The Terror Dream And Counterfactuals
First of all, whatever the merits of The Terror Dream and Michicko Kakatuni’s scathing review, would it hurt TPM Cafe so much to invite someone to the bookclub who doesn’t write a post saying, essentially “Oh, Faludi, you’re just so right, allow me to go on for the next 1000 words celebrating your rightness”? That’s just boring for us readers. But let’s get on to the substance. It’s all below the fold.
First of all, let me note that I haven’t read Faludi’s book, so take what I say with the requisite grains of salt. I have, however, read a bunch of reviews and the entirety of the Book Club. To make things cleaerer, here’s Faludi’s statement of her thesis:
I began to suspect that our response to 9/11 was intended in large part not to defend us against the actual threat but to repair a cherished American myth that the attacks had damaged. And this myth of American invincibility was indeed rooted in our frontier past.
My initial problem with Faludi’s central argument is that it is non falsifiable. How does someone who supported the war in Iraq, say Peter Beinart or Paul Wolfowitz, prove that they weren’t just covering up their own feelings of insecurity? How can anyone disprove that “our response to 9/11 was intended in large part not to defend us against the actual threat but to repair a cherished American myth that the attacks had damaged.”? But talking about falsifiability isn’t really all that useful when dealing with a thesis that attempts to explain the aggregate of actions by different cultural and political actors by pointing to a common “narrative” or particular insecurity that is the root cause of all these actions.
While Faludi is certainly correct that much of the post 9/11 cultural and political rhetoric seemed to follow the predictable script of us being penetrated by some dark, inscrutable other and subsequently lashing out to cover up our shame at being attacked, her theory can’t explain particular actions. Especially the Iraq War. The War in Iraq was a disaster that can not be explained simply by pointing to a narrative or script that dates back to the Puritan colonies. The jingoistic reaction to the attack could have easily been directed towards Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia or any number of Middle Easter countries — but we chose Iraq? Why? This is where Faludi’s thesis begins to lose its explanatory power — because the war in Iraq was being thought up and advocated for well before 9/11. The PNAC letter was written in 1998 and the neocon intellectual and policy foundations for war with Iraq were in place before the attacks.
Despite Stephen Ducat’s endorsement of the Frankfrut School approach to politics, we can point to the actions of a few individuals that set the stage for our grievously bad policy following 9/11. Ducat says:
On the part of some on the left, however, the challenge has been of a completely different nature. The work of the Frankfurt School, and more contemporaneously, that of George Lakoff, Thomas Frank, and Drew Westen notwithstanding, a surprising number of progressives are still embedded in the naïve rationalism that has plagued liberals and Marxists for generations. Many still hold the assumption that people make voting and other political decisions based primarily on a reasoned assessment of their economic self-interest and the objective merits of policy proposals. And, as this thinking goes, if the public fails to do so, it is because they simply lack access to the facts. The centrality of emotion, metaphor, fantasy and the phantasmagoric eruptions of the unconscious are either ignored or treated with sneering derision
Ducat and Faludi would tell us that our jingoistic reaction to 9/11 and the Iraq War were inevitable outcomes — because that’s how Americans from as far back as Puritan times respond to attacks. For Ducat, electoral or policy analysis is secondary to discussing the “phtasmagoric eruptions” that actually govern American political life. I pose this question to Faludi and Ducat: what if the Florida recount had turned out differently and Al Gore was the president on 9/11> Would we have invaded Iraq, engaged in this ridiculous “for us or against us” rhetoric, closed in on the world and pursued a policy of reckless unilateral militiarism? No, we wouldn’t. But in Faludi and Ducat’s world, where symbolism, narratives and deep psychological drives govern all political behavior, a Gore administration wouldn’t have responded much differently. If the type of narrative that Faludi describes is so deeply embedded into our national consciousness, who the president is simply doesn’t matter, our reactions are literally already narrated for us.
Ultimately, this type of political analysis denies our agency and blinds us to the more immediate, tangible roots of our current situation. The War in Iraq wasn’t inevitable, having such a demented response to a terrorist attack needn’t always occur. We can hold individuals responsible for certain policy choices, and the public responsible for enabling those individuals.
