Positive Liberty

H. L. Mencken was one of the few people ever to tell the truth about retributive justice:

A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B steals $700, employs it in playing at dice or bingo, and is cleaned out. What is A to do? Let B go? If he does so he will be unable to sleep at night. The sense of injury, of injustice, of frustration will haunt him like pruritus. So he turns B over to the police, and they hustle B to prison. Thereafter A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He pictures B chained to the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet underground, devoured by rats and scorpions. It is so agreeable that it makes him forget his $700.
[From A Mencken Chrestomathy, New York: Vintage Books, 1982, p 119.]

Mencken may have been speaking from pure cynicism; I hear it was one of his weaknesses. But all the same, his observation is useful in explaining certain facts of American politics today.

Consider first of all that 42% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the September 11 attacks. And they continue to believe without even a shred of positive evidence in their favor. Official reports from all major intelligence sources, investigations by the media, and even the President himself have all denied that Saddam Hussein or his regime were directly involved. Were there any contacts? Perhaps–if you define “contacts” as al Qaeda cells existing in Iraq without the consent of the regime.

Why, then, do so many people continue to believe?

We weren’t lied to. Or at any rate, the lie has long since been debunked, as anyone who has been paying attention should know by now.

Pure ignorance is an appealing possibility, but I can’t accept it. Remember, these people didn’t answer the question by saying “unsure” or “no opinion.” Like it or not, right or wrong, they claimed to believe.

Cognitive dissonance may well be the explanation: Inside all of us, there is a deep-seated urge to feel as though the world makes sense–as though a summation of all the facts would yield a reasonable, unproblematic picture. In the picture we imagine, we are always right, and we are always the heroes.

In reality, the past four years have been a disaster for the United States. The 2000 election badly undermined our democracy and shook our self-confidence. One year later, a foreign power successfully attacked us on our own soil. Now we are engaged in a war whose justification was dubious from the outset and whose ultimate success is even more doubtful.

In keeping with the urge to resolve all cognitive dissonance, we want very much to feel that recent events can all somehow be comfortably explained. We want to feel that we are a part of a coherent story, and that in that story, we’re wearing the white hats. We want to feel good about ourselves again.

And we want those pleasant dreams.

Thus it is that 42% of the public has welded together two unrelated evils–September 11 and Saddam Hussein’s vile dictatorship. Joining them imparts a noble purpose upon the sacrifices that we have made in Iraq. Reasonable or not, it also gives us a catharsis for September 11.

Suddenly our history makes sense again. It’s the story of vengeance, and we all know it by heart–even if Mencken was one of the very few ever to state it so flatly. To our great relief, we really are fighting a just war. And if the Iraqis suffer, we need not trouble ourselves overmuch about their welfare: Retribution brings pleasant dreams.

These 42% of course constitute the mostly ignorant and generally silent masses of the country. The educated hawks, the talking heads, the warbloggers–these people usually insist most piously upon rebuilding Iraq and bringing democracy to the middle east. In their own very quiet way, they even insist upon distancing Saddam Hussein and September 11.

But the 42% aren’t really listening. They don’t care to rebuild Iraq, not any more than they care to learn the truth about September 11. Either one would ruin the pleasant dreams.

Want proof of my outrageous assertion? Here it is: Recently, Congress learned that the Bush administration has spent no more than one billion of the 18.4 billion earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction. Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Conservatives who ostensibly wish the Iraqis so well should be up in arms over this blunder; instead, they are silent.

If rehabilitating Iraq is our highest foreign policy priority, then why does no one care when we hear that it’s not working?

The answer is that rehabilitating Iraq isn’t our highest priority. Punishing Iraq is our highest priority–punishing Iraq for something that it did not do.

Pleasant dreams, once again.

And the tortured explanations that Mr. Bush gives to his critics, the stuff about democracy and the global struggle against emerging threats–well, we need not worry too much about that. We sensible Americans know the truth. We can feel it, in the pleasant dreams that we have.

Update, 9/21: Juan Cole says something very similar:

I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush’s cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place.

How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment?

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