The Imperial Consensus
The United States is a two-party single-ideology state. This has been true at least since the Wilson Administration when American corporations concentrated their power over labor, the economy and government. This consolidation was presented to the public as the necessary response to a national emergency arising from World War I and the Russian Revolution. "Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare was the earliest and most extreme resort to state power in twentieth-century America to suppress labor, political dissidence, and independent thought." This corporate lock on political power was dramatically illustrated by the arrest and imprisonment, in 1918, of Eugene V. Debs, the great railroad union organizer and Socialist party candidate for US President. Debs was the personification of the struggle by industrial workers to gain just and secure employment from the monopolistic companies involved in the rapid growth and organization of the American economy after 1877, the year of the great railroad strikes and the Socialist takeover of the city of St. Louis (for one week).
Debs was prosecuted for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, which is an ancestor of today's Patriot Act, and which was used to imprison Americans who spoke out against World War I; it is still on the books. In March 1919, Debs was convicted of speaking out publicly against the draft and the war, and was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. The Russian Revolution erupted in 1917, and spurred a reaction by American capitalists intent to ensure no such social upheaval would occur here. A 1919 law allowed for the deportation of aliens who opposed organized government or advocated the destruction of property (also an ancestor of today's Patriot Act). The "Palmer Raids" of 1919 and 1920 (named for Wilson's Attorney General) saw thousands arrested and ordered deported, many simply former Russian peasants. Then as now, there was a "war on terrorism," the true meaning behind this Orwellianism being exposed by John Pilger's reversal of it: "the war is terrorism."
By the time that a sixty-six-year-old Debs was released from prison by President Harding in 1921, the Socialist and Progressive parties and the unions and the mass movements that had given rise to them were sufficiently dissipated, restricted and controlled so they would never pose a revolutionary threat to corporate power (though there was some resurgence of unionism and socialism during the Great Depression of the 1930's). During the 1920's, the pioneering and very successful use of propaganda in favor of the war effort by the Wilson Administration was transformed into a new public relations industry, which was underwritten by corporate interests in a campaign to co-opt the American people into a gradual and continuing diminution of their rights and freedoms, in favor of an uncritical support for corporate prerogatives and power to determine social priorities. This campaign of social engineering has never ceased. "Workers," -- with properly reconditioned minds -- are now "consumers."
The Singular Ideology Of Corporate Social Organization
Let us consider an admittedly cartoonish rendition of the singular ideology we Americans have been brainwashed to accept as the norm. The six linked concepts of this ideology are: 1) individuals are fulfilled by consumption, 2) aggregate consumption requires industrial scale to supply, 3) therefore, individuals "need" corporations, 4) corporate efficiency makes fulfillment accessible and affordable, 5) thus, the individual's "need" for "low price" is an endorsement of corporate optimization, and 6) efficiency is gained by increasing scale, expanding markets, and eliminating restrictions. The ideological conclusion is that unlimited corporations equate to unlimited individual fulfillment. Any state animated by this ideology will inevitably be drawn to imperialism -- increasing scale, expanding markets, and eliminating restrictions.
The primary flaw in this straw-man of an argument is with the initial statement, in fact individuals are not fulfilled by consumption. The other flaw with this argument is that it assumes the world is an infinite reservoir of resources and markets, which will fuel the "open loop" operation of the singular ideology, and that this same world is an infinite absorber of its waste products. Other flaws are the exclusion of the possibility of decentralized industry and agriculture in step 2, of public ownership or nationalized industry (e.g., healthcare) in step 3, denial of monopolistic tendencies in step 4, the assumption of personal greed as the individual's prime motivation in step 5, and the presumption that optimizing profit should take precedence over any other concern in step 6. However, the argument persists in practice because it offers a justification for greed at every level of social organization, from the individual to the corporate.
By definition, people that do not participate in the singular ideology are threats. By their aloofness, or abstention, they "prevent" the system from fully "expanding" and thus "optimizing" itself (put this way, it sounds viral). Stated from a different perspective, the members of the ideology are denied the opportunity to profit from an engagement with the non-participants -- who are a "closed market." For eighty-six years closed markets had been known simply as "communism," and their inhabitants as "communists" and "socialists." There is nothing in their existence that satisfies the root motivator in the singular ideology: "what is in it for me?" What may be new is the addition of the terms "Islamic fundamentalism" and "Islamic radicalism" as variant labels for "closed market."
