Rather than Thursday Night at the Movies, or ABCs TGIF (Thank God Its
Friday) line-up, the networks are now embracing strategies like multi-
plexing and Internet streaming that allow viewers to watch what they want,
when they want, on the screens of their choice. The new digital time-shifting
devices and services such as video on demand (VOD) and the digital video
recorder (DVR) respond to and also help to change the rhythms of labour
and leisure.23 DVRs not only allow people to store and time-shift pro-
grammes of their choice, they also allow viewers to pause or rewind
programmes as they are transmitted into the home.24 TV, in other words, is
moving from being a time-bound medium based on simultaneous transmission
from a local station (or its national network feed) to an endless activity based
on storage in and retrieval from decentralised data banks, ideally with global
reach.
Although time-shifting technologies are still relatively rare among US
television households, they nevertheless have important implications for
media culture and the ways in which people perceive their own relation to it.25
Rather than gathering audiences in shared viewing rituals, these devices and
services operate on a new ideal of personal media consumption that
revolves around ideologies of individual choice. These choices are, of course,
orchestrated in advance by large corporations like TiVo that provide people
with a new form of feedback in which viewers receive marketing reports on
themselves (If you liked Survivor, youll like Lost ). In this respect, these new
digital contraptions entirely invert the 20th-century broadcast ideal of public
service. Rather than attempting to provide programmes that are in the
public interest, these devices instead tell the public what they are interested
in, and then market that knowledge as a consumer service. Moreover, at the
turn of the 21st century, these devices seem poised to divide the audience
into what one television industry insider terms a two-tier viewing popu-
lation. Indeed, DVR ownership has thus far largely broken down along
socio-economic lines, with the majority of digital time-shifting devices being
found in the households of wealthy and educated urbanites.26 Digital time-
shifters have emerged as the television audiences equivalent of the fast
castes described by Susan George, elites whose power and privilege is both
reflected in and constituted by their control over greater speeds of motion
and activity than enjoyed by most.27 For members of this self-segregating
public, the decision of when and on which digital platform to view
television is more than just a matter of convenience. It also becomes a
lifestyle choice as important to the construction of a successful consumer
identity as the car one drives.
In the well-worn tradition of planned obsolescence, the promotional

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discourses deployed by the consumer electronics industries increasingly

suggest that real-time viewing is as out of date as black and white receivers
and bunny ears antennae. So too, advertisements for digital technologies
conflate time shifting with a rebellious declaration of independence from
the centralised forms of oversight embodied by the scheduling practices of
the national television networks. They do so under the neoliberal banner of
privatisation, inviting the self-reliant citizen-viewer to think of time shifting
as akin to opting out of the industrial eras anachronistic collective leisure
rituals. With slogans like TV Your Way, Program Your Own Network, and
You Run The Show, companies like TiVo promote DVRs as machines that
allow viewers to wrestle control of the schedule away from the moribund
grip of network executives. Driving the point home, one advertisement
for TiVo even depicts two gangsters throwing a network-programming
executive out of the window of his corner office.28
In addition to these new dynamics of time shifting, the new technologies
have also had a profound relation to the everyday experience of space and
place. Whereas the mid-century TV receiver was a piece of living room
furniture fixed in place and symptomatic of family viewing in the home, as
television matured it became an increasingly mobile activity. First in the
1960s, the introduction of portable models (made possible by innovations
with transistors) created new types of social fantasies around watching TV.
During these years of the sexual revolution, advertisers promoted television
as liberation from rather than a retreat to the private life of the family.
Advertisements for portable sets showed young TV viewers on the beach,
women carrying mini-portables in mod mini skirts while out on the town,
and one humorous ad for Sony even showed viewers at a nudist colony
gathered around a Sony portable receiver.29 In the 21st century, mobility
continues to be a key element of media experience. People receive TV
over a host of mobile platforms including laptops, cell phones, iPods, and
iPhones, and the Hollywood studios are creating mobisodes designed
distinctly for viewers on the go.30 However, unlike the portable TV, which
was promoted primarily as a leisure pursuit, todays mobile devices are aimed
at the new lifestyle ideal of multi-tasking across a series of labour and leisure
pursuits.
As testimony to this contemporary ideal of multi-tasking, televisions new
mobile screens are not just marketed as entertainment centres but also as
productivity tools. Mobile technologies conflate activities of leisure and
labour so that, for example, the cell phone watcher may at any moment
receive a business call or the PC user can switch between watching a Buffy
rerun and figuring out earnings on the latest stock reports. Whereas
Thorstein Veblen famously coined the phrase conspicuous consumption to
characterise the bourgeois lifestyles circa 1899, today media industries
promote a lifestyle of conspicuous production where leisure and labour
activities are wholly intertwined. Accordingly, a 1990s advert for ATT

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showed vacationers (or were they workers?) receiving a fax on the beach,
while computer magazines routinely show a new generation of wired men
and women lounging on sofas or patio decks while working from home on
their PCs.31
NATIONALISM, TRANSNATIONALISM AND GLOBAL FLOWS
The new mobile and time-shifting technologies are changing the prospects
for broadcastings national culture or at least the fantasies of nationalism
that network TV once offered viewers. For much of the 20th century, broad-
casting provided American audiences with their most explicit reminders that
they belonged to what Benedict Anderson calls the imagined community of
the modern nation state.32 Media scholars have long remarked on televisions
capacity to forge and sustain a sense of national (or even global) unity,
pointing to its live coverage of extraordinary events (including President
Kennedys assassination, the moon landing and Princess Dianas death) as
illustrations of the mediums capacity to foster a sense of togetherness in the
here and now.33 But just as niche narrowcast channels fragment the audience
into sharply defined taste publics, digital time shifting fragments the tele-
vision audience temporally. Commenting on the trend, Michael Lewis of the
New York Times observes that, after decades in which broadcasting formed
the basis not only of the mass market but also of Americans national
identity, a technology [the DVR] appeared that can unravel the collective.34
More generally, critics and pundits have expressed alarm over these
developments, cautioning that the desynchronisation of media consumption
is tantamount to the breaking up of America.35 Only now, they suggest, the
risk is no longer simply that of two Americas divided by partisan lines, but
rather of a multitude of Americas fragmented by niche tastes, time-shifting
practices, and mobile forms of cultural consumption that no longer seem
grounded in a particular place or shared sense of national identity.
However, even if these developments have weakened televisions illusion
of shared community (at least for those members of the audience that TV
historically targeted as citizen-consumers), they simultaneously make it
possible for viewers to participate in television publics that transcend
national borders. In the context of media conglomerates global marketing
strategies and the diffusion of digital and networked technologies, television
programming now circulates internationally at unprecedented speeds,
through both authorised and unauthorised channels. While news pro-
gramming has long crossed national borders (for example, via CNN and
BBC newscasts, and more recently Al Jezeera), today viewers around the
world can experience weekly episodes of their favourite entertainment series
approximately in sync with US audiences, and people can participate with
fellow fans in online discussions and web-based collaborative projects.
Likewise, peer-to-peer file-sharing websites dedicated to the television,
cinema, and music of specific nations enable US audiences to download

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programmes almost instantaneously after they have aired overseas. While

the publics instantiated by these international media flows may be of little
solace to critics alarmed by the dissolution of the national audience, their
emergence in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks suggests that the current
media environment has now escaped its national borders, and that, despite
momentary calls to patriotism, the media are no longer really American at
least in the way that mid-century industry chiefs and government strategists
hoped they would be.
In this respect, while television might have been the centrepiece
technology of Luces American Century, today TV is part of what Arjun
Appadurai calls the image and economic flows of a transnational global
culture.36 In the Cold War era, radio and television programmes were
incorporated into government sponsored campaigns to spread the American
image abroad (for example, the Voice of America disseminated American
jazz programmes overseas) and, by the 1960s, the television industry fully
recognised the profits to be made in international syndication.37 These
circumstances led to wide-ranging disputes about American cultural
imperialism through the media. In the 1980s, scholars and critics marvelled
at the global embrace of the primetime serial Dallas (197891) and its
reception worldwide. Yet studies of the global audiences for Dallas and
other US media products suggest that worldwide audiences tend to interpret
programmes according to their own cultural contexts and social back-
grounds.38
Moreover, despite critics fears of homogenisation, worldwide television
programmes have not exactly imitated US productions; instead, international
productions often express the values and beliefs systems of local cultures.
Considering the transnational East Asian success of the (post-) trendy
Japanese serial drama Tokyo Love Story (which aired in the early 1990s), Ien
Ang argues that rather than thinking about globalisation as a worldwide
phenomenon with uniform effects, it is more useful to think of the ways in
which cultural proximity (or shared influences, fashions and identities)
among audience formations accounts for both programme popularity and
the transnational flow of meanings across national boundaries.39 Similarly,
in their research on Chinese viewers of Japanese dramas in Singapore,
Elizabeth MacLachlan and Geok-lian Chua show how different generations
of Singaporean women interpret the shows differently and according to their
own predilections for the perceived Western values these programmes
contain. Meanwhile, people are using the Internet to question US media
stereotypes. For example, Pricilla Pea Ovalle shows how the website
Pocho.com uses parody to critique the depiction of Mexican Americans on
US television.40 As these and other studies suggest, rather than thinking
about American influence on the rest of the world, it is more useful to think
about disjunctures in the way different nations and cultures experience
media modernities.41

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In this sense, the meaning of America in the 21st century is itself subject
to the transnational flows of a global image market in which television and
digital media play a central role. Not surprisingly, in the US the question of
televisions future is often bound up with larger trepidations about the future
of America itself. When media pundits speculate on what TV and new
technologies may do to us, they are also asking (whether consciously or
unconsciously) what the media will do to America as a whole way of life. As
TV morphs into digital devices, as it splinters into narrowcast channels, and
as it circulates in transnational flows, its future for the nation is uncertain.
But, in the present century, as in the past, televisions role for good or
bad depends less on technological invention than it does on cultural
inventiveness. Today, whether in Hollywood studios, the headquarters of
multinational corporations, or on interactive websites like YouTube and
grassroots chat rooms like moveon.org, the media are being re-imagined
for a world no longer as American as Luce and his contemporaries had
once declared. In this respect, even though television still sends images
of America around the world, at least when it comes to the media, the
American Century no longer prevails.

