Fear and Solidarity

The year just ending will always be identified with a single set of images--the World Trade Center under attack, exploding, collapsing. Not since 1941, with its photographs of the battleship Arizona being blown apart at Pearl Harbor, has one image so clearly encapsulated a year.

But the real story of 2001 has been the way the American people responded to the assault--and here, two reactions have overshadowed all others: fear and solidarity. The fear has been omnipresent (though more intense in Northeastern cities), but, strikingly, it has also been contained. It has not led, as some predicted, to a wholesale abuse of Arab Americans or Muslims, in the manner of the Japanese American internment of World War II (a testament to the enduring legacy of the civil rights movement).

It has provided a political base, however, for gratuitous assaults on civil liberties from John Ashcroft’s Justice Department--particularly the department’s proposed suspension of the authority of civilian (or even normal military) courts to handle cases related to security issues. Then again, Americans’ peacetime attachment to civil liberties has been a sometime thing, at best. It’s not public opinion that has shifted, but the willingness of the government to suspend certain constitutional guarantees of civil liberties.

More notable than the fears of the American people, though, has been their solidarity. In part, this has meant solid support for both the purposes and the prosecution of the war. Indeed, the current conflict has become almost the antithesis of Vietnam, which in many ways is still the great dividing line in American politics. This time, the divisions were few. In the wake of Sept. 11, both liberals and conservatives agreed about the reality of the threat to the nation and the nature of its enemies. If the Taliban seemed almost a throwback to the Dark Ages, Al Qaeda seemed something more ominous and a little more familiar: a militant band of theocratic fascists, stateless terrorists who, like the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, viewed pluralism and an open society as their mortal enemies.

Such dissent as emerged to the war effort came early on from portions of the campus left--so accustomed to criticizing (often quite rightly) the U.S. role in the world that it couldn’t shift gears when American civilians and liberalism itself came under murderous attack. (A far broader group of liberals entertains quiet doubts about the possible long-term fallout from the war but largely held their peace.) Ironically, as the U.S. began to counterattack, the left largely fell silent while numerous right-wing pundits began to complain that the war wasn’t being prosecuted vigorously enough. In truth, the Bush administration has fought a smart, low- and high-tech war that adhered to one of the cardinal liberal values that emerged in reaction to Vietnam: proportionality. Clearly, this was not a war in which the U.S. could destroy a village--or a nation--in order to save it; the need to maintain and cultivate support in the Middle East and elsewhere--and not least, here at home--dictated a strategy that put a premium on avoiding both civilian and American casualties. Indeed, at year’s end, the primary achievement of the Bush administration is that it has waged a war that was successful on the battlefield without the kinds of actions that would have lost it the support of other nations and of Americans back home. (Nearly all of which could come unstuck if, in 2002, Bush decides to take that war to Iraq.)

The American people displayed a second kind of solidarity in response to Sept. 11 and its aftermath: support not simply for the war effort but for each other, for the nation’s public purposes and public institutions. Donations to emergency charities went through the roof, but so did such things as trust in government and confidence in the public sector. When New York’s firefighters rushed up the stairs at the World Trade Center, the whole concept of public service took on a legitimacy-- indeed, a nobility--it never should have lost. Polling and focus groups conducted since the terrorist attacks have consistently shown that two-thirds of the public now affirm their trust in government--a figure not seen since before Vietnam. They also show that people want to address the nation’s economic problems collectively. A series of surveys by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, for instance, show an astonishingly high level of support for public-works projects (such as building schools and transportation infrastructure) rather than tax cuts as a way to keep us from a devastating recession.

This has posed a conundrum for the Bush administration, which continues to view government as a problem, not a solution, on almost any issue, save the war. On the issue of federalizing airport security, Bush had to bow to the near-universal sentiment for expanding that one piece of government, but on almost every other question, he has stayed the doctrinaire anti-government course he charted from the outset of his term.

Obviously, the events of Sept. 11 profoundly altered the Bush presidency. But from the vantage point of the end of his first year in office, what’s remarkable is how much of his presidency has stayed unchanged. Begin with the man himself: Before Sept. 11, he was clueless but affable; since Sept. 11, clueless but commanding. Given a Michael Gerson speech and enough prep time, the president can muster a quiet eloquence, but he has shown no capacity for genuine persuasiveness, a sine qua non for a leader of any war that encounters difficulties. He is fortunate not only that the Afghan conflict proceeded so smoothly, but also that British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped in to justify the war to other, more skeptical nations. He is fortunate, too, that his wartime counselors have struck just the right balance--Colin L. Powell’s yin and Donald H. Rumsfeld’s yang combining to form a sensible strategic vision. Indeed, much of Bush’s popular support is really support for the administration’s national-security apparat. If stories ever spread of Bush, as they did of Abraham Lincoln, that he had overruled his entire Cabinet on a matter of war and peace, the demand for Paxil would outstrip all supply.

As with the man, so with his policies. Bush took office promoting a surprisingly narrow conservative agenda--unilateralist in foreign policy, laissez-faire in domestic--and he’s largely stuck with it through war and recession. In his first months as president, Bush indicated he’d repudiate the Kyoto accord on global warming, the bioterrorism treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile pact. Then, just as longtime allies were despairing of any U.S. involvement in global initiatives, the events of Sept. 11 forced Bush to assemble a broad international coalition to wage the war. For the past few months, his administration did that with considerable skill, but it’s hard to envision that coalition sticking together through a long struggle against terrorism when the U.S. spurns its allies at every other turn.

