Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade

Introduction

The decade covered by this collection of essays is actually seven years, from the morning of September 11, 2001, to the night of November 4, 2008. The margins of a historical period don’t conform to the turning of a new zero; eras are defined less precisely but more truly by events, a prevailing moral atmosphere, what it felt like to live during a certain time. With just a little simplification, it’s possible to see from a distance that the thirties began on October 24, 1929, and ended on December 7, 1941; that the sixties began on November 22, 1963, and ended on—well, maybe on December 6, 1969 (the Altamont Speedway concert), or January 27, 1973 (the signing of the Paris Peace Accords), or August 9, 1974 (Nixon’s resignation). (It is easy to see the beginnings of things, Joan Didion wrote, and harder to see the ends.) Only a year on, is it too soon to define the period between the attacks on American soil and the election of Barack Obama as a distinct era? I’m going to anyway. It was the era of terror and of waste, when America, at the dizzying height of its powers, was given a chance to change the world in a new direction, failed miserably, and responded to the failure by changing itself. The era began with an unprecedented American tragedy; it ended, and a new era began, with one of those occasional moments of national renewal that have been among our saving graces.

These seven years, following an earlier time of domestic tranquillity and triviality, were crowded with drama: wars, suicide bombings, secret prisons, partisan combat, wild gyrations in the stock market, economic collapse, the disappearance of entire industries, political transformation. In retrospect, all this agitation had the quality of the various stages of some prolonged illness, during which the patient sweated, tossed, became delirious with visions incubated by a strange logic, spoke incomprehensibly, suffered delusions of possessing enormous strength, inflicted inadvertent pain on himself and others, collapsed and lay prostrate, and slowly began to recover. When I was in Baghdad in 2007, I had lunch in the Green Zone with an American official who said to me, Do you think this is all going to seem like a dream? Is it just going to be a fever dream that we’ll wake up from and say, ‘We got into this crazy war, but now it’s over’? It isn’t over, but now that the country has begun to emerge, we can look back and ask: What was it all about? Perhaps those seven years were the last spasm of the world’s greatest power at its apogee, the beginning of its slow decline. Perhaps they were a painful working out of certain malignancies that had been dormant within the country for years, while other malignancies erupted around the world. History confers on events the ex post facto aura of narrative coherence and inexorability—perhaps it was all accident and needless folly.

For most Americans, September 11 and all that it unleashed dominated the decade. This revealed, among other things, our besetting narcissism, the vice that leads us to imagine ourselves the best or the worst but at any rate the center of every thing. The shock of that morning can still be felt years later, but for an Iraqi or a Congolese the human loss on September 11 would have been, proportionate to population, an average day. It’s just that we hadn’t seen it coming and never felt so helpless before. I had erroneously and perhaps inappropriately hoped that the force of the blows would jolt America out of the long daydream of the Reagan and Clinton years, into a consciousness of responsibility at home and abroad. Things didn’t quite work out that way—America’s reputation sank to a fathomless global low. And yet, partly for this reason, the years right after the attacks saw a period of unusual openness to the world on the part of this most insular nation. Until we grew weary of the bad news and set up real and mental barriers to the world, Americans expressed a willingness to learn about other countries and to understand why so many people regarded us with ambivalence, if not outright fury. Oprah devoted a show to Islam, and the front page of The New York Times ran story after story, year after year, under unpronounceable headlines.

But because Americans do nothing in restrained measures, the news of the world was swallowed in great gulps, large quantities of it on the Web and cable networks as well as more established outlets, often without the help of background or context. The torrents of images from alien places pouring into the minds of Americans and everyone else, pictures of air strikes, beheadings, charred corpses, terrified children, elicited anguish and outrage but above all the consciousness of being unable to do anything about it. Too much information and not enough understanding or power: globalization and violence merged to create a particular kind of psychosis, with well-founded fears and judgments warped into paranoia and hallucination by nonstop media saturation. The world beyond your street was never closer, and never more out of reach.