NOTES
1. See Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For discussions of African
Americans and early television see Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos and
Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (New York, NY: Free Press,
1991) and Donald Bogle, Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television
(New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
2. See Spigel, Make Room for TV, p. 112; Newton N. Minow, The vast wasteland,
in Equal Time: the Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest (New York, NY:
Atheneum, 1964), pp. 4569.
3. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New
York, NY: Bantam Books, 1968).
4. For more on television and 9/11 see Lynn Spigel, Entertainment Wars:
Television culture after 9/11, American Quarterly, 56(2), June 2004, 23570.
5. Victoria Johnson, Welcome home? CBS, PAX-TV, and heartland values in
a neo-network era, in Robert Allen and Annette Hill (eds), The Television Studies
Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 40417.
6. This is not to say that the standards of objectivity were without their own
ideological underpinnings. The fact that in the US news anchors were
historically virtually always white men already suggests the failings of objectivity
in TV journalism.
7. John T. Caldwell, Convergence Television: aggregating form and repurposing
content in the culture of convergence, in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (eds),
Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), pp. 4174.

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8. Robert McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York, NY:
Seven Stories Press, 1997), p. 6. See also Patricia Aufderheide, Communications
Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (New York, NY:
Guilford Press, 1999).
9. See Federal Communications Commission, Docket 06-93 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 24 July 2006); 2006 Review of the Media
Ownership Rules, http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/.
10. Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Shaded
Lives: African American Women and Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2002).
11. Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives, p. 38.
12. Latinos hardly visible on prime time television, UCLA study finds, Press
Release, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 3 April 2003.
13. Charlotte Brunsdon, Lifestyling Britain: the 89 slot on British television, in
Spigel and Olsson (eds), Television After TV, pp. 7592; Lisa Parks, Flexible
microcasting: gender, generation, and television-internet convergence, in
Spigel and Olsson (eds), Television After TV, pp. 13356.
14. For example, Joe Millionaire delivered Foxs highest ratings in its time slot in eight
years among adults aged 1849. Leslie Ryan, Are short-run reality series a long-
term fix?, Electronic Media, 13 January 2003, 1A, 55.
15. Laurie Ouellette, Take responsibility for yourself : Judge Judy and the
neoliberal citizen, in Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (eds), Reality TV:
Remaking Television Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2004),
pp. 23150; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide
(New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006).
16. Nick Browne, The political economy of the television (super)text, Quarterly
Review of Film Studies, 9, 1984, 17483; Paddy Scannell, Radio, TV and Modern Life:
A Phenomenology of Broadcasting (London: Blackwell, 1996).
17. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 475.
18. Scott M. Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Spaces (London: Sage, 1994),
p. 245; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 476.
19. Lonnie Golden, Flexible work schedules: what are we trading off to get them?,
Monthly Labor Review, March 2001, 50.
20. According to the US Census Bureau, as of 2000, only 22.4 per cent of American
households contained married couples living with their children. Frank Hobbs,
Examining American Household Composition: 1990 and 2000 (Washington, DC: US
Census Bureau, 2005), p. 6.
21. A spy in the house of work, Fast Company, October 1993, http://www.
fastcompany.com/magazine/00/spy0.html/.
22. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (London: Blackwell, 1989).
23. Time shifting was possible with the videocassette recorder (VCR) in previous
decades. But the new digital services and devices allow for a much more
automated and regularised time-shift system.
24. In 2007, Nielsen reported that approximately half of all broadcast primetime
programmes viewed by DVR households are time shifted. Mitch Burg, DVRs

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and ads: a whole new dimension for time, Television Week, 26(3), 15 January
2007, 11.
25. As of March 2007, fewer than 15 per cent of US television households owned
DVRs; approximately 25 million homes patronised VOD services in 2006. Jack
Neff, New study finds DVR usage saps product sales, Television Week 26(10),
5 March 2007, 22; Daisy Whitney, VOD: getting bigger, but not better yet,
23 April 2007, http://www.tvweek.com/article.cms?articleId=31833/:.
26. Mike Bloxham, The DVR divide, 8 August 2007, http://blogs.mediapost.
com/tv_board/?p=136/.
27. Susan George, The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century
(London: Pluto Press, 1999); Susan George, Beyond the WTO, 1999,
http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?page=archives_george_speed&print_
format=YGeorge, S.; see also David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and
Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 198200.
28. William Boddy describes this advertisement in New Media and Popular
Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 128.
29. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 60103.
30. Max Dawson, Little players, big shows: format, narration and style on
televisions new small(er) screens, Convergence, 13(3), August 2007, 23150.
31. Lynn Spigel, Designing the smart house: posthuman domesticity and
conspicuous production, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4), 2005, 40326.
For Thorstein Veblens original thesis see The Theory of the Leisure Class (New
York, NY: Dover, [1899] 1994).
32. Benedict Anderson uses the phrase imagined community to discuss the way
newspapers joined strangers together across geographical spaces and helped to
create a shared sense of belonging to the modern nation state. See Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York,
NY: Verso, 1999), p. 35.
33. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
34. Michael Lewis, Boom box, New York Times Magazine, 20 August 2001, 66.
35. Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
36. Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy,
in Bruce Robbins (ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press), pp. 26995.
37. Michael Curtin and Lynn Spigel, Introduction, in Lynn Spigel and Michael
Curtin (eds), The Revolution Wasnt Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (New
York, NY: Routledge, 1997).
38. For studies of the audiences for Dallas see, for example, Elihu Katz and Tamar
Liebes, The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 1990) and Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the
Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985). For a classic theory of media
interpretation and social context, see Stuart Hall, Encoding/decoding, in Hall

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TELEVISION AND DIGITAL MEDIA

et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 12838.
39. Ien Ang, The cultural intimacy of TV drama, in Koichi Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling
Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2004), pp. 30310; Joseph D. Straubhaar,
Distinguishing the global, regional and national levels of world television, in
Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi et al. (eds), Media in Global Context: A Reader
(New York, NY: Edward Arnold, 1997), pp. 2948.
40. Elizabeth MacLachlan and Geok-lian Chua, Defining Asian femininity:
Chinese viewers of Japanese TV dramas in Singapore, in Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling
Asian Modernities, pp. 15575; Priscilla Pea Ovalle, Pocho.com: reimagining
television on the Internet, in Spigel and Olsson (eds), Television after TV, pp.
32441.
41. We borrow this formulation from Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference, in
Robbins (ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere, pp. 26995.

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18. ANIMATION AND DIGITAL

CULTURE

Paul Wells

The digital revolution happened without marches, placards and conflict; it

was not about the overthrow of monarchs and governments; it was played
out by corporate culture in cahoots with scientists, engineers and tech-
nologists. There was no conspiracy. For some, clinging to the term new
media meant that there was a modicum of resistance. There was still old
media print, television, cinema but with each passing day, these too were
absorbed within the digital realm. Some suggested that it was the end of
history, the end of cinema, the end: a quiet apocalypse that ironically found
a key touchstone in the tragic spectacle of 9/11 and the War on Terror played
out by the Bush administration. The revolution will not be televised, but
nowadays it will inevitably be digitised.
As the YouTube, MySpace and Second Life generation enjoys its
apparently democratic presence on the Internet, and the economies of
domestic acquisition of digital equipment and software applications change
to facilitate back-bedroom studios, issues in production, exhibition, dis-
tribution and, crucially, representation have inevitably changed. Shilo
McClean has noted that this raises an extensive array of philosophical issues
when what we view in images moves from recording to representational
technologies, substituting idealised and stylised imagery for the indexical
record.1 Kay Hoffman qualifies this, though, by noting that with digitisation
we may have to adjust to a new magnitude of constructedness of the image,
when it comes to how reality is presented to us in film and television, but
the principle and the problem are as old as the cinema itself .2
The early 21st century is a time of ubiquitous email, the omnipresence of

