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Forlorn Hope: Lost Dreams of American Renewal

Richard Seymour

Excerpt from The Liberal Defence of Murder, Verso, 2008

American liberals who supported the war on terror have done so on ostensibly humanitarianand democratic grounds. Yet, underlying those soothing bromides was a fantasy ofAmerican regeneration through violence. Commentators as diverse as Frank Rich, DavidBrooks and George Packer had contended in the wake of that an era of decadence andfrivolousness had just drawn to a close. Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Timesthattolerance for people with dangerous ideas seems frivolous compared with the need to stopthem. Her new sense of seriousness, as she chose to call it, allowed her to understand theurgent patriotism of Stephen Spielbergs Band of Brothers. The invocation of Americans ina collective struggle with fascism was not incidental: Spielbergs focus on World War II, seenby many as a good liberal war, had arguably been an effort to overcome the trauma of

Vietnam and resuscitate liberal nationalism. Shulevitz continued: Somewhere deep in myheart, I have always longed for a catastrophe like the present one, as it would produce acollective purpose comparable with World War II or the Velvet Revolution. It would sweepaside all triviality, such as petty political squabbling and enervating celebrity gossip . An op-ed in the Washington Post mused that the hijackers decided to attack the symbols ofAmerican empire, financial domination, military hegemony, strangely ugly buildings housingthe people who rule a strangely ugly world despite our soft hearts. It was this softness, thefailure to make this strangely ugly world beautiful, that had brought about such bloodyconsequences in Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon and Somalia.

On the day that the attack on Afghanistan began, former New York Timeseditor James Atlastold the papers readers that [o]ur great American empire seems bound to crumble at some

point and that the end of Western civilization has become a possibility against which theneed to fight terrorism is being framed, as Roosevelt and Churchill framed the need to fightHitler. The alarming ease with which Western civilization was conflated with the Americanempire was matched only by the implication that nineteen hijackers from a smalltransnational network of jihadis represent a civilizational challenge, an existential threatcomparable with the Third Reich. But this was precisely the argument of liberalinterventionists. Thus, the polemics of Paul Berman, shorn of the language of empire,nonetheless held that both Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Baath regime updated the totalitarianchallenge to liberalism that had been represented by Nazism and Stalinism. For Ignatieff,the war on terror was an older contest between an empire whose grace notes were freemarkets and democracy, and barbarians. And for Christopher Hitchens, nothing less wasat stake than secular democracy, under threat from Islamic fascism. This challenge

demanded both a censorious moral clarity and support for extraordinary measures to abatethe threat.

Anatol Lieven, in his study of American nationalism, compared the post-9/11 climate in theUnited States to the Spirit of 1914 that prevailed across Europe on the outbreak of WorldWar I. It is a perceptive comparison. As Domenico Losurdo illustrates in his Heidegger andthe Ideology of War, that era also generated a striking martial discourse (Kriegsideologie),which insisted on civilizational explanations for war. It was then mainly thinkers of theGerman right who elaborated the discourse. Max Weber, though politically liberal, arguedthat the war was not about profit, but about German existence, destiny and honour. Someeven saw it as a religious and holy war, a Glaubenswieg. Then, too, it was hoped that warwould restore social solidarity, and authenticity to life. The existentialist philosopher Edmund

Husserl explained: The belief that ones death signifies a voluntary sacrifice, bestows

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sublime dignity and elevates the individuals suffering to a sphere which is beyond eachindividuality. We can no longer live as private people.

Nazism inherited Kriegsideologie, and this was reported and experienced by several of thoseclosest to the regime as a remake of the wonderful, communal experience of 1914. InPhilosophie (1932), Karl Jaspers exalted the camaraderie that is created in war [and that]

becomes unconditional loyalty. I would betray myself if I betrayed others, if I wasntdetermined to unconditionally accept my people, my parents, and my love, since it is to themthat I owe myself. (Jaspers, though a nationalist and political elitist like Max Weber, was nota biological racist, and his Jewish wife would fall foul of Nazi race laws). Heidegger arguedthat [w]ar and the camaraderie of the front seem to provide the solution to the problem ofcreating an organic community by starting from that which is most irreducibly individual, thatis, death and courage in the face of death. For him, the much-coveted life of bourgeoispeace was boring, senile, and, though contemplatable, was not possible.

These are family resemblances, rather than linear continuities. The emergence ofcommunism as a clear and present danger to nation-states, and the post-war conflagrationsof class conflict, sharpened the anti-materialism of European rightists who were already

critical of humanism, internationalism and the inauthenticity of commercial society. Theirdilemma was different, and their animus was directed against socialist ideologies that barelyregister in todays United States. Yet, some patterns suggest themselves. The recurringthemes of Kriegsideologie were community, danger and death. The community is the nation(or civilization) in existential peril; danger enforces a rigorous moral clarity and heightensones appreciation of fellow citizens; death is what they must experience so that we do not.

The hope that a nationhood retooled for war would restore collective purpose proved to beforlorn. The fixtures of American life, from celebrity gossip to school shootings, did notevaporate. By 2003, Dissentmagazine complained that a larger, collective self-re-evaluationdid not take place in the wake of September 11, 2001 not as regards foreign policy, butrather the domestic culture that had formed during the orgiastic preceding decade. Anangry New Yorkerarticle would later mourn the dissipation of simple solidarity alongside thesquandering of international goodwill by the Bush administration. Yet, it was through thatdream that the barbarian virtues of the early-twentieth-century German right infused thelingua franca of American imperialism.