Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
Summary
This study examines the problem of America’s democratic deficit from a rhetorical perspective applied to the representation of terror. Robert Ivie discusses democracy’s centrality to the national identity and how prevailing constructions of democracy constitute a republic of fear, in which the threat of foreign and domestic “others” is chronically exaggerated in rituals of vilification and victimization.
From this perspective, the book critiques influential notions of deliberative democracy and democratic peace and then turns to an analysis of their problematic operation in the war on terrorism. In reassessing the nation’s traditional distrust of democracy and critiquing the Bush administration’s rhetoric of evil, Ivie advances an argument for addressing the problem of terror in an agonistically inflected idiom of democracy that articulates productive relations of consubstantial rivalry, an approach that is responsive to the prevailing condition of radical diversity in a global information age.
Accordingly, Chapter 1 examines how standard representations of democracy in American political culture function as incentives for war. It includes an analysis of how elitist conceptions of democratic deliberation reflect and reinforce what might be called the nation’s inclination toward “demophobia,” a degrading attitude toward the people that is tone deaf to contemporary challenges of pluralism and diversity.
Chapter 2 examines the irony of distrusting democracy as the very symbol of the nation’s identity, i.e., the tension between democracy’s legitimizing ethos and its unruly impulses which is managed by invoking the myth of disease to fabricate the image of a distempered demos. It explores how the founders fashioned a republic, grounded on the fiction of representation, that privileged supposedly rational elites and contained rather than entrusted itself to the rule of the people.
Chapter 3 discusses how the fear of foreign contamination and desire to control domestic distemper motivates a quest for universal peace under the sign of democratization. This chapters critiques a scholarly literature (which has so heavily influenced contemporary U.S. foreign policy) to raise serious questions about the validity of the democratic-peace theorem and to show how it contributes yet another powerful incentive for war.
Chapter 4 turns to an analysis of how this “republic of fear,” with its appetite for war whetted by its peculiar construction of democracy, responded predictably but problematically to the tragic events of 9/11 by endorsing an evolving presumption of preemptive and perpetual war. A nation of reluctant belligerents that historically proclaimed itself predisposed to peace no longer placed the principal burden of proof on those who advocated an open-ended, global war on terror that entailed a curtailment of civil liberties and democratic deliberation domestically.
Chapter 5 extends the critique of America’s counterproductive war on terror by discussing how a rigid and simplistic rhetoric of evil profiled the enemy crudely but powerfully, entangling the U.S. even more dreadfully in a theater of reciprocal demonizing and escalating violence. It further discusses the untapped potential for displacing the dysfunctional language of evil by giving primacy to a balance of liberal-democratic values and speaking in a more robust democratic idiom. Addressing “agonistic Others” strategically as “consubstantial rivals” reduces the impulse to exaggerate danger and invent scapegoats. The characteristics of this more robust democratic idiom, which substitutes rhetorical flexibility for ideological rigidity, are examined.