Right-wing Patriotism: What William Bennett Doesn't Understand
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
THE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington shocked and outraged most Americans. It is common to respond to what is shocking and unexpected by invoking familiar vocabularies...
...For although one cannot question the pervasiveness of the patriotic revival, political influence "was another matter...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political science at Indiana University, Bloomington...
...Those who have advocated on behalf of civil liberties, and those who have sought to exercise their civil liberties by challenging government policy, are not threatening American freedom...
...The central statement of this ideological position is William Bennett's Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism...
...But it is an ideological version, according to which those who question America's historical record or its role in the world or even the policies of its current government (the previous government is another thing entirely) thereby call into question their civic credentials...
...Indeed, we are often told that we fight against terrorism in order to make the world safe for freedom elsewhere...
...Most important, it undermines the ethos of a democratic society...
...DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 67 RIGHT -WING PATRIOTISM Such arrogance is not simply an affront to all citizens and the freedom they cherish...
...Fighting terrorism is necessary, but it is not sufficient...
...military response and U.S...
...For the exercise of democratic freedom is never more necessary than during times of crisis, and especially during times of war...
...Righteous anger and resolve had joined in support of our leaders, our armed forces, our country...
...Bennett seeks to use these truths to DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 65 RIGHT -WING PATRIOTISM advance a conservative agenda...
...Ordinary Americans understand this...
...They are also enemies of international law, human rights, and liberal universalism...
...Across the nation patriotic ardor burned bright...
...But it is politically dangerous...
...Democracy is not synonymous with high presidential approval ratings...
...It enacts an arrogance that borders on megalomania...
...The problem here is twofold...
...This makes Bennett's rancor all the more striking, and all the more objectionable...
...they must be clearly defined legally and monitored by independent judges...
...To be fair to Bennett, his version of America is not a chauvinistic one...
...And yet the central thesis of his book is that this "moral clarity" is not universally shared, and that those who remain unclear pose a danger to the country...
...Legalism is not a quibbling matter...
...Bennett's mission is to contest their dissenting predispositions and ideas, to limit the damage they have caused, and to defeat them...
...It is another to imagine that your fight is simply Right and that those who question it are simply Wrong...
...For them, the "real" problem was not al-Qaeda or even terrorism...
...To adopt the position I am advocating is not to defend moral relativism...
...For the first time in a long while there was a palpable, shared sense that this was indeed our country, and that it was a country worth fighting for...
...The first is, quite simply, an arrogant conflation of commitment to the U.S...
...Even though the national will has been "aroused," and "righteous anger" has spread, these educators and intellectuals "sow a truly widespread and debilitating confusion...
...Whether one agrees with everything they say or not, this bears constant repetition...
...And the antidote, too, remains the same: moral clarity and outrage sufficient to overpower any and all ambivalence...
...Similar themes have been articulated, in more refined but potentially more dangerous form, in a number of speeches by Lynne Cheney, and in a report put out by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni—an organization founded by Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman—entitled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America, and What Can Be Done About It...
...1. The difference between simple and constitutional patriotism: Bennett fails to consider what "love of country" means and what about one's country merits "love" or any special attachment...
...The basic themes of this conservative argument are easily summarized: whereas ordinary Americans are righteously indignant and angry about terrorism, liberal intellectuals and academics have so exalted critical reason that they are incapable of common sense...
...they are the preconditions of a well-functioning democracy...
...But all too often this project of "liberation" means nothing more than the exercise of American power in the world (the Bush administration's new planning document on national security in the twenty-first century takes this model to new heights of arrogance...
...George W. Bush may be a president who came to power under questionable circumstances and who promotes a political agenda that we oppose...
...2. The difference between parochial values and universal values: it is wholly appropriate for American citizens to respond to attacks on the United States as American citizens, to feel particularly threatened, and to believe that the state that acts in their name ought to respond in the name of their security and freedom...
...Many on the liberal left, myself included, are no less angry...
...Yes, the majority of Americans had achieved, or perhaps never entirely lost, moral clarity about our nation...
...It is correct to insist that terrorism is not simply a reflection of "deeper" maladies for which the United States is ultimately responsible...
...These are not dangers to democracy...
...But more significantly, Bennett's argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy...
...In The Death of Moral Outrage, Bennett presented the Clinton administration as an incarnation of everything that is RIGHT -WING PATRIOTISM hostile to American decency, and interpreted the failure of a sufficient number of intellectuals to share this view (it is an uncomfortable fact that most ordinary Americans also failed to share this view) as a sign of their essential moral turpitude...
...What Bennett fails to see is that the defense of freedom is inextricably bound up with its robust exercise...
...Equally important are the principles of just war, which have too often been dismissed by conservatives, and especially Pentagon officials, in recent public discussions...
