America: the power of fear as public policy

Fear and Fantasy – by Simon Critchley

My question is very simple, but the answer is far from self-evident: how do we begin to grasp the political situation in which we find ourselves? It is politics that I would like to talk about, or more precisely the logic of the political; more precisely still, my concern is the logic of the political as it is deployed by the Bush administration in the USA. The concept that I want to advance in order to get a grip on that logic, a concept that I hope has some explanatory power, is what I call “crypto-Schmittianism”, which I will explain presently.

What exactly happened in the American Presidential elections last year? Or rather, how did Bush win? I think part of the story is that certain people in the Bush administration have got a clear, robust and powerful understanding of the nature of the political. They have read their Machiavelli, their Hobbes, their Leo Strauss, and misread their Nietzsche. They understand the more or less noble lies that need to be told in order to secure and keep political power. In their custody, some of the most precious words we have – democracy, rights, human dignity and most of all freedom – have been twisted and debased into ignoble lies that are told in order to maintain political power.

But, worse still, certain people in the Bush administration have read their Carl Schmitt. They understand that politics (and this might serve as a definition) is a sphere of activity that acts through force, generally founded on law – but not always, not in a time of emergency or a state of exception when the sovereign is he who makes the law, as was the case in Guantanamo. The political is a sphere of activity which is concerned with the external security and the internal order of a political unit, what we usually call a state, whether local, national or imperial. Furthermore, the political is that activity that assures the internal order of a political unit like the imperial state through the more or less fantastic threat of an enemy. The political is about the construction of an enemy in order to maintain the unity of the citizenry. That is to say, the unity of the citizens, in this case Americans, is constituted through the relation to an enemy. Post-9/11, that is, post-Cold War and the disappearance of the communist enemy, this role has obviously been taken over by what is called international terrorism: Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, or whatever fantasy fusion of these beings was melded in the minds of the electorate, or more recently by shadowy figures like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There is a double fantasy going on here: the fantasy of the enemy and the fantasy of the homeland. Furthermore, it is through the fantasy of the enemy that the fantasy of the homeland is constituted.

Politics has arguably always been conducted at the level of fantasy, the image and spectacle, but it is particularly egregious at the present time. Indeed, what unites the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda is their obsession with the spectacle, a painful love affair with the image, both the image of empire's spectacular defeat on that sunny September morning four and a half years ago, and the attempt to respond to that defeat with the image of “shock and awe” in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; both the carefully controlled and choreographed video appearances of Osama bin Laden sitting cross-legged in a cave and speaking softly with an AK 47 propped up behind him, and “W” strutting and smiling in combat fatigues on an aircraft carrier to declare the end of hostilities. To fail to understand the politics of fantasy is to have no way of understanding why citizens in Florida feel more threatened by terrorism than do citizens of New York City, where 9/11 really happened. Politics is more than ever concerned with the spectacle and the control of the image, which is what makes the Situationism of Guy Debord more relevant than ever as a diagnostic tool in political analysis. Yet, there is a contradiction to the present, namely that it is characterised by an utter pervasiveness of the spectacle, yet what that spectacle reveals is a social process that is hollow to the core, where the reality it offers its subjects is that of Reality TV.

To understand the political is to understand that order and security (and the two terms have become systematically blurred: order is security, security of the fantasy of the homeland from the fantasy of the enemy through the control of the conditions of the spectacle) are maintained through the opposition to an enemy, an enemy at once real and fantastical, a sort of shadowy imago that can strike at the heart of the place you call home at any and every moment. That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry. I'm thinking of economy in Freud's sense here, as the regulation of the right distribution of energy, of affective flow, in the psycho-political organism. It seems to me that there is a desperate need at the present time for the development of a discipline that we might call “political psychology” or “political psychoanalysis”.

This idea of politics as the management of fear is nothing new. It is the lesson of Aeschylus' Oresteia . The Oresteia is a thoroughly political tragedy concerned with the nature of justice in the state, with what is right for the Athenians at the moment of their imperial ambition, their imperial extension and projection of power. At the end of the drama, Athena, the arbiter of justice, a sort of one-woman-goddess version of the Supreme Court, says

Neither anarchy nor tyranny, my people.
Worship the mean, I urge you,
Shore it up with reverence and never
Banish terror from the gates, not outright.
Where is the righteous man who knows no fear?
The stronger your fear, your reverence for the just,
The stronger your country's wall and city's safety.

Shore up the mean with reverence and terror. But never banish terror from the gates of the state. The stronger the fear, the stronger the reverence for the just, the stronger your country's wall and the city's safety. A safer world, a more hopeful America, to recall the slogan of the brilliantly, indeed spectacularly, well-managed Republican National Convention in New York in September 2004. The political as the strength of the country's wall, is maintained through an economy of fear and an economy of terror. Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.

