We Are the Baddies

I was born in 1984. Which means the end of my legal childhood coincided (give or take a few months) with the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon of September 11, 2001. I was in second period art class; the teacher rolled in the precarious TV cart, plugged in the giant cathode ray box, and we watched the invincibility we hadn’t even realized we felt crumble with the reinforced concrete. Too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, I and my elder millennial cohort spent our youth in the height of Pax Americana, learned about oral sex in middle school from the Clinton impeachment, and watched the towers fall as we stood at the precipice of our own adulthood. 

The defining political event of our young lives was the most spectacular example of imperial blowback in modern history. Then George W. Bush squandered global sympathy by doubling down on U.S. violence in the Persian Gulf, and any reckoning Americans might have had with the series of geopolitical choices that made a skyscraper in New York City the target of a transnational network in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan was instead redirected into futile efforts to stop country’s next imperial adventure.

Now, this same microgeneration is staring down middle age as denizens of a country that bombed a school full of young girls, killing at least 175 people, in the opening hours of a war begun by our government without any coherent justification, much less one that would pass muster under international law, and without the Congressional authorization required under U.S. law. It is a war our government was no doubt emboldened to begin because it previously suffered no ill consequence—domestic or otherwise—from kidnapping the leader of another country. And it is a war that has distracted from the fact that, simultaneously, our government was also imposing a blockade on Cuba that has led to blackouts and an unknown number of deaths as hospitals were unable to power respirators and NICU units.  

In short, in the language of the memeified Mitchell and Webb sketch, we are the baddies. 

In that sketch, after making that realization (arising from the protagonists’ close examination of a Totenkopf, an artistic choice that has its own hyper-contemporary political resonance), the Mitchell and Webb characters run offscreen. But we—anti-Trump Americans—can’t escape the consequences of our government’s actions quite so easily. 

On February 28, U.S. military strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s defense minister, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces; they also killed the father, wife, teenage son, and three other family members of Iran’s current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. However evil we Americans may believe either Khamenei to have been or to be, it is impossible to have lived through September 2001 and not recognize the probability that at some point, if not in our lifetimes at least our children’s lifetimes, there will be a violent attempt to rebalance the scale of suffering between Americans and Iranians. Surely a man who has lost that many people close to him will want vengeance; and if not him, one of the brothers or fathers or sons of the more than 3,000 people killed in Iran in the past eight weeks. 

For many Americans, myself included, there is a more profound, existential dread uncurling in our stomachs as we desperately call our members of Congress to try to stop a threatened civilization-ending bombardment against the Iranian people. The return of the imperial boomerang does not just feel factually inevitable, it feels morally inevitable as well. What would it mean if we lived in a world where the U.S. military could destroy so many lives, so wantonly, and not suffer any consequences? 

Getting away with it

This is not to say we would “deserve” those consequences. I am, as I am sure many if not most readers are, categorically opposed to the death penalty; I would defend even individuals personally and directly responsible for suffering against reciprocal horrors. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, my moral worldview abhors a bully who wins. It has become difficult, if not impossible, to remain committed to moral universalism, the notion that my life has the same value as anyone else’s, while maintaining the hope and the belief that my life and my children’s lives will not be shaped by the repercussions, violent or otherwise, of what Trump is doing with my tax dollars. I am not so naïve as to believe that the arc of history bends toward justice or that evildoers always get their comeuppance, but I find it discomfiting to contemplate the possibility that the U.S., as a global actor, will simply get away with this.

But of course, we already have. The 2003 Iraq War killed untold thousands but the average American suffered no ill consequence, no reciprocal violence. Why then does this time around feel different? Part of it is this lack of pretense, the utter disregard for the myth of U.S. heroism. There’s no longer any plausible deniability that our leaders are well-meaning, just misguided. Part of it too, paradoxically, is our collective sense of helplessness. 

The march to war in Iraq was met with street marches in U.S. cities, including the then-largest single-day global protest. There have been massive street protests against Trump, too. But the February 28 bombing of Iran did not merit spontaneous uprising the way the Muslim Ban of 2017 prompted hundreds of thousands to congregate at airports or even protests with the scale and ideological breadth of those rapidly assembled in 2020 in response to the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani and the threat of war in Trump’s first term. Instead “war with Iran” was largely rolled into the litany of atrocities by the administration opposed under the No Kings banner when people showed up in force a month after the war had begun.  

