217

CHAPTER 13
Wake-Up Call

America is lurching to the right.… Until the 1960s, there had been almost no relevant right-wing organizations in America.… By the 1970s, the Right had been transformed into an institutionalized, disciplined, well-organized, and well-funded movement of loosely knit affiliates.… The New Right network supports whoever shares its desire for radical political change and its resentments of the status quo. As such, the New Right is anything but conservative.¹

Alan Crawford

The evil was very grave: the Republicans, entrenched in power, cynically abused it; they subverted the integrity of the vote, and of the press; they mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, and copying the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attention from their actions.²

José Martí, Cuban poet and independence hero on the U.S. election of 1884

Following World War II, the United States developed a broad middle class that made it the envy of the world. Achieving this took a devastating depression, a labor-friendly president who refused to field federal troops to fire on striking workers, a world war, and a strong, well-organized labor movement. Those elements combined to create a dynamic that for a time moderated the excesses of Empire.

The reforms, however, did not challenge Empire’s underlying institutions and culture. Ownership remained concentrated and economic power remained vested in a few large corporations. The labor unions were themselves organized as imperial hierarchies headed by labor leaders as jealous of their power as any corporate CEO or incumbent politician. In the manner of an immature democracy, the political culture focused on individual rights, with little sense of the civic responsibility required of a mature democracy. Then a deeper cultural challenge began to emerge.

218

CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO EMPIRE

The 1960s were a time of cultural ferment. A new generation told the corporate plutocrats, “We don’t buy into your consumerism and your wars.” It told the theocrats, “We have no use for your narrow interpretations of biblical authority and rigid standards of sexual morality.” African Americans and women of all races were telling both plutocrats and theocrats, “We reject your efforts to define us as something less than fully human; we demand recognition of our humanity.” Traditional lines of authority, including those of the traditional family, were eroding.

There was also a growing global environmental consciousness that challenged the conventional wisdom of economic growth. The Club of Rome’s study, Limits to Growth, published in 1972, pointed out that the human burden on the ecosystem was rapidly approaching the limits of what the planet could sustain. Although the study was dismissed by economists as doomsaying, many of the planet’s crucial natural systems were already in decline. A sharp rise in oil prices precipitated by actions of the OPEC oil cartel focused attention on the limits of global petroleum reserves and the vulnerability of the U.S. economy’s dependence on foreign oil. The environmental movement began to gain strength. The foundational values of a new culture of Earth Community were finding growing acceptance, posing an increasingly serious challenge to the institutions of Empire.

At the same time, the United States faced serious economic challenges from abroad. In addition to the political and military threat of the Soviet Union, several nations of Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, were developing strong export-oriented economies that were challenging U.S. corporations at home and abroad. Other nations were telling U.S. corporate plutocrats: “We can play the game of global competition better than you can, even on your home turf.” These developments threatened not only the hegemony of U.S. corporations but also the jobs of American workers.

Elitist plutocrats and theocrats felt the foundations of their power and privilege eroding. Empire was at risk. The movement to choose a more democratic human future was in ascendance. Earth Community was in gestation. Empire mobilized to strike back.

Television was transforming how people used their time and related to the world. Beginning about 1960, passive forms of participation in public life began displacing more active forms. People were patronizing 219fast-food outlets, professional sporting events, and gambling casinos with greater frequency. There were corresponding declines in voter participation, newspaper readership, Parent Teacher Association membership, union membership, frequency of family meals, philanthropic giving, and perceptions of honesty and morality.³ Relationships among people were not so much changing as simply eroding. People were feeling increasingly vulnerable and disconnected. There was a troubling sense in the air, particularly among self-identified conservatives, that the moral and social foundations of society were disintegrating. The uncertainty and resentment created fertile ground for the demagogues of Empire.

Renewing the Historic Alliance

Historically, rejection of the democratic ideal in America has coalesced around one or both of two fundamentalisms. Plutocrats, heirs to the vision of Alexander Hamilton, embrace a market fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by persons of financial means. Theocrats, heirs to the Calvinist vision of John Winthrop, embrace a religious fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by those of a prescribed faith and celebrates wealth and power as a mark of God’s favor. Although plutocrats give priority to material values and theocrats to spiritual values, their shared drive for dominator power and aversion to democracy make them allies of convenience.

