Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt on John Bodnar’s *Divided By Terror: American Patriotism After 9/11*

What is patriotism? What does it mean to be patriotic? John Bodnar’s Divided by Terror addresses this question in the context of post-9/11 America. He notes at the outset that meaning of patriotism, in the United States of the early aughts as in other places and times, is essentially contested. What’s at stake in this contest, Bodnar argues, is nothing less than “just what the character of the national identity should be.” Would America be a truly democratic society capable of learning from its mistakes – “bad wars, inequality, and intolerance,” or would it succumb to an “impulse to glorify aggression” and “dismiss the value of human needs and connections in favor of pride, power, and chauvinism”? (4)

Bodnar introduces the “patriot’s debate” by presenting two broad and conflicting conceptions of patriotism. The first is the rather commonplace notion of loyalty and allegiance to one’s nation-state, especially in a time of war. In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, adherents to this notion of patriotism “rallied to the flag” and threw their support behind the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of a Global War on Terror. Bodnar describes this as “war-based patriotism” and laments the way that it tends to nurture “hatred and aggression” while “reducing its focus to militarism and a highly forceful version of nationalism.” (3) Bodnar’s second broad conception of patriotism is what he calls “empathic patriotism.” By this he means a sense of national belonging rooted in an “ethic of love” whereby “citizen loyalty embrace[s] a sense of mutualism.” (4) According to this principle, citizens are compelled to accept responsibility for harm their nation-state causes in the world and then work “to improve their nation and its social relations.” (4) Patriots of this variety rejected the Bush administration’s militarized response to 9/11, and committed themselves into the work of tending to the harm that that response incurred – both at home and abroad.

Bodnar documents the full range of the contest over the meaning of patriotism across a myriad of public expressions to include public policy, commemorations and art exhibits, feature films and documentaries, and grass roots activism. In the realm of public policy, Bodnar documents the ways in which the initial response to 9/11 was dominated by war-based patriotism. As he notes, public opinion polls showed overwhelming popular support for the Bush administration’s decisions for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the belligerence of American public opinion was at least partially explainable by a relentless barrage of pro-war propaganda disseminated by the nation’s major news outlets – “Key television news anchors such as Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather put aside any effort at objective new analysis…” to become loud and enthusiastic cheerleaders for war. (30) As Hermann Goring observed during his 1946 war crimes tribunal, it’s easy to lead a nation to war, “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”[1]

While it may be easy to lead any nation to war, it is worth noting that it is particularly easy in the U.S. given the centrality of war-making to the structure and constitution of the political system. Not only is the military-industrial complex central to domestic American political economy, but, as Bodnar suggests, virtually all of the myths, symbols, and rituals that legitimate U.S. state violence are grounded in an imagined frontier past. The influence of this frontier myth on the nation’s political culture can be seen in moments such as when President Bush spoke of the need to “start displaying some scalps,” or when he boasted of “tightening the noose” around the neck of Osama bin Laden. (32, 36). This imagery of “frontier justice” constituted an integral part of the “civil religion” of American nationalism, in which American state violence is seen as an expression of the “will of God.” (7)

Given a national propensity to violence so deeply rooted in the country’s political institutions and political culture, it can be easy to overlook dissident perspectives. Bodnar, however, devotes roughly an equal number of pages to documenting instance of “empathic patriotism.” He highlights courageous voices willing to brook national ridicule for to daring to question the nation’s political leadership. He notes, for instance, that on February 15, 2003, cities and towns across the US joined in a global wave of protest against the Bush administration’s planned invasion of Iraq. (92-93) He draws attention to individuals who volunteered to travel to Afghanistan and Iraq to bear witness to the devastation wrought by the American war machine, and to administer aid to those injured and displaced by the violence. And while films like American Sniper (2014) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) smashed the box office and won widespread acclaim, Bodnar argues that such jingoistic expressions were “vastly outweighed by the relentless effort of filmmakers to capture the tragedy and suffering of soldiers, families, and innocents abroad who bore the brunt of American military power.” (214) This was especially the case as the moral and other costs of war became increasingly apparent.

Bodnar’s effort to recover dissident voices and articulate an alternative conception of patriotism is laudable in spirit, but in this reviewer’s opinion, his analytical categories suffer from a lack of conceptual precision. In particular, the definition of “empathic patriotism” is rather vague. This becomes a problem because it is hard to conceive of all of the disparate instances of dissent documented in the book as falling under something that can be described as “patriotism” – emphatic or otherwise. Without meaning to do so, the effort to reclaim and rehabilitate the idea of patriotism may fall into what legal historian Aziz Rana describes as “creedalism,” or the naïve belief in the “inherently inclusive promise of the American project.”[2] For Rana and others, this creed is morally and intellectually bankrupt – plainly contradicted by the facts of history. From this more critical perspective, genocide and slavery were foundational to American state and remain intrinsic to its nature. If this is indeed the case, then the political divisions within American society may be even deeper and wider than Divided By Terror might allow.

[1] G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1947), 279.

[2] Aziz Rana, “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire,” Dissent, May 23, 2022, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/left-internationalism-in-the-heart-of-empire.