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mobile phones, the cinema of post-production, computer-gaming cultures,

the vacuity of reality television, and of the multi-channel society. There is an
implied sense of a global community though and, arguably, as most citizens
move from being merely consumers to becoming producers, we live in a time
of both famine and feast. The computer defines the data, the desk and
destiny. Inevitably new identities form; ideological, ethical and spiritual
principles become confused, challenged or re-defined to take on an often
extreme clarity. Conspiracy culture proliferates, suggesting that all the things
that in the past one dared to believe in are no longer certain. This, then, is the
21st-century version of the postmodern terrain.
It has always been the case, of course, that the arts and humanities have
sought to engage with and address the major questions that arise from such
conditions of existence, and that each disciplinary stance has used its
sometimes highly specific tools to interrogate important agendas. For the
purposes of this chapter, the nature of digital culture will be explored
through the medium of animation. For so long associated with the achieve-
ments of the American animated cartoon, the Disney classical style, and the
branding of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and Betty Boop, animation has
now become, like new media, an almost redundant term in the way that
it embraces every cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary
context or environment. There is the self-evident presence of the animated
feature film, the television sitcom, the independent short or the web-toon (all
essentially versions of animation cinema), but it is also an omnipresent
language in other disciplines from architectural design to medical imaging.
Animation has always embraced the other arts painting, sculpture, dance
and theatre but now, faced with the impact of digital technologies, it
has been rent from its status as a pro-filmic creation in which phases of
movement progress linearly and incrementally frame by frame. It is now a
creative practice in which the mere manipulation of the frame and ability to
edit within the frame has changed the nature of how animation might be
understood.
While a number of writers have suggested that if animation was once a
subset of cinema, it is now the constituent language of cinema itself, this is
still to render animation as a particular langue.3 It is the language of meta-
morphosis, condensation, fabrication, penetration, symbol and metaphor
and sound illusionism. It insists upon its filmic credentials in the material
preparation for creating rather than recording a model of cinema. This has
become a richly nuanced language, though, and its achievements have been
recognised as a core modernist practice, as the redefining condition of the
filmic apparatus, and a term by which the discourses of art might be played
out.4 This re-engagement with animation has inevitably recast the practice
as a metaphysical principle rather than a specific application: for example,
in the video artist Tom Shermans case emphasising the forms mnemonic
tendency:

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Animation is the hard copy of memory, accessed while it is being

rendered by hand, or by hands assisted by machine. In general,
animation is memory that moves and evolves I am saying that
animation memory in the act of forming alludes to something
essential, yet unattainable: the imagination itself.

Added to this:

Animation is a complex category of meta-media phenomena, a manner

of creative behaviour quite capable of attracting and sustaining
attention in all manner of media environments. Animation has marched
through cinema, television, and now video, without missing a beat,
because it is the concrete process of manufacturing records of
psychological memory.5

Shermans view is persuasive: that animation is a process which most directly

accesses imagination through the act of memory and uses technology
to manufacture concrete records of interior states. Canadian artist and
animator, Pierre Hebert, however, insists that animation has also become a
way of recording the experience in using and living through technology,
noting that every work of art is an implicit statement about technology.6 In
many senses, animation has always been concerned with the tension between
the physical and the metaphysical; the material and the meaning; and, most
importantly, the visualisation of psychosomatic experience to provoke
cultural and philosophical questions.

THE NEW TRADITIONALISM

It would be easy then to look at the major animated features produced in
the United States in recent years what Shilo McClean calls the new
traditionalist work as the core indicators of aesthetic, technological and
philosophical preoccupation. This focus would report on the aesthetic shift
from Disneys classical 2D styling to Pixars 3D computer-generated plastic
realism, or the technological interventions that have overcome the holy grails
of simulated water or human hair, while never quite creating the plausibly
human synthesbian. Equally, it might record the philosophical preoccu-
pation with looking backward to embrace a more populist and easily
understood myth of America in the face of the digitised adventures of flawed
heroes and dystopian ideas about progress. Brad Birds The Incredibles (2004),
for example, may finally vindicate the heroic versatility and moral outlook of
the Parr family superheroes attempting to live a normal suburban life in the
face of the possibility that they might be sued by those who do not wish
to be saved but its enduring and resonant message lies in the anxiety The
Incredibles plays out about conformism, the debilitating routines of daily

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existence, the failings of family life and social mentoring, and the over-
whelming question of what remains to be saved in the midst of such moral
relativity. It was little wonder that Disney narratives for all their recent
leftist critique survived for so long as enduring examples of family-friendly
mass entertainment, refusing nuance, ambivalence or ambiguity in the con-
struction of easily understood notions of good and evil and the deployment
of popular archetypes.7 So embedded was this ideological imperative in
Disneys classical 2D styling, however, that it has not survived into the 3D
era. The new relativities of digital creativity have essentially moved the
feature animation aesthetic into a less familiar terrain of relative values.
The Disney text has always been subject to critical interventions, but none
have essentially transcended the brand value of Disney narratives, or
challenged the power of archetypal heroism and villainy so readily under-
stood by a public eager for clarity and moral certainty. It is significant that the
loss of Disneys classical styling, and its replacement by the new digital
orthodoxies in 3D feature animation finally provoked a crisis in represen-
tation some ten years after Toy Story ( John Lasseter, 1995), the first fully
computer-generated animated feature, and still a triumph of cinematic
storytelling and cultural populism. It was not until the arrival of a critical
mass in the production of computer-generated animation a certain number
of features produced annually rather than merely the long-awaited latest
release from Pixar or DreamWorks was there a critical shift in focus of the
films.
For so long the wow factor associated with computer-generated
animated features overwhelmed the view that they might actually have
something to say, or have meaning and affect. Only with the arrival of a glut
of poorly received films was there an engagement with content. Barnyard
(Steve Oederkerk, 2006) came under particular attack: this could be the film
that snaps everyones patience with Hollywood animations which have a Dell
computer chip where their heart should be.8 Interestingly, seemingly poor
films were associated with the cold heart of the computer, and the implied
longing for the intimacies of old style, hand-crafted storytelling. Never-
theless, Barnyard still lent itself to an arguably bizarre allegorical
interpretation: Ben is Bush senior fighting the first Gulf War, Otis is Bush
Junior, revenging his father after 9/11, and the coyotes are the terrorists.
Unlike the astringently pessimist Animal Farm, this feel good movie is Orwell
that ends well.9
Although this reading of Barnyard is a highly forced grounding of the film
in a political discourse, it does at least suggest that animated films can carry
seriousness of purpose, or a pertinent subtext. Championed, however, were
films that seemed to privilege an overt leftist intervention: most notably, Blue
Skys Ice Age (Chris Wedge, 2002), Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (Carlos Saldanha,
2005) and Australian George Millers Happy Feet (2006) with their ecological
concerns. Exploring the normal liberal tensions between individualism and

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the mass, which is common to most American movies (animated or

otherwise), Happy Feet tells a left-leaning tale of humankinds deliberate
exploitation and abuse of the oceans, and the ways in which a fundamentalist
rhetoric is employed to blame liberals and non-white groups for not being
faithful Republicans committed to trusting the government and the political
status quo. During a historical phase in which Hollywood movies have
become predicated on what Phil Melling describes as an adversarial
imagination, the reclamation of left-leaning or small c conservative values
has been important in reasserting the localness of traditional Republican and
Democrat identity (arguably lost to a past mythology) in the face of broader
ideological and spiritual struggles played out on a global stage in the War on
Terror.10 It is important to stress, though, that this reading relates to what
might be termed as mainstream or institutional animation. The economies of
the Hollywood animation (as well as the traditional filmmaking) industry
have embraced the digital shift as a way of re-determining the modality of
animation and the execution of visual effects, but this is still largely within
the traditional paradigm of classical narrative. Crucially, though, the embrace
of digital technologies has empowered filmmakers and animators in other
ways, and the potential radicalisation of the animated image has resulted in a
possible radicalisation of the means to narrative, in addition to refreshing
ideological and political perspectives.
Richard Linklaters Waking Life (2001) employs digital rotoscoping, which
works as an almost literal vindication of Lev Manovichs view that cinema
can no longer be distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical
media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting.11 Embracing an old
animation technique first used by the animators of the Disney and Fleischer
Brothers studios in the 1930s, this new model of rotoscoping digitally traces
and paints over live-action footage, enhancing or revising the original
material into a much more richly encoded text, more readily aligned to the
dream state or an alternative mode of consciousness than the literal record
can achieve.
The characters in Waking Life ruminate on a variety of personal, political
and philosophical enquiries and anecdotes, thereby revising notions of
classical Hollywood narrative by prioritising vocal performances. These
performances act as a catalyst for interpretation by the animators, whose
visualisations foreground, intensify and comment on the moods and
emotions of the speakers. Thus, the abstract vocal performance of the actors
might be said to support the contemplative abstractions of the characters. It
also heightens a consideration of human endeavour and purpose as forms of
narrative or the quest for a new story a proposal ironically offered by a
chimpanzee at a lecture in Waking Life.
These subjective histories once more delineate notions of the relativity
of reality, whilst their representation dismisses the claims of photorealism
to embrace that reality. More pointedly, a drive-by political campaigner

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broadcasting his vision, played by Alex Jones, who reddens and darkens with
the intensity of his anger, dismisses the core political axes in American life,
played out by the Republicans and Democrats, as two sides of the same coin;
two management teams bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery
Incorporated. The fundamental mistrust of American political life, or
the notion of a coherent or common waking life, underpins the quasi-
existential questioning process that serves as narrative in the film, positing
the notion of the unconscious, the dream, the fantasy or solipsistic con-
sciousness as an alternative engagement with lived experience. Recalling the
mnemonic tendency in animation, cited earlier, and making figural the
intrinsic ability of animation to visualise and capture interior states, Waking
Life demonstrates the liberation of digital technologies. Animation is used
as an interrogative language and the search for meaning in an era of rela-
tivity, challenging received knowledge of political dogma and ideological
orthodoxies.

