Democracy and America's War on Terror (review)

Robert Ivie has written an important book on an important topic. His central argument is that "contemporary threats and challenges facing the United States can be addressed more constructively in a robustly democratic idiom than by perpetuating the debilitating image" of democracy as frail and endangered; further, that democratic practices should be given primacy over policies and principles that further republicanism, as this—rather than interventions to impose democratic states—is the path to peace (3). Ivie writes from a postmodern perspective tempered by a Burkean frame, eschewing the practices of current "liberal democracy."

The book is divided into five chapters plus a conclusion. The first, "Republic of Fear," describes how we have been conditioned to fear real democracy—what in the 1960s was termed "participatory democracy." In Ivie's view, the republican form of government bequeathed to us by the founders serves primarily to restrain the demos, to the detriment of real democracy, by teaching us to fear difference. What results is a paradox wherein the United States professes the value of democracy while fearing its true practice.

In "Distempered Demos," chapter 2, Ivie traces democratic practice in the polis of ancient Athens, arguing that a "stable democratic culture emerged within a productive rhetorical tension between the demos and the elite" (50). He explains how democracy in fledgling America was reduced to a republic, and citizens were transformed from decision makers to bystanders. Likewise, in chapter 3, "Democratic Peace," Ivie explores the political theory of democratic peace—the notion that democracies do not make war on each other. He demonstrates how the centerpiece of post–World War II foreign policy has been the promotion of democratic regimes abroad, even though historically "Americans have placed neither unqualified trust nor collective faith in democracy despite its status as a god term of national ideals and mission" (117).

Chapter 4, "Fighting Terror," is one of the strongest in the volume. Ivie focuses on the rhetorical and military decisions made by George W. Bush and advisors in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. In particular, Ivie discusses the folly of thinking in terms of a "war" on terrorism and the choice to cast the U.S. response as an attempt to eradicate evil. It is here that Ivie begins to describe how a democratic approach to developing a response to the terrorist attacks might look. Ivie expands this argument in chapter 5, "Idiom of Democracy." After an exposition on the futility of retribution framed as war, a.k.a. the "terrorist trap," Ivie describes what a "democratic idiom" might sound like. Drawing on Burke, he argues for a rhetoric of identification that addresses rivals as agonistic Others rather than as evil enemies.

The conclusion continues in this same vein, arguing that American hegemony and the insistence on exporting democracy, albeit in a weak and anemic form, will condemn the world to a series of violent upheavals in response to U.S. "anti-imperialistic imperialism." What is needed is a "course correction" to a more prudent deployment of American power; a prerequisite for that move, however, is engaging the world in the "rhetorical idiom of democracy" (198). Reading this book, one keeps hoping for some glimmer of how this reversal of course might come about in a country where so many would willingly cede civil liberties in exchange for a feeling, if not the reality, of security.

The argument Ivie makes is both simple and complex, and the writing proceeds through carefully but densely argued claims. The effort is impressive, yet ultimately unsatisfying, in part because the book cannot decide what it is about. Sometimes it seems to argue against the handling of the war on terror, at other times it is more focused on the shrinking of democracy as a mode of public decision making. The link seems to be the underlying assumption that, had the demos participated in the decision to go to war, the result would have been different somehow. But where is the...