The Age of Conflict

...So we have new arguments...

...What the Bush administration is now presenting, and what the public seems to want, is Rudy Giuliani-ism on a global scale...

...On the other hand, democracies tend to become patriotic during wartime, if history is any guide, and this will drive an even deeper wedge between regular Americans and the intellectual class...

...The war ended with a grand march by the Union armies through Washington, an event that symbolized America's emergence as a unified nation and a superpower in the making...

...For these thinkers, virtue inheres in the powerless...

...And the ensuing war will mean that the next few years will not only feel different from the last few...

...The conservatives who fear that the United States won't take out Saddam are national security conservatives...

...He's not conservative on the social issues...

...the culture was homogeneous, shallow and boring...

...The institutions that fight for us and defend us against disorder—the military, the FBI, the CIA—will seem more important and more admirable...

...By doing this, Giuliani restored order, so that New Yorkers could go out and live whatever sorts of lives they wanted to lead...

...Do we give higher priority to destroying all terrorist states, or to preserving our alliances...

...All around the world there were people casting off old systems so they could embrace a future of peace and prosperity...

...In books like One Nation, After All and Moral Freedom, Wolfe called the prevailing ethos "small scale morality...

...During the Cold War, Reinhold Niebuhr was a major intellectual figure...

...Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control...

...George W. Bush's Washington was bound to be different from Bill Clinton's...

...Meanwhile, all across the political spectrum, interest in public life waned, along with the percentage of adults who bothered to vote...

...Looking back, the striking thing about the 1990s Zeitgeist was the presumption of harmony...

...We have traded the anxieties of affluence for the real fears of war...

...It will constitute a hinge moment in American history...

...They want power themselves and do not object to the central institutions of government, even the military, exercising power on our behalf...

...Are there liberals still intrigued by the disease of "affluenza" or the menace of corporate branding...

...The terrorists are a virulent subset of a much larger group of anti-capitalists, one that includes many politicians, bureaucrats, writers, media types, academics, entertainers, trade unionists and, at times, church leaders...

...He is reasserting authority to show that under Pax Americana, the world is governable...

...It opened with this sentence: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me...

...To reach this graduate-school level of sophistication, you have to have passed through elementary courses in moral reasoning...

...first you see a black face staring left, then suddenly your perception changes and you see a white face staring right...

...Be moderate in your beliefs, and tolerant toward people who have other beliefs...

...No one can predict the political and cultural consequences of a war, any more than the course of the war itself...

...We will begin to see ourselves against the backdrop of the Taliban...

...they will feel dramatically different...

...The people who try to explain events via economic reasoning begin to look silly...

...She was the quintessential columnist of the 1990s, brilliantly treating politics as a sitcom...

...He simply went after the bad guys and the actual things they did to create disorder...

...right-wing talk radio dwelt on the atrocities committed by the FBI, the DEA, and other agencies at places like Ruby Ridge and Waco...

...They worry that we will be half-hearted and never really tackle our problems...

...But history never repeats itself neatly...

...Foxes, by contrast, believe you have to move cleverly and subtly...

...Americans have been reminded that, despite what the multiculturalists have been preaching, not all cultures are wonderfully equal hues in the great rainbow of humanity...

...As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, "Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct...

...Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding...

...Can anybody imagine why we cared about Inside.com...

...Moreover, we will see power migrate from the states and Capitol Hill to the White House...

...This is a moral code for people who are not threatened by any hostile belief system, who don't think it is worth it to stir up unpleasantness...

...For example, commercial life seems less important than public life, and economic reasoning seems less germane than cultural analysis...

...He believed the United States should forcefully defend freedom and destroy its enemies...

...Literary critic Paul Fussell, a great student of American culture in times of war, wrote a book, Wartime, on the cultural effects of World War II...

...In the first place, we will probably become more conscious of our American-ness...

...Academics analyzed the twilight of national sovereignty...

...But September 11 brought the 1990s to a close all at once...

...Evil exists...

...Some national cultures, the ones that have inherited certain ideas—about freedom and democracy, the limits of the political claims of religion, the importance of tolerance and dissent—are more humane than other civilizations, which reject those ideas...

...The barbarians at the gates are more numerous than you thought...

...At the start of the Civil War, nobody could have foreseen how the war would alter the domestic political culture, producing a raft of legislation ranging from the Homestead Act to the transcontinental railway to currency reform...

...The weak are sanctified, not least because they are voiceless and allegedly need academics to give them voices...

...These outgroup leftists dislike the Taliban, but to ally themselves with American power would be to annihilate everything they have stood for and the role they have assigned themselves in society...