...Democracy is a system of popular self-government based on the idea that no individual or group has a monopoly on the truth, and that a plurality of views must thrive and be allowed political voice in order for public policy to be legitimate and intelligent...
...This means that 68 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 we should care deeply and publicly about the requisites of a just war, and just as seriously about the requisites of a just peace...
...But such sacrifices must be carefully specified and publicly justified...
...Constitution and of democracy more generally...
...It is common to respond to what is shocking and unexpected by invoking familiar vocabularies and seeking the comfort of ideological certitudes...
...It is fighting effectively against terrorism and, more important, it is a way to realize the values that give meaning to the fight against terrorism...
...Rarely are the true implications of such a moral universalism taken seriously—which would mean taking seriously certain things that many self-proclaimed "patriots" have little concern for: international law, multilateral and global forms of governance, human rights, and responsible forms of globalization...
...It marginalizes exactly that which is most worthy of respect and commitment—the existence of constitutional government, the rule of law, the codification of civil liberties, and the practice of democratic dissent...
...It is another to figure them as enemies of the republic or of the people, and to call for days of "reckoning" to come...
...It is precisely because there is a real crisis and a real enemy that it is important to address these issues...
...For the result can be nothing other than bad policy and an inability to correct it...
...For he is not wrong when he wishes to criticize some of the "antiwar" arguments that have been advanced in the wake of 9/11...
...The exercise of freedom is to the democratic body politic what aerobic exercise is to the human body—what energizes it and what keeps it alive and flourishing...
...This is an incendiary charge, one that surely is as irresponsible as the most vitriolic anti-American statements...
...and while the response to terrorism requires moral clarity and courage, liberals promote ambivalence, doubt, and dissent, all signs of moral weakness in the face of evil...
...It is not simply an incitement to repression...
...Of course freedom matters," he might say...
...that's what makes democracy necessary...
...Those of us on the democratic left who have supported the fight against al-Qaeda understand this...
...they must be explained to, and overseen by, Congress...
...For forty years, leading educators and intellectuals had been saying and writing and teaching that the United States was no better and might even be worse than its enemies...
...and they must be as minimal and as temporary as possible...
...foreign policy neither explains the resort to terror nor mitigates its malevolence, that a U.S...
...Constitutional patriotism is a morally valid commitment...
...As a result, his book explains why he fights, but it fails to explain why many others fight, or why they should fight, and what they should be fighting for...
...The obvious failing of such an argument is that for the most part it is Bennett and his conservative colleagues, and not liberal intellectuals, who are using 9/11 as an occasion to attack their political adversaries...
...According to Bennett, cultural relativism and moral cowardice have "come to dominate virtually every one of our major cultural and educational institutions...
...But the underlying malady remains the same: the reticence or skepticism of liberal intellectuals...
...It involves more than elections— whether fairly tabulated or not—and the obligation of citizens to abide by the laws of those who have been elected...
...We have never expressed unqualified support for the Bush administration, or the way the war in Afghanistan has been fought, or the way the terrorist threat has been used to justify the abrogation of civil liberties or the promulgation of Manichean visions of struggle between Good and Evil...
...They are defending it...
...while Americans are rightly patriotic, liberals are either insidiously cosmopolitan or downright anti-American...
...This is because any war that is justifiable requires the unforced support of the nation's citizens...
...T T HE PEOPLE who planned and executed the attacks of 9/11, and who plan future attacks in the name of a militant Islamist ideology, are enemies of the United States...
...It is to defend the moral value of democracy and the moral priority of the practices that constitute a liberal democratic state...
...If you were you would focus your energy on the terrorist Evil and not on conservative writers like me...
...So freedom becomes a particular conception of "freedom" that glorifies America and condemns any skepticism about the glorification...
...But they are central parts of the infrastructure of democratic politics...
...But precisely because it is a war in defense of freedom, it must not be used as a pretext to limit freedom...
...They cannot be mandated by law...
...And would it last...
...But they are truths all the same...
...It is also a recipe for disaster...
...Bennett's answer to the first question: not sufficiently secure...
...Why can't you...
...Playing fast and loose with the danger of terrorism and the traumas of the nation, it casts moral guilt too widely, too vindictively...
...In Why We Fight the apparent source of evil has shifted—from Bill Clinton to Osama bin Laden...
...Working toward this goal is not "giving in" to terrorism...
...foreign policy more generally...
...Why We Fight catalogues the supposed deficiencies of the intelligentsia, defends the "moral clarity" of patriotic Americans currently rallying behind flag and president, and urges a vigorous "battle" against liberalism on behalf of America...
...What is needed, in short, is a moral clarity unknown to Bennett—the moral clarity of serious inquiry, liberal values, and a patriotism that is constitutional and robustly democratic...
