In an interesting piece in the New York Times, Susan Faludi advises us to look to our colonial past and the conflict between settlers and Native Americans as a useful guide for what to do in our post-9/11 world. She writes in part:
The founders of our country were steeped in the experience of Metacom’s Rebellion... It was in these very times, with recent knowledge of domestic attack, that our founders expanded, not contracted, the concept of democracy, authoring the very liberties we have been tempted to renounce in our own time of “troubles.”
If the polls recording widespread disenchantment with the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s performance are any indication, we may finally — a half-dozen years after 9/11 — be prepared to ask some hard questions about our response. That suggests we may be at a moment of clarity and, hence, of great possibility. By returning us to the trauma that produced our national myth, the 9/11 attacks present the opportunity to look past the era of buckskin bravado and unlock the cabinet wherein lies America’s deepest formative fear, the fear of home-soil terrorism.
Perhaps Faludi's antipathy towards the Bush administration has led to her own convenient amnesia. It is true that in the revolutionary period, founders expounded the concept of democracy. However it is not true that they expanded it dramatically beyond the systems of governance already employed in the colonies. The franchise, for example, was extended only to white male landownders and slavery was legal. The liberties Faludi accuses us of having "renounce[d]" in this post-9/11 world are leaps and bounds beyond the initial liberties as practiced by the founders. It was, after all, as Faludi seems to have conveniently forgotten, the immediate post-revolutionary period that brought us the sedition act, which surely she does not intend us to revisit. This period also brought us the Alien act, still a part of our laws today.
Throughout the history of these United States we continue to grow the meaning of freedom beyond freedom as experienced in any other nation on earth. We did not spring forth from the revolution a perfect nation, and we continue to grow today. For Faludi to suggest that the last five years of American jurisprudence are regressive and we ought to return to the revolutionary war period is ludicrous. It's a cute analogy, but the 'buckskin bravado' she derides was not pointless: it was the decision that in the face of a terrifying and unpredictable enemy, the preservation of a nascent state was more important. If Faludi is urging us to revisit this determination, I respond that abandoning the value of protecting America from threats is stupid..
