The September Eleventh attacks have become an ur-excuse that nearly rivals communism in its capacity to justify all manner of unAmerican activities by the federal government.
Opposition to communism enabled Joseph McCarthy's ill-begotten political career, but also the systematic purging of lesbians and gay men from federal jobs as alleged security risks and the blacklisting of writers in Hollywood who had commited no crimes, but merely exercised that right to peaceable assembly that our Constitution plainly guarantees. It allowed federal officials to countenance the use of unsuspecting Americans as guinea pigs in experiments to test the effects of radiation exposure. And it produced some of the largest errors ever in American foreign policy, from the merely embarrassing Bay of Pigs invasionette, to the patently unjust, undemocratic imposition of authoritarian regimes in Iran, Chile, and elsewhere, to that biggest, most tragic yet of American foreign policy screw-ups, the Vietnam War. All because of our largely self-manufactured belief that communists were out to get us.
Comes now the 9/11 attacks, which were in important ways very different from the communist threat. First and foremost, they were a horrifying, incomprehensible attack directly on American soil, targeted at symbols of American power. Secondly, these attackers apparently really are out to get us. These facts created a perfect storm, ripe for exploitation by over-zealous conservatives who deeply value authoritarian government and went about trying to impose it on the United States to the extent that our anti--authoritarian Constitution and political traditions would allow. They quickly started two real wars and declared an abstract war -- on terrorism -- that was impressive for its enomous elasticity, which enabled all manner of expansions in federal power for those of an authoritarian bent.
Bits and pieces of the Bush administration's authoritarianism leaked out as they were happening -- efforts to spy on American citizens, disregard of fundamental American restrictions on government power in the treatment of detainees, horrible mistreatment of innocent persons suspected without good cause of terrorist activities, outright lies in the effort to justify an unnecessary war. All from an administration that revealed the characteristic incompetence in the daily management of government that is the hallmark of crony-authoritarianism -- FEMA's inept response to Katrina, the willful denial of scientific evidence that contradicted political imperatives, the wholesale politicization of the Justice Department. With Bush mercifully out of power through the ordinary operation of our political process, now we confront the issue of torture, which many Americans – including such conservatives as John McCain -- consider fundamentally unAmerican apart from the nearly universal belief among experts that it just doesn't work. Dick the Dictator Cheney continues to embarrass himself with his increasingly histrionic efforts to justify the Bush administration's policy on torture.
The big thing that the 9/11 attacks have in common with anticommunism is the proposition that this is something new, which justifies all manner of innovation in federal policy, including disregard of basic American principles of justice, which is ironic, given conservatives' supposed regard for tradition. Although Obama has disappointed some of his supporters, including me, with his willingness to perpetuate Bush administration policies, still he has a fundamentally different attitude toward the "war on terror" and will likely not try to use it as a blanket excuse for expanding his own power.