NOT-SO-SPECIAL EFFECTS
Linklaters Waking Life resists the heightened photorealism enabled by digital
technologies, and which is often viewed as the norm. Indeed, while it is
almost uniformly the case that digital interventions take place in all films,
it is still clear that digital processes are most often understood as visual
effects, or what were previously known as Special Effects before their
special status disappeared into code. When they are visible most notably in
the early excesses of the morph or in the array of creatures, aliens and
mythic beings they essentially resemble Waking Life in the privileged use of
animation as a signifying language.12 This level of overtness in the texts
normally signals the presence of the animator and suggests the intrinsically
self-figurative and self-reflexive nature of animation, but it is also the case
that animation in its new digital guise is taking place in less obviously
exhibitionist contexts.
It is useful to delineate, therefore, what commonalities traditional
definitions of animation and the typologies of visual effects share. It
becomes clear that the diversity and application of visual effects is not
dissimilar to the variances and breadth of purpose in traditional animation:
what I have described elsewhere as the movement between orthodox animation
(essentially classical Disney hyper-realism or the new traditionalist model),
experimental animation (non-linear, non-objective works) and developmental
animation (playing out degrees of difference between them).13 This is more
pithily expressed by Maureen Furniss as the space between mimesis and
abstraction,14 and directly echoes the typology discussed by Shilo McClean
(see Table 18.1).
This effects model demonstrates the gradual but perceptual movement
from photorealist representation to abstract expression. However, the model

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Table 18.1. Typology of special effects adapted from McCleans analysis15

Type of effect Definition Example
Documentary Visualisation of abstract and How the Twin Towers Collapsed
technical concepts and theories (Discovery, 2002)
unimaginable unless graphically Inside the Twin Towers
realised (Discovery, 2006)
Invisible Deliberately concealed and Children of Men (2006)
undetectable interventions
preserving the reality of the
diegetic world; audience must
not suspect or detect effects use
Seamless Seemingly invisible effects but Titanic (1997)
actually discernible and detectable Gladiator (2000)
if given consideration (most often
in period films)
Exaggerated What would happen realistically The Day After Tomorrow
in the unreal or excessive (2004)
circumstances of narrative;
perceptual realism but cognitive
improbability
Fantastical Shows us things to be untrue, but The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
with such conviction that we (20013)
believe them to be real (Albert
La Valley); sublime or excessive
imagery; extending real world
into the world of fantasy
Surrealist Deliberately noticeable imaginative Amlie (2001)
or spectacular effects that must be
read as a concept or metaphor
New Traditionalist Narrative and cartoonal tradition Toy Story (1995)
of long form animation features Toy Story II (1999)
HyperRealist Completely animated computer- Final Fantasy (2001)
generated figures and environments Gollum in The Lord of the
Rings Trilogy (20013)

includes the recognition that a digital effect in the HyperRealist style may
still be identified by the completeness of its application, and its commitment to
a total level of constructedness in the computer environment, rather than the
partial mix of elements described by Lev Manovich in his seminal definition
of digital cinema as live action material + painting + image processing +
compositing + 2D computer animation + 3D computer animation.16
It is important, though, to interrogate the term computer animation in
this formulation a little more closely. There are three distinct categories,

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which might enable a fuller understanding of the breadth of material that

could be viewed as computer animation:

(1) First, computer-assisted animation as the use of the computer in the

determination of motion control; the deployment of specific kinds of
software in the completion of process tasks normally undertaken by
hand; replacing the camera as a recording device. Essentially this means
the use of digital technologies as a media aid.
(2) Second, computer-facilitated animation in which the computer is
deployed in the revision and re-determination of other already
established, principally 2D, material approaches: drawing, painting,
collage and scanned photo-montage; data used from motion capture
or rotoscoping also informs this category as it operates as an index of
performance motion. In this case, digital technologies function as
adaptive media.
(3) Third, computer-modelled animation, which sees the computer as the
core context in the construction of worlds within a 3D environment,
and might readily be called digimation. This model uses digital tech-
nologies as origination media.

It is important to note that these aspects may overlap and combine in some
projects, particularly multimedia works.
Interestingly, at present it is clear that computer-assisted animation is,
in effect, a relative orthodoxy, present in most forms of animation or
film production to some degree. Computer-facilitated animation, though,
appears the province of more experimental or progressive and largely
independent work, whilst computer-modelled animation, represented here
in McCleans work, predominantly as new traditionalist, has hyperrealist and
documentary applications. Even with these distinctions and categories, there
is acknowledgement of a significant movement towards the view that
traditional filmmaking practices are not merely being overtaken by digital
processes, but that the aesthetics of such films are moving closer to the visual
codes, conventions and dynamics of animated film. Robert Skotak, a
visual effects supervisor at 4-ward Productions notes: Overall I think that
synthetic images are promoting a sense of illustration in visual effects. You
come across a castle in the mist, and it is the ideal time of day, it is backlit, the
mist is just so It feels too much like an animated film, because its all pretty,
all controlled.17

PROOF BY ANIMATION
David Clark has remarked that animations trajectory into new media has
radically altered the techniques of the medium, but perhaps more
importantly it has fundamentally altered the metaphors by which we imagine

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time and change.18 Such metaphors have been increasingly bound up,
however, with the dominant iconography of erotica and violence, which are
brought together controversially in Edouard Saliers 2006 animated short
Flesh (available on YouTube). Saliers vision is predicated on the idea that
corporate America is preoccupied with its own obsessive indulgences, here
played out as the mainstreaming of pornography, conflating titillating
masturbatory images of Playboy-styled models with the phallic infrastruc-
ture of the New York architectural skyline. Pornography has become a multi-
billion dollar industry in the US and the everyday evidence of a consumer-led
culture that sits uneasily with the old-style moralities of fundamentalists or
even the neoliberal sensibilities of the political mainstream. When Salier,
as a deliberate provocateur, uses the events of 9/11 in combination with
pornographic content, the ethical implications of the images are extremely
challenging.
In Flesh the terrorist planes plough into a World Trade Center now
embellished with erotic images, releasing explosive, jagged edged spears,
frozen in an angular configuration. But this is not the end of it. Further
planes emerge, each crashing into more and more buildings, thereby
reducing the attack on the city to the status of a computer game; its
infrastructure virtually destroyed, the flesh of its citizens arbitrarily
dismissed or abused. Although such imagery recalls the idea of the pleasures
of war and the cathartic arousal which may come with the heightened and
abandoned energies of assault and brutality, Saliers film is less about the
titillation of tyranny and terror and more concerned with the deep-rooted
complacency of a nation caught up in the belief in its own mythic narratives
and undermined by the excessive exploitation of liberty. Indeed, Saliers film
concludes with the rebuilding of America from the debris set against the
Statue of Liberty. Nevertheless, it is clear that normal service has been
resumed: a pornographic America survives, a slave to its own appetite for
power and insistence upon control, epitomised in the erotica mapped on to
the sky-scraping banks and businesses of New York.
Clearly this is not a Disney-take on animation or national identity, but one
that in employing the expressive resources of computer-generated, neo-
gaming, neo-realist digital animation challenges received understanding of
9/11 iconography and the competing mythologies now attached to it. Like
Holocaust deniers before, some believe 9/11 to be an elaborate hoax;
conspiracies abound and reality seems entirely relative. It is perhaps ironic,
then, that increasingly animation is being viewed and used as a tool by which
the truth might be understood; some sort of legitimate proof in the equally
ironic light of the deep betrayal of traditional media to sustain truth and
appease our camera-never-lies eyes. The mistrust of the indexical nature of
reality assumed in photorealism always illusory, of course has led to the
notion of accepting animation as an arbiter of insight because of its self-
evidently authorial intention and the foregrounded nature of its artifice.

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Animation is almost always intrinsically metaphorical and insists upon self-

reflexively interpreting its own meaning. As he searches for an ambivalent
stance that seeks to embrace both the Muslim perspective and American
culture, Saliers work may be less ideologically coherent than this reading
suggests, but it does highlight an important point about the use of
pornographic imagery set against news footage.
For all the crassly staged and performance aspects of pornographic
material, it might be argued that, perversely, such sex acts have become a
closer indexical record of the real in the contemporary imagination, and a
fundamental reflection of a primal underbelly which is lost and repressed
beneath legitimate corporate culture and populist social veneer. While there
are clearly ethical difficulties in accepting this view, especially when it does
not take into account the production of what might be regarded as non-
mainstream pornographic scenarios and practices, it is clear that one of the
reasons why Salier uses the Playboy or Private-styled, girl-centred, soft-focus
imagery is to illustrate and reveal its systematised embeddedness in a highly
phallocentric stage of late industrial capitalism. Flesh becomes the outcome
of a culture in which the business of sex become a bizarre index of the real
in the face of the collapse of ideological certainty, the mistrust of lens-based
media and the escalation of simulated experience, best epitomised in the
synthetic violence of computer games, played while the reality of brutal
conflict escalates across the world. The animated film has rarely exhibited the
illusionism or contradictions of contemporary existence so pertinently, but
unsurprisingly Flesh is not alone in addressing 9/11 as a touchstone of an
America in crisis.
Lazyboy Animations epitomise a low-rent approach to making animated
films. Fan-generated, the work is made with Flash animation using the
controversial observations of the Nobody Likes Onions comedy broadcasts as
their soundtrack. Launched in 2005 Nobody Likes Onions its like taking a
cold shower in sarcasm is actually Patrick Melton, Dagre and Johnny B.,
three comedians from the Tampa Bay area in Florida, producing a thrice-
weekly podcast of topical satire. Representing a more radical critique of
American culture in the style of South Park or Don Hertzfeldt, the trio are
deliberately provocative in their views and opinions. The animation itself
does little more than visualise some of the more contentious statements for
easy comic effect, but nevertheless exploits both the ease in which digital
applications enable the simple apprehension of the podcast, the minimal
construction of the animation itself using basic software, and its wider
exhibition and dissemination on the Internet. The 9/11 Tribute (2006)
looks at the tragedy five years on and imagines the World Trade Center as a
toy called Towery, with attached spinning planes, charred bodies that fall
out if the toy is shaken, and the warning: Careful Kids, Its Flammable.
Further along, the towers are imagined as Twin Tower Salt and Pepper
shakers, and the original footage dismissed with the comment You see the

