What's This "We" Business?

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.” And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban.

Tom Nichols "Afghanistan Is Your Fault"

This analysis is fair enough, I suppose, but I do have one problem with it: there is no "we." And that's been the problem all along. The American public is not a single, unified body with common aims, interests and understanding of the world around it. In a group of appreciable size, there will be a multiplicity of interests, some (if not many) operating directly at cross purposes to one another, even in the absence of zero-sum games. In an intensely partisan environment, and one driven by negative partisanship, at that, there will always be someone looking to criticize. And since partisan criticisms will typically find a receptive audience among co-partisans, regardless of what the criticism is or it's overall coherency. These facts, taken together, call into question the idea that "we" can directly tell anyone anything.

President George W. Bush had this problem. This perfectly reasonable assessment: "I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world," was seized upon by Democratic politicians like Senator John Edwards and even now-President Joe Biden as a declaration of defeat and "unacceptable." The debate over whether President Bush's analysis was partisan then, and the debate over leaving Afghanistan is partisan now. Now that it's President Biden presiding, rather than Senator Biden criticizing, it will be Republicans leveling charges of unacceptable defeatism. Because it will work. It will elevate their stature in the eyes of people for whom President Biden can do nothing worthwhile and become a demonstration of right thinking that's independent of the argument itself; in much the same way that Senators Edwards and Biden found a receptive audience in Democrats aggrieved with the Bush Administration.

But even if it weren't the case, all that someone's critics need have in common is an understanding that the person being criticized isn't doing it right. Everything else is just detail. And so critics need not agree with one another, even if they are being consistent over time. And in a society where disagreeing with "them" is how people prove both worth and loyalty to their social reference groups, the idea that a national debate could have lead to anything approaching a national consensus is a pipe dream. (And even then, that pipe needs to have something pretty strong in it.) And while the specific form that negative partisanship has taken may be different, this fracturing of the polity is nothing new. As I understand it, the United States has never been a unified population, outside of a few very short-lived instances. The immediate aftermath of, for instance, the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington DC, resulted in people being united in grief and anger at a common enemy, but partisan divisions quickly made themselves known, and many Americans demonstrated an inability to distinguish a different-looking citizen from an Islamist fifth columnist or infiltrator (presuming those making the mistake cared about the difference in the first place).

In order to say that "we" are delivering a message, there first has to be an understanding that there can be a broadly shared consensus. Previously, that consensus was somewhat falsified, created by simply ignoring those people who disagreed, or whose interests were harmed. As more and more people obtained access to the public discourse and the franchise, a single social voice based on one group's understanding of their own interests became less and less tenable as an ongoing practice. And in such situations, it's more common, at least in the United States, for those groups to deliver their own messages, rather than to hammer out some form of compromise message. That cacophony of different constituencies results in a situation where there is no one message ever being delivered, even if one set of voices is momentarily significantly louder than the rest.