In addition to the logic of the external enemy, we might put this together with the issue of the internal enemy, that I haven't discussed, what the Right would call “the culture of death” that is opposed to Bush and the recently-dead Pope's so-called “culture of life”. Namely those purportedly amoral, value-free nihilistic east and west coasts, dens of iniquity like Greenwich Village and Berkeley, full of queers, Jews and resident aliens, relentlessly aborting fetuses while being metaphysically uncertain, perhaps even atheistic. If we place the internal and external enemy side-by-side, then the picture starts to look very nasty indeed. The United States is effectively disunited and divided into we might call “Puritania” on the one hand and “Pluristan” on the other.

And to think that many, many people, intelligent well-meaning people, people on the 2003 anti-war marches, people all over the world, even some of the titanic intellects on the faculty at the New School where I work, had the stupidity to describe George Bush as stupid. He is not stupid. Calling him stupid is stupid. What we witnessed in the lead up to last November's election victory was the exercise of genuine political intelligence.

Yet, what I have just said doesn't really get at the phenomenon in the right way. I would argue that what characterises the concept of the political in the Bush administration is not so much Schmittianism as what I want to call “crypto-Schmittianism”. What do I mean by that? Roughly the following: on the one hand, the concept of the political is based on the fantasy construction of the enemy and maintenance of the economy of awe and terror that allows order to be secured in the so-called homeland. On the other hand, the decisive feature that defines the current US administration is a thoroughgoing hypocrisy about the political. What I mean is that, in Carl Schmitt's terms, there is something chronically depoliticising about the ideology of the current administration. Going back to those ignoble lies that are being told, contemporary US imperial power espouses an utterly moralising, universalist, indeed millennial, ideology whose key signifier is freedom. Allied to freedom are notions of democracy and human rights, and the administration even has the audacity to speak about human dignity in the 2002 National Security Strategy document that provided the metaphysical justification for pre-emptive military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Not far behind these signifiers lies the crucial question of faith and the link between faith and politics, or the triangulation of a faith that permits a moralisation of political judgments on a metaphysical basis. The astonishing and much-discussed factoid about the presence of moral values in the exit polls from last November, which caused a minor panic amongst American liberals, is deeply interesting to a humble philosopher. Citizens are making political decisions that are really moral judgments and these judgments flow from a dogmatic metaphysics; to be precise, God as the depoliticising instance par excellence. Once again, to bang this point home, this is not stupid. To critical, secular, well-dressed metro-sexual post-Kantians like us, this view of the world might well appear deluded, indeed we might think that a pro-life, anti-queer metaphysics is downright pernicious, but there is no doubt that the triangulation of faith, morality and politics is a framework of intelligibility that makes powerful sense. To go further, one might say that the strong connection between faith, morality and politics is one of the most enduring features of civil society in the US since the time of the original violent settlement, through to the eulogies of Tom Paine and Tocqueville. The left ignores that connection at its peril.

Let me try to summarise crypto-Schmittianism with an anecdote. In his book, Bush's Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward asked “W” if he talked to his father before going to war in Iraq. He replied in the negative, but added that he had consulted a higher father. This is at once funny, psychoanalytically revealing, and deeply serious, I think. But I have no reason to doubt “W”'s moral and theological sincerity. It reveals that a political decision of the classic friend-enemy variety is being made on the basis of the depoliticising instance of God's will. The considerable power of this kind of political thinking (and – lest we forget – it is the justifying logic of most colonialism, which is what leads one to conclude that so much contemporary politics is simply neo-colonial) is that the enemy is not just, as in classical war, unlike us, or advancing a territorial claim that we want to repel, or blocking a territorial claim that we want to make. On the contrary, on the crypto-Schmittian view, the enemy is evil and becomes, in Schmitt's words, an outlaw of humanity, an outlaw who can therefore be legitimately annihilated in the name of freedom. Might it not be the defining characteristic of contemporary essentially economic wars, that they are fought around the signifier of humanity? And might not the presence of this signifier be the key to understanding the savage inhumanity of contemporary war? And although I do not think that philosophers should be in the business of prediction and prophecy, there is little doubt in my mind that future wars (and there will be future wars unless there is significant geo-political transformation) will also be economic wars fought for the possession of scare commodities, notably oil as the key global commodity. Recall Schmitt's adaptation of Proudhon's remark, “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat”. I think this means that the slightly further left amongst us should also be careful about invoking the signifier of humanity in any oppositional politics.

To summarise my main point, the Bush administration has a clear and strong understanding of the political, but this is wrapped up in a moralising, depoliticised discourse. This combination is hypocritical but politically extremely effective. It is, indeed, lethal to its enemies.

(Simon Critchley is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York and at the University of Essex. He is the author of Very Little ... Almost Nothing and On Humour (Routledge).)