October, 2002

Cold War Redux
Ira Chernus, Religious Studies

The most important intellectual change in the past year is our return to the language and worldview of the cold war era. In U.S. public discourse, one important theme has always been the idea of having a divinely ordained mission, of being God’s chosen people. But chosen to do what? For most of our history, the answers to that question spoke of endless progress, changing things for the better for all Americans and, many believed, for all humanity.

Cold War Discourse

The prevailing idea of mission changed dramatically during the cold war. The justifications for the U.S. cold war effort were mostly about preventing things from getting worse. Americans got used to the idea that the enemy might well be there forever. The best to hope for was containing this enemy forever. An impermeable wall of containment supposedly insured national security.

Political, social, and economic changes around the world constantly threatened to pierce that wall. So U.S. political discourse was dominated by fears of these changes. Our nation’s special role in the world was no longer to create positive change. It was now, above all, to prevent disastrous change, to make sure that the world did not get terribly worse.

In the late 1960s, U.S. leaders tried to prevent change in Vietnam. The reaction to the Vietnam War set off all sorts of change in this country. Nixon and Reagan came to power as the great defenders of the status quo. It is no accident that the cold war years saw our domestic political life shift so noticeably to the right. If our mission was to conserve things, to prevent change around the world, it was only natural to become more conservative at home too.

When the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, the whole cold war structure of language and meaning threatened to come crashing down with it. National leaders and pundits rushed to shore it up. They warned us that the world was not less, but more, dangerous, precisely because we could not know who the enemy was. When George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he said, "Today, we still have enemies. We don’t know who they are, but we know they are out there."

Ending the Era of Confusion

On September 11, 2001, we learned who they are. The era of confusion ended. Our new mission became, in Bush’s words, "the destruction and the defeat of the global terror network." We were back on familiar ground, squared off against "the evil ones" who hate our freedoms, marshalling all our resources to prevent catastrophic change.

One important question was left open, however. Were we back in the days of World War II, uniting for a war that would end only with the enemy’s unconditional surrender? It sounded that way when Bush said that terrorists "follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

Yet Bush said something else that night, which went largely unnoticed. He described the new war on terrorism as "a task that does not end." Vice-President Cheney agreed: "There's not going to be an end date when we're going to say, ’There, it's all over with.’'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that U.S. actions "surely will not" eliminate terrorism "completely from the face of the Earth." In other words, the goal is not unconditional surrender but merely containment, just as it was in the cold war. Rumsfeld was quite candid about this. The "new kind of war" is not so new, he admitted. "It undoubtedly will prove to be a lot more like a cold war than a hot war.''

Bush and his administration realize that they can’t rally public support for a war aiming only at containment. Most of the time, they say that the war on terrorism will end with something like unconditional surrender. But the truth is already out. Who really believes that we can ever put an end even to Al-Qaeda, much less to all terrorist networks everywhere? Just as in the cold war years, we must assume that the enemy, in one form or another, will always be at our gates.

The Uses of Evil

The parallel with the cold war was strengthened when the president told us that we must fight an "axis of evil." The administration has consistently linked terrorism and "axis of evil" nations as two sides of same threat. This creates an image of all the evildoers as a highly organized structure. The war on terrorism thus becomes a much more organized and familiar kind of struggle between the nations of good and the nations of evil. And, as in the cold war years, we are told that we must be willing to use weapons of mass destruction precisely because the enemy has and may use those weapons.

Once the "axis of evil" is linked to terrorism, which can never be wholly eliminated, it implies that "the axis of evil" is a threat that may be contained, but never eliminated. The war against evil will be endless, giving the government an endless justification for giving itself more and more wartime powers.

During the 2000 presidential campaign the candidates debated about how to create a better future, especially by educating our children more effectively. Today, such talk has virtually disappeared. The real debates are about competing plans to prevent dangerous changes and maintain relative stability. The more we are convinced that insecurity is perpetual, the more we fear and resist fundamental change. Our slogan is not, "United we move" or "United we progress," but "United we stand."

The National Insecurity State

As long as insecurity dominates the public landscape, there will be fear of change of every kind. The polls tell us that the public generally favors all sorts of liberal proposals for domestic improvement. Yet conservatives manage to block most of those plans. They play skillfully on the fear of change that is deeper than the hope for change. Even though, in the latest polls, a majority once again says that the country is headed in the wrong direction, there is no overwhelming demand for basic change.

This is not surprising. When constant change provokes widespread fear and despair, the conviction of unchanging insecurity engenders a paradoxical kind of confidence. In the face of a massive shock to our cultural assumptions, there is a strange satisfaction in returning to the familiar terrain of the cold war. The prospect of another long era of cold war erases the uncertainties of the ‘90s. It returns our culture to the certitude of simplistic absolutes. It tells us that nothing has really changed and nothing need ever change.

That promise of continuity is immensely reassuring. It offers the best reason to go on resisting change. Perhaps many Americans now look ahead with more hope precisely because they can now believe that there is nothing really new to hope for, that the future will not be fundamentally different from the present. They cling to the insecurity that justifies their resistance to change. They take comfort in knowing that the explosions of September 11, which we are told changed everything, could not shake the foundations of the national insecurity state.

The problem¾ the fear of terrorist attack¾ has become the solution to our cultural confusion. This is the paradox that keeps us trapped in the conservative politics of the national insecurity state. As we mourn the tragic deaths of September 11, we should also mourn the most tragic death of all: the death of hope for a genuinely better, more secure, more peaceful future.

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