“Ridiculous” was the word from the White House about the ruling declaring the clause unconstitutional. “Junk justice,” Governor Pataki said. “Just nuts,” Senator Daschle said. “Doesn’t make good sense to me,” Representative Gephardt said. There was on this point a genuinely bipartisan rush to act out the extent of the judicial insult, the affront to all Americans, the outrage to the memory of the heroes of September 11. After the June 2002 ruling, members of the House met on the Capitol steps to recite the Pledge — needless to say the “under God” version — while the Senate interrupted debate on a defense bill to pass, unanimously, a resolution condemning the Ninth Circuit decision.
These were, some of them, the same elected representatives who had been quick to locate certain upside aspects to September 11. The events could offer, it was almost immediately perceived, an entirely new frame in which to present school prayer and the constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. To the latter point, an Iowa congressman running unsuccessfully for the Senate, Greg Ganske, marked Flag Day by posting a reminder on his Web site that his opponent, Senator Tom Harkin, who had spent five years during the Vietnam War as a Navy pilot, had in 1995 opposed the flag burning amendment. “After the tragic events of September 11,” the posting read, “America has a renewed sense of patriotism and a renewed appreciation for our American flag. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.” To the school prayer point, according to The New York Times, a number of politicians were maximizing the moment by challenging restrictions on school prayer established by courts over the past four decades. “Post-September 11,” the Times was told by Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, “the secularists are going to have a harder time making their case.” One footnote on the Pledge issue, and the extent to which it intersects with the case the secularists are going to have a harder time making: a significant number of Americans now recite the Pledge with another new clause, which they hope to see made permanent by legislation. After the words “with liberty and justice for all,” they add “born and unborn.”
All of these issues or nonissues are, as they say, just politics, markers in a game. The flag-burning amendment is just politics, the school prayer issue is just politics — a bone to the Republican base on the Christian right and a way to beat up on the judiciary, red meat for the “Reagan Democrats” or “swing voters” who are increasingly seen as the base for both parties. The prohibition on the creation of new cell lines from discarded embryos that constituted the president’s “compromise” on the stem cell question is politics. The fact that Israel has become the fulcrum of our foreign policy is politics. When it comes to any one of these phenomena that we dismiss as “politics,” we tend to forgive, or at least overlook, the absence of logic or sense. We tell ourselves that this is the essential give-and-take of democracy, we tell ourselves that our elected representatives are doing the necessary work of creating consensus. We try to convince ourselves that somewhere, beneath the posturing, there is a hidden logic, there are minds at work, there is someone actually thinking out the future of the country beyond the 2004 election.
These would be comforting notions were they easier to maintain. In fact we have created a political process in which “consensus” is the last thing the professionals want or need, a process that works precisely by turning the angers and fears and energy of the few — that handful of voters who can be driven by the fixed aspect of their own opinions — against the rest of the country. During the past decade — through the several years of the impeachment process and through the denouement of the 2000 election — we had seen secular democracy itself put up for grabs in this country, and the response to September 11 could not have encouraged us to think that the matter was in any way settled.
We had seen the general acquiescence in whatever was presented as imperative by the administration. We had seen the persistent suggestions that anyone who expressed reservations about detentions, say, or military tribunals, was at some level “against” America. (As in the presidential formulation “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”) We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war. And we had seen, buttressing this reconception, the demand that we interpret the war in Afghanistan as a decisive victory over al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and radical fundamentalism in general.
This was despite repeated al-Qaeda-linked explosions through Southeast Asia.
Despite continuing arson and rocket attacks on girls’ schools in Afghanistan.
And despite the fact that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said in November 2002 at the Brookings Institution that we had lost momentum in Afghanistan because the Taliban and al-Qaeda had been quicker to adapt to U.S. tactics than the U.S. had been to theirs.
3
In 1988, a few weeks after George W. Bush’s father was elected president, I wrote a postelection note for The New York Review about a trip the senior Bush had made to Israel and Jordan in 1986, when he was still vice president. He had his own camera crew with him in Israel, but not in Jordan, since, as an official explained to the Los Angeles Times, there was “nothing to be gained from showing him schmoozing with Arabs.” Still, the Bush advance team in Amman had devoted considerable attention to crafting visuals for the traveling press. Members of the advance team had requested, for example, that the Jordanian army marching band change its uniforms from white to red. They had requested that the Jordanians, who did not have enough helicopters to transport Bush’s traveling press corps, borrow the necessary helicopters to do so from the Israeli air force. In an effort to assure the color of live military action as a backdrop for the vice president, they had asked the Jordanians to stage maneuvers at a sensitive location overlooking Israel and the Golan Heights. They had asked the Jordanians to raise, over the Jordanian base there, the American flag. They had asked that Bush be photographed studying, through binoculars, “enemy territory,” a shot ultimately vetoed by the State Department, since the “enemy territory” at hand was Israel. They had also asked, possibly the most arresting detail, that, at every stop on the itinerary, camels be present.
“This is in fact the kind of story we expect to hear about our elected officials,” I wrote in 1988:
“We not only expect them to use other nations as changeable scrims in the theater of domestic politics but encourage them to do so. After the April 1961 failure of the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy’s approval rating was four points higher than it had been in March. After the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic, Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating rose six points. After the 1983 invasion of Grenada, Ronald Reagan’s approval rating rose four points, and what was that winter referred to in Washington as “Lebanon”—the sending of American marines into Beirut, the killing of 241, and the subsequent pullout — was, in the afterglow of this certified success in the Caribbean, largely forgotten.