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plane crash into the towers, and you say, like, wheres the popcorn?
Nobody Likes Onions conclude their gags by suggesting that the people
running up and down the stairwells in the towers could be best remembered
running to the British comedian Benny Hills chase theme, Yakkity Sax,
as the whole thing had become a farce: the last phrase uttered on the
9/11 Tribute.
Tasteless or not, the simple animation of these statements supports the
jokes and, in some ways, vindicates the underlying critique which suggests
that 9/11 has become as much of a commercial vehicle as any other event
and, for all concerned, has become about making money rather than
recognising what has been lost and why. The rhetoric of corporate America
has seemingly triumphed over the most powerfully affecting political act in
the US in the last 50 years. Salier and Lazyboy clearly share this view, and
both implicitly make the claim that the very things that are supposedly at the
spiritual heart of American politics and identity are vehicles by which its
hypocrisy and contradiction might be exposed. As Salier notes of the attacks
by the multiple planes in his film:

those attacks have finally no effect on the town; on the contrary, they
only increase the spectacular decadence they are trying to knock down.
The more the planes attack the town, the more debauchery, gigantism,
images of violence and the hellish town proliferate.19

The essential message of these films is that the nation has learnt little from
its history, but, ironically, in the digital era it is this sense of history and
notions of historiography that are most under threat.
This is illustrated by a final consideration of a 9/11 film predicated on
using animation. Mike Wilson of Integrated Consultants Design to Reality
project creates a visualisation of Flight 77s flight trajectory as it crashes into
the Pentagon. This authoritative vision is based on Forensic Engineering:
Recreating events in the form of Newtonian physics-based visual com-
munication that offers forensic dispute resolution, but which is nevertheless,
as the voiceover at the beginning of the movie explains, a Solidworks
generated animation showing the physics of a dynamic situation to help offer
explanations when a particular incident has a counter-intuitive outcome.
While such rhetoric is reassuring for some in its implied sense of inevitable
rightness, the piece still operates through the artifice of animated sequences,
supposedly proving the official version of what occurred on the morning of
9/11 to more sceptical conspiracy theorists, here described coyly as those
with a counter-intuitive view of the matter. The animation essentially shows
the descent of the aircraft knocking over lamp-poles; the low flight trajectory
recorded by a security camera video; the reason for the apparently unscathed
lawn and untouched cable spools; the particularity of the planes entry into
the building, which resulted in major internal destruction but only minor

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external damage; and the place of external debris. The animation is

supported by photographic evidence but its intended sense of record is
determined by the way the animation creates a narrative for the available
photographic evidence and not the reverse.
Design to Reality no more proves that this was an aircraft than it might
effectively dispute the conspiracy theorists view that this could have been a
missile. Merely animating the idea that the aircraft flew into a building leaving
an aircraft shape in the same way as Tom might leave a cat-like figure when
running through a wall in a Tom and Jerry cartoon is hardly persuasive,
but there is an intrinsic belief that the truth is clarified and proven by
the controlling determinacy of computer animation. It is clear that the
photographs prove that lamp-poles were knocked over, debris was found
and that a generator and ground structure damage were recorded, but it is
the animation that actually penetrates the unimaginable or unspeakable
conditions which attended the crash and created its physical outcomes.20
While it is often the case that animation is particularly adept at revealing
technical, mechanical, organic or psychological interior states, the assump-
tion here is that what amounts to any counter-intuitive interpretation of
events is somehow effaced by quasi-scientific creative solutions offered by
business consultants, surely commissioned to uphold the official version.
Animation here, then, becomes dispute resolution.
Intriguingly, such a principle in many senses like those proposed in the
critiques offered by Salier and Lazyboy seemingly offers a notion of what
Niall Ferguson has described as virtual history based on hypothetical or
counterfactual propositions. At a time when the facts seem increasingly
relative, such virtual histories can take on increasing authority supported by
the visual determinacy of digitally animated interventions. As Ferguson
notes,

the business of imagining such counterfactuals is a vital part of the way

in which we learn. Because decisions about the future are usually
based on weighing up the potential consequences of alternative courses
of action, it makes sense to compare the actual outcomes of what we
did in the past with the conceivable outcomes of what we might have
done.21

VIRTUAL HISTORY
The three animations I have discussed here are but a step from saying that
actual outcomes and conceivable outcomes might be one and the same thing.
The literal and metaphoric deployment of animation suggests that virtual
histories may be constructed out of the deeply subjective and relative
contexts of the contemporary period, which define and underpin a new
version of historiography. Ferguson notes that

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there have been two distinct kinds of counterfactual which have

been used by historians: those which are essentially the products of
imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and those designed
to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew
imagination in favour of computation.22

Filmmakers are not historians, but it is not hard to place Salier and Lazyboys
work in the former category and Wilsons in the latter, and merely confirm
their counterfactual equivalence. The relegation of causation as a deter-
mining model of understanding events (largely because causes often seem
indeterminable or at least contestable) and the rise of an inclusive structural
analysis (embracing a range of sociologically determined factors as the
contextual provocateur or imperative of the historical moment) has in fact
enabled contingency and indeterminacy to become significant aspects of the
new historiography. Arguably, this model remains too complex and broad
without an organising principle, but in some senses it is clear that the
traditional historiographic certainties of the past have come to play second
fiddle to the highly visible and seemingly transparent representations offered
up by the unprecedented presence and intervention of media technologies.
History, under these circumstances, is inevitably constructed more as
commodity than concern, or more about commodity as a concern, or in line
with Francis Fukuyamas instrumental view that history is at an end.
Such postmodern playfulness and mock finality is belied, however, by the
insistence of history and the deep-seated requirement to know that what has
gone before did matter. The urge to preserve, conserve and know again,
persists and every new tool of expression is thus applied to the excavation of
the past however, immediate or transient as a lost world. One need only
take the image of the computer-generated dinosaur in such entertainments
as Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) or quasi-documentaries like Walking
with Dinosaurs (Tim Haynes, 1999) as a key symbol of such history. Prehistoric
creatures are created in the computer, legitimised through the codes and
conventions of the wildlife documentary, and made into history by
speculative assertion. These are the new archives and new texts, a more
subjective substitute for the object of history, validated both by the evidence
that informs knowledge and the creative practice of imagined epistemologies
embodied in persuasive visual signs. Simply, history is not only that which
is determined by historians and scholars, but by those who can creatively
interrogate the past and produce a narrative which invites the maintenance
of its significance, not at the level of social and cultural change but at the
more individualised portal of local effect and emotional spectacle. It is not
enough to know and critically embrace; history must be felt. The rise of the
psycho-historian and the micro-history is thus inevitable, but aided,
abetted and enabled by hard copy of memory in the animus, the animation,
and the animator of digital intervention.

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Under such conditions, it is sometimes hard to deny that the past is

another country. Ironically, animation techniques which foreground their
own self-reflexive process in revealing change, reinventing the past, and
reconstructing the old as new, seek to evoke not merely an alternative view,
but the process by which it has been determined. It is perhaps perverse to
accept that it is the potentially anarchic freedoms of animation as a mode of
record which might best reveal this to us, but there is much in its artifice that
remains much more appropriate to the recall of the psychology, physiology,
emotion and the material culture of history than has been previously allowed.
It might now be viewed as the most pertinent of temporal and archaeological
excavators. By using the capacity of animation, and the digital shift to reveal
the metamorphosis in everyday events throughout history, in the service of
a better understanding and preservation of the past, it is perhaps the final
irony that it is possible to challenge the belief in our own more problematic
fictions.

NOTES
1. Shilo McClean, Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 60.
2. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?
The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
1998), p. 166.
3. See Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney:
Power Publications, 1991); Paul Watson, True Lyes: (re)animating film studies,
in Paul Wells (ed.), Art & Animation (London: John Wiley/Academy Group,
1997), pp. 469; and Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002).
4. For modernist practices of animation, see Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands:
Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (London: Verso, 2002) and Paul
Wells, Animation and America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002); for
discussion of redefined filmic apparatus, see Vivian Sobchack (ed.), Meta-
Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and Suzanne Buchan (ed.), Animated
Worlds (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2006); and for animation and art, see Chris
Gehman and Steve Reinke, The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema
(Ottawa: YYZ Books, 2005) and Benjamin Cook and Gary Thomas The
Animate! Book: Re-Thinking Animation (London: Lux, 2006).
5. Gehmann and Reinke, The Sharpest Point, pp. 1945.
6. Pierre Hebert in interview with Paul Wells, December 2005.
7. See, for example, Wells, Animation and America, pp. 10225.
8. Philip Bradshaw, Film review: Barnyard, The Guardian, 20 November 2006.
9. Philip French Thoroughly modern Marie, The Observer, 22 October 2006.
10. See Philip John Davies and Paul Wells (eds), American Film and Politics from Reagan
to Bush Jnr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 182201.
11. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 195.