The years after September 11 saw, strangely enough, a golden age of American journalism, a late-life flowering even as the traditional news business was dying thanks to the Internet. Not in Washington—where the press covered the Bush presidency the way it’s covered politics for the past several decades, as entertainment and sports, even when the story was as serious as war and a corps of insiders with high-level access failed to see what was under their noses—but in Jalalabad and Jeddah and Falluja. During these years, the curiosity of readers and generosity of editors allowed me to travel to foreign places that ordinarily didn’t show up on the map of the American media, and to devote considerable time, resources, and words to conveying the stories of their obscure inhabitants as something more than exotica or horror show. Long-form narrative journalism, that luxury of an earlier, slower time, like the three-volume novel or the three-martini lunch, turned out to be the means by which much of the reading public at the start of the twenty-first century started to understand what had been done to America and what America was doing in return. On the surface, all was chaos and violence—if causes and truths lay anywhere, they were down below. And now that the country is pulling inward again, to its habitual focus on its own concerns, we may soon look back at the period after September 11 as a rare moment when Americans became interested in people other than themselves.

The center of my journalistic world during these years was Iraq. I began writing about the coming war in the months before it began, made six trips to Iraq after the invasion, and only stopped thinking obsessively about it after most of my Iraqi friends had left the country in 2007 and 2008. But there’s a gap in this collection between the start of the war and its later years, a period covered by reporting that is not included here because it became the basis for The Assassins’ Gate, my book about Iraq. The reader expecting a continuous, if fragmentary, chronicle will find instead a sudden jump from nail-biting pre-war forecasts to grim late-war reporting. The discontinuity highlights certain changes in my thinking and writing that came with the war.

The past decade was as intensely ideological as the 1930s. After September 11, it seemed to me necessary not just to understand the worldview that had turned passenger planes into missiles, but to answer its mental force with a counterforce. The conservative administration in Washington mustered its own very quickly and assertively: it was nationalistic, militaristic, and almost religiously certain. My political inclinations pointed in a different, though not an opposite, direction. The interventions and failures to intervene of the 1990s had shown that, in certain circumstances, America could be an instrument—often of last resort—for good in the world, and that liberalism’s problem was too much hesitation in the face of this possibility, not too little. I wrote several essays after September 11 in the belief that more was required in the wake of the Islamist assault and the conservative reaction than just liberal criticism.

Today, the ambition of these essays makes me a little uneasy—something in the tone and language no longer sits well. There’s a tendency toward overreach, driven by uncertainty more than overconfidence, and by an unreliable excitement in the thick of world-historical events. After a few trips to Iraq, words like democracy and totalitarianism, appeals to grand ideological struggles, and comparisons with the Cold War began to sound a little too glib. The analysis was still relevant and, in a sense, intellectually justified, but it did not tell you what to do or how to do it, and in the case of Iraq—a war I supported, for reasons that had more to do with strong emotions than global strategy—it gave the wrong answer. Abstractions and sweeping statements suddenly seemed dangerous. Ideas scare me. They get people killed, Dexter Filkins of the Times, who has seen as much of the latter as any journalist, said when we met in Baghdad.

One alternative to intellectual journalism is reportage that approaches pointillism: the patient accretion of local knowledge, building story upon story one fact at a time, while restraining the impulse to generalize, with the awareness that the subject is too complex, maybe even unknowable, for any kind of summary judgment. For a while my pieces from Iraq, under the chastening influence of experience, moved in this direction. But answering bad or misleading ideas with no ideas at all is hardly satisfying. The war in Iraq introduced me to new ideas about war, developed by dissidents inside the government and military; but the theories they propose are closer to the ground than philosophy or ideology, less intellectually stimulating but better informed and more strategically useful.

My ambition as a journalist is always to combine narrative writing with political thought. Finding the balance is a continuous struggle, but each needs the other and is poorer without it.

The ideological battles of the past decade left out large swaths of the globe. The poor countries of the Southern Hemisphere, where religion is a way of life and not a political weapon, had begun to push their way into the consciousness of enlightened people in wealthy countries during the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War lifted the ideological shadow of the two superpowers. Without the American-Soviet rivalry to consume the world’s attention and resources, these trouble spots, plagued by poverty, mass killing, disease, and tyranny, became the object of a kind of consensus on the part of humanitarians: outsiders had a moral interest in what went on inside distant borders and an obligation to ameliorate it. In certain circumstances, this obligation even came at the expense of national sovereignty, for in the post–Cold War world, as an awareness of the contagious effects of local problems grew, borders became less sacrosanct and sometimes disappeared right off the map. Like any new idea, this humanitarian consensus was extremely controversial in practice and the source of a great deal of hypocrisy and evasion. But double standards and violated standards are better than no standards at all; desperate people don’t care very much about the moral consistency of people who are not desperate. At the very least, worldwide media made it harder to ignore what was happening to small boys in Sierra Leone and teenage girls in Cambodia.