On domestic policy, the Bush administration has proved itself a one-trick pony--the trick being tax cuts for the rich. Bush took office as if he were Ronald Reagan in 1981, treating his victory margin of negative 540,000 votes as though it were a mandate to roll back government. Initially, he argued that the surpluses the government was running should be spent not for schools and health care but for tax cuts to the rich--and, with the aid of centrist Democrats in both houses of Congress, he got his cuts enacted. Then, with recession looming and to counter the economic shock of war, he argued that what the nation needed was--drum roll, please--more tax cuts for the rich and for corporations that had been cruelly forced to pay a minimum tax over the preceding 15 years. Since most of those cuts wouldn’t take effect for several years, the stimulative effect of this legislation seemed nonexistent, so much so that this time, even the most credulous centrist Democrats refused to go along. Indeed, by year’s end, most of them had concluded that the goal of the Bush White House--as it had been of Reagan’s--was to create federal deficits that would force the shrinkage of the federal government. With the nation in recession, and with the number of medically uninsured Americans again on the rise, this was a policy that only a Southern conservative could love. But, then, Southern conservatives firmly control the Republican Party at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

For all of Bush’s popularity, 2001 was not a bad year politically for the Democrats. In November’s two off-year elections, Democrats retook the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, an outcome so dismal for the GOP that the White House forced the ouster of the party chairman. The ongoing shift of socially moderate suburbs to the Democratic column, apparent throughout the 1990s, continued apace.

The political clouds for the Democrats in 2001, ironically, appeared in places where they had overwhelming majorities. In America’s two mega-cities, New York and Los Angeles, progressive candidates for mayor had their candidacies come unstuck as a result of racial tensions within the Democratic coalition. In L.A., former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa found it impossible to assemble a majority coalition without African American support. In New York, longtime liberal paladin Mark Green saw his effort blown apart by racial tensions, and racial demagogues, within his party. In a broad sense, Democrats spent 2001 in a notably unsuccessful effort to expand their long-standing black-white-liberal urban coalition to include the burgeoning Latino population.

The imperative of winning more Latino support also loomed large in the Bush White House, where political consigliere Karl Rove foresaw grim prospects for the GOP, generally, and his boss, in particular, unless Latinos could be persuaded to vote Republican in greater numbers. It was Rove who drove the administration’s most important political initiative--its effort to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, in hopes of boosting its Latino support. This initiative, however, was one more casualty of Sept. 11, which rendered border security an immediate necessity that thwarted the prospects for quick action on immigration reform.

An even more sobering turn for Republican prospects in 2001--and more sobering still for the nation--was the recession. Plainly slowing in spring and summer, the economy revved into reverse right after the September attacks. What had been a dot-com bust and a decline in manufacturing suddenly expanded to a range of service industries, travel and tourism most of all. More ominous still, the downturn was global: Both Europe and Japan were in recession, too, by year’s end. And while a number of economists have predicted the downturn will be brief, not one has identified a plausible engine for a robust recovery. No sector seems capable of generating the kind of growth that the U.S. experienced in the late 1990s, and absent the full-employment economy that we experienced for so tantalizingly brief a time, the real gains made by the poor in the last few years seem certain to be lost.

Considering that the chief contribution of the Bush White House to the nation’s economic well-being was an upper-bracket tax cut that helped plunge the budget into the red while doing nothing to avert a recession, the administration has been remarkably unchastened in inflicting its economic vision on the rest of the world. No nation, for instance, adhered more slavishly to American conservatives’ model for a developing economy than Argentina, which pegged its currency to the dollar, sold off its major enterprises to foreign investors, held wages down and cut social spending to the bone. (For that matter, no Latin American nation was a more faithful political ally: Even now, Argentina plans to send troops to Afghanistan.) For its troubles, we rewarded the Argentines by having our henchmen at the International Monetary Fund dictate deeper and deeper cuts in their safety net, until finally, last week, that net gave way, and the elected government with it. In the end, all that mattered to our government was the repayment of foreign debt--not the stability of our ally, nor the sovereignty of its democratic government. (And Argentina has suspended its debt payments.)

Even in a year when we have built a global coalition to defend the values of an open society against the hatreds of a closed one, our global vision remains sadly deficient. We have, in fact, presented a bewildering array of faces to the world during the past year. The actual conduct of our war, perversely, has shown us at our most humane and sensitive to the needs of other nations and peoples. Our statecraft--from our calamitous noninvolvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to our rejection of a range of crucial treaties--has shown us to be a capricious hegemon, uneasy with the very idea of global responsibilities. Our economics have shown us at our most doctrinaire and parochial--champions of financial institutions equally indifferent to human rights in China and political self-determination in Argentina.

This year has seen the American people suffer a fearful shock and come together to affirm both their nationhood and a common set of values--above all, tolerance and openness, the pillars of a modern democratic society. Those are the values for which we fought and won a war. In our other dealings with the world, we would do well not to leave them behind on the battlefield.

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Harold Meyerson is executive editor of The American Prospect and political editor of the LA Weekly.