Whose Rights?: Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion

5. Who Is “Us”?

108 Chapter 5 Who is “us”? W ho are the principal insiders and outsiders in the contemporary era? or to use an earlier formulation provided by Robert Reich (1990), “who is ‘us’?” When Reich posed this question, his idea was that the interests of workers and consumers alike were undergoing a rapid transformation at the hands of globalization. No longer , for instance, could consumers simply assume that “made in america ” meant profits derived from a product’s purchase would flow directly back into american workers’ pockets and bank accounts. instead, the complexity of the global economy meant that a non-u.S. or foreignowned firm might at times provide better wages and other economic benefits for americans, and that “buying american” might well involve purchasing a product whose constituent parts were assembled elsewhere . Popular perceptions might be slow to catch up. But according to Reich, globalization was transforming the fundamentals of identity and interest. two decades later, rhetoric and concern about the impact of globalization have spread widely. international migration, the increasing flow of capital across borders and the subsequent outsourcing of jobs, alongside the internationalization of culture and social and political movements, highlight just how dramatic these changes have been. among its many consequences, high rates of migration across borders raises anew classic questions about insider versus outsider groups, and tensions between conceptions of national identity have become increasingly contentious. Conflicts generated by a more global, integrated world have no obvious political resolution in sight. Globalization is at the heart of the age in which we live. But at the same time that globalization seems to be reaching into all corners of economy and society, much public opinion research in the united States has remained steadfastly domestic in its orientation. Consider , for instance, the rich fields of research on attitudes toward disadvantaged groups. When studying perceptions of, and attitudes toward, Brooks.indb 108 11/27/2012 9:55:43 AM Who is “us”? 109 such groups as women, african americans, hispanics, or gays and lesbians , the underlying issue of whether group members are “american” is usually held constant or simply ignored. But do people view the status of groups differently if they are not u.S. citizens? more generally, what is the impact of a group boundary that spans more than a single nation? When survey respondents are prompted to think about virtually any group of importance, such as Christians, hispanics, whites, or women, does the degree to which they think of members of the group as american citizens (or not) affect their views? these are critical questions in a global era. they define a novel agenda concerning how confounding transnational processes influence perceptions and attitudes about insider versus outsider groups. these issues are especially important in the context of counterterrorism , because perpetrators and sources of the threat are often thought to be foreign nationals, even though a number of key incidents have involved american citizens. the relevance of the citizenship status of the presumed targets of counterterrorism policies to understanding public responses to the war on terror is thus potentially strong. indeed, in the previous chapter we found initial evidence for the relevance of national identity to public attitudes toward war on terror policies. Now we want to take a few more steps to firm up the case at hand. We need to make sure that national categories involving, for instance, “u.S. citizens” are not actually a proxy for a different sort of transnational boundary, particularly one involving an ethnic category or group, such as Christians or muslims. in doing so, we are approaching questions about insiders versus outsiders from a new and, we think, potentially fruitful vantage point. We find, to anticipate the thrust of our results, support for our general expectations. National identity distinctions matter and are not simply a proxy for cross-cutting ethnic categories. our new analyses of group affect dynamics deliver particularly strong findings about how affect toward popular and unpopular groups can be experimentally manipulated when national identity status is brought into the picture. Finally, a new experiment into military commissions extends our focus on counterterrorism . here, we find that both national and transnational identity cues matter to policy-attitude formation. Domestic Versus Transnational Approaches Within past scholarship, an underlying distinction concerns the degree to which an analyst is investigating one or multiple nations. often, a single-nation focus is implicit. Yet in all cases we seek to show how distinctions across national contexts tend to be of consequence for understanding...