But after September 11, American foreign policy once again divided the world into ideological camps, and neither Ivory Coast nor Burma fit into one. Traveling through Africa and Southeast Asia during these years, I heard a number of people crack the same bleak joke: that their country’s obvious problem was a lack of terrorists. If a suicide bomber blew himself up next to an appropriate target, media attention and development money and other lifelines would flow their way. For even when the outside world wasn’t thinking about them, people in these forgotten places were acutely aware of the outside world. In a town near Ivory Coast’s border with Liberia, I saw a drunken young rebel fighter in a T-shirt showing the faces of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, like the stars of an action film, side by side, as if to say: Don’t make me choose—I’m with the guy who wins. In Rangoon, a dissident artist earnestly explained to me that a single well-placed American bomb dropped on Burma’s remote new capital could make up for all the harm done by all the bombs in Iraq.

The inhabitants of countries like these find themselves in a situation of existential absurdity. From the global media we know something about their plight—occasionally enough to want to act and alleviate it. And from the same global media they know something about us, too, enough to borrow freely—the fighters on both sides of the civil war in Ivory Coast styled themselves after American gangsta rappers, while people all over Africa dress themselves in our castoff clothing. But the information never leads to meaningful action. From across this great gulf we look at them, and they look at us, and nothing happens. A French scholar in Abidjan had a phrase for the condition of young people there: lèche-vitrines. The closest they can come to matching their aspirations with possibility is window-shopping. In this context, the Internet and satellite television become torments.

When the Iraq War began, Ivorians demonstrated in their capital for America to invade their country, too, and end French interference in their civil war (that week I happened to be in the only country on earth where the invasion of Iraq was wildly popular). The coincidence of these events contained an irony that became clear only later: the idea of outside rescue perished in Iraq. The humanitarian consensus of the 1990s collapsed after it was invoked to justify the most controversial war in recent history—to the great benefit of Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, and Than Shwe. After Iraq, the burden of working out their own destiny falls more and more on young people living under tyranny in Burma, on self-employed Nigerians scavenging a living in the thronged streets of Lagos. The West, with its staggering abundance, its music and images, and its freedoms, remains a model and a temptation. But the sense that a quick and simple answer to human misery lies somewhere out there no longer holds many people on either side of the gulf under its spell. If this is a case of wising up, it’s also a sign of atrophied imaginations.

To some degree, almost every essay in this collection deals with the problem of idealism. Why is it a problem? Because, whether on the scale of individuals or nations, good intentions prompt actions that always lead to unintended consequences. Because, for all our saturation in media, we never really know enough until, one way or another, it’s too late. Because, as Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination, Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination. The corruption that begins in enlightenment and ends in force is a particularly American one, and the era of terror was rotten with it, producing along the way innumerable critics, internal and external, of American self-righteousness. They are all in one way or another descendants of Graham Greene, who identified the original sin of innocence at the start of the American war in Vietnam. When a new movie version of The Quiet American was released just before the Iraq War, Greene’s ghost stirred and spoke as a new generation of Americans apparently headed down another road to hell.

But idealism would hardly be a problem at all if it were as easily disposed of as it is in Greene’s theology of anti-Americanism. When the perils of interfering stop human beings from making one another the object of enlightened interest, that won’t be the exercise of moral realism, but its death. The antidote to the dangerous innocence of Greene’s Alden Pyle, and of the scheming visionaries who gathered in London just before the invasion of Iraq, is not an ennui that shrugs in the presence of hubris and folly, as if to say, What did you expect? This is more often than not the pose of observers who are comfortable and secure enough that they can afford to be unimpressed when evil enters the room. It’s a more callous form of innocence. For the writers who mean the most to me, experience in the world makes the moral imagination more capable of registering and resisting the injustice of things, not less. V. S. Naipaul, the soul of skepticism, devoted his novels and essays to stripping away with supreme precision the illusions of and about people in the former colonial world. But in spite of his famous cruelty, at the heart of his work is an abiding belief in individual striving, the pursuit of happiness, man’s perfectibility. George Orwell saw firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by the Stalinist left, but unlike Hemingway, he didn’t adopt a false cynicism toward it, nor did he allow it to unhinge him, as it did John Dos Passos. In Spain, Orwell witnessed the worst of his own side and the other side, and the effect, he wrote in Homage to Catalonia, was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.