...Can anybody relive the excitement that greeted the release of Windows 95...

...It's interesting that the people who are lions on foreign policy also tend to be lions on domestic policy, while the foxes are fox-like both abroad and at home...

...Garreau interviewed psychologists who study "figure/ground" reversal...

...Obviously nobody knows what the future years will feel like, but we do know that the next decade will have a central feature that was lacking in the last one: The next few years will be defined by conflict...

...For that matter, can anyone read Maureen Dowd without wincing...

...When life or death fighting is going on, it's hard to think of Bill Gates or Jack Welch as particularly heroic...

...For Bush, the leader of the free world, the issue is terrorism, not street crime...

...Anti-establishmentarianism on the right comes in libertarian and populist forms...

...An easy cynicism settled across the land, as more people came to believe that national politics didn't really matter...

...Defense spending was drastically cut, by Republicans as well as Democrats, because there didn't seem to be any clear and present danger to justify huge budgets...

...He seeks to clear the domestic front so he can focus on the fight against terror...

...But let's not sacrifice our freedoms because the FBI and CIA want more power," Norquist told the Boston Globe...

...Shocked out of the illusion of self-reliance, most of us realize that we, as individuals, simply cannot protect ourselves...

...What struck him at that moment of danger was that it really does matter whether you are English or German...

...As criticism of our war effort grows in Europe, in hostile Arab countries, and in two-faced countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which dislike our principles but love our dollars, Americans will have to articulate a defense of our national principles and practices...

...Giuliani is not even particularly interested in the general moral fabric of the city...

...Human beings are flawed creatures capable of monstrosity...

...That would mean trouble for faith-based initiatives and religion in the public square...

...Osama bin Laden is not motivated by economic self-interest, and neither are our men and women who are risking their lives to defeat him...

...Difficulties, even tragedies, are inevitable...

...The Cold War was over, and while the ensuing wars—like those in Bosnia and Rwanda —were nettle-some, they were restricted to global backwaters...

...the next economic recovery was bound to have different growth sectors, a different personality...

...Neither was particularly knowledgeable about foreign affairs...

...If this conflict lasts as long as it is likely to last—as long as the president has warned us it will—it will reshape our culture and our politics...

...War isn't only, as Bourne said, the health of the state...

...He is the one rounding up the posse, forsaking social issues and other moral debates for a straightforward act of international prosecution...

...Do we give higher priority to cracking down on domestic terror or preserving civil liberties...

...What I heard as I talked to Americans," Wolfe wrote of his research, "was a distaste for conflict, a sense that ideas should never be taken so seriously that they lead people into uncivil, let alone violent, courses of action...

...Hold me accountable...

...What mattered instead, it seemed, were local affairs, community, intimate relations, and the construction of private paradises...

...Sitting on their campuses, they are powerless themselves, and have embraced a delicious, self-glorifying identity as the out-manned sages who alone can see through the veils of propaganda in which the powerful hide their oppressive schemes...

...The splits have been most spectacular on the left...

...It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority," Hamilton continued...

...This means you need to think in moral terms about force—and to be tough-minded...

...We don't like the bad guys either...

...Subjects that used to seem David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...He is a guy who sits around with his friends watching the Godfather movies and reciting the lines...

...They value free market reforms, but believe that right now other conservative agenda items should take a back seat to national security...

...It all depends on what they have in them...

...He has tried to reduce partisan conflict on the stimulus package...

...Here is the otherwise intelligent economist Steve Hanke, in Forbes, analyzing bin Laden: Don't make the mistake of interpreting the events of Sept...

...The greatest political effect of this period of conflict will probably be to relegit-imize central institutions...

...During the Cold War, we saw ourselves in contrast to the Soviet Union...

...Giuliani took over a city plagued by crime and apparently ungovernable...

...They stand with the victims of hegemony, patriarchy, colonialism, and all the other manifestations of central authority...

...We had probably entered a time of transition even before the September 11 attack...

...In an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, tolerance, and industrious-ness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory...

...To be more safe, [people] at length become willing to run the risk of being less free...

...We must exercise our power...

...The splits on the right have been quieter, but no less important...

...That realization is bound to have cultural effects...

...For them the main danger is appeasement...

...Its adherents have noticed that during wartime, the power of the state tends to expand...

...The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore...

...But now he too is engaged in the effort to restore order so that people can go about their lives...

...Then they have to make concessions...

...But we still have to act forcefully because our enemies are trying to destroy the basis of civilization: "We are drawn into an historic situation in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity" Niebuhr's prescription was humble hawkishness...

