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Hunt the Devil
A Demonology of US War Culture
By Robert L. Ivie, Oscar Giner The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8819-5
CHAPTER 1
Evildoers
The incantation of evil casts a spell of militant insecurity on the American people. War is the national sacrament of atonement. It sacrifices a scapegoat in whom the world's evil is invested. No rhetorical equation is more deadly than this "myth of redemptive violence." The Manichean distinction between good and evil is a "pervasive cultural code" that militarizes US political discourse.
The nation's preoccupation with evil precedes and anticipates the tragedy of 9/11 and the presidency of George W. Bush. Adolf Hitler, forever fixed in the nation's memory as evil personified, is the unredeemed Darth Vader of popular culture, a dark symbol of malevolent power. Ronald Reagan is the cinematic president eager to erect a Star Wars defense against the Soviet Union's evil empire. The image of evildoers evoked by Bush after the fall of Manhattan's twin towers resonates not only with rightwing Christian fundamentalism but also with the mainstream political culture. It is rooted in the secular religion of national mission and the enduring myth of American exceptionalism.
Exceptionalism is a moralistic legacy that insists Americans are opposed to evil in their foreign relations and are "on God's side against Satan" in matters of war. According to this creed, the United States is the one essential nation above all others, the beacon and exemplar of standards no other country can match. As a founding myth and national wellspring, exceptionalism turns a war on terrorism into a sacred symbol for remaking the world in America's self-image.
Bush's rhetoric of evildoers is a case in point. It channeled a cultural penchant to render America's enemies diabolical. When he declared an unrestricted war on terror, he spoke in the language of a Christian crusader. In a modern rendition of the Puritan covenant of renewal, he depicted a chosen people watched over by a God who was testing the national character. He advanced a righteous call to arms that absolved the United States of any responsibility by making clear that "the evil character of an external enemy was to blame." This was the "theistic essence" governing Bush's rhetorical world, a world divided by good and evil and given purpose by God's will. The divine will was to be fulfilled by a people of faith in their pursuit of "moral security."
Guided by his faith, Bush preached in biblical cadences to a receptive nation the message of holy battle to bestow freedom on a corrupt world. Any and all means were justified in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Despite the distinction he made between terrorism and the religion of Islam, after he had already referred to the war on terror as a "crusade," the president and his supporters persisted in the use of "coded Christian language" to invest the war with "messianic meaning." The "greatest force for good in history" was fighting for "the glory of God." This global war on terror was America's "Third Awakening."
Bush's war rhetoric allowed little to no room for critical thinking. Every consideration, domestic and foreign, became a matter of national security viewed through the moralizing lens of an evil threat. National security was equated with health security, retirement security, economic security, and more. A doctrine of preemptive war was advanced to rid the world of evil before it could strike the United States. The image of Satan incarnate was the rhetorical trump card for a preventative war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Bringing down the demonic Hussein was "a test of national moral resolve in the face of evil." The palpable malevolence of terrorism legitimized a regime of executive authority and undercut the separation of powers, even as it eroded civil liberties, deflected criticism of economic elitism, and eschewed diplomacy as a viable instrument of foreign relations.
The Demon of Distempered Democracy
This obsession with evil, revealed in a rhetorical trope deeply embedded in US political culture, is "inherently corrosive of democratic politics." The trope of evil prods the nation to dehumanize its enemies and displace its own "deformities" onto a vilified Other. It sets in motion a "victimage" ritual through which America redeems itself on an altar of vicarious sacrifice. The more the image of the enemy is made sinister, the greater the nation feels in danger of damnation. The articulation of evil suffuses every perception, reason, and calculation for choosing war over peace. It colonizes the collective judgment. Naming the demonic enemy constitutes the peculiar state of war that turns the nation against its democratic self.
Indeed, America's chronic impulse to war is provoked by democracy's shadow, which casts a dark veil of anxiety over the public disposition. This deep distrust of the people confounds the identity and bewilders the political will of a self-proclaimed exceptional nation. It produces nothing short of a cultural tension that is resolved in presidential rhetoric as a commanding motive for war.