During the Spanish Civil War, writers very publicly took sides. A few ran risks; more adopted stances. And many of them, including some great ones, ended up violating their calling—looked the other way, took refuge from the messiness of facts in ideology, used pretty words for ugly things, settled scores or satisfied vanities in the name of high principles, wrote out of sheer ignorance, told outright lies. The analogies to our own time don’t need to be spelled out. Whenever writers wade into the mucky shoals of ideology and war, they do so at their peril. One understandable reaction is to insist on a kind of purity of craft that restricts the writer’s role to that of scrupulous witness, distrusting all claims not founded in particulars. But the moral, for me, is not that writers shouldn’t take sides. In a tumultuous time like the one we’ve been living through, only those who draw entirely on inwardness or imagination for their subjects could avoid having and, in some way, expressing a view about the world-shaking events happening every week. Partisanship is inevitable, and it’s better not to pretend that it doesn’t exist or try to cut it out like a cancer. One can only be honest about having a point of view while remaining open to aspects of reality—the human faces and voices—that might demolish it. The best means I know for doing this is journalism.

What I truly detested was American liberalism, Graham Greene once said. He meant our materialism, our shallowness, our lack of a tragic sense. But it turns out that even after the era of terror, with all its waste, the world still expects something from America. When a new face of idealism, tempered and restrained by self-knowledge, appeared in the shape of a new political figure, the country revealed that criticism and change are as integral to American democracy as innocence and arrogance. The election of Barack Obama was made possible during the course of an extraordinary year by a series of tectonic shifts: the collapse of the conservative ideology that dominated American politics since Reagan, the implosion of the country’s financial system after years of erosion in its political economy, a new mass politics of youth in a new technological era, and the tremors of a resurgent liberalism.

It was clear from the beginning that Obama, in his personal story and his political style, represented something novel, but its shape took time to materialize. The year 2008 saw one of those rare convergences between individual character and public events that can produce a decisive turn in national history. Obama’s signature word was hope, but by election night what he offered was something closer to a sense of limits, an acceptance of responsibility in the conduct of individuals and of the country, at home and abroad. His victory did not close the book on the era that began on September 11, 2001—the wars continue, the threat of terrorism still hangs over us, the failure of markets will haunt us for years, the times will remain interesting. But it did mark—and so decisively that you could hear the click of change on the night of November 4—a shift in moral consciousness. The country gave itself a second chance to fulfill the promise lost seven years before.

The pieces from the 2008 campaign come with certain birthmarks that already date them. The same is true of almost every thing in this collection, because the nature of journalism is to be topical and transient. This is its well-known weakness, but it is also the surprising source of whatever lasts. The best way to tell the future what it was like to live in a previous era is to be engaged in its passions and concerns.

—March 2009

PART ONE

After September 11

Living Up to It

Adapted from the introduction to The Fight Is for Democracy, ed. George Packer (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).

1

In the minutes after the South Tower fell on September 11, 2001, an investment banker had an epiphany. Having escaped with his life just ahead of the collapse, he wandered through the smoke and confusion of lower Manhattan until he found himself in a church in Greenwich Village. Alone at the altar, covered in ash and dust, he began to shake and sob. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he looked up. It was a policeman.

Don’t worry, the cop said, you’re in shock.

"I’m not in shock, the investment banker answered. I like this state. I’ve never been more cognizant in my life."

Around the same time that the banker noticed his changed consciousness and a hundred blocks north, I thought, or felt, because there were really no words yet: Maybe this will make us better. That was all; I didn’t know what it meant. The feeling made me ashamed because it seemed insufficiently horror-stricken. But like any repressed feeling, it continued to lurk. And in the hours and days that followed, it seemed to be borne out on the streets of New York.