In the late 1960s, a small group of plutocrats and theocrats formed an alliance to avert the fall of Empire and drive the U.S. political center sharply to the right. It proved a powerful combination. The plutocrats delivered the money in record amounts for political campaigns, think tanks, and media outreach. The theocrats delivered the votes by mobilizing the resentment of the frightened and alienated who felt themselves being pushed out of the middle class. They called themselves the New Right, although their agenda was scarcely new. United by their antipathy for democracy and their drive for power, they worked together to gain control of the Republican Party and move both the Republican and Democratic parties well to the right of the former political center.

Organizing for Dominion

The elites of the corporate plutocracy have long organized through trade associations and umbrella organizations like chambers of commerce.⁴ They also have a long history of supporting conservative think tanks, 220such as the Hoover Institute, established at Stanford University in 1919. The Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921 by a group of prominent businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, played a defining role in shaping State Department planning for U.S. global dominance of world resources and markets following World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt formed the Business Advisory Council in 1933 to strengthen ties between the corporate world and the U.S. Department of Commerce. David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 to foster cooperation among the elites of Europe, North America, and Japan in advancing neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalization.

Influential though they were, these institutions generally functioned as polite old-boys’ clubs outside the public spotlight. This changed dramatically as leading plutocrats mobilized to reassert control of the nation’s political agenda. They launched a sophisticated and well-funded campaign to control the mass media, organize new lobbying alliances, mobilize grassroots support, and finance supportive intellectuals, think tanks, and university departments. They offered special courses and junkets for judges and law students, bankrolled friendly politicians, and brought to bear the most advanced tools of corporate advertising and PR to shape the political culture and agenda.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sought the advice of Virginia attorney and future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell about what it perceived to be a growing domestic threat to capitalism. Powell responded with a memo titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” In it, he warned of an assault by environmentalists, consumer activists, and others who “propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it.” He called on the chamber to mobilize “the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business… against those who would destroy it.”⁵ On Powell’s recommendation, in 1973 the chamber formed the Pacific Legal Foundation to defend corporations against public-interest efforts to enforce environmental regulations, protect workers’ rights, and tax corporate profits.

William E. Simon, who served as secretary of the treasury under presidents Nixon and Ford, left the Treasury Department in 1977 to become president of the Olin Foundation. There he mobilized conservative foundations behind a strategic effort to align the judicial system with corporate interests and to build a network of influential right-wing 221think tanks. He served as a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation, helped shape the program of the Bradley Foundation, and joined the boards of several right-wing think tanks funded by the Olin Foundation, including the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute.

In 1972, the CEOs of a number of America’s largest corporations formed the Business Roundtable to lobby the Congress on behalf of U.S. corporations and their top executives. The Roundtable played a major role in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan, the passage of tax breaks for corporations, and the Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994. The Roundtable also had a leading role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade agreements written by and for corporate interests.

Before 1970, few Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington, D.C. By 1980, more than 80 percent did. The flow of corporate funds to political campaign coffers grew accordingly. Corporate-funded front organizations with misleading names like Keep America Beautiful presented themselves as grassroots citizen initiatives to mobilize political support for corporate-sponsored policy agendas.

New funds flowed to existing right-wing think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1943), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (founded in 1962), the Hudson Institute (founded in 1961), and the Hoover Institute. New right-wing think tanks included the Heritage Foundation (1973), which shaped much of the Reagan administration agenda, the Cato Institute (1977), and Citizens for a Sound Economy (1984).

Building a Voter Base

Efforts by the theocrats to build a loyal conservative voting base centered on mobilizing conservative white Christians. Early strategists who had been active in Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential campaign formulated a “family values” agenda and framed the idea of a mass-based “Moral Majority” movement of conservative Christians. To this end, they formed Focus on the Family in 1977 and Concerned Women for America in 1979.⁶ By the end of the 1990s, Focus on the Family controlled a radio and publishing empire with an annual budget of $110 million, over 1,300 employees, its own zip code in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a syndicated talk radio show broadcast on some 1,500 222stations in North America and 3,400 stations around the world.⁷ In 1979, they recruited conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell as point person to recruit conservative white Christian churches to the movement.⁸