This is not because Americans support the war. If public opinion is to be understood as the basis for moral responsibility, Americans were far more implicated by Iraq: almost the same percentage of Americans oppose the war in Iran now (59%) as supported the war in Iraq in February 2003 (66%). Nor is it cowardice. As the people of Minnesota taught us last winter, Americans are prepared to defend their neighbors at great personal cost. 

Rather, the lack of popular uprising against the war seems to be precisely because Trump has ruled like a king. Of course, U.S. leaders are elected, and so Americans have, to a greater or lesser degree, been able to identify with those leaders as agents to their principal. But even in the interstices of elections, those leaders have ridden the waves of public opinion, sunk or buoyed by perceptions (measured by an elaborate polling ecosystem and refracted back to the public as well as transmitted to the people with power through various media), constrained or empowered by general sentiments and the implicit electoral threat they provide. Because we, the voting public, felt this tie, however distant, between ruler and ruled, and because of the U.S. military’s overwhelming capacity for violence, one of the privileges of American citizenship has been our self-understanding as geopolitical agents: Those who would do on a world scale had to answer to us. 

Trump has broken that tie. He is unaccountable to law, to norms, but also to public opinion. Whether or not he is able to consolidate power to avoid leaving office in 2029, he acts as if he (and perhaps more to the point, his political party) is unconstrained by such constitutional niceties. Ironically, it is this domestic disempowerment that throws our complicity into sharp relief: No longer the protagonists of our own political narratives, our opposition or self-justification alike rendered irrelevant, we Americans have begun to see ourselves as victims of history for the first time. We are not on the losing end of a domestic political disagreement in which we can say, well, we put up a good fight but were outvoted by our neighbors. Those opposed to the war cannot accept it as the unfortunate but legitimate outcome of a set of political commitments to internal democracy. And because we cannot tell a story of principled acquiescence to a legitimate collective decision, we are confronted with our own inaction in the face of injustice.

The fact that Trump is ruling like a king does not excuse us. Hannah Arendt, scholar of totalitarianism and revolutions, makes this point in On Violence, an essay published alongside her defense of civil disobedience as a collective democratic endeavor. Against those who would identify power with the ability to command through organized force, Arendt argues violence is what emerges in the absence of power. Obedience as the basis for political rule is overrated; only in the most extreme conditions of fascism do people act under threat of violence. Instead, quoting Madison, Arendt asserts that “all governments rest on opinion”—monarchies even more than democracies, because a solitary individual (the monarch) lacks the power of numbers. Ultimately all governments are subject to the veto of mass uprising. The continued, zombie-like functioning of U.S. civic life, while attributable in part to federalism and the flourishing of local governments, also operates as an implicit ratification of the regime. However fascist Trump’s aspirations, we do not have the excuse of living under conditions of totalitarian repression to excuse our failure to exercise our collective veto. 

Trump’s War on Iran has forced Americans into a Catch-22: It is impossible to remain absolutely committed both to the safety and well-being of Americans, our families and loved ones included, and to the idea of an even vaguely egalitarian world order. That war, in its disregard not just for the lives of Iranians but U.S. political opinion, has also deprived Americans of their political agency, has made just living one’s life a morally unacceptable posture.

Moral wounds

There is a term for our current political condition, in which our own day-to-day lives are indefensible but there are no obvious means by which we can produce a different outcome in Iran: Moral injury. It describes the suffering experienced by individuals with authority operating within systems who carry out acts (or through their inaction, allow consequences) abhorrent to their own values without having abandoned those same values. To describe someone as suffering a moral injury is not to excuse their actions, but to recognize the impossibility of having done anything else—the injury is precisely in forcing someone to do a terrible thing who wouldn’t otherwise. It is also a way out of the dead-end discourse of desert. Recognizing moral injury invites sympathy on behalf of the morally injured and claims of justice against the system that has produced the outcome. It invites the person presented with the trolley problem to ask who exactly designed these tracks in the first place.

The term moral injury was first introduced by psychologists treating military veterans—specifically, Vietnam veterans. Because, of course, Iran is not the first time the U.S. has committed atrocities abroad. Spencer Ackerman has written a book arguing much of the first Trump administration’s immigration and military abuses can be traced to legal and institutional changes begun in the aftermath of September 11, as part of the War on Terror. 

But even that is relatively recent history. September 11 is also the anniversary of the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile. General Pinochet, who led the coup, proceeded to rule the country for 17 years, during which he disappeared more than a thousand individuals, many of whom were unceremoniously murdered by being tossed from a helicopter into the Pacific Ocean. The extent of U.S. involvement in the coup that installed Pinochet is a matter of historical controversy, but the C.I.A. acknowledged in 1974 it spent more than $8 million in the years leading up to Pinochet’s violent seizure of power funding other would-be usurpers. Once installed, Pinochet called upon the assistance of University of Chicago economics professors who designed a program of neoliberal state reorganization on behalf of the violent dictator.

