Tocqueville, Powell, Miller, and September 11

November 200 1 Historically Speaking Walter LaFeber Tocqueville, Powell, Miller, and September 1 1 September 1 1 attacks have changed The how Congress and the Bush administration think about security, the economy, budget issues, and (at least temporarily) even partisanship . Unknown, of course, is how long this different thinking and America's New War (as several television stations now brand these beginnings of the twenty-first century ) will shape the politics and spending policies of a nation usually reluctant to commit itself over long periods to quite different, and often individually restrictive, priorities—especially when the old priorities and ways of thinking produced the highly affluent, if often cloying but comfortably trivial, society of the late 1990s. Monica Lewinsky and Forrest Gump meet Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. A few film critics are already beginning to ponder this pivotal question. They are wondering aloud whether Hollywood will finally have to begin making movies for adults. Perhaps, although it will be economically tempting, not to mention easier, to produce the same kind of mindless escapism, heroism-from-a-safe-distance, technology-instead-of-thought, easy-tounderstand -good-wars, and other types of platitudinous films. The idea ofa good war, for example, looked one way when viewed from the perspective of soldiers who came under fire to destroy Hitlerism and Japanese militarism. It looked different from the perspective of many civilians who were able to enjoy an adequate income for the first time in a generation. The rationing of monthly amounts of meat, sugar, and gasoline between 1942 and 1945 appeared less restrictive to those who during the 1930s could not afford to buy meat or automobiles. Given this perspective, the New War against terrorists does not promise to be a good war. The New War is suggestive much less of Pearl Harbor than of Tocqueville's warning 170 years ago that Americans will have trouble conducting a complex, secretive, long-term foreign policy because they have a short attention span, have too little historical understanding to comprehend long-term interests, don't trust unforthcoming governments, and prefer such domestic pursuits as making money. To some students of U.S. foreign policy, this formulation has become known as the Tocqueville problem: how can a complex, pluralistic, entrepreneurial society be organized and disciplined over long periods to support a foreign policy or war? This problem has necessarily been at the center ofpresidential concerns in every war Americans have become involved in since the late 1790s. Good wars, if Tocqueville is correct, turned out to be those when some were sent to die for a great cause and most remained safe and increasingly prosperous at home. The wars of 1812 and 1861-1865 may well have been necessary, but given the near-defeat and destruction of U.S. property in the first, and the incredible bloodshed in the second, few would have called them good. President George W Bush recognized a massive fact of American history when he at once dispatched a professional (that is, non-conscripted) force overseas, while telling Americans to invade shopping malls, pocketbooks at the ready. During World War II, President Roosevelt asked Americans to save, especially through war bonds, as they enjoyed increasing prosperity . In the New War, President Bush orders Americans to spend; both the Tocqueville problem and the nature of21stcentury capitalism demand it. It would seem this New War might be different and move outside Tocqueville's categories. For the first time since 1812, a foreign enemy has inflicted heavy civilian casualties on the U.S. mainland, indeed on the nation's largest city. The question nevertheless has to be asked as Tocqueville formulated it: whether, and if so how long, Americans are willing to change their way of acting and, above all, thinking in a war that, as the president constantly warns, can last decades and not (as in, say, Kuwait or Kosovo) hours or months. A thirtyminute -longer wait at airline check-in counters does not count in answering this question. Gun battles at 30,000 feet with unbalanced passengers, or a long economic downturn during an extended, unpredictable war, do. How Americans think about this new war, and how patient they will be...