...We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting...

...11 purely in terms of terrorism and murder...

...Some people, and some nations, turn cowardly or barbaric...

...Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were elected president of the United States...

...There are other cultural effects...

...In these debates, so far, THE Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and the Washington Post have made the case for the lions...

...Liberals who work in politics—Democrats on Capitol Hill, liberal activists, academics who are interested in day-to-day politics— almost all support President Bush and the war effort...

...In that age of peace and prosperity, the top sitcom was Seinfeld, a show about nothing...

...Instead our political landscape will have a few intellectuals on the fringes, while the main argument unfolds—to borrow Machiavelli's terms—between the lions and the foxes...

...As we recoil from the Islamic extremists, we may be less willing to integrate religion into political life...

...We have moved from an age of peace to an age of conflict, and in times of conflict people are different...

...This skepticism applies not only to any new social programs that might emerge in this centralizing moment, but to proposals to strengthen the forces of law and order...

...Not all cultures are compatible...

...But now violence has come calling...

...He didn't stop to ponder the root causes of crime, or whether the '60s had sent America into irreversible decline...

...We will care a lot more about ends—winning the war—than we will about means...

...What changes after a hinge is our stories of ourselves," Joel Gar-reau wrote recently in the Washington Post, "Who we are, how we got that way, where we're headed and what makes us tick...

...He embraces every Democrat he can wrap his arms around...

...Both promised to be domestic-policy presidents...

...During the blitz in 1940, George Orwell sat in his bomb shelter and wrote an essay called "England Your England...

...For every regular Joe who follows the Humphrey Bogart path in Casablanca, from cynicism to idealism, there is an intellectual like Fussell, whose war experiences moved him from idealism to lifetime cynicism...

...The collapse of the dot-com economy already meant that Silicon Valley and the wonders of high technology were not going to hold the nation's attention during the next ten years the way they did during the last ten...

...Since we can't defend ourselves as individuals against terrorism, we have to rely on the institutions of government: the armed forces, the FBI, the CIA, the CDC, and so on...

...No longer the compassionate conservative, he has, with impressive decisiveness, turned himself into a fighting conservative...

...We will be influenced by dark passions...

...Lions believe in the aggressive use of power...

...Moreover, the cost-benefit analysis dear to economists doesn't really explain much in times of war...

...This creates rifts on both left and right, because both movements contain anti-establishment elements hostile to any effort to relegitimize central authorities...

...It may truly be a strange new world...

...Life in times of war and recession reminds us of certain hard truths that were easy to ignore during the decade of peace and prosperity...

...Peace seemed in the offing in Northern Ireland and, thanks to the Oslo process, in the Middle East...

...It's impossible to know if the renewed confidence in government that we already see will translate into a new sort of big government activism, as some liberals are predicting...

...There is certainly precedent for that, as writers like Robert Nisbet (in The Present Age) and Robert Higgs (in Crisis and Leviathan) have shown...

...The Internet, Microsoft ads reminded us, fostered communication and global harmony...

...We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks...

...Now it is no longer possible to live so comfortably in one's own private paradise...

...The fundamental arguments won't be over economic or social issues, they will be over how to wield power—whether to use American power aggressively or circumspectly...

...Chinese Communists were supposedly being domesticated by the balm of capitalist success...

...To preserve order, good people must exercise power over destructive people...

...Wars are nasty things: They make governments grow," Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform told the Washington Post...

...Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained," Lincoln declared in his Second Inaugural...

...It will be interesting to see whether we Americans, who sometimes seem unsure of even the fundamental moral categories, can educate ourselves sufficiently to engage in the kind of moral reasoning that Niebuhr did...

...He and his police commissioners worked aggressively to arrest people who broke the law...

...Catton was writing about the Civil War, but his observation applies to most wars, and it will likely apply to the war to which we are now committed...

...On balance, George W. Bush is behaving more like a national security conservative (without, of course, committing himself on Iraq...

...Many literary and academic liberals, on the other hand, have built a whole moral system around powerless-ness...

...The economic slowdown had already brought one boom to an end...

...That means that it's no longer sufficient to deconstruct ideas and texts and signifiers...

...We are now only beginning to surrender some freedoms, but we will trade in more, and willingly...

...The earnest conformity that does prevail in wartime drives intellectuals—who like to think of themselves as witty, skeptical, iconoclastic dissidents—batty...

...Private life requires public protection...

...The New York Times, Robert Novak, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Barney Frank, and Jack Kemp have supported the foxes...