Weekly meetings of the Religious Roundtable, founded 1979 in Washington, D.C., facilitated coordination of the political efforts of the New Right. Then in 1981, the Religious Roundtable became the Council on National Policy to provide a more formal body to coordinate a broader coalition of secular and religious groups.⁹ Strategy for the 1996 presidential election was coordinated through weekly meetings convened by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, bringing together such groups as the Christian Coalition, the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, and the National Right to Life Committee.¹⁰

Outsiders marvel at the success of the Far Right in unifying its fractious base of conflicting interests and values behind a common political agenda. The key is that in the classic dominator relationships of Empire, the coordination of diverse factions and the settling of differences takes place at the leadership level where shared power goals generally override sometimes sharp ideological differences. The leaders tailor their messages to their individual constituencies to gain support for centrally chosen policies and candidates. Since the organizing is from the top down, there is little need for cross-constituency communication and coordination at the grassroots level. This pattern contrasts with the more complex organizing dynamic of global civil society, which self-organizes through interconstituency communication and cooperation at the popular level—the partnership model of Earth Community.

After the failure of his 1988 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, televangelist Pat Robertson founded the politically sophisticated Christian Coalition and embarked on a strategy crafted by his savvy chief lieutenants, Ralph Reed and Guy Rogers, to take control of the Republican Party. Rogers spelled out the simple arithmetic underlying their electoral strategy at the coalition’s first national conference in November 1991.¹¹

In a presidential election, when more voters turn out than in any other election, only 15 percent of eligible voters actually determine the outcome.… Of all the adults 18 and over eligible to vote, only about 60 percent are registered.… Of those registered to vote, in a good turnout, only half go to the polls. 223That means 30 percent of those eligible are actually voting. So 15 percent determines the outcome in a high-turnout election. In low-turnout elections… the percentage that determines who wins can be as low as 6 or 7 percent.… We don’t have to persuade a majority of Americans to agree with us.… Most of them stay home and watch television.¹²

As Robertson was building the Christian Coalition to mobilize the grass roots, other right-wing strategists and funders were creating two networks of think tanks to replicate at the state level the political infrastructure that had been the foundation of their success at the national level. One network, comprising think tanks modeled on the Heritage Foundation, was coordinated through the State Policy Network. The second network, comprising Family Policy Councils developed by Focus on the Family, was loosely modeled on the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. These networks generally functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. Their primary purpose was to market an ideological agenda of conservative economic- and social-policy proposals.¹³

STEALTH POLITICS

The alliance faced a difficult barrier in its effort to mobilize a voter base. The plutocrats’ agenda of subverting democracy, shrinking the middle class, and making a few people fabulously wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest does not naturally attract a broad popular constituency. It violates basic moral principles of economic and social justice and runs counter to the self-interest of all but the very rich.

The theocrats faced other challenges distinctive to their faith. First, a major portion of the Christian Right constituency on which they pinned their hopes believes that the earthly world is the domain of the devil and beyond redemption. Many also believe that the Rapture, the time when Christ will return to lift the faithful bodily to heaven, is imminent. Because these beliefs render political action pointless, most Christian groups of such persuasion took little interest in political life and had to be convinced of their Christian duty to engage politically.

The second challenge for those who sought to mobilize the Christian Right as a political base was the deep influence of the ideas of R.J. Rushdoony, a champion of Christian Reconstructionism, whose articles were regularly published in Falwell’s newspaper. Journalist Frederick 224Clarkson, who specializes in reporting on the Christian Right, explains that

generally, Reconstructionism seeks to replace democracy with a theocracy that would govern by imposing their version of “Biblical Law.” As incredible as it seems, democratic institutions such as labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools would be on the short list for elimination. Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Men deemed insufficiently Christian would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this theocracy that capital punishment would be extended beyond such crimes as kidnapping, rape, and murder to include, among other things, blasphemy, heresy, adultery and homosexuality.¹⁴

In short, the vision calls for creating a theocratic state with legal codes similar to those of the early Calvinist colonies in New England. A program akin to that of Islamic fundamentalists who seek to create Islamic states, it lacks broad popular appeal. To build a loyal voter base, plutocrats and theocrats alike had to become skilled in waging stealth campaigns that played to the resentments of those who were being squeezed out of the middle class while cloaking the real agenda in populist rhetoric and values.