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12. See Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema (London:
Verso, 1999).
13. See Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998).
14. See Maureen Furniss, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics (Sydney: John Libbey,
1998).
15. McLean, Digital Storytelling, pp. 69103.
16. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 301.
17. Jody Duncan (ed.), Cinefex, 100, January 2005, p. 65.
18. Gehmann and Reinke (eds), The Sharpest Point, p. 150.
19. Edouard Salier in interview with Paul Wells, April 2007.
20. The concept of penetration in animation is fully defined and explored in Wells,
Understanding Animation, pp. 1226.
21. See Niall Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Pan,
2003), p. 2.
22. Ibid., p. 18.

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INDEX

Abu Ghraib, 2689 Baer, Ulrich, 245, 250

Achcar, Gilbert, 58 Balincourt, Jules de, 56, 9
Adorno, Theodore, 212, 249 Bana, Eric, 222
Afghanistan, 102, 105, 109, 154, 186 Bangladesh, 156
Afghanistan War, 2, 39, 44, 55, 5860, 105, 109, Barber, Benjamin, 150
187, 267 Baudrillard, Jean, 213
Agnew, Spiro, 91 Beers, Charlotte, 1056
AIDS, 37, 152 Beijing Olympics (2008), 10, 16
al-Qaeda, 2, 59, 102, 105, 1089, 1534, 187, 214 Beinart, Peter, 69
Ali, Tariq, 58 Bell, Daniel, 50
Allen, George, 22 Bellah, Robert, 124, 134, 136, 1389
Allende, Salvador, 181 Bender, Lawrence, 223
Alvarez, Michael, 233 Benjamin, Walter, 269
Amis, Martin, 2456 Berg, Paul, 166
Anderson, Benedict, 8, 284 Berger, Peter, 133
Anderson, Perry, 51 Berger, Sandy, 38
Andoni, Lamis, 109 Berlin Wall, 45, 35, 55
animation, 14, 221, 224, 291304 Bernays, Edward, 98
Aniston, Jennifer, 215 Berry, Halle, 220
Ann Arbor, MI, 220 Berry, Wendell, 122
anti-globalisation, 150, 153, 1556 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 156
Appadurai, Arjun, 6, 8, 9, 148, 285 Bin Laden, Osama, 2, 105, 108, 218, 246, 254
Aquinas, Thomas, 166 Bird, Brad, 293
Arendt, Hannah, 118, 122 Birkerts, Sven, 12, 11819
Asilomar, CA, 168 Biskind, Peter, 221
Auster, Paul, 249 Blackburn, Elizabeth, 168
Austin, TX, 30, 202, 220 Blair, Tony, 14, 15, 161, 163, 199
Australia, 11, 162, 175, 183, 190 Blanco, Kathleen, 196
Austria, 173 Bloom, Alan, 86
Bloom, Harold, 117, 118
Bacevich, Andrew, 38 Bosnia, 58, 150
Bad Religion, 218 Boulder, CO, 202

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INDEX

Bourne, Randolph, 7, 231 Clark, David, 298

Bradley, Bill, 28 Clark, Dick, 276
Braudel, Fernand, 49 Clinton, Hillary, 11, 31, 401, 280
Brazil, 155 Clinton, William J., 2, 910, 24, 278, 301, 368,
Brigham, Robert, 59 403, 54, 57, 6870, 85, 104, 129, 132, 137,
Brinkley, David, 103 148, 151, 21113, 248, 280
Brooks, Paul, 204 Clooney, George, 219, 2202
Brown, Louise, 170 Coen Brothers, 221
Brownback, Sam, 1625, 175 Colbert, Stephen, 75
Browne, Jackson, 217 Cold War, 1, 12, 27, 31, 357, 402, 45, 4951,
Brunsdon, Charlotte, 279 53, 55, 578, 60, 6970, 75, 84, 856, 88, 97,
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 54 99100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 1478, 150, 154,
Buchanan, Patrick, 31, 214 180, 190, 204, 212, 214, 255, 260, 285
Buckley, William F., 83, 87, 88 Coleman, Norm, 30
Burnham, James, 86 Concord, MA, 195
Bush administration see Bush, George W. Conners, Nadia, 223
Bush, Barbara, 218 conservative thought, 4, 1213, 227, 301, 43,
Bush, George H. W., 2, 25, 36, 556, 97, 148, 294 50, 74, 76, 8194, 137, 13940, 151, 154,
Bush, George W., 25, 1113, 212, 23, 257, 28, 16670, 174, 214
303, 3840, 434, 46, 49, 5260, 66, 69, 76, Corn, Joseph, 179
81, 98, 1012, 1078, 124, 132, 1356, 138, Cotkin, George, 12, 11621
145, 154, 1616, 16870, 1735, 1824, Coulter, Ann, 12, 26, 846, 924, 21415
1979, 212, 216, 21819, 223, 2389, 250, Crawford, TX, 1612
265, 291, 294 creationism see intelligent design
Bush, Jenna, 1613, 175 Crvecoeur, J. Hector St John de, 228
Butler, Judith, 267 Crockatt, Richard, 224
Butterfield, Tara M., 233 Cronkite, Walter, 103
Byrd, Robert, 43 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, 217
Cuba, 42, 44, 234
Caldwell, John, 278 Cumings, Bruce, 58
Callinicos, Alex, 51
Campanella, Richard, 1978 Damon, Matt, 221
Canada, 141 Darfur, 16, 217
Cannon, Lou, 33 Darwinian thought, 8990, 167, 204, 229
Caouette, Jonathan, 221 David, Laurie, 201
Capa, Robert, 262 Davis, Gary, 200
Card, Andrew, 43 Davis, Lydia, 247, 251
Carey, Alex, 101 Dawkins, Richard, 128
Carson, Rachel, 2025 Deech, Ruth, 173
Carter, James E., 13, 25, 41, 54, 97, 129, 135, 184 Deleuze, Gilles, 212
Carville, James, 104 DeLillo, Don, 14, 124, 222, 24650, 2523,
Casanova, Jose, 1289 2567
Casey, William J., 100 De Niro, Robert, 214
Catholicism, 31, 73, 83, 102, 129, 135, 13941, Denmark, 167, 174, 188
235 Denton, Jeremiah, 135
Chambers, Whittaker, 84, 86, 889 Derrida, Jacques, 82, 21213
Chvez, Csar, 232 Detroit, 183, 218
Cheney, Richard, 2, 43, 45 Deutsch, Donny, 216
Chile, 181 Dewey, John, 32, 68, 712, 73, 122
China, 10, 15, 16, 40, 51, 156, 157, 162, 1713, Diaz, Cameron, 202
175, 186, 189, 198, 201, 230, 234, 235, 240, DiCaprio, Leonardo, 202, 221, 223
285 Dickstein, Morris, 82
Chomsky, Noam, 103, 213 Didion, Joan, 91
Christianity, 4, 74, 89, 128, 13141, 167, 240, Diggins, John Patrick, 82
254 digital culture, 5, 11, 14, 107, 211, 224, 260, 262,
Chua, Geok-lian, 285 26670, 273, 27686, 291304
Civil Rights Movement, 51, 66, 723, 217, 232 Disney, 2778, 2926, 299