In short, we—Americans—have always been the baddies of the post-World War II order. Or at least, one among a menagerie of baddies.

For a certain subset of left American intellectuals, Samuel Moyn most prominent among them, the greatest political imperative (pun intended) of this moment is pointing out this fact. Too often, in my view, these intellectual efforts, intentionally or not, produce a political orientation of arch superiority against those attempting to throw up friction against Trump’s worst excesses and detract from the urgency of our present moment. Yes, in theory the call is to more radical action than the anti-Trumpers propose, but in practice the comparisons are brought out to deflate the urgency of taking concrete steps, now. Even worse, they offer MAGA recourse to whataboutism or even implicitly congratulate Trump for putting an end to past hypocrisies. This anti-anti-Trump diagnosis isn’t wrong when it calls out the hypocrisies of past Democratic politicians and U.S. foreign policy. But it does not offer a political program for calling the question on those hypocrisies and thereby overcome them. These thinkers spend time and words explaining why the work of those who act as if liberalism’s aspirations were genuine cannot succeed, but do not offer any other positive ideological framework of sufficient popularity and purchase from which to fight the rise of fascism. Theirs is ultimately a diagnosis of despair, not hope.

But, like many in my post-9/11-adulthood generation, I have children, and so hope is a necessity.

In the Mitchell and Webb Nazi sketch, we know the off-screen ending: capitalists and communists put aside their differences to crush the fascists, unseat their increasingly erratic leader, and establish a European order that has proven surprisingly effective at preventing violence on that continent, at least. This awareness of the characters’ impending defeat makes their self-realization funny, rather than horrifying. But the nascent global superpowers who might emerge to unseat a Trump-led decaying American empire do not promise a more just or open world order. In the words of a 2016 Leonard Cohen poem that has been circulating around the internet as of late: You aren’t going to like what comes after America.

Empire is liberalism’s original sin. A doctrine premised on universal human equality has, in practice, been the ideological framework through which its earliest authors justified the extension of military domination and economic extraction from a small island off the western coast of the European continent. In Liberalism and Empire, Uday Singh Mehta begins by recognizing that the great lights of British liberalism (Bentham, both Mills, Macauley) were the greatest defenders (or employees) of the British Empire in India. Indeed, Mehta observes, the origins of transoceanic British imperial rule and "liberal" thought almost precisely coincide, with Locke's authorship of Carolina's colonial constitution. Part of this is explicable as the paternalist consequence of the progressivist credo; if there is a truth to be universally acknowledged, well, why wouldn't we share it with our benighted brethren? But Mehta also suggests this historical convergence arises from the liberal commitment to a vision of political freedom and internal equality. For that domestic agency to be meaningful, Mehta suggests, the national formation in which political participation happens must be able to exercise unfettered power across the global order. Against the republican tradition in which supremacy in the household was the predicate for full political participation, liberals could extend equal citizenship to everyone within the national border so long as there was a subject other against which this politically empowered collective could still rule. The metropole could offer minimal economic guarantees sufficient to facilitate public participation without large-scale redistribution, so long as that metropole could extract the labor and resources necessary to that material comfort from those outside the political community of equals.

Perhaps then, at the nadir of American liberalism, there lies an opportunity to finally cleave the political ideology’s dark, imperial twin. After George W. Bush left office in ignominy, President Obama went on what was later disparaged as a global “apology tour.” But as those of us who voted for him with pacifist hopes would learn in the next few years, Obama’s American vision was still an imperial one, albeit carried out via drone and diplomacy rather than brute force. Having confronted our complicity in global suffering and also our own vulnerability as political objects, as well as subjects, we can build a post-Trump politics that does not just put the adults back in charge but instead dethrones them. If we win (and I am increasingly convinced we will), we need to dismantle those aspects of the executive that, long before 2016, were empowered to do unaccountable violence. And we need to recognize those aspects of the U.S. legal order that continue to reproduce a racialized and geographic hierarchy between the U.S. and the world and abolish those, too. Tempting as it may be to try and restore the supposed glory days of the post-World War II order, we cannot restore our political agency at the expense of the rest of the world and we can no longer pretend to be ignorant of the body count left by American imperial impunity.

Featured image is Israel's bombing on IRGC facilities in Tehran, by Avash Media