There are many fights to be had and there still needs to be one with those who are still asleep, an intervention of sorts, remembering all the while that they are the way they are because of their fear that shame does not let them admit they have.

There is still hope as long as some remain with eyes wide open and are willing to fight.

The conscience that was present during the Viet Nam war has not seen the light of day. We have destroyed a culture, one of the oldest surviving civilizations on a planet. Our collective justification for doing so precludes any awareness of the needlessness of our actions and how little relationship they bear to anything that happened to us on 9-11.

There is a lot of shame involve in being afraid and it is not necessarily excorcised by venting the nation’s destructive forces in ways that leave doubts as to whether our actions are making us safer. The only therapy coming from Bush is that we must remain afraid.

For myself, I see no other way to snap out of the trance except to recognize the failure of leadership since 9-11 and the true source of our fear, then let them know that they cannot make us afraid any longer.

I must buy the Slotkin book. I have found nothing since 9-11 that resonates quite as much as the quote at the top of this article. What will it take for people to admit that giving peace a try might actually make us safer?

I probably should’ve just said “racist exceptionalism”; I was responding less to what you were saying than to my own assumption that the rage unleashed via 9.11 would not have been the same if we were attacked by terrorists of European extraction.

“[She] sees [her] own country as so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion, and yet [she] feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world . . . cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed. . . . While [she] naturally does not not like [our opponent's ideology], what distinguishes [her] from the rest of us who also dislike it is that she shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to, such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-a-vis [our opponent]. [She] would much rather concern herself with the domestic scene . . .” – Richard Hofstadter, “The Psuedo-Conservative Revolt – 1954″ (in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1967)

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Faludi had a fascinating op-ed in the Times a few days ago, America’s Guardian Myths, where she touches on these themes, focusing on how colonial mythic reactions to decades of bloody conflict – starting with King Philip’s War/Metacom’s Rebellion – is echoed in our response to 9/11. I’ll just mention two things:

- Mary Beth Norton’s argument (In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692) that the trauma of the late 17th C. Indian Wars made possible our archetypal witch hunt – a disturbing possible parallel with today that others have already noted ;

More of Slotkin’s theme of mythic “regeneration through violence” – I’m in a hurry, let me just link to an (not very good) old post of mine (scroll down to Nov. 26).

That is your mistake and the mistake of many progressive types: blame the leaders but leave the common people out of it (the poor dears!). The public just did not stop to think after 9/11, and that is unforgivable.

And that attitude is a big reason progressivism became marginalized and the Right took over.

In my experience Americans are pretty smart about figuring things out when they understand what’s going on, especially about matters with which they’ve had personal experience. However, when something happens that is completely out of the blue, as 9/11 was, and especially when it involves stuff going on outside our borders, Americans need honest leaders who will help them understand what happened and put it into context. Instead, we had Bush, and we had a pack of far-Right xenophobes dominating mass media and bringing out the worst in people.

Any ideas anyone?

As moonbat says, I’ve written about this a lot; see, for example, here. It’s pretty clear to me what happened. Very briefly, the old New Deal coalition that had been the base of the Democratic Party broke apart in the early 1970s under pressure from the antiwar movement and the New Left. But the New Left took the position that part politics was uncool and never moved in to replace the New Deal coalition. So the Democratic Party was orphaned, in a sense. Progressive activism splintered into “identity politics” and single-issue activist groups, which by the 1980s had fallen into a pattern of competing with each other.

In the meanwhile, also in the 1970s, some far-Right billionaires began to build the infrastructure of think tanks and media that came to dominate mass media and politics. While progressivism was splintering, the Right was building a huge coalition with a well-funded infrastructure to get its message across.

Regarding “we fought a war on poverty and poverty won,” note that this was essentially a white main telling other whites that “we’re not going to throw your tax dollars at inner city blacks any more.” Racism drove a lot of whites out of the Dem party in the 1960s and 1970s, and the GOP scooped them up.

I hadn’t noticed that I said anything about racism, although I believe the one demographic group who never gave Bush a majority approval is African Americans. But Faludi’s theme is much more about sexism than racism. It’s about 90 percent about sexism, actually.

Part of the the problem, I think, is that no social or artistic or political leaders in opposition to the neocons have offered a simple and coherent alternative narrative– and unfortunately it seems that large numbers of people need some kind of replacement schema.

Yep, I hear you on that.

Part of the the problem, I think, is that no social or artistic or political leaders in opposition to the neocons have offered a simple and coherent alternative narrative– and unfortunately it seems that large numbers of people need some kind of replacement schema.

In 2004 Kerry essentially said he’d be just like dubya, just somewhat less so– better management of bad policies, etc.. I’d argue the level of discontent people felt with the incumbent and the war is why Kerry didn’t lose by 15 or 20 points with as lame a message as he offered. Although both Obama and HRC have a better presentational style than Kerry, so far I don’t see either one of them offering anything beyond focus-grouped platitudes.

If you look at the enormous, unfocused discontent that so many Americans feel today, I’d say the time is particularly ripe for someone to come along and articulate a positive yet resolutely post-imperial future for the US. It’s just too bad most of the democrats are scared sh**less of taking on such a mantle.

I would only add that terrorism isn’t anything that is new or unique to the United States. Londoners of the 80s got used to an occasional bomb from the IRA and just considered it a risk of living. If we had a real President (and not Curious George) they would have again put terrorism in perspective by talking about other models that other countries have used to defend themselves – a real president would have utilized global good will and gotten help from the rest of the world.

But, alas, we live with our Curious George … (weeping)…