...It can't be illegitimate to respond to such attacks...
...And his answer to the second: it will last only if it is defended against its principal enemies—not terrorists but American intellectuals and college professors...
...troops in harm's way...
...THE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington shocked and outraged most Americans...
...That is why we fight...
...The second is an even more serious assumption that to question the sufficiency or even the necessity of a military response is somehow to align oneself with the enemies of freedom...
...It obscures important differences and distinctions...
...Clearly, he is revolted by the disregard for human freedom signified by terrorism, and he rightly believes that the U.S...
...It is one thing to fight for freedom, and to defend this fight in a spirited way...
...What this means is that one can strongly disagree with others without vilifying them or castigating them as immoral or terroristic or "enemies of the people...
...They ought to be condemned, fought, and defeated...
...Bennett is not wrong to be angry about terrorist attacks...
...Indeed, in his outraged identification with supposedly yeoman virtues and his attacks against supposedly spineless intellectuals (Am I alone in noticing that most conservative anti-intellectual intellectuals, especially the male ones, protest the decline of "toughness" a little too much...
...In the fight against al-Qaeda and its allies, we are on the same side...
...Both combatants view their own moral standpoints as the only authentic moral standpoints...
...Echoing a litany of conservative complaints going back to Edmund Burke (if not Aristophanes), Bennett laments the decline of "sturdy" virtues and the spread of a critical spirit...
...r r ....0., civil liberties are not simply the valued and necessary rights of free individuals...
...In failing to understand this distinction, Bennett fails to understand why we fight...
...Most important, such sacrifices should never abridge core democratic values, especially freedom of expression and association and the right to due process of the law...
...Equally important is the project of creating a better world, a world that is more just and, because it is more just, is more secure and more peaceful...
...Saddam Hussein himself was recently "re-elected" in a landslide that would have made Stalin jealous...
...But insofar as constitutional patriotism is a loyalty to one's country based on the freedoms that are its historical achievement, this patriotism points beyond itself, to the value of those freedoms as such, and to a moral commitment to the idea that these freedoms are universal and ought to be extended to those, everywhere, currently being denied them...
...It would be easy to demonstrate that his book, and the spate of similar books and articles, is tendentious, unsubstantiated, and ideological, and that it exploits the current crisis for partisan advantage...
...For Bennett these critics of the United States are dangerous and immoral...
...Neither Bennett nor Bush is a terrorist, and the kind of overblown rhetoric to be found in some left quarters, according to which there is no difference between Bush (or Bennett) and Bin Laden (see the cover of Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms), is simply overblown rhetoric...
...Though this has been less noticed, American conservatives responded to 9/11 in a very similar way...
...s s UCH A moralization of politics is neither unintelligible nor illegal...
...The former communist "people's democracies," we may recall, had elected leaders...
...There seems to be little room in Bennett's account for such positions, which, on his view, fall far short of rallying around flag and President...
...But I think that it would be both too easy and unwise to respond in this way to Bennett...
...Bennett is a political adversary, but he is also a fellow citizen of a democratic state...
...This has been a standard refrain on the television talk show circuit, especially on Fox News (9/11 64 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 seems to have done for Fox what the Gulf War did for CNN and, long ago, the Iran hostage crisis for Nightline on ABC...
...All of those who truly "love" America, whatever their race or ethnicity RIGHT-WING PATRIOTISM or religion, are included...
...Bennett does a great disservice to the values that alone give meaning to the project of fighting terrorism...
...Such reactions were rightly criticized, in these pages and elsewhere, by those leftists who believed that the problem behind the 9/11 attacks is indeed terrorism, that the unfortunate record of U.S...
...Moral clarity requires that they be stated and acted upon...
...And although neither goes so far as literally to construct their adversary as an enemy to be fought by any means necessary, both figuratively construct the adversary in exactly that way...
...But beyond the exaltation of a mythical "America," many conservatives treated the 9/11 attacks as an occasion to revive the "culture wars" of the 1980s and to target the left, and liberalism more generally, as the real enemy...
...Bennett long ago established himself as an elite spokesperson for "civic virtue" and "common sense," a defender of ordinary sensibilities who at the same time speaks from a special vantage point as someone who is educated and in the know...
...It is one thing to disagree with others and even to organize politically against them...
...Neither is he wrong to want to define the "we" who support a fight against terrorism and to suggest our reasons...
...And it is inconsistent with the arrogant claim that only the Fuhrer or the Party or the Mullah or the President or the Attorney General or the Philosopher of Moral Rectitude knows the Truth, and that all those who disagree with him are wrong or, worse, Enemies of the People...
...It is at the heart of our system of government...
...And you would understand that at the moment of decision it is sometimes necessary to join ranks and put complaining aside and defend your country...