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Dixie Chicks, The, 21719 Germany, 106, 1734, 175, 180, 185, 188, 229,
Dole, Robert, 28 231
DSouza, Dinesh, 86, 215 Germany, Kent B., 197
DuBois, W. E. B., 146 Gergen, David, 27
Dukakis, Michael, 25 Gingrich, Newt, 423
Duxbury, MA, 204 Ginsberg, Allen, 85
Dylan, Bob, 217 Giroux, Henry, 239
Giuliani, Rudolph, 264
Eagles, The, 218 Glendon, Mary Ann, 122
Eagleton, Terry, 51 globalisation, 8, 1213, 28, 36, 57, 76, 104,
Eck, Diana, 140 1245, 14557, 172, 174, 187, 199, 285
Edgerton, David, 17980 Goebbels, Joseph, 98
Efron, Edith, 913 Goldwater, Barry, 83, 91
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 23, 28 Gonzalez, Alberto, 23
Ellis, Bret Easton, 2479 Gore, Albert, Jr, 2, 26, 28, 30, 76, 2034, 213,
Ellison, Ralph, 122 216, 2223
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 122 Grant, Madison, 231
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 123, 201, 228 Gray, Herman, 279
Eminem, 218 Green Day, 217, 219
Engelhardt, Tom, 191 Greenspan, Alan, 27
environmentalism, 11, 1245, 148, 152, 157, 168, Grenada, 186, 261
1827, 195, 2015 , 2223, 2945 Groening, Matt, 224
Erikson, Erik, 11 Ground Zero see World Trade Center
Etzioni, Amitai, 122, 236 Guantnamo Bay, 23, 44
Evans, M. Stanton, 91 Gulf War, 1, 52, 56, 58, 104, 186, 200, 235,
2612, 267, 294
Fairbanks, Evan, 265
Falwell, Jerry, 25, 83, 131 Haiti, 58, 104, 186
Federal Communications Commission, 220, 276, Haltunnen, Karen, 8
2789 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), 45
Ferguson, Niall, 191, 3023 Hanford Reach, WA, 205
Feyarbend, Paul, 89 Hannity, Sean, 92
Finland, 172, 174, 188 Hardt, Michael, 1534, 156
Fish, Stanley, 82, 93, 1667 Harris, Sam, 128
Flett, Kathryn, 245 Hart, Gary, 37
Florida, Richard, 212 Hartz, Louis, 71, 78, 146
Ford, Gerald, 54 Harvey, David, 147, 1878, 281
Ford, Harold, 22 Hauerwas, Stanley, 137
Foucault, Michel, 823, 87 Hebert, Pierre, 293
France, 167, 174, 213, 276 Heclo, Hugo, 136
Frank, Thomas, 75 Held, David, 150, 152
Franklin, Benjamin, 1212, 229, 231 Hendrikson, David, 38
Friedman, Thomas, 45, 8, 10, 76, 79, 1501, Herberg, Will, 134, 136, 139
153, 1556, 172 Hermann, Margaret, 42
Frist, Bill, 21, 163 Hertzfeldt, Don, 300
Fromm, Erich, 10 Hilton, Paris, 205, 278
Frum, David, 223 Hirschman, Charles, 241
Fuller, Margaret, 251 history, theories of, 35, 14, 35, 50, 55, 58, 123,
Fukuyama, Francis, 3, 45, 27, 35, 50, 55, 578, 145, 149, 150, 218, 222, 241, 247, 250, 257,
60, 123, 145, 148, 215, 303 291, 3014
Furniss, Maureen, 296 Hitchens, Christopher, 128
Hoepker, Thomas, 263
Gaghan, Stephen, 222 Hoffman, Dustin, 214
Galbraith, J. K., 10, 52 Hoffman, Kay, 291
Gass, Robert, 106 Hofstadter, Richard, 32
Gellner, Ernest, 58 Hollinger, David, 127
George, Susan, 282 Hollywood, 14, 103, 2023, 205, 2201, 222,

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276, 283, 286, 2945 Johnson, Lyndon B., 21, 24, 26, 41, 59, 67, 2324
Hong Kong, 189 Johnson, Phillip, 8990
Horkheimer, Max, 212 Johnson, Shoshana, 238
Horowitz, David, 868, 90, 934, 213 Jones, Alex, 296
Houen, Alex, 246 Judaism, 254
Houston, TX, 220 July, Miranda, 221
Howard, John, 238
Howe, Irving, 118 Kakutani, Michiko, 255
Huckabee, Mike, 13 Kalfus, Ken, 246, 248
Humphrey, Hubert, 24 Kallen, Horace, 2301
Hunter, James Davison, 301, 13940 Kant, Immanuel, 712
Huntington, Samuel, 4, 5, 38, 50, 58, 105, 154, Kass, Leon, 168
2346 Kaufman, Eric, 228
Hurricane Katrina, 2, 22, 125, 1969, 217, 223, Kazin, Alfred, 69, 122
23941 Kazin, Michael, 11
Huston, Walter, 1011 Kelley, Dean, 140
Hustvedt, Siri, 249, 251 Kemp, Jack, 25
Kennan, George F., 4, 57
Iceland, 167, 190 Kennedy, Edward, 24, 25, 68
Ikenberry, John, 40 Kennedy, John F., 24, 41, 67, 102, 103, 134, 204,
immigration, 5, 7, 23, 85, 123, 212, 214, 224, 234, 284
22736, 2401 Kennedy, Robert F., Jr, 2012
India, 10, 15, 151, 155, 171, 1723, 175, 185, 189, Kerry, John, 2, 25, 27, 29, 30, 212, 213, 217, 220
198, 201 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 39
Indonesia, 149, 157 King, Coretta Scott, 103
Ingraham, Laura, 213 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 22, 667, 723, 232
intelligent design, 86, 8991, 163, 1667 Kissinger, Henry, 32, 514
International Standards Organization, 6 Klein, Naomi, 156
Internet, 75, 923, 104, 107, 117, 119, 189, 197, Kloppenberg, James, 70
21214, 254, 268, 2701, 273, 27980, 282, Kosovo War, 37, 104, 149, 154, 186
2846, 291, 300 Krauthammer, Charles, 36, 39, 51, 55
Iran, 23, 83, 978, 109, 150 Krimsky, Sheldon, 169
Iran-Contra, 21, 56, 101 Kristeva, Julia, 9
Iraq, 4, 22, 40, 49, 55, 57, 59, 86, 978, 105, 110, Kristol, Irving, 57, 83
26870 Kristol, William, 167
Iraq War, 2, 4, 12, 29, 33, 40, 445, 49, 523, 55, Kuhn, Thomas, 89
5860, 67, 69, 81, 102, 1068, 145, 1545, Kushner, Tony, 222
166, 1867, 199, 217, 21820, 237, 260, Kuwait, 97
26670, 272 Kyoto Protocol (1997), 195, 198
Ireland, 172, 173
Iriye, Akira, 57 LaFeber, Walter, 59
Islam, 4, 50, 74, 834, 102, 1056, 108, 130, 141, Landrieu, Mary, 165
150, 154, 2345, 240, 2536, 277 Lasch, Christopher, 11, 119
Israel, 105, 162, 175, 199, 222 Lee, Spike, 223
Italy, 152, 153, 174 Lemann, Nicholas, 93
Lennon, John, 219
Jackson, Andrew, 39 Lewis, Anthony, 44
Jackson, Janet, 220 Lewis, Michael 284
Jacoby, Russell, 12, 116, 118 Libby, Lewis, 39
James, William, 11, 52, 54, 65, 68, 70, 71 liberal thought, 1214, 238, 30, 32, 42, 53, 57,
Jameson, Fredric, 147, 213 6578, 858, 90, 123, 140, 14750, 155, 166,
Japan, 51, 151, 167, 171, 175, 180, 185, 188, 202, 21415, 2201, 234, 278; see also
285 neoliberalism
Jay, Paul, 8 Lifton, Robert Jay, 11
Jefferson, Thomas, 201 Lilla, Mark, 82
Jencks, Charles, 181 Limbaugh, Russ, 92, 214
Jenkins, Henry, 280 Lincoln, Abraham, 22

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Linklater, Richard, 221, 2956 Morris, Dick, 27

Lipmann, Walter, 122 Morris, Errol, 82
London, 5, 40, 105, 161, 163, 173, 176, 218, 276 Morrison, Toni, 224
Los Angeles, 202, 222, 276 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 122
Lott, Eric, 70 Muir, John, 201
Luce, Henry, 9, 25960, 269, 271, 275, 2856 multiculturalism, 4, 8, 14, 84, 86, 148
Lynch, David, 221 Mumper, Larry, 88
Lynch, Jessica, 2378 Muravchik, Joshua, 37
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 4, 82 Murrow, Edward R., 103, 216, 220, 222

McCain, John, 28, 445, 135 Nader, Ralph, 28

McCarthy, Joseph, 214, 220, 222 Nagin, C. Ray, Jr, 196
McCartin, Joseph, 11 nationalism, 79, 14, 3640, 46, 56, 58, 70, 124,
McCartney, Paul, 219 138, 150, 152, 227, 231, 277, 284
McChesney, Robert, 2789 nativism, 8, 22931, 2334, 236
McClean, Shilo, 291, 293, 2968 Negri, Antonio, 1534, 156
McCullin, Don, 262 Neiman, Susan, 130
McCurry, Steve, 263, 265 neoconservatism, 2, 3640, 49, 5152, 55, 57, 81,
McElvaine, Robert, 4 83, 84, 1656; see also conservative thought
McEwan, Ian, 245 neoliberalism, 28, 14850, 152, 155, 280, 283,
McFarlane, Robert, 56 299; see also liberal thought
McGovern, George, 27, 42 Neuhaus, Richard John, 83, 127
McGuire, Tobey, 222 New Left, 75, 867, 91
McInerney, Jay, 2459 New Orleans, LA, 30, 1968, 223, 23941
MacIntyre, Alisdair, 121 New Right, 25, 83, 86, 89
McKibben, Bill, 205 New York City, 12, 91, 131, 138, 180, 189,
MacLachlan, Elizabeth, 285 21819, 24756, 266, 276, 299
McLemee, Scott, 237 New Zealand, 190
McLuhan, Marshall, 276 Nicaragua, 56, 1001
McNamara, Robert, 82 Nicholson, Jack, 221
Maher, Bill, 277 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 10, 32, 69, 77, 122
Mailer, Norman, 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57, 251
Maines, Natalie, 21819 9/11, 16, 1115, 24, 29, 32, 35, 3840, 43, 45,
Malcolm X, 232 4951, 53, 5760, 6869, 83, 105, 107,
Manovich, Lev, 295, 297 1234, 1278, 1301, 1369, 145, 149, 153,
Marable, Manning, 239 155, 1801, 1967, 21214, 21820, 224,
Marquand, David, 4 2278, 2312, 2346, 241, 24556, 2626,
Marvin, Michelle, 214 277, 2856, 291, 294, 299301
Mays, Benjamin, 10 Ninkovich, Frank, 57
Mead, Margaret, 10 Nisbet, Robert, 52
Meiselas, Susan, 263, 265 Nixon, Richard, 234, 26, 41, 43, 52, 54, 91, 199
Mellencamp, John, 217 No Child Left Behind (2002), 44, 90
Melling, Phil, 295 North Korea, 98
Melton, Patrick, 300 Norway, 162
Messud, Claire, 14, 2468 Novak, Michael, 83
Mexico, 124, 196, 233 Nunberg, Geoffrey, 75
Meyer, Frank, 88 Nussbaum, Martha, 213
Miami, FL, 235
Michaels, Walter Benn, 2367 Obama, Barack, 11, 13, 135, 236
Mill, John Stuart, 166 OConnor, Sandra, 45
Minow, Newton, 276 OReilly, Bill, 92, 214
Mishra, Pankaj, 247, 252 Orlando, FL, 99
Mitchell, Joni, 217 Ouelette, Laurie, 280
Mondale, Walter, 25 Ovalle, Pricilla Pea, 285
Monroe Doctrine, 57
Moore, Michael, 12, 23, 26, 656, 756, 220, 224 Pakistan, 109
Moore, Roy, 132 Palestine, WV, 237