Mobilizing Resentment

The New Right alliance became especially effective in targeting the resentment of small-business owners, farmers, and wage laborers whose middle-class status was threatened by the very system they were being mobilized to promote. It was a diabolically effective strategy. Since the actual intention was to advance a neoliberal economic agenda hostile to the middle class, the greater the New Right’s success, the greater the anxiety and resentment it engendered. Through skillful scapegoating, the resentment of the middle class was deflected away from the economic policies that were the real source of its affliction and was turned instead against gays, people of color, feminists, welfare recipients, immigrants, drug addicts, government workers, Jews, and the liberals who support them.¹⁵ All the while corporate advertisers were cultivating an individualistic culture of greed and materialism and using sex and violence to keep people glued to television sets, thus fueling social alienation and a sense 225of decline in moral values. As liberal reformers focused their attention on expanding the rights and freedoms of women, people of color, children, and gays and lesbians, the New Right accused the reformers of being responsible for the breakdown of the moral order of traditional American cultural norms— “the work ethic, sexual restraint, self-reliance, patriarchy, Christian worship, and patriotism.”¹⁶ The New Right found it particularly easy to generate resentment among struggling working-class taxpayers against welfare recipients.

The New Right found that three story themes worked particularly well to mobilize their constituencies: social ills are the result of permissive liberalism; free market capitalism is more effective than government in delivering prosperity; and the external threat of Communism (later terrorism) requires a strong defense.¹⁷ These themes in turn supported cuts in social welfare programs, the deregulation of markets, and lucrative military contracts for corporate sponsors. As observed by researcher Jean Hardisty,

In confusing and frightening times, Christian Right groups provide clear rules of conduct and theologically ordained answers to life’s problems.… The New Right captured and mobilized widespread social stress caused by rapid social and economic change. It did not create backlash sentiments out of whole cloth. They had already existed, at least latently. New Right leaders listened to them, took them seriously, and then mobilized and manipulated them.¹⁸

The theocrats respond to attacks on their positions with the charge that opponents are motivated by a hatred of Christians, America, and the moral order. This tactic disguises the fact that promoting hatred and intolerance—particularly against society’s most vulnerable people — places them sharply at odds with the foundational values of the Declaration of Independence, the teachings of Jesus, and the beliefs of the substantial majority of Christians. Indeed, most Christians, including many who identify themselves as fundamentalist or evangelical, are compassionate, committed to progressive democratic values, and deeply offended by the un-Christian aims of leaders of the theocratic right and their distortions of Christian teaching. Hardisty and Clarkson each underscore the essential distinction between the followers of the New Right, who are struggling with legitimate concerns, and the leaders of the New Right, who manipulate those concerns for political advantage.¹⁹ 226

Exploiting Family Breakdown

The New Right has been brilliantly successful in restoring the imperial status quo in relations between the owning and the working classes. Since 1983, nearly all the gains from economic growth have gone to the very richest Americans as union membership has declined and the real wages of working people have fallen.

As the wages of a typical male worker fell below the level required to support a family, women who earlier had begun to experience a new sense of freedom found that workplace participation was no longer a choice but a necessity. Many were forced into jobs paying less than a living wage. They no longer had the time or energy to prepare home-cooked meals and care for their own children.

With no one to care for the home, demand grew for corporate-produced processed foods and corporate-operated fast-food chains. Declining nutrition generated more business for the health care industry. Children left in the care of television sets were programmed for their consumer roles. Each of these developments opened new marketing opportunities for corporations and advanced economic growth while simultaneously advancing the family and community breakdown, alienation, and stress that provided fertile ground for political demagogues.

Men who played by the rules felt betrayed by the loss of the provider role that was once the foundation of their identity.²⁰ Women, feminist and antifeminist alike, felt betrayed as the jobs that once promised greater freedom became imperatives that limited their freedom. The family life essential to the well-being of men, women, and children had been replaced by the depersonalized marketplace.

The greater the moral decay and family breakdown, the greater the fear and resentment that gave the New Right its power. Blame feminists. Blame liberals. Blame people of color. Blame welfare moms. Just don’t blame the people who are dismantling the institutions of family, community, and democracy.

