The question of why it has populist resonance is also interesting, and here Thomas Frank’s diagnosis is pretty sound even if his solution is off. That kind of dualism resonates well in lower middle-class and working-class households in the US who feel consistently as if they’ve been abused by history in the last thirty years–not necessarily hurt by a specific government action or a specific social class that they can locate in their own small communities but by people “out there” somewhere, by forces “out there”. For folks in that situation, saying that history is driving by a struggle between the elect and the forces of evil is very appealing–it both explains why they have found their economic and social existence squeezed from all sides, and promises them a reversal of fortune if only they will endorse a struggle carried out on their behalf but far away from their own communities.

Concede for the moment that whatever the character of American power in the world before September 11th, 2001, it has since then been at least quasi-imperial in its nature, at least in Iraq and Afghanistan. How odd it is, then, that the conscious doctrine of the people making policy appears to be not “divide and conquer” but “unify all possible foes into a single unitary body”.

This is most interesting indeed. Yes, you’re right about this. And it indicates to me that, for all that talk about Iraqi oil, this war is not primarily economic. Sure, economic advantage is being secured, but its through the ordinary corruption and cronyism that pervades this administration. They didn’t need to wage a war to create opportunities of this sort.

No, I believe this war is quite different in character. It’s driven by a need to oppose. In effect, when the Evil Soviet Empire collapsed, the convenient target of lots of animus also collapsed. So where to focus that animus? It took THEM ten years to find an external target — after ramping up the war on drugs, and then going after Clinton — but they found one, “terrorism.”

I’ve got a longish piece over at The Valve that’s relevant here. It’s about identity formation and, in particular, about how some identities exist in opposition to other identities. In the middle of that piece I quote a statement made by Mario Cuomo, ex-governor of New York, in The New York Times Magazine (March 19, 1995):

The Second World War as the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let’s all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.