A U.S. identity built on state fantasies

Donald E. Pease is professor of English and Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College. He is author of The New American Exceptionalism.

My book is primarily concerned with the irreconcilable rifts within U.S. political culture that opened up during the lengthy period of transition from the termination of the cold war to the inauguration of Barack Obama, and with the disparate state fantasies that emerged to organize U.S. citizens' relations to these antagonisms. Such fantasies should not be construed as disposable representations of the state's procedures of governance. The fantasies through which a population takes up a different juridico-political order constitutes an essential dimension of the order's symbolic efficacy. The so-called "birthers" movement supplies a good example of a state fantasy that discloses the difference between the fantasmatic structures of the Bush and Obama administrations.

In declaring a global war on terror as the state's response to 9/11, President George W. Bush accomplished what his father had not. This apocalyptic event enabled him to bring closure to one epoch and to install a very different order of things. President George Herbert Walker Bush had attempted to inaugurate a New World Order in the form of a restricted war with Iraq. But at the conclusion to that war, U.S. citizens were still lacking the imagined presence of an internal enemy who could re-instate the dynamic structure of American exceptionalism as a collectively shared state fantasy. All that changed after 9/11. The buildings that were the targets of the attacks—the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Building—were icons that represented the people of both covenants.

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