War Shows Extraordinary Ability to Unite the Public : Patriotism: Pessimism fades and Americans rally around the flag, a contrast to reaction to domestic crises.

Flag sales are swelling. Blood drives are oversubscribed. Yellow ribbons flutter from car aerials and billboards and offices. In January, the Marines and Army--the services that are facing the greatest risk in the ground war with Iraq--exceeded their recruitment goals.

Polls show President Bush with near-record approval ratings. More than four in five Americans say they back his decision to go to war. In a matter of weeks, the mood of the country has reversed: Polls now find a majority of Americans consider the country to be on the right track, a startling reversal from December, when most considered the nation off in the wrong direction.

This emotional surge has graphically demonstrated that, even in an era of skepticism about government, war still has an extraordinary ability to unite the public--at least before bad news, and casualties, mount.

In recent years, many analysts have wondered whether the nation has become too segmented and disillusioned with its leaders to be united behind any purpose. Their pessimism seemed to be validated in the gridlock that has persisted for a decade between the Democratic Congress and Republican White House on corrosive domestic problems--from crime and poverty to education and economic competitiveness.

The intensity of support Bush has mobilized recently more precisely focuses the problem: What is it about war that unifies the nation in a way that domestic problems almost never can?

Throughout history, nations have often found in war a sense of unity that eludes them in peace. When World War I erupted, crowds euphorically coursed through the streets of Berlin, storming newspaper vans to read the latest reports. “No one knows anyone else,” wrote one reporter on the scene. “But all are seized by one earnest emotion: War, war, and a sense of togetherness.”

Even in the United States, with a less stentorian martial tradition, some leaders have virtually welcomed the annealing ferocity of war as a means of instilling the communal spirit lacking in civilian life. Returning to the United States in the late 1930s, diplomat George Kennan found himself yearning for “almost any social cataclysm,” even a war, “that would carry away something of this stuffy individualism and force human beings to seek their happiness . . . in their relationship to society as a whole” as he wrote in his diary at the time.

The urge to emotionally unify in wartime has proven surprisingly resilient in the current conflict, despite all the cynicism engendered by Watergate and Vietnam. During the long prelude to the Gulf War, public resistance, influenced by memories of the quagmire in the jungle, forced the Bush Administration to move cautiously and promise that a confrontation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would “not be another Vietnam.”

Since hostilities began last month, that opposition movement has deflated. Though about a fifth of the population remains strongly opposed to the war, they have seen their influence wane rather than grow since fighting began. Most of the public has reacted not with the weary suspicion of Vietnam’s end, but the instinctive coalescing it displayed at the start of that and earlier wars. Reversals on the battlefield, which now appear unlikely, could dim that enthusiasm.

The public’s response over the past month indicates that the experience of Vietnam, though intensifying public scrutiny of foreign engagements, has not soured a majority of Americans on the projection of U.S. force abroad.

“The public doesn’t want Americans fighting all over the world for all sorts of arcane causes,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “But, on the other hand, we do feel a responsibility as a world leader, and for the most part people want to see America exercising that responsibility.”

Many say that the Gulf War has demonstrated the continuity of more traditional American attitudes toward war: the willingness to rally behind the commander-in-chief, defer to his decisions and embrace his objectives. “We really are a fairly homogenous society,” said Republican pollster William McInturff. “Those are very, very, enduring values in our country.”

This feeling of shared national purpose has almost never been achieved in peace. In this century, historians say, the country has perhaps come closest in the first days of the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency, when the strain of the Great Depression produced a warlike sense of foreboding.

“That is the one moment where we have seen a comparable rallying to the President,” as in a war, said historian Alan Brinkley of the Graduate Center of City University of New York. “And, even then, Roosevelt very self-consciously and openly used the analogy of wartime” to rally support for his program.

Other attempts to use the wartime metaphor for peacetime goals have not been as successful: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and most pointedly, former President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to designate his energy policy “the moral equivalent of war.” That effort so lacked war’s urgency that the very comparison inspired ridicule--to the point where Carter’s initiative was reduced to the toothless acronym: MEOW.