Those at the bottom of the economic ladder were most commonly people of color—especially African Americans—who were frequently targets of the scapegoating. With few options available, some turned to the drug trade as their best hope for economic success. This led to sharp increases in drug convictions and a swelling prison population, which in turn had a devastating impact on many African American families and drew funds from education and other public needs. It worked out 227well, however, for the corporate elites who profited from the public contracts to build and operate prisons and the ability to employ prison labor for a pittance.²¹

Struggling to make ends meet and maintain some semblance of the consumer lifestyle, middle- and lower-income households went deeper into debt—thus obligating themselves to turn over an ever growing share of their hard-earned income as interest payments to bankers. Those who had previously enjoyed a comparatively relaxed middle-class life were forced to work harder to support a declining standard of living, even as those at the top enjoyed gourmet restaurants, exotic vacations, private jets, and ever larger and more numerous homes.

PLUTOCRACY AS A BIPARTISAN CAUSE

The New Right’s first major political triumph was the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. The Reagan administration (1981–89) took the lead in implementing the neoliberal economic agenda in the United States, as the administration of Margaret Thatcher advanced the cause in the United Kingdom. In addition to the measures noted above, military expenditures were increased, and the abandonment of antitrust enforcement allowed for ever larger corporate mergers. Europe, Canada, and Japan were pressured to similarly “modernize” their economies.

The third-world debt crisis of 1982 created the necessary pretext for the IMF and World Bank—operating under the direction of the U.S. Treasury Department—to impose the neoliberal agenda on indebted low-income countries. Through their structural-adjustment programs, the IMF and World Bank stripped governments, some democratically elected, of their ability to set and enforce social, environmental, and workplace standards or even to give preference to firms that hired locally or employed union workers.

After the Republican Ronald Reagan, the presidency passed to the Republican George H. W. Bush (1989–93) and then to the Democrat Bill Clinton (1993–2001). Each administration differed in style and priorities, but America’s plutocracy remained fully in charge and its pro-corporate agenda moved seamlessly forward, irrespective of which party was in power.

Clinton, although a member of the presumably more liberal Democratic Party, made major contributions to the New Right agenda by 228rolling back social welfare programs, pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and replacing the GATT with the more powerful WTO. His administration also expanded the number of crimes qualifying for the death penalty and rejected efforts to slow executions. It eliminated 10 million of 14 million people from the welfare roles, supported lowering the capital gains tax, presided over an increase in the number of people without health insurance, refused to sign the international Land Mine Treaty, accelerated drilling for gas and oil on federal lands, and became the first administration since Richard Nixon not to raise the standard for automobile fuel efficiency.²²

By the time George W. Bush assumed the powers of the U.S. presidency in January 2001, the New Right had already made significant progress in rolling back the gains of the earlier challenge to Empire. It is telling that the Republican president Richard Nixon (1969–74), considered in his time an archconservative, was by today’s standards a champion of labor and the environment somewhat to the left of the current mainstream of the Democratic Party. In 1970, he created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the Clean Air Act, setting deadlines for reducing automobile emissions. He signed the Endangered Species Acts of 1969 and 1973. In 1971, he signed the law that established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces standards for workplace safety.²³ He also opened the way to a peaceful political relationship between the United States and Communist China.

WAKE-UP CALL

For all its populist pretensions, the New Right takeover of the U.S. government was far from a spontaneous expression of the popular will. Rather it was the product of a carefully crafted campaign to manipulate the popular culture to serve the private interests of an imperial elite. It involved a well-organized and well-funded alliance of corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats who brought money and votes to the table in an intentional bid to turn back the clock on democracy, civil liberties, the economic advances of the middle class, and cultural and religious pluralism. The seriousness of the threat to democracy, peace, and U.S. world power and prestige did not hit home for most Americans, however, until the most extremist administration in memory took 229power after the turn of the century. By the overreach of its extremist agenda, this administration exposed the reality of the New Right’s intentions. It also drew attention to the elite bias of the U.S. political system and its vulnerability to a takeover by political extremists with a deep aversion to democracy.

In his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush presented himself as a compassionate conservative who would work for ordinary people, leave no child behind, protect the environment, be fiscally responsible, and pursue a peaceful, cooperative, and nonbelligerent foreign policy respectful of the rights and interests of others.