I spent most of two days sitting on a sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn, waiting to give blood with hundreds of other people. I had long conversations with those near me, in the temporary intimacy between strangers that kept breaking out all over the city. There was Matthew Timms, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed video producer who had tried to film the attacks from across the East River in Williamsburg, only to find his camera battery had gone dead. His own detachment, he said—which extended to his whole life—so disturbed him that he wanted his blood drawn in order to overcome it. I volunteered so I could be a part of something, he said. All over the world people do something for an ideal. I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind. Like when the news was on, I was thinking, What if there was a draft? Would I go? I think I would. Lauren Moynihan, a lawyer in her thirties, had traveled all over the city pleading with hospitals and emergency centers to take her blood and been turned away by all of them. As a civilian, without skills, she felt useless. This is like a little bit short of volunteering to go for the French Foreign Legion, said Dave Lampe, a computer technician from Jersey City who was wearing suspenders decorated with brightly colored workman’s tools. A sixteen-year-old girl named Amalia della Paolera, passing out juice and cookies along the line, said, This is the time when we need to be, like, pulling together and doing as much as we can for each other and not, like, sitting at home watching it on TV and saying, like, ‘Oh, there’s another bomb.’

Everyone wanted to be of use and no one knew how, as if citizenship were a skilled position for which none of us had the right experience and qualifications. People seemed to be feeling the same thing: they had not been living as they would have liked; the horrors of the day before had woken them up; they wanted to change. So they had come to stand in line, and they continued to wait long after it became clear that no blood was going to be needed.

The mood that came over New York after September 11—for me it will always be tied to the Missing picture posted at my subway stop of a young woman named Gennie Gambale, and then all the other pictures that appeared overnight around the city; the flags sprouting in shop windows; the clots of melted candle wax on sidewalks; the bitter smell of smoke from lower Manhattan; the clusters of people gathering in the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Union Square to sing or write messages or read them; the kindness on the subway; the constant wail of sirens for no obvious purpose; the firemen outside a station house in midtown accepting flowers at midnight; the rescue workers at the end of their shift trudging up West Street with gray dust coating their faces and clothes; the people waiting at barricades on Canal Street with pots of foil-covered food; the garrulousness of strangers; the sleeplessness, the sense of being on alert all the time and yet useless—this mood broke over the city like a storm at the end of a season of languid days stretching back longer than anyone could remember. People became aware, as if for the first time, that they were not merely individuals with private ends. Whitman’s spirit walked down every street: What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? The embarrassment of strong emotions felt by sophisticated people in peaceful times dropped away, and strangers looked at one another differently. We became citizens.

This mood lasted around two weeks, then it began to fade. The cleanup was taken out of the hands of volunteers and entrusted to experts with heavy machinery. Elected officials told the public to resume normal life as quickly as possible. Average people could show they cared by going out to dinner and holding on to stocks. Then came the anthrax scare, which created more panic than the air attacks had, replacing solidarity with hysteria; and then the Afghanistan war, which signaled the return of the familiar, since the public in whose name it was fought had no more to do with it than with other recent wars. By now, it’s hard to believe that anything as profound as the banker’s epiphany really happened at all.

I thought that the attacks and the response would puncture a bloated era in American history and mark the start of a different, more attractive era. I thought that without some such change we would not be able to win this new war—that the crisis that mattered most was internal. One undercurrent of the mood of those days was a sense of shame: we had had it too good, had gotten away with it for too long. In the weeks afterward, W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939 kept appearing in e-mails and on websites and on subway walls, with its suddenly apt first stanza:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

For at least a low dishonest decade, large numbers of Americans had been living in an untenable state, a kind of complacent fantasy in which the dollar is always strong; the stock market keeps going up; investments always provide a handsome return; wars are fought by other people, end quickly, and can be won with no tax increases, no civilian sacrifices, and few if any American casualties; global dominance is maintained on the strength of technological and economic success without the taint or burden of an occupying empire; power and wealth demand no responsibility; and history leaves Americans alone. It didn’t matter whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House, or whether we were bombing some foreign country or not. Public concerns had nothing to do with politics or citizenship, those relics of the eighteenth century, and every thing to do with the market—Where, Auden wrote, blind skyscrapers use / Their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man.

This fantasy took on its most lavish and triumphant expression in New York, and it was frozen in place there when the towers fell. Several weeks later, a journalist wandered into the ghostly executive dining room of Deutsche Bank, across Liberty Street from where the South Tower had stood, and noted the breakfast menu for September 11: smoked-salmon omelettes and chocolate-filled pancakes. The remains of a meal for two—half-drunk juice turning dark, a mostly eaten omelette, withering fruit—sat abandoned on a table. The whole scene was finely coated in the ubiquitous gray dust and ash, like the tableaux of Romans caught eating and sleeping by the lava of Vesuvius; except that Pompeii was entirely destroyed, whereas the American civilization at which the nineteen radical Islamist hijackers aimed passenger planes still persists in roughly its old shape, though ragged at the edges and shaky in the nerves.