What makes the public reaction to war so different than to any other challenge? The most logical answer might be that wars represent threats to the nation that exceed the risks posed by any domestic concern.

But not all wars present such overwhelming dangers.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan might have eventually become a fundamental threat to the survival of the United States. But, though an unchecked Hussein could have created problems for the United States in the Middle East, few believe he could endanger the nation’s survival. In fact, many analysts argue that unchecked domestic problems of crime, poverty, and waning economic competitiveness pose a greater long-range threat than Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.

Instead, most public opinion experts agree that the key to wartime solidarity is not the magnitude of the threat but its location: In a confrontation with a foreign enemy, Americans focus on the traditions that unite them, while domestic problems invariably illuminate the fissures that divide them.

“The question ‘Who is us?’ is very easy to define against a foreign aggressor,” said Robert B. Reich, professor of political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “But ‘Who is us’ is much more difficult to fathom when it comes to examining social problems close to home.”

In the Gulf War, that natural tendency to close ranks has been enhanced by a sustained media focus that dwarfs the attention ever devoted to any domestic issue. “At no other time are you going to get 80% of the public focusing on your message,” said McInturff.

Nor has Bush’s message been disrupted by dissonant notes from other leaders. Since the war began, virtually the entire national political hierarchy--including those who resisted the decision to fight--have endorsed the President’s actions. No domestic issue ever inspires such a uniform signal to the public from its leaders. The only sustained dissent has come from the grass-roots anti-war movement; but it has been hamstrung by the widespread public belief that protest hurts the troops in the field.

All this means that the war--for the time being--is essentially immune to the ongoing debate over costs and benefits that nags all domestic policy initiatives. If the troop deployment drags on, criticism of its human and financial costs will inevitably mount. Stanford University political scientist Richard A. Brody noted that the public does not feel competent to second-guess a President’s strategy for fighting a war--but will ultimately hold him responsible if it does not appear to be working.

For now, the debate over the war’s price tag and whether allies are bearing enough of the burden has a vaguely academic air to it: No one is suggesting that the war be stopped because it is costing too much money.

“There are some things you simply do because you have to do them,” said Sen. Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) “No one suggested in the Second World War we can’t oppose Hitler because the bill might be too high.”

That attitude starkly differs from debates over domestic problems, where the first question is invariably: How much will it cost? Nothing better summarizes the difference in attitudes than the gap between Bush’s ringing declarations about shaping a sweeping new world order, and budget director Richard G. Darman’s recent assertion that the Administration will seek “a new domestic order” only “at the margin of practicable change.”

That contrast could hold one key to postwar domestic politics, providing Democrats with a new means of dramatizing their argument that the U.S. influence in the world will decline unless it restores not only its military, but its economic strength.

Pride over the military’s performance appears to have temporarily arrested fears of American decline: Two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent Times Poll thought the war would strengthen America’s international position.

That boost of confidence may prove fleeting. The poll also found that nearly three-fifths of Americans still believe economic strength will determine the U.S. position in the world in the coming years, while just one in nine thought military might would be most important.

That powerful sentiment--reaffirming the dramatic findings of polls through the late 1980s--suggests that with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the trade deficit, Americans now lastingly see the country as more embattled economically than militarily.

That concern guarantees that once the fighting stops, Democrats and even some Republicans will argue that the United States must mobilize to attack its domestic problems as aggressively as it has rallied against Iraq.

If the fighting continues to go well, Democrats who opposed the use of force may find that the only way they can talk about the war politically is to contrast its success with the Bush Administration’s inability to make comparable progress against problems at home.

In his response to the President’s State of the Union address, Mitchell signaled the Democratic strategy--and a potentially major theme in next year’s presidential race--when he declared: “If we can make the best smart bomb, can’t we make the best VCR?”

Though the analogy has proven less than compelling in domestic politics, by this time next year it may be common to hear Democratic presidential hopefuls describing the need to build cars and computers that can compete with the Japanese as the moral equivalent of war.