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2001, Bush reiterated his promises, pledging that his administration would embody “a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion, and character” and challenged Americans to become engaged in the nation’s civic life.²⁴ He further pledged that in foreign affairs the United States would “show purpose without arrogance.… Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.”²⁵

These were uplifting words true to America’s founding ideals. Most of those who voted for Bush took him at his word. As it turned out, Bush and the small circle of former corporate officers and lobbyists, neoconservative military hawks, religious fundamentalists, and Washington insiders he installed in the top ranks of his administration took power with a well-developed agenda sharply at odds with those professed commitments.

Given that Mr. Bush had never previously distinguished himself for his managerial skills, the speed with which the regime he brought to power took control of the entire administrative branch of the U. S. government was truly stunning. Behind him was a well-disciplined political cabal that had been developing its relationships and agenda for years before the Supreme Court handed Mr. Bush the keys to the White House.

The new regime wasted no time in demonstrating that its intentions were less than compassionate and more than conservative. Within days of taking office, the regime had halted action on several thousand pages of progressive executive orders Bill Clinton had issued in his final days.²⁶ It had denied aid to overseas groups that mention abortion to women as a medical option, developed a $1.6 trillion tax-cut proposal for the super-rich, and introduced an education program centered on vouchers and standardized testing²⁷ designed to undermine public education. 230By March 2001, the regime had announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming²⁸ and had issued a seemingly endless flow of orders loosening restrictions on oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, and coal-fired power generation. It was soon clear to many that the administration’s larger goal was to nullify previous efforts made on behalf of democracy, the middle class, and the environment in favor of global imperial rule by a dynastic U.S. ruling class headed by the House of Bush.²⁹

Within a few months of taking office, Bush, who had promised a cooperative, nonbelligerent foreign policy, had expelled fifty Russian diplomats from the United States on unsubstantiated charges of spying, pulled back from engagement in peace and reconciliation processes in Ireland, the Middle East, and the Korean Peninsula, and withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to implement a missile defense shield. An increasingly unilateral and belligerent U.S. foreign policy created growing alarm among long-standing U.S. allies in Europe.³⁰

VISION OF PAX AMERICANA

The thrust of the new regime’s foreign policy, including plans to invade Iraq, had been worked out years before it took office. In 1992, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense in the Bush I administration, commissioned a group headed by Paul Wolfowitz to prepare a document on a post–cold war defense strategy for the United States. The report, completed in January 1993 just before the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, presented a clear message: the United States must maintain sufficient military force to dominate any potential rival and be prepared to use that force unilaterally to maintain its dominant position in the world. Iran and Iraq were named as competitors for power in the Middle East and therefore potential threats to U.S. control of the region’s oil resources. Leading Republican neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan followed up with an article in Foreign Affairs that called for the United States to establish a “benevolent global hegemony.”

In 1997, Kristol and Kagan joined a virtual who’s who of top-level defense officials and advisers from the Reagan and Bush I administrations to form the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). 231Founding members included Cheney, Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle, who formed the Bush II defense-policy team; and Jeb Bush, Bush II’s brother. In September 2000, PNAC issued a report titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. The report spelled out a plan for global U.S. military domination. It envisioned imposing a Pax Americana on the world in the manner of the Pax Romana of the ancient Roman Empire.³¹ The report became the blueprint for the military plans and policies of the Bush II regime.

The PNAC report observed that mobilizing public support for its agenda of global military dominance would be difficult “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”³² Osama bin Laden’s September 11, 2001, attack provided the regime just what it needed. Well prepared, it moved quickly to embrace what key members, including Bush, Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice described in National Security Council meetings as a “great opportunity.”³³ Playing to the fear and insecurity that followed the attacks, the regime quickly seized the moment to advance an unabashed imperial agenda at home and abroad.

Bin Laden’s Gift to Bush

Public support for the Bush II administration, which had been falling steadily in the midst of a moribund economy, suddenly soared following the attack. The nation rallied in support of its commander in chief as the regime invaded Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attack. Global civil society, which had significantly slowed efforts to advance global neoliberal economic policies, was stunned into temporary quiescence. Bush declared perpetual war against terrorism and announced a military doctrine allowing for unilateral preemptive first strikes, including the possible use of nuclear weapons.

