THE MANIPULATED SYMBOLS OF AMERICA MYTHICAL NATIONAL IDENTITY

Joseph Margulies, What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("The obligation to speak in the shared language of symbol and myth generally poses no difficulty for our leaders. They do not expound on the wonder of American ideals merely because that is what one must say to get ahead. All evidence suggests that they, like the great majority of Americans, genuinely believe in the myths they repeat. Their faith in the symbols they invoke is deeply felt. Southern slaveowners in the antebellum era gave rousing speeches in defense of equality as they understood it, which moved the hearts and stirred the souls of whites throughout the region as they prepared to die in defense of the Peculiar Institution. We do a great disservice to the historical record if we pretend that, simply because their vision of the nation no longer predominates, it was therefore false of insincere." "This brings us to one of the core contentions of the book. The values and beliefs that make up national identity are best understood not as fixed stars in an unchanging sky but as a set of immensely powerful symbols that are manipulated, deployed, and redefined to justify competing social arrangements. The rule of law, to take just one example, is not some unchanging state of affairs whose meaning is universally agreed upon. It is a symbol that partisans invoke to rally support, justify a policy, or explain an attack, and its use has changed dramatically over time. And the idea of the rule of law embraces other symbols that are similarly powerful and equally malleable. The Constitution, for instance, is the master symbol of the rule of law and moral legitimacy in American life. For many people, it is the trump card that settles all arguments. But snippets associated with the Constitution can play a similar role. Phrases like 'separation of powers,' 'the Bill of Rights,' 'the right to bear arms,' 'due process,' and 'habeas corpus,' all of which come directly or indirectly from the Constitution, or even an expression like 'We the People,' which is part of the preamble, are infused with such great symbolic power that most Americans consider them worth defending even if they do not know exactly what they mean. Like other key elements of the American experiment, they are rhetorical resources, weapons in the verbal battle to achieve dominance in the public square for one or another vision of national life." Id. at 26-27. From the bookjacket: "In this startling analysis of the direction of America's political conversation since the events of September 11, 2001, Joseph Magulies traces the evolution of American identity. He show that for key elements of the post-9/11 landscape--especially support for counterterror policies like torture and hostility to Islam--American identity is not only darker than it was before September 11, but substantially more repressive than it was immediately after the attacks. Even more surprising, this appetite for repressive policies has developed while the terrorist threat has declined." Though Margulies does not reference it, Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics is relevant here, as are the many treatments of America's flirtation with fascism during the twentieth century. Might post-9/11 America be in a fascist or totalitarian drift?).