...What had been central suddenly has become peripheral...

...Can anybody get interested in think tank reports on Social Security lockboxes or charitable choice...

...Back then, we faced a godless foe...

...We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous action to preserve our civilization," Niebuhr wrote...

...now we are facing a god-crazed foe...

...That debate in itself will shape American culture...

...riveting will seem stale...

...The libertarian, anti-government, "leave us alone" conservatives, such as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, believe Bush should use his popularity to push through capital gains tax reductions and the like...

...You have to be able to construct hard principles so you can move from one idea to the next, because when you are faced with the problem of repelling evil, you absolutely must be able to reach a conclusion on serious moral issues...

...Orwell went on to describe what it meant to be English...

...What had been ignorable has suddenly become central," Garreau writes...

...Like Orwell, Americans are once again becoming aware of themselves as a nationality, not just as members of some ethnic community or globalized Internet chat group...

...It has become clear that we are living in a world in which hundreds of millions of people hate us, and some small percentage of them want to destroy us...

...That's what you get when you stare at one of those drawings of two heads facing each other in profile...

...To understand such actions, you need to study history, religion, and ethics...

...The tragedy of the conflict with communism, he argued, was that, "though confident of its virtue, [America] must yet hold atomic bombs ready for use so as to prevent a possible world conflagration...

...Since September 11, conservatives have broken down into two camps: those who fear that Bush will go squishy on Iraq, and those who fear that he will go squishy on capital gains...

...They believe that national security arguments should not be used to strengthen the hand of Washington...

...Neither had performed much in the way of military service...

...The army tried to recruit volunteers by emphasizing its educational benefits, with narcissistic slogans like "An Army of One...

...He would not even think of raising divisive social issues...

...Other people, and other nations, become heroic, brave, and steadfast...

...His approach was: Every morning you strap on your armor and you go out to battle the evil ones...

...We have to do so while realizing that we will not be capable of perfect disinterestedness when deciding which actions are just...

...It's more important to be feared than loved...

...Now it is not possible to ignore foreign affairs, because foreign affairs have not ignored us...

...But the most important cultural effect of conflict is that it breeds a certain bloody-mindedness or, to put it more grandly, a tragic view of life...

...When on rare occasions people talked about bitter conflict, they usually meant the fights they were having with their kitchen renovators...

...You maneuver situations so as to get your rivals in the place where you want them to be...

...But while doing so, it should seek forgiveness for the horrible things it might have to do in a worthy cause...

...Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates...

...Instead, he's interested in preventing acts of disorder...

...Meanwhile, technology was building bridges across cultures...

...The central difference is that the political liberals are comfortable with power...

...What we may end up with, therefore, is an America in which the old split between hawks and doves is no longer relevant...

...They champion the outgroups...

...They don't think it's worth getting into a big fight over reducing taxes at a moment of national crisis...

...In 1952, he wrote The Irony of American History...

...But many academic and literary leftists, ranging from Eric Foner to Susan Sontag to Noam Chomsky, have been sour, critical, and contemptuous of America's response to September 11...

...The nation is a nursemaid that breeds certain values and a certain ethos...

...They go to extremes...

...Can anybody remember what was so buzz-worthy about Tina Brown...

...Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very soil in which society's roots are nourished...

...Commerce and communications seemed much more important than politics...

...It's the gutcheck of the nation...

...Conservatives, of all people, felt so safe that they became suspicious of the forces of law and order...

...The irony of our history, he continued, is that we are an idealistic nation that dreams of creating a world of pure virtue, yet in defeating our enemies we sometimes have to act in ways that are not pure...

...They worry that America will act unilaterally and tear its coalition and trample upon our own freedoms...

...Conservative activists were heard referring to police as "bureaucrats with badges...

...They detest the domestic bipartisanship that Bush has cultivated on Capitol Hill...

...Historians who want to grasp the style of morality that prevailed in the 1990s should go back to the work of sociologist Alan Wolfe...

...And it's possible to speculate about what that means...

...Books appeared with titles like All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization...

...Surveying the culture of that period, he endorsed the view of historian Eileen Sullivan, who wrote, "There was no room in this war culture for individual opinions or personalities, no freedom of dissent or approval...

...But it does seem clear that we have moved out of one political and cultural moment and into another...

...His instinct was always: Give me authority...

...Now Americans are being killed simply because they are Americans...

...But she has been struggling to adapt to an era in which politics really matters...

...War, Randolph Bourne observed in 1917, "is the health of the state...

...They grow sour, and alienated from mainstream life...