Political predictions usually come true when reality and wish coincide, and as it turned out, I was wrong. September 11 has not ushered in an era of reform. It has not made America or Americans very much better, more civic-minded. It has not replaced market values with democratic values. It has not transformed America from the world’s overwhelming economic and military power into what it has often been in the past—a light of freedom and equality unto the nations. None of this has happened, because America is currently governed by bad leaders, because the opposition is weak, because our wealth and power remain so enormous that even an event as dramatic as the terrorist attacks can’t fully penetrate them, because a crisis doesn’t automatically bring down the curtain on an era, because change usually comes in the manner of a corkscrew rather than a hammer.

Yet my first response on the morning of September 11 still seems the one worth holding on to. The investment banker jerked awake, the aspirations up and down the line of those wanting to give blood, revealed something about the moral condition of Americans at this moment in our history. Like any crisis, the attacks brought buried feelings to the surface and showed our society in a collective mirror. That day changed America less than most people anticipated, but it made Americans think about change—not just as individuals, but as a country.

2

The hijackers believed they were striking a blow at a decadent civilization, and they were partly right. Islamic terrorists had been trying for years to make Americans aware of their implacable hostility. In 1996 Osama bin Laden declared war on American interests in the Arab world, and in 1998 he extended it to American and Jewish civilians every where, telling a reporter that he had learned from Somalia that Americans were too soft and cowardly to fight back. No one here noticed. Only a deeply insular, perpetually distracted people with a short memory, a vague notion of the rest of the world, and no firsthand experience of tyranny could have absorbed all the blows of the past decade without understanding that a serious movement wanted to destroy us. Imagine what the hijackers saw in their last days on earth—a society so capacious and free that it opened itself wide to the agents of its own destruction and gave them the tools to do it. The soulless motels and parking lots of small towns from Florida to Maine, the promiscuous street mix of colors and sexes and faiths, the lack of prayer, the half-dressed women, the fat people in tight clothes, the world empty of Allah, the supreme thrill of knowing in advance what every ignorant idiot around them did not, the endless stock market news on airport lounge televisions, the drowsy security guards, and finally the towers coming into view, thrusting up out of the clear blue sky in their dazzling white arrogance. The hijackers would have seen, and hated, both America’s best and its worst—the rowdy polychrome energy, the moral emptiness of wealth and power.

To imagine a new, and a better, American response, it’s necessary to look hard at where we are now and how we got here. One of the features of American life that had fallen into decay by September 11, 2001, was our democracy. The reasons are numerous and have a complex history, but I want to discuss three. The first has to do with government, and with ancient (and more recent) American attitudes toward it. The second has to do with money, and how it’s distributed in American society. The third has to do with an idea, which I will call liberalism, and the people whose business is ideas, who are called intellectuals.

Suspicion of government was seared into Americans’ minds before there was a United States. But the Enlightenment pamphleteers and politicians—Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and others—distrusted government in a way almost opposite that of modern people. The eighteenth-century mind that gave birth to the new republic believed human beings to be rational creatures with a nearly limitless capacity for finding happiness if only they are free. Government in a well-constituted republic, Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, his scathing response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, the founding document of conservatism, requires no belief in man beyond what his reason can give. In this sense all men are indeed created equal—endowed not just with rights but with reason. Liberal government, of which America gave the world the first example, was government based on reason rather than tradition (or ignorance, as Paine would have it; or faith, in the Islamists’ terms). This confidence in the human mind to work out its own destiny meant that government, set up by consent to limit freedom only enough to ensure the public good, should remain small. If it got too big, it would concentrate too much power in privileged hands and turn back toward favoritism and distinctions, and against freedom and its rational use. Limited government, then, was a means, not an end; the end was human happiness, best achieved when men are free.

Individualism is part of our national character—the most famous part. But so is moralism, and this, too, goes back several centuries. The utopian fantasies of the pilgrims were submerged under the commercial practices of republican society, but they were never completely buried. The main theme of American history since independence has been the cheerful, vulgar, brutal, wantonly innocent pursuit of happiness, from the frontiersman to the venture capitalist. But a minor theme keeps recurring, a moralism so rigid that it baffles Europeans—from John Brown to Kenneth Starr. Just as American individualism can appear either healthy and dynamic or blindly selfish, American moralism swings wildly between high-minded idealism and hysterical intolerance. At certain moments—our entry into World War I was one—the transformation happens almost overnight: the muckraker gave way to the night rider, the Progressive city commission to the Red Scare, without any letup in the sense of a national crusade.