Domestically, Bush demanded that the Congress act immediately to pass new tax cuts for the rich, increase corporate subsidies, expand domestic police powers, roll back civil liberties, create a Department of Homeland Security, weaken social and environmental protections, increase military budgets, and weaponize space. The administration pushed this agenda in the name of national unity, security, and patriotism, branding those who opposed it as traitors who sided with the terrorists. Congressional Republicans celebrated, and congressional 232Democrats fell into line behind them to give Bush most of what he had asked for. The world was on notice that the historic forces of Empire had regrouped.

Then on December 2, 2001, the Enron Corporation declared bankruptcy in the first of a wave of disclosures of corporate accounting fraud of unprecedented magnitude, to which a number of top officials, including both Bush and Cheney, were closely linked. Investor confidence was shattered and share markets fell sharply.

Public support for a thorough rethinking and transformation of badly broken economic institutions was building. The plutocracy was again on the defensive, and things looked bad for the Republican members of Congress who faced the voters in the 2002 midterm elections. An administration desperately in need of another diversion again began beating the drums of war.

The message went out: Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, intends to use them against the United States, and was complicit in the September 11 terrorist attack. The pundits of corporate media and the New Right picked up the cry. Public attention again turned to preparations for war, and in the 2002 elections the Republicans further consolidated their control over Congress.

Ever the master of the stealth campaign, Bush used his January 2003 State of the Union message to buttress his claim to being a compassionate conservative and build support for war against Iraq. He spoke of a job for every man and woman who wanted one; support for small business; tax relief for middle-income workers; affordable health care for all Americans; energy independence; a major investment in nonpolluting hydrogen energy; human services for the homeless, the fatherless, the addicted, battered women, and seniors; and a major AIDS initiative for Africa. Even as he spoke, he was working to cut funds for these and other popular programs.

In this same speech, he charged Iraq with posing a threat to U.S. and global security and asserted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would remove a ruthless dictator and his weapons of mass destruction while bringing food, medical supplies, and freedom to Iraq’s people. It was a masterful piece of theater amplified by the corporate media. Although it fooled no one abroad, it played well at home, and Bush’s approval ratings soared. Bin Laden had given Bush the greatest political gift of his career. Bush reciprocated by giving Bin Laden the greatest political gift of his. 233

Bush’s Gift to Bin Laden

In disregard of an unprecedented global expression of public opposition, Bush began the bombing of Baghdad on March 19, 2003. The PNAC plan for U.S. global military domination was now in play. On cue, the nation rallied behind the administration. On March 21, 2003, with public attention focused on the war, a Republican-controlled Congress began debating a new White House tax plan that would further cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and reduce benefits for veterans.

Far from being the major military threat the administration had claimed it to be, Iraq turned out to be nearly defenseless. Its weak and demoralized military promptly disintegrated in the face of the massive firepower of U.S. forces. On May 1, 2003, Bush landed in a jet fighter aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln against the backdrop of a huge banner declaring “Mission Accomplished,” to announce victory in a war that had scarcely begun.

In carrying forward the long-planned Iraq invasion, the Bush II administration combined ruthless dishonesty with arrogant incompetence to squander U.S. power in what James Webb, former secretary of the navy under President Reagan, called “the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory”—a costly and bungled invasion of the wrong country for the wrong reasons. A ruthless dictator was removed, but there were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had taken no part in the terrorist attack against the United States.

The invasion brought the Iraqi people mainly death, the devastation of their physical infrastructure, and political instability. The blunder fueled worldwide terrorist recruiting, turned world opinion against the United States, isolated it from its former allies, depleted its treasury, and squandered its military resources on a violent quagmire with no exit strategy.³⁴

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda’s ranks swelled with new recruits, and Bin Laden’s reputation soared. Al Qaeda, however, had no need to launch further terrorist attacks on the United States, because the U.S. administration continued flawlessly playing out Bin Laden’s script of weakening the United States militarily, economically, and morally.