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Politics Of War
The political consequences of the Iraq War are evidently similar to those of WWI, a political repression of varying degree aimed at elements of the society seen as threats to the corporate-imperial interests prosecuting the war: "foreigners," generally from the Southern countries of the world and in particular Muslims, anti-corporate dissidents, civil libertarians, and any advocates of socialistic causes (e.g., unionism, environmentalism, social welfare). Besides the diminished rights and increased policing typified by the Patriot Act, our politics is likely to narrow in scope, receding from public aspirations (national healthcare, national daycare, national education through university, a ten month work year with four day work weeks) to hew to the corporate concerns (pharmaceutical profits, insurance industry protection, military-industrial subsidies, agribusiness subsidies, polluter protections, labor control, relief from financial regulations, corporate access to public trust funds).
Also, our politics is likely to become more divisive (a painful thought), as pro-war and anti-war sentiments harden in a climate already poisoned by an expanding gap between rich and poor. The typical American, not specifically targeted by the new security procedures (beyond removing shoes for inspection at airports), is most likely to feel the political effect of the Iraq War as a diminishing of any public discussion of social welfare issues, because "the war" and "diminished resources" have made the passage of such social legislation more remote. In the simplest terms, the Iraq War is just one more step in which the national government recedes in its concern for the typical citizen. "As the Russian dissident economist Boris Kagarlitsky points out, 'Globalisation does not mean the impotence of the state, but the rejection by the state of its social functions, in favor of repressive ones, and the ending of democratic freedoms.'"
Society At War
The social impact of the Iraq War will reflect the degradation of the supporting economy and the political environment in which it operates. It will be experienced differently as individuals are either inquisitive or evasive in their attitudes towards choices presented by the society at war. Here we are considering civilians, far removed from the circles of power, or military operations.
To the inquisitive person naturally drawn to activism (inspired by religion or politics) and sympathetic to an anti-war attitude, the Iraq War will present a new challenge of exposing the propaganda promoted by American imperialists, and in building an opposition. An inquisitive individual motivated by personal gain instead of morality would find the careerist opportunities presented by the new circumstances. Wars are always accompanied by war profiteering and financial swindles.
To the evasive person, which is to say most of us, the social impact of the war will be experienced as often-unnoticed absences, such as diminished cultural and artistic activity, with reduced diversity in what remains, because of funding losses to the war effort. The war climate will also produce increased xenophobia, especially toward Muslims, a greater tolerance of violence in our entertainment and expressions, a coarsening of our attitudes towards suffering (being subtly shaped by corporate media to tolerate the war with its accompanying repression and deprivations), a distancing from people and activities that seem radically anti-war, in fear of being identified as an "enemy" by unseen government surveillance (sometimes you really are not paranoid, and they really are out to get you), a reluctance to "speak out," or "volunteer," or "expose" your opinions in public, a submersion of personal attention into work, consumerism, sport and popular entertainment, and in general an evasion of discussion or reflection on the issue of personal responsibility in the state of society.
I have not read anything that surpasses The History Of The Peloponnesian War for insight on society during a time of war. In it, Thucydides writes,
The great wish of some is to avenge themselves on some particular enemy, the great wish of others is to save their own pocket. Slow in assembling, they devote a very small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile each fancies that no harm will come of his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays.
Psyche Of War
A society at war is one where many people have a sense of dread, because they feel helpless to influence events, which could turn unexpectedly with devastating consequences to them personally. "Will I find myself in a hijacked plane, blown up by a suicide bomber?" "Will the FBI come to speak with me, because I have a security clearance and work for a defense contractor while my brother is a radical anti-war Muslim?" "Will I be able to start college, because I can't find any scholarships and can't afford loans?" "Will they find out I crossed the border eighteen years ago?" "How do I get a job now?" "Can I trust him?" "Will I see him again?" "Will they find out?"
War is depressing, it drives one inward, towards inertia, in search of anonymity.
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