The most potent political idea of my lifetime has been hostility to government—from Goldwater’s crankish extremism in the defense of liberty, to Reagan’s triumphant government isn’t the solution to the problem; government is the problem, to Clinton’s final tactical surrender: The era of big government is over. In this thinking, the government doesn’t embody the will of the people—in fact, it’s something alien, and a threat to their well-being. The creed reached a reductio ad absurdum in the last days of the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush proclaimed that the Democrats want the federal government controlling the Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. We understand differently, though. You see, it’s your money, not the government’s money. The superficial similarity of modern conservatism to the language of the founders is misleading. Jefferson and his generation saw democratic government—a new beginning of human history—as the collective embodiment of rational man. It served the public good. Conservatives today have no concept of the public good. They see Americans as investors and consumers, not citizens.

Like most victorious ideologies, antigovernment conservatism grew as complacent as the welfare-state liberalism it replaced—and far more extreme. The thinking of Timothy McVeigh wasn’t far from the core of the respectable American right in the 1990s. The doctrinal rigidity hardened to the point where, in the absence of government interventions, untreated problems, from the health care system to the electoral system, continued to fester, and still do. Among other things, September 11 reminded Americans that they need a government: inside the towers, public employees were going up while private ones went down.

One of the strangest things about the antigovernment era is that it coincided with the first prolonged drop in wages in American history. While free-market thinking was reigning triumphant, the middle class was contracting; even the brief pause during Clinton’s second term turned out to be riding on a mountain of personal debt and a stock market bubble that had to burst. So why was there no protest movement, not even a moderate legislative program, against the concentration of 50 percent of the nation’s wealth among 1 percent of its people, the lopsided effects of tax cuts, the massive economic dislocations caused by deindustrialization and globalization? When you come to think of it, less calamitous forces sparked the American Revolution.

But the change from an industrial to a high-tech economy, along with the movement of jobs and investment around the world, has been too incremental and various and complex to arouse any focused resistance. Most of the influential voices in society—the politicians, scholars, and journalists who, along with other professional classes, seemed to do better and better—said that the change was inevitable and ultimately beneficial, and the public believed them. Meanwhile, the money kept adding up in the winners’ column, staggering amounts that no longer meant anything—hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar compensation packages for a CEO having a subpar year. This money bought unprecedented political power. Some businessmen spent their fortunes running for office; others paid for their influence indirectly.

The relationship between democracy and economic inequality creates a kind of self-perpetuating cycle: the people hold government in low esteem; public power shrinks against the awesome might of corporations and rich individuals; money and its influence claim a greater and greater share of political power; and the public, priced out of the democratic game, grows ever more cynical about politics and puts more of its energy into private ends. Far from creating a surge of reform, the erosion of the middle class has only deepened the disenchantment. For thirty years or more the musculature of democracy has atrophied, culminating in 2000 with a stolen presidential election.

For the past century, the political philosophy of collective action on behalf of freedom and justice has been liberalism. For most of that time, it was an expansive, self-confident philosophy, and history was on its side. Since around 1968, liberalism has been an active participant in its own decline. A creed that once spoke on behalf of the desire of millions of Americans for a decent life and a place in the sun shrank to a set of rigid pieties preached on college campuses and in eccentric big-city enclaves. It turned insular, defensive, fragmented, and pessimistic. The phenomenon of political correctness, which for a period during the 1980s and early ’90s became the most visible expression of liberalism, amounted to a desire to control reality by purifying language and thought, to make the world better by changing a syllabus, or a name, or a word. It was a kind of cargo cult. At bottom, it represented a retreat from politics.

During these years, the energy that had once gone into struggles for justice under the heading of labor or civil rights balkanized and propelled narrower causes, defined not by any universal principles but along the lines of identity. This turned liberalism’s original project on its head: Two centuries ago, and up until the late 1960s, it was conservatives who argued for the importance of tradition, tribe, culture, for all the things given, while liberals put their faith in the free individual, who transcended any specificities of time and place, and whose rights were universal, by virtue of being human. Rhetorically, at least, all of that changed in the past few decades. The right took up the universalist language of reason, freedom, and truth, while multiculturalism spoke for group grievances based on the accident of birth. Many of them were real and redress was long overdue, but the idea of social justice ended up being someone else’s business.

