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I’m old enough to remember when Social Security was the “third rail” of American politics -- too dangerous for even the most conservative politician to touch. You’re probably old enough to remember that, too. It wasn’t very long ago. As recently as the 2012 Republican primaries, Mitt Romney defended Social Security against attacks from other candidates (notably Rick Perry), and Romney emerged the GOP standard-bearer.

How things have changed in just a year. It’s not merely that a Democratic president is offering, very publicly, to cut Social Security benefits. There’s something much more important: In the mainstream of American political conversation, this revelation was not treated as very big news.

Oh, it made headlines. But it shared equal billing at best -- and was often buried beneath -- a host of other stories. You could easily get the impression that the most important thing Barack Obama did on April 5 was to remark on the good looks of California’s state attorney general and then apologize to her.

As I wrote this, his budget proposal including the Social Security cuts was number five on the Washington Post website’s “most viewed stories” list; his apology to that attorney general was number one. The very idea of cutting Social Security benefits is no longer a big deal in the media, so it’s no longer a big deal to the public. And that change is a very big deal indeed in the mythology of American politics.

Until recently, successful Republican as well as Democratic politicians have avoided any hint of tampering with Social Security. It’s a bipartisan tradition going back to Dwight Eisenhower. When he was just a private citizen he warned that the liberal Democrats, who had created Social Security a decade earlier, wanted to “advance us one more step toward total socialism, just beyond which lies total dictatorship.” In letters to wealthy friends he pledged to “combat remorselessly all those paternalistic and collectivistic ideas."

Once in the White House Eisenhower changed his tune. Even though his Republican party controlled both houses of Congress, he told aides that it would be politically impossible to change the Social Security system; the public would never stand for it.

That was precisely the way Franklin D. Roosevelt had planned it. Knowing conservatives were eager to pounce on every New Deal program, he designed Social Security so that no one could attack it as a “government giveaway.” The benefits would not -- and still do not -- come out of the government treasury. They come out of a special pool of money funded by payroll taxes. To hammer home that point, FDR made sure the first benefits would not flow until some time after the first taxes were paid in.

In this way FDR created the myth of Social Security: When you retire or are disabled and stop working, the checks you get in the mail don’t come from the government. They are your own money -- the money you’ve set aside over the years -- being returned to you, fair and square. No American worker is going to let the government touch his or her own money. That’s how FDR made sure Social Security would be the “third rail.”

Like most myths, this one is compounded of fact and fiction. It’s true that Social Security is a separate fund and an insurance program of sorts. You don’t take out of that fund unless you’ve paid in. But the amount you take out is rarely directly proportional to what you’ve put in. And the separation between Social Security fund and federal treasury disappeared long ago, because the government has raided the fund regularly.

However the proportion of fact to fiction has little to do with the power of a myth. The myth of Social Security has been such a staple of American political life because it is so simple and seems to capture so well the basic idea of fairness and equity: If you work hard and set aside some of your earnings every paycheck, when you can no longer work you will still have enough to live a decent life. The government won’t give you the money; it’s your money. But government will guarantee that the money will be there.

That sounds a lot like the recent rhetoric of Barack Obama: If you work hard and play by the rules, it’s the government's responsibility to make sure you can live a decent middle-class life, no matter how long you live.

Yet now Obama’s policies have diverged from his rhetoric, as well as from the policies of all successful politicians since FDR’s day -- and it’s not very big news at all. How can that be?

The short answer is that the old myth of Social Security no longer has the power it has held since FDR’s day. We are watching a time-honored political myth begin to die.

Myths don’t die because they are debunked by facts. Myths die when new, more persuasive myths come along to take their place. Soon, the demise of the old myth just doesn’t seem so important any more.

The new myth, in this case, is a story about the baby-boomers who will soon all be retired or disabled. They’ll draw down huge amounts of Social Security money, the myths says, far more than they have put in and far more than the younger generation can provide for them. If we don’t cut their benefits, the nation will go broke.

This myth thrives despite the mountain of facts that contradict it. Social Security is infine financial shape until the youngest baby-boomers are at least 90, maybe 100. If the system needs more money after that, there’s a simple solution: Raise the cap on the Social Security payroll tax. Right now, no matter how many millions you may earn, you pay that tax on only the first $113K of your income. Start taxing income over $113K (which is only the top 5% of wage-earners) and the Social Security fund begins to swell, covering all future needs. It’s a solution that gets huge support from the public, when pollsters ask about it.