Delusion and Denial

This brings us to the question of how Mr. Bush won the loyalty, even the love, of so many Americans. Political success with a democratic 234electorate depends on the ability of the politician to project an image people can connect to psychologically. With the help of Karl Rove, master of the Machiavellian arts, Bush crafted a public image of himself as a strong father protector who cares for those loyal to him, vanquishes those who oppose him, and keeps his children safe from harm.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack sent shock waves of fear and insecurity through the nation. Fear is the demagogue’s best friend because it causes regression to more primitive levels of emotion and behavior that are more easily manipulated. The ability of nineteen men armed only with box cutters to so easily penetrate the defenses of a nation protected by the world’s most powerful military to such dramatic effect dealt a devastating blow to our self-identity and sense of security. Suddenly it was clear that we were hated by people who have the means to do us substantial harm and from whom our expensive military establishment offers no protection.

It was a national moment of great need and opportunity. Americans were ready to unite behind a great cause to demonstrate our solidarity in the face of adversity. A global effort to eliminate the injustice and intolerance that are root causes of terrorism would have been a suitable cause—as would a national effort to dramatically reduce oil consumption in general and dependence on Middle East oil in particular.

Playing the role of national father protector, George W. fulfilled both his own need for a sense of personal omnipotence and his constituency’s need for reassurance, promising to keep us safe in return for unquestioning loyalty and obedience. He drew on the self-righteous exceptionalism characteristic of an Imperial Consciousness to assure the nation that the attack was, pure and simple, the work of evildoers who hate America for its freedom and democracy. Rejecting the possibility that we might bear any guilt, he retaliated with the full force of U.S. military power against the closest thing he could find to a visible enemy, ignoring the reality that the use of military force against invisible terrorist networks is both futile and counterproductive.

Most Americans went into denial and rallied around the office of the president. Others were intimidated by the threat of being branded America haters, terrorist lovers, or Bush bashers. It took five years for the majority to acknowledge that the Bush II administration was bankrupting the nation and sending its youth off to be killed and maimed in an unwinnable war based on lies. It took Hurricane Katrina, the near total destruction by flooding of New Orleans, one of the most fabled of 235U.S. cities, and the needless deaths of more than a thousand poor blacks to awaken the nation to the gross incompetence and corruption of an administration once embraced as national savior, and to the lingering realities of race and class in America.

Confronting Our National Shadow

In Jungian psychoanalysis, the term “shadow” refers to aspects of the self that have been denied and relegated to the unconscious mind as threats to the conscious mind’s preferred self-image. It includes not only negative qualities but also positive potentials the conscious mind finds too unnerving to accept. For example, a man may deny those aspects of himself associated with the feminine; a woman may deny those aspects of herself associated with the masculine.

It is much the same for nations. This is a time of sorrow and denial for the United States. We suffer from the considerable gap between our idealized self-image as a democratic, peace-loving nation and the reality of our history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, exploitation of working people, and imperial expansion. The denial of our national shadow comes at a heavy price, for we cannot correct disabilities we deny. An essential mark of maturity in both individuals and nations is the capacity to acknowledge and address all the dimensions of one’s character, both positive and negative. To become the people and the nation of our ideals, we must find the wisdom and the courage to collectively acknowledge and learn from our past transgressions and to engage in a process of national and global healing and reconciliation.

Those who dismiss such critical examination as an act of disloyalty, even treason, reveal that they have yet to develop the emotional maturity to acknowledge the shadow of our national experience and to assume the full responsibilities of democratic citizenship, which requires a capacity for critical self-examination, both individually and nationally.

We the people of the United States have received a wake-up call to the reality, perils, and sorrows of Empire we cannot afford to ignore. The devastating policy failures visited on the United States in the opening years of the twenty-first century speak to more than the sins of a corrupt and incompetent administration intent on rolling back the 236post–World War II economic and political gains of the U.S. middle class and asserting global imperial rule by military force. They speak to a five-thousand-year imperial legacy, a plutocracy posing as a democracy, and a wounded national psyche in denial of the shadow side of our national story.

The idea that our proud nation could fall under the spell of extremist political forces is itself so alien to our self-image as to be difficult to accept. We have had our wake-up call to the reality that we are far from immune to the susceptibilities of an immature consciousness that have held our species captive to the self-destructive social pathologies of Empire for five thousand years. It is also a wake-up call to the power of stories in shaping our self-image and the course of history.