There are several continuous phases in democracy's impulse to war. We — the people — fear the enemy within: an impassioned ogre of mob violence, a deformed Mr. Hyde who reflects the common fear and shared anxiety about democracy. This internal demon — forged in the crucible of collective weaknesses, misshapen by national ambivalence toward the political system Americans claim to honor — is readily projected onto external sources that are conjured as evil and defined as the public enemy. A discourse of diabolism swiftly follows to paint a threatening picture of the enemy's evil savagery and to goad the nation to defend its holy democratic soul against civilization's wicked foes. The projection of a troubled identity, the displacement of the nation's own seeming vileness onto others — "in order to wipe it out with their blood" — is a recurring goad to fight.
This demonic impulse to war assumes many guises in US presidential rhetoric. The devil, as an essential antagonist in the nation's cosmology, has had a long and notable history in national dramas playing the part of the enemy. To kill the foreign devil-enemy is to reaffirm the nation's special virtue as a chosen people destined to overcome malevolence so that civilization may prevail. This heroic mask is the stuff of political myth. In the secular rituals of presidential rhetoric, the mask pretends worldly realism in order to summon the god of war, which is a necessary posture to assume in a world of presumed enlightenment. Even as the nation dances to the drums of war, it justifies aggression in the prosaic presidential idiom of the real, the rational, and the practical. Herein lay the riddle of war's apparent complexity but basic simplicity — the extraordinary cultural appeal of the call to arms.
Detecting the presence of this powerful mythos in presidential rhetoric raises the question of its meaning for democratic culture and its implication for governance in an age of continuous warfare. Can democracy, emptied of its incentive to humanize aliens by the diabolical incantations of presidential rhetoric, function as an inclusive politics of contestation? Or must it succumb, as did the first French republic, to a culture of war? To answer this question, it is important to acknowledge that George W. Bush's presidential rhetoric is not an aberration of American political culture but rather a manifestation of unresolved issues of national identity played out in a mythic ritual of redemptive violence.
As a principal constituent of political culture and a basic element of national identity, democracy is defined by the language in which it is embedded. The terms with which democracy commonly clusters, as well as the history of their separate and combined usage, establish a working notion of its sense, sentiment, and significance at a given point in time. Democracy is an attitude articulated within the polity and configured by rhetoric, especially by conventions of discourse that treat relations of similitude as relations of equivalence or virtual sameness. A constellation of figures rendered by conventional usage into language that is taken more or less literally (what we might call literalized metaphors) comprises the nation's metaphorical concept of democracy. Giambattista Vico understood that such metaphors operate as condensed myths or, as Stephen Daniel puts it, "myths-in-miniature."
Throughout US history, this metaphorical or mythic conception of democracy has been fraught with tension by the troubled image of a desired but dangerous spirit of self-rule. In the American political lexicon, democracy is affirmed but also qualified by figures of containment, which work to constrain its full expression and dreaded impact on the fragile reign of reason and prudence. American democratic rhetoric often composes a reverse kind of medieval bestiary in which base or animal attributes are attached to the symbolic representation of citizens. As Benjamin Barber observes, the rhetoric of democracy in America is akin to "zookeeping." Human "creatures," situated by "liberal democratic imagery" within a menagerie of sovereign lions, bleating sheep, and ornery wolves, are reduced in Alexander Hamilton's language to one great beast. In this "political zoology," Barber noted, "liberal democracy's sturdiest cages are reserved for the People," who are admired for their proud individuality but considered dangerous as a madding crowd.
Madison, at most a "reluctant democrat," was among the prevailing founders who framed constitutional barriers to popular rule as a hedge against the unruly mob. Madison's republic was his "remedy" for containing the "mortal disease" of "popular councils," his "proper cure" for democracy's "common impulse of passion," his "guard against the confusion of a multitude," his hedge against the "malady" of "sinister" prejudices and "wicked" schemes. In his republic of representative governance, the "wisdom," the "enlightened views," and the "virtuous sentiments" of a superior few — the natural aristocracy — substituted for the degradations of "factious tempers," "local prejudices," and "sinister designs," all of which were "sown in the nature of man" and thus inherent to popular rule. The "confusion and intemperance of a multitude," he believed, "never fails to wrest the scepter from reason." The uncontained, undisciplined demos was seen as a violent mob under the evil influence of primal passions, allowing the savagery of chaos to prevail over reason, order, and justice. This was the distempered, demonic beast of democracy that so troubled federalist elites — their dark, mythic image of human depravity. Through the healing principle of representation they exorcised the people from government in order to found the nation.