While liberalism slept, the country became more corporate, less democratic, less equal, more complacent. Liberalism has been a kind of enzyme in America’s democratic system, periodically catalyzing reactions, speeding up change, making the organism more vital. Without it, our democracy tends to get fat and sluggish, as the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence becomes a wholly private matter. In the tension between individual and community that every democracy has to negotiate, what we saw in America in the years leading up to September 11 was the triumph of market individualism, without commitments. The polis was routed and the sense of civic responsibility died on both the left and the right. Instead, they offered a choice of hedonisms.

Dissatisfaction with the condition of democracy isn’t new. It recurs among writers and intellectuals throughout American history, almost always couched in images of rot or decay or slackness, as periods of intense civic activism give way to ages of business dominance. The republicans of the Revolutionary era saw their new country release the massive energy of a free people into the getting of wealth, and it was not the republic for which men had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. By 1809 Philip Freneau, a Jeffersonian poet and journalist, beheld his countrymen besotted by prosperity, corrupted by avarice, abject from luxury, and in 1812 he proposed another war against the British as a dubious restoration of the spirit of ’76. After the supreme sacrifices of the Civil War, Walt Whitman began to wonder what the fighting had all been for—whether making America safe for Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller and a victorious people with hearts of rags and souls of chalk had merited Gettysburg’s last full measure of devotion. Is not Democracy of human rights humbug after all? Whitman asked. In his 1949 book The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tried to suck new life into the lungs of the New Deal and antitotalitarianism as the stagnant waters of the television era started to rise around him: Why does not democracy believe in itself with passion? Why is freedom not a fighting faith? Democracy, it turns out, is a muscle that needs more frequent exercise than Americans have generally been interested in mustering.

In our own gilded age—whose obituary some commentators wrote after September 11—intellectuals played a curiously muted role. Who will be regarded as the Freneau, the Whitman, or the Schlesinger of the Nasdaq era? There was no convincing critique, no passionate dissent, no partisan literature that moved significant numbers of people and stands a chance of being read in ten years. The reasons for this intellectual vacuum are many. Academic thinking, infatuated with postmodernist theory, has satisfied itself with a fake-specialist jargon and a coy relativism that prefers dancing circles around important questions to the risk of trying to answer them. Political dissidence suffers, as it has in this country at least since Thoreau, from a sneering contempt for average American life and a sentimental insistence that reality simply fall in line behind enlightened feelings. The best imaginative writers withdrew into the inner life and its discontents, or else wrote about American society with such compulsive irony that nothing could be affirmed beyond a style of narrative brilliance. There is also the possibility that most intellectuals, in universities and think tanks and journals, have no authentic quarrel with American life. Seduction by iced latte, mutual fund, and The Sopranos is a slow, nearly invisible disease; it can happen without leaving a trace in print, yet at some point the organism has lost the impulse to object. An opposition that is financially secure, mentally insincere, and generally ignored isn’t likely to produce Common Sense or Democratic Vistas. Very few intellectuals today—and this goes for conservatives as well, including those who have made careers out of loudly claiming otherwise—feel a strong enough attachment to their country to want to change it. The idea that anything of great consequence depends on the condition of America’s democracy sounds quaint.

This is the landscape on which the sun rose that late-summer Tuesday morning, as the polls opened in New York for a primary election that bored everyone, and the bankers rode the escalator toward their smoked-salmon omelettes. Then out of the blue sky came what Hannah Arendt called a new thing in the world. It was the worst thing most Americans alive today have ever known. And the task was now ours to understand how the world was, and was not, new.

3

We are engaged in a war for world opinion, a war of ideas. No one should doubt that we are losing it—and that this has something to do with the condition of American democracy. Our leaders have failed to articulate what we are fighting for beyond our own security and the assertion of our power around the world; and the failure is no accident or missed opportunity. It comes from the fact that they themselves have no ardor for democracy. The ideals of freedom and equality, secularism, tolerance, and critical inquiry that have lain at the heart of the American experiment from the beginning get lip service from those in power; much of the world, with some reason, sees America’s commitment to them as shallow and