But, to repeat, myths don’t die because they are debunked by facts. They die when they are eclipsed by new, more powerful myths. The myth that Social Security benefits must be cut is one part of the myth of the “debt crisis,”  which is, in turn, just part of the much larger mythology of homeland insecurity -- the narrative that says America is teetering on the cliff, ready to be plunged into disaster, very possibly even extinction, by some evil force or other. That’s been America’s master narrative, our most powerful myth, for decades.

The fact that Social Security is sound, and could be made more sound by raising that cap on the payroll tax, doesn’t make headlines or get much air time because it doesn’t fit into our ruling myth of insecurity. And Obama’s decision to propose Social Security cuts doesn’t make a huge political wave because it fits so well into that ruling myth.

Sure, polls consistently find people opposing those cuts. But the more important point is that -- judging from the media coverage of Obama’s decision and the weakness of the opposition to it -- the public now accepts those cuts as inevitable, because the myth of insecurity is the political water we all swim in.  

Cutting Social Security benefits even a small amount will be another victory for the myth of homeland insecurity. Once that myth comes to control the public view of Social Security, there’s no limit to the cuts in benefits. Everything and anything must be given up for the sake of national security: That’s been America’s creed for a very long time. When Social Security cuts become routine news, that creed gets a huge boost, opening the door to even larger benefit reductions.

So there’s much more at stake in the Social Security debate than the amounts of the monthly payments. It’s really a fundamental debate about the mythology that shapes American political life. Will we maintain the New Deal myth, the basic social contract, which Barack Obama voices so eloquently: If you work hard and set aside part of each paycheck, you’ll be guaranteed a decent life after you stop working?

Or will we scrap it in favor of the insecurity myth, which creates such a different  kind of social contract: Since danger threatens America so massively and so imminently, each of us must sacrifice to save a whole nation on the brink of collapse -- and the poorer you are, the more you must sacrifice? That’s the direction Obama’s policy is taking us in.

Yet both options remain open. Like FDR and Eisenhower, Obama will go whichever way the political wind blows. The choice is up to us. 

FDR with Ibn Saud, first king of Saudi Arabia, in February 1945.

In a column I’ve just posted on Tomdispatch.com I summarized the tremendous task Barack Obama seemed to commit himself to, in his recent Middle East trip, as he once again took on the role of peacemaker:

[He] must satisfy (or mollify) both the center-left and the right in Israel, strike an equally perfect balance between divergent Israeli and Palestinian demands, march with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu up to the edge of war with Iran yet keep Israel from plunging over that particular cliff, calibrate the ratcheting up of punishing sanctions and other acts in relation to Iran so finely that the Iranians will, in the end, yield to U.S. demands without triggering a war, prevent the Syrian civil war from spilling into Israel, which means controlling Lebanese politics too -- and do it all while maintaining his liberal base at home and fending off the inevitable assault from the right. 

That’s a tall order, indeed. But in American political culture we expect no less from any president. After all, he is “the most powerful man in the world” -- so he should be able to walk such a high wire adroitly, without fretting too much about the consequences should he fall.

Whenever an American president travels abroad, his overriding plan is to act out on the world stage the fantasy that so many Americans love: Their leader, and the nation he embodies, have unlimited power to control people and events around the globe.

In this imaginary scenario, the president can do all because he knows all. He is above every fray, understanding the true needs of both sides in every conflict. That’s why he can go anywhere and tell the locals what is true and right and how they should behave.

With his awesome wisdom and omnipotence, the mythic president can deftly maneuver his way across the most challenging and dangerous situations and settle every dispute with god-like justice. He can be all things to all people. So he never has to make painful sacrifices or suffer any losses, as he proves that the American way must eventually triumph over all.

Historians should wonder: How did this mythic image of the all-powerful president arise? Already in late eighteenth-century writings we can find confident claims that the fledgling United States of America is destined to play a unique role in bringing peace to the world.

But the idea that the president would personally have such power has its earliest seed in Theodore’s Roosevelt’s successful mediation to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. TR was probably motivated mostly by concern that the war would interfere with burgeoning U.S. trade interests in east Asia. But the Nobel Peace Prize he received seemed to mark him as less interested in national power than world peace.