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INDEX

Panama, 186, 261 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 27

Parks, Lisa, 279 Roosevelt, Theodore, 39, 57, 2301, 233
Parks, Rosa, 67 Rorty, Richard, 32, 68, 701, 73, 82, 124, 213
Parton, Dolly, 205 Roszak, Theodore, 82, 89
Paterson, NJ, 253 Roth, Eric, 222
Patriot Act (2001), 43, 74, 227, 236 Roth, Philip, 2478
Paul, Ron, 135 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1334
Pawlenty, Tim, 30 Rove, Karl, 26, 84
Pearl Harbor, 3, 9 Rowe, John Carlos, 89
Pease, Donald, 8 Roy, Arundhathi, 245
Peck, Dale, 11920 Rudman, Warren, 38
Pelosi, Nancy, 45 Rumsfeld, Donald, 39, 107, 269
Pentagon, 1, 21, 39, 50, 1023, 107, 186, 218, Russia see Soviet Union
245, 269, 301 Rwanda, 58, 146, 150
Perot, Ross, 36
Peterson, Leila Connors, 223 Saddam Hussein, 59, 978, 1078, 218
Pfaff, William, 55 Safire, William, 100
Pfiffner, James, 43 Said, Edward, 8, 58, 213, 240
Phillips, Kevin, 83, 91 St Louis, MO, 181
photojournalism, 14, 224, 2608, 2701 Salier, Edouard, 299303, 305
Piestewa, Lori Ann, 238 Sandel, Michael, 122
Pinochet, Augusto, 181 Sandinista, 56, 100, 101
pluralism, 14, 52, 70, 82, 84, 132, 211, 213, San Francisco, 92, 190, 200
22741 Santorum, Rick, 90
Podhoretz, Norman, 83 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 82
Pogge, Thomas, 156 Sassen, Saskia, 6, 1567
Portland, OR, 220, 265 Savage, Michael, 845, 923, 21415
postmodernism, 4, 12, 32, 502, 68, 8194, 117, Scanlan, Margaret, 246
119, 123, 128, 145, 213, 292, 303 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr, 69, 71, 213, 234
Powell, Colin, 23, 51, 97 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 578
Prividera, Laura, 238 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 199, 203
Putnam, Robert, 74 Scorsese, Martin, 221
Seattle, 89, 150, 152, 153, 220
Raban, Jonathan, 253, 255 secularism, 13, 31, 84, 12831, 141
Radiohead, 218 Seiter, John, 106
Radway, Janice, 8 September 11, 2001 see 9/11
Rand, Ayn, 88 Shapiro, Stephen, 248
Ratner, Sidney, 231 Shawn, Wallace, 116, 121
Rawls, John, 32, 656, 718, 213 Sherman, Tom, 292
Raymond, Walter, 1001 Shultz, George, 35
Reagan, Ronald, 11, 12, 218, 30, 33, 35, 37, 41, Shute, Jenefer, 247, 2512
52, 548, 99101, 103, 136, 147, 278 Silvers, Robert, 264
Reality television, 216, 278, 280, 292 Simon and Garfunkel, 217
Redford, Robert, 221 Simpson, O. J., 92
Regan, Judith, 92 Singapore, 1623, 172, 175, 188, 285
Reich, Otto, 101 Skotak, Robert, 298
Reich, Robert, 27, 70, 147 Smith, Adam, 147
Reimar, David M., 229 Smith, Tony, 57
Rice, Condoleezza, 23, 200 Smith, W. Eugene, 262
Richardson, Louise, 108 Smith, Zadie, 245
Richtin, Fred, 262 Smith-Shomade, Beretta E., 279
Rieff, Philip, 120, 122 Snyder, Alvin, 103
Robertson, Pat, 131, 163 Soderburgh, Steven, 221
Roe v. Wade (1973), 13, 165 Solondz, Todd, 221
Romney, Mitt, 30 Somalia, 58, 186
Ronell, Avital, 250 Sontag, Susan, 82, 117, 213, 271
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 10 South Korea, 4, 16970, 171

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Soviet Union, 45, 12, 27, 367, 50, 568, 83, Veblen, Thorstein, 283
99100, 103, 106, 129, 141, 148, 188 Vertovec, Steven, 67, 8
Spielberg, Steven, 16, 222, 303 Vietnam War, 4, 12, 24, 32, 36, 403, 4960, 62,
Springsteen, Bruce, 217, 21920 67, 82, 87, 91, 136, 147, 186, 212, 261, 276
Steger, Manfred, 155
stem cell research, 4, 13, 22, 124, 16170, Wallace, George, 83
1724 Wallis, Brian, 266
Stephanopoulos, George, 104 Walt, Stephen, 36, 40
Stevenson, Adlai, 24, 213 War on Terror, 12, 35, 39, 445, 58, 102, 1058,
Stewart, Jon, 75 1534, 240, 260, 26971, 291, 295
Stiglitz, Joseph, 153, 156 Washburn, Jennifer, 169
Stiller, Ben, 214 Washington, DC, 21, 523, 57, 59, 91, 138, 161,
Stipe, Michael, 217 163, 167, 171, 205
Strauss, Leo, 81 Washington, Denzel, 220
Streisand, Barbara, 214 Washington, George, 22, 45, 135
Sudan, 186, 217 Watergate, 43, 62
Sweden, 167, 174, 188, 190 Weaver, Sylvester, 276
Switzerland, 188 Webb, Alex, 2634
Webb, James, 22
Takacs, Stacy, 237 Weigel, George, 83
Tarantino, Quentin, 221 Weigman, Robin, 8
Taylor, James, 217 Weinberg, Robert, 175
technology, 46, 14, 33, 76, 89, 104, 1245, Weinberger, Casper, 51
1623, 166, 168, 1705, 17991, 196, Weissman, Irving, 171
199205, 222, 240, 260, 262, 2679, 271, West, Cornel, 123, 213
2756, 279, 2826, 293, 295 West Point, NY, 36, 40, 44
television, 14, 26, 41, 75, 912, 1034, 107, 180, Weyrich, Paul, 83
197, 213, 216, 2234, 246, 251, 2612, Wick, Charles Z., 103
27589, 2913 Willimon, William, 137
Thompson, Hunter S., 91 Wilson, Mike, 301
Thoreau, Henry David, 195, 201 Wilson, Woodrow, 32, 39, 57, 135, 136
Tichenor, Daniel J., 230 Winfrey, Oprah, 211, 279
Tillich, Paul, 10 Winthrop, John, 134
Tillman, Jane, 251 Wohlstetter, Albert, 53
Timberlake, Justin, 220 Wolfe, Alan, 75
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 115, 1234, 228 Wolfe, Tom, 912
Towell, Larry, 263 Wolfowitz, Paul, 39, 53
transnationalism, 3, 69, 67, 76, 148, 1513, 155, Woodward, Bob, 43
216, 223, 2846 Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996),
Trilling, Lionel, 6970, 71, 118, 122 28
Truman, Harry S., 4, 24, 57, 67, 100 World Trade Center, 1, 34, 14, 27, 50, 102, 109,
Tsing, Anna, 157 138, 1801, 214, 219, 245, 249, 252, 255,
Tucker, Robert, 38 260, 2636, 277, 297, 299300
Turner, Ted, 104 World War II, 3, 29, 50, 69, 146, 180, 187, 190,
231, 235, 249, 275
United Kingdom, 12, 5, 13, 22, 38, 40, 75, 99, Worley, Darryl, 218
141, 151, 1614, 167, 169, 170, 173, 199, Wuthnow, Robert, 13940
218, 279, 301
United Nations, 2, 36, 37, 44, 67, 184 Yellowstone National Park, 205
Updike, John, 117, 2469, 253, 2556 Yemen, 109, 187
USA Today exhibition (2006), 56 Young, Neil, 76, 21719
U2, 217 Yugoslavia, 104, 186

Van Sant, Gus, 221 Zangwill, Israel, 230

Vaughan, Vince, 215

324