“Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side.” subhead, “Public Safety”
October 20, 2011, “The Lost Decade,“ Angelo M. Codevilla, claremont.org
“Nothing
our rulers did post-9/11 eliminated the threat from terrorists or made
the world significantly less dangerous. Rather, ever-bigger government
imposed unprecedented restrictions on the American people and became the
arbiter of prosperity for its cronies, as well as the
manager of permanent austerity for the rest. Although in 2001 many
referred to the United States as “the world’s only superpower,” ten
years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation
declining, perhaps irreversibly. This
decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse
than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it. This is the “new normal.” How did this happen?
September
11’s planners could hardly have imagined that their attacks might
seriously undermine what Americans had built over two centuries, what millions of immigrants from the world over had come to join and maintain. In fact, our decline happened because the War on Terror—albeit microscopic in size and destructiveness as wars go—forced upon us, as wars do, the most important questions that any society ever faces: Who are we, and who are our enemies? What
kind of peace do we want? What does it take to get it? Are we able and
willing to do what it takes to secure our preferred way of life, to deserve living the way we prefer? Our bipartisan ruling class’s dysfunctional responses to such questions inflicted the deepest wounds.
Wars in general increase the power of any polity’s ruling class to answer such questions in its way, and to work its will….After 9/11, at home and abroad, our
bipartisan ruling class did the characteristic things it had done
before—just more of them, and more intensely. In short, the War on
Terror empowered this ruling class to show its mettle, and it did so. Ten years later, the results speak for themselves: the terrorists’ force mineure proved to be the occasion for our own ruling elites and their ideas to plunge the country into troubles from which they cannot extricate it....
[scroll to subhead]: Public Safety
Solidity of the home front, i.e., mutual trust between the people and their government, has to be statecraft’s paramount priority. But
the assumption on which our ruling class based its approach to internal
security against terrorism—namely, that it is impossible to distinguish
ordinary Americans from terrorists—negates the basis for mutual trust. Ordinary
Americans, on whom the government imposed ever more intrusive security
measures and whom it scolded for being “Islamophobes,“ reasonably felt that government might regard them as “violent extremists.” Our rulers also went out of their way to appease the most unfriendly parts
of America’s tiny Islamic population, including seeking advice on the
proper attitude to take toward Muslims from the transparently
anti-American Council On American Islamic Relations. But this simply gave such people more power to further their agendas,
while foisting upon the American people a dispiriting political
correctness. How could anyone have imagined that any people would not
lose confidence in elites that seemed arguably more solicitous of enemies than of fellow citizens?
What
would have happened if, instead, our ruling class had approached the
problem of internal security by reminding itself that the American
people had secured American society very adequately during World War II
and the Cold War, against enemies far more potent and who blended into
American society more easily than contemporary terrorists ever could? Honesty would also have required admitting that the
hijackers of 9/11 were able to succeed partly because the U.S.
government had trained a generation of Americans not to interfere with
hijackings. Our bipartisan rulers might also have reconsidered
whether perhaps they might have erred by configuring new public
buildings and reconfiguring old ones to treat the public, whom officials
are supposed to serve, as potential threats? Our rulers might have paid
attention to Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that America
was much less policed than Europe, but suffered from less crime because
ordinary citizens took public safety into their own hands.
Only with difficulty can we imagine post-9/11 America…minus the TSA screeners (whose uselessness is demonstrated by every “red team” test penetration). But we don’t have to imagine that the passengers of Flight 93 took matters into their own hands the moment they realized that government rules were costing them their lives,
and that, ever since, aircraft passengers have policed their flights
with absolute efficiency. Nor do we have to imagine that ordinary
Americans naturally recoil from and protect themselves against persons
who display the kind of foreignness and animosity that Islamists and
their sympathizers cannot hide. The 2006 case of “the flying Imams” showed the Imams’ threatening behavior caused ordinary Americans to remove them from a flight and hence from the possibility of doing harm. Unfortunately, it also showed that the U.S. government came close to making the Americans’ immunological behavior liable to civil penalties.
Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side.
After 9/11 President George W. Bush told the American people to go shopping and behave normally. In short: forget that you will never again be free to live as before.
Think about money. This advice followed naturally from the government’s
decision to persist in its ways instead of lifting terrorism’s burden
from America.
What might have happened if, instead, Bush had told Americans that the
terror threat would not last forever, because their government would now
undertake some expensive military operations that would soon allow normal life to resume?…No doubt, in fall 2001 the American people would have accepted these sacrifices. But they would have demanded results. Since the administration was not about to try that, it sought to satisfy the American people with the pretend-safety of “homeland security,” with images of U.S. troops in combat, and perhaps above all with domestic prosperity fueled by record-low interest rates and massive deficit-spending.
This
pretend-prosperity aimed not only to anesthetize criticism of endless
war, but also to feed both political parties’ many constituencies—the ruling class’s standard procedure. Both parties joined in expanding federal guarantees for sub-prime mortgages, subsidies for education, alternative fuels,
and countless activities dear to well-connected players. Both parties
congratulated themselves for establishing new entitlements for
prescription drugs and for medical care for children. When the “great
recession” began in 2007 Democrats blamed Republicans’ excessive spending on “the wars,” while Republicans blamed it on Democrats’ excessive spending on everything else. Both are correct, and both are responsible.”…
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