...Democracy is inconsistent with the official exploitation of fear and anxiety...
...For them, of course, the standard trope was not "America as imperial power" but "America as all that is noble and just and good in the world" (see Dinesh D'Souza's aptly titled What's So Great About America...
...But he is also the chief executive of the United States...
...Yet Bennett's rhetoric tends strongly—"resolutely" in his words— in this latter direction...
...For Bennett, the events of 9/11 were a defining moment when, after decades of sixtiesinspired skepticism and cynicism, Americans recovered their moral senses...
...They are its lifeblood...
...This is an impoverished and anti-intellectual conception of patriotism...
...Terrorism is a malevolent reality that must be fought as such...
...But it is possible to say this and also acknowledge that the way the world is organized matters, and the way others in the world view the United States and view liberalism matters too...
...Some sacrifices of liberty—regarding airport security, visa requirements, and perhaps even FBI surveillance of those reasonably deemed "terrorists"—may now be necessary in the name of security...
...But liberals such as you are not really serious about fighting...
...For the critics, Bennett is dangerous and immoral...
...Constitution and the American political system codify freedoms worth defending...
...But many Americans, even many American intellectuals, have supported a mili 66 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 tary response to al-Qaeda without signing on to the Bush administration's broader unilateralist vision, or its domestic restrictions, or even its reluctance to place U.S...
...The moral failing of Bennett's book, and of the discourse of post-9/11 anti-liberalism more generally, is that it doesn't do this...
...Democracy requires diversity, plurality, disagreement, and dissent...
...But in Bennett's discourse "freedom" becomes serious only when attacked by terrorists, and its defense is a way of fighting not only against terrorists but also against others who are not terrorists but who are presumptuous enough to disagree with Bennett...
...I can imagine Bennett's rejoinder...
...But for this very same reason we must be clear about who and what "the enemy" is, and isn't...
...At the same time, Bennett is a poor defender of the U.S...
...But we have nonetheless been supporters of the use of force against terror, and to that extent we have made common cause with conservatives such as Bennett...
...3. The difference between the moral and the political: conservatives such as Bennett are correct to insist on the importance of morality in politics...
...Bennett's book is the intellectual equivalent of declarations by President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that "you are either with us or against us...
...military response was necessary and just, and that only the United States can lead an effort to destroy terrorist networks that pose a general threat to any acceptable conception of civilized life...
...Indeed, within the boundaries of the law, there exists an extraordinary degree of latitude for the practice of such a politics, plenty of space for the harsh anti-liberalism of Bennett and for the equally harsh anti-liberalism of some antiwar activists and protesters...
...Few Americans, including Bennett, would be likely to deny this in principle...
...But how secure was it...
...A A LTHOUGH BENNETT'S version of "moral clarity" is insufficiently clear about many important things, three stand out...
...So it is hardly surprising that many on the American left responded in just such a way, recurring to the language of "anti-imperialism," "peace," and "global justice" to condemn the U.S...
...It was the system of global capitalism dominated by the United States...
...But he also seeks to "differentiate" social critics who "feed doubt," and thus promote " moral perversity," from ordinary Americans— and hold them to account...
...Freedom" becomes a rhetorical weapon in the battle against anyone who lacks Bennett's "moral clarity...
...This is the thrust of Bennett's book...
...Most American citizens have supported the war in Afghanistan because they believe that this war is intended to defend them and what they hold most dear...
...The premise of a democratic society is that the plurality of opinions is an RIGHT -WING PATRIOTISM ineliminable feature of the human condition...
...But public policy should not be driven by anger, and it should not be a means of seeking vengeance...
...Constitution and even to the American Republic with a loyalty to the ideas and agendas of Bush and Rumsfeld and their intellectual comrades in arms...
...A healthy skepticism toward what one stands for politically and a reluctance to demonize others with whom one shares a common political world are necessary features of our public life...
...It is precisely because of the moral priority of these practices that we must fight terrorist networks that threaten them...
...Unlike Burke, however, Bennett writes not in a time of revolution but when there exists no politically viable alternative to the status quo, and when intellectual incredulity about the possibility of such an alternative is pervasive...
...But this requires a kind of proportion and judiciousness that is noticeably absent from the conservative screeds...
...It should be a means of achieving justice by means of justice, to the fullest extent possible, even in times of war...
...DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 69...
...It is wholly appropriate to make strong moral judgments, and to put your politics in the service of such judgments...
...You can find it also in such recent best-sellers as Ann Coulter's Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right and Sean Hanitty's even more tendentious Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism...
...Bennett is the common person's intellectual, who refines what ordinary Americans supposedly think but also has sufficient intellectual gravitas to be able to expose the failings of the intellectual class...
...His latest book is The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
