After John Roberts’ swing vote in Florida v. Dept. Health allowed the Supreme Court to uphold the Affordable Care Act, I wrote a piece that put a damper the ecstatic Liberal celebration. It seemed many Americans were missing the larger picture. As I pointed out, whether you love or hate “ObamaCare,” the bill’s partisan passage and trial by judicial fire actually symbolizes America’s long range turn to the right, not the left.
In the next two posts, I’ll examine how that rightward turn happened. And to do so, I’m going to focus on what might seem at first glance to be an unlikely cause: The end of the Cold War.
Of course there are many reasons why America has become more conservative during the last thirty or so years. The decline of Liberalism in the 1970s, the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, and changes in the workforce and economy are just a few causes. All of those and many others are important. But I’d like to focus on the end of the Cold War, not only because it explains a lot, but also because it is largely overlooked.
Overlooking the end of the Cold War to explain America’s growing conservativism is understandable since it was supposed to usher in a new era of “peace dividends” and free us from the fear of a nuclear holocaust. But the Cold War had also been a crucial part of the way Americans defined themselves. And when it ended, it destabilized our national sense of self.
For many years now, scholars have tried to understand the Cold War in social and cultural terms. It did not exist only in political and economic spheres. The Cold War also had a profound impact on Americans’ attitudes, status, relationships, values, ideals, and so forth. It deeply influenc
ed the way we understood ourselves and the world around us. Most everything in American culture, from education to religion to media, had a Cold War context. And during the Cold War, popular culture defined Americans as creative, hardworking, god-fearing purveyors of freedom who proudly and bravely stood united against the world’s evils.
But when the Cold War defied most people’s expectations by suddenly and dramatically disintegrating into the ashes of history, it had an unforeseeable effect. It created an identity vacuum of sorts, and Americans’ conception of just what it means to be American fractured in the void.
Since WWII, Americans had relied upon concrete external threats from foreign nations as rallying points around which they could smooth over their differences, and define themselves and the nation’s best interests. Those external threats also allowed Americans to confidently, and at times sanctimoniously, criticize other societies.
Whether right wing fascism or left wing communism, both forms of totalitarianism were easily fingered as wrong. To contrast themselves from totalitarianism, Americans claimed that U.S.-styled democracy and capitalism were superior and moral. And for half a century, they fostered this sense of moral superiority by facing down powerful international opponents. Americans sanctified the U.S. model in their own minds by contrasting it against the political and economic inferiority of fascism and communism. And they did so vigorously.
After some initial hesitation, the United States played the leading role in vanquishing German, Japanese, and Italian fascism. Afterwards, Americans settled down for the long struggle against Russian and Chinese communism. For Americans, every contrast helped define them, and every victory, large or small, told
them they were right.
However, in 1989 the Cold War began winding down as the Soviet Union unraveled and the People’s Republic of China stepped up its market reforms. These superpowers had helped define Americaness by stubbornly promoting a competing vision, and Americans felt superior whenever they bested their super power competitors, which was often. But by the early 1990s, Russia and China were no longer stubborn, second-best outsiders. Instead, America’s two staunchest enemies now entered its sphere of dominance in a subordinate role. Consequently, the U.S. no longer faced any serious external threats from a nation state it could reflexively define as evil.
What to do?
In some ways the response was swift and predictable. Before the Soviet corpse was cold, the United States trumped up a new external, totalitarian threat in the form of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s regime was indisputably brutal, but in truth it was never an actual threat to American dominance or to the U.S. government, which had actually supported it for many years.
An external threat did emerge when Al Qaeda launched its 2001 attacks. However, despite the very real damage it wrought and the threats it presented, Al-Queda was not a competing state or empire. It only aspired to be one, and rather vainly at that.
Both Iraq and Al Quaeda proved far inferior to prior American competitors, yet the public responses were telling. Though the first Iraq war was a walkover, many Americans celebrated as if the fate of the world had hinged upon victory. The Cold War mentality was still fresh. And after 9-11, the U.S. tried to frame Al Quaeda guerillas as a WWII or Cold War-style nation-state enemy. This could be seen in many ways, perhaps most obviously in the frequent use of the imagined term “Islamo-fascism.”
Despite some Americans’ best efforts to convince themselves that Cold War-style threats still confront us, they most certainly do not. Neither
the second-rate state of Iraq nor the non-state actors of Al Quaeda come anywhere close to filling the Bad Guy shoes previously worn by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, or even Mao Zedong’s China.
For more than half a century, Americans had used external threats from foreign nation-states to define their sense of Ameicaness. But those days are now over. And in the next post, we’ll take a look at how that has affected the way Americans view themselves today, and how that in turn has pushed the country to the right.