This mythos of the democratic demon contained within the republic has haunted the nation throughout its history, even as Americans have struggled in fits and starts to create a more democratic republic. Whigs complained in the nineteenth century, for example, that Jacksonian demagoguery had caused the republic to "degenerate" into a democracy — that is, to become a "mobocracy" ruled by evil passions and the vulgar ignorance of the poor masses. The new democratic style of middling political communication was considered by political elites to be a dangerous development of "catering to the demos," which they believed was undermining moral probity and rectitude in public affairs. Twentieth- century critics, such as Walter Lippmann, doubted that education could reform a degraded public.
Previous to the fall of Communism, scholars had warned that a rising rhetorical presidency constituted a serious and growing threat to republican governance — that a worsening condition of presidential demagoguery, or direct appeal to the masses, bypassed responsible deliberation in Congress. In the midst of this worry over properly containing and disciplining domestic democracy, the nation's political leadership endorsed a theory of democratic peace that prescribed a thin veil of democratization as the way to global peace. This assumption legitimized an aggressive post–Cold War foreign policy and a subsequent doctrine of preemptive warfare for fighting the tyranny of terrorism. George H. W. Bush's Gulf War quickly launched a brave new world order of "moving toward democracy through the door of freedom" and "toward free markets through the door to prosperity," exuding a distinctly crusading spirit that Amos Perlmutter considered "mission oriented" and aimed at world domination. Bill Clinton, nervously following in Bush's presidential footsteps, proclaimed that America, as the one essential nation, must secure "democracy's triumph around the world." Overtones of national insecurity and vulnerability resonated throughout Clinton's rhetoric of democratic world order. Even the extension of democracy — assuming "the ennobling burdens of democracy" to foster a "global village" — in these uncertain and tenuous times was a risky affair, it seemed, when the world's "oldest democracy" continued its "most daring experiment in forging different races, religions and cultures into a single people." Democracy was hazardous at home and abroad.
By the logic of the prevailing metaphorical construct, securing the demon of democratic passion inside a rational container was equivalent to quelling the forces of savagery that threatened civilization. The inner conflict paralleled the outer struggle, and suppressing the forces of savagery was the mythic motive for America's historic mission of spreading democracy's empire. From the beginning, as Robert Kagan argues, America was perceived by much of the world as a dangerous nation because of its "aggressive and seemingly insatiable desire for territory and dominant influence." This abiding desire for control, along with a craving for ideological and commercial hegemony, posed the ongoing danger of "swallow[ing] up those cultures with which it came into contact." Yet, a lack of self-awareness about these expansive tendencies, "even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony," has left Americans perplexed when they discover that others hate and fear their powerful reach. Empire was America's unacknowledged vocation, its mythic calling expressed as the sacred mission of an exceptional people to advance civilization by overcoming the evil forces of savagery and securing a lasting democratic peace.
After 9/11, terrorism became the threatening face of savagery in democracy's troubled empire. Indeed, terrorism became not just democracy's mortal antagonist but also its evil counterpart, at once an enduring cause for unlimited warfare and a ready pretext for unruly democracy's restraint. The demon of distempered democracy was symbolically subsumed under the war on terror. The face of the terrorist enemy was a semblance of the face of the inner savage. The terrorist was the dark brother, if not offspring, of the democratic demon. Democracy served ambiguously as war's purpose and provocation, sought after in the ideal but arrested in the present while its distempered, totalitarian shadow remained dangerously at large. Such a "disowned shadow" in troubled hero myths, as Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz note, is readily projected onto an Other toward whom "we then relate ... in an unconscious, undifferentiated way, usually with automatic and dogmatic hatred or fear."
Democracy remained, in Sheldon Wolin's astute term, a "fugitive" — a paradoxical marker of national identity at a time of increasing alienation between the people and their rulers. Its invocation in American political rhetoric and media was "a tribute, not to its vibrancy, but to its utility in supporting a myth that legitimates the very formations of power which have enfeebled it" by means of antidemocratic strategies such as appeals to efficiency, stability, emergency, and so on. In this way, America's superpower "claim to democracy" was "a form of hypocrisy," a shallow symbol without a substantive, participatory practice. Democracy's basic principle of collective self-rule was "fictitious" in the contemporary world that reduced "majorities" to "artifacts manufactured by money, organization, and the media." Whether America's claim to a democratic identity was paradoxical, hypocritical, or fanciful, it was freighted with tension, distrust, and apprehension.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hunt the Devil by Robert L. Ivie, Oscar Giner. Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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