That image of a disinterested pursuit of peace and justice was magnified manifold by Woodrow Wilson, who truly founded the myth of the omnipotent president on the global stage. Wilson deftly blended appeals to the idealism of the Progressive era (and the Christian Social Gospel) with warnings that Americans would never be safe until the world was “safe for democracy.”

To what he extent was he an idealist, and to what extent did his idealistic words mask a crafty pursuit of U.S. interests? Historians will probably debate that question forever. But there’s no debating his profound influence on the image of the presidency as an office responsible for bringing peace and justice to all lands.

That image languished during the Republican presidencies of the 1920s, waiting to be revived by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He always cited “cousin Teddy” and Wilson as his two great political heroes. So it’s not surprising that FDR followed their lead. In private conversations and letters, he promoted a vision of a unified democratic capitalist order spanning the entire globe, with America leading the way. And he was more than ready to play the role of omnipotent dispenser of peace and justice to maintain that order.

But he knew that the American people were hardly ready to see the nation, or the president, take on that level of international involvements. Even when war broke out in Europe, FDR had to confront a public deeply divided on whether they and their should get involved. Like Wilson, FDR mounted a major public relations campaign to gain support for his efforts to use America’s mighty power to control events around the world. Like Wilson, he appealed to both idealistic traditions and vivid depictions of threats to U.S. interests and American lives.

Once the U.S. entered World War II, resistance to this new global role pretty much evaporated. But FDR continued to worry that, once the war ended, the public would revert to its “isolationist” tendency to ignore issues of peace and justice in the rest of the world.

Roosevelt had underestimated his own achievement. By the war’s end, his skillful rhetoric had persuaded nearly all Americans that their own safety depended on their government's -- and especially their president’s -- ability to control events everywhere. With all the other major powers devastated, the U.S. had such preponderant power that the fantasy of total control seemed quite realistic.

Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union quickly burst that bubble. But by the late 1940s American public discourse had settled on a seemingly comfortable consensus that lasted through the Cold War era: The U.S. would control everything of significance that happened in the “free world,” on our side of the Iron Curtain, while exercising enough control over the communist bloc to “contain” it.

Once the Cold War ended FDR’s vision of a single global order seemed genuinely within reach. So there was even more reason to embrace the mythic vision of the president’s unlimited power.  

There’s a good argument to be made that the most important results of U.S. foreign policy ever since the 1940s -- for better and for worse -- have flowed directly from this image of the omnipotent president, representing the omnipotent nation, trying to exercise unlimited control.

The most vivid lessons came from presidential (some call it imperial) overreach, most notably in Vietnam and Iraq. Yet despite these remarkable evidences to the contrary, many Americans still cling to the mythic narrative of “the most powerful man in the world,” able to control events in every corner of the globe. Why?

The question can be answered in many ways. If we stay strictly within the confines of the study of myth, one explanation seems most compelling.

The claims for presidential control have always grown hand in hand with fears about what we now call homeland security. There’s a straight line leading from Wilson’s warning that Hun victory would spell the end of all civilized (read: American) values to the Obama administration's warnings about North Korea’s nuclear weapons and the Syria’s chemical weapons. All the fears built up along the way created what I call the myth of homeland insecurity: the conviction that the very existence of America is constantly in peril.

The best way -- perhaps the only way -- to allay that fearful belief has been, and apparently still is, to accept the myth of the omnipotent president: “The most powerful man in the world” can manage every situation, no matter how perilous, with wisdom and skill. He can give a cleverly calculated prod here and a perfectly calibrated nudge there, pull all the strings with unfailing precision, without ever losing his perfect balance. Thus he can guarantee a safe outcome for America.

How reassuring it must be to believe that. And how predictable it is that, as long as this mythic story prevails, presidents will continue to overreach their true, limited power, with results that most of America will come to regret.

Yet the irony is obvious: The more regret, the more insecurity; the more insecurity, the more powerful the appeal of the myth of all-powerful president. And the cycle just keeps on turning.

“The United States is taking the threat of a ballistic missile attack from North Korea very seriously,” Melissa Block informed us on NPR the other day, sounding very serious herself. To protect us from that threat, the U.S. will station 16 more anti-missiles missiles in Alaska.

 “The big questions, of course, are this,” NPR’s Tom Bowman explained: “Would North Korea actually launch a missile against the United States, and would these missile interceptors work? And frankly nobody knows for sure, but the Pentagon says, we have high confidence.”

High confidence that the missile defense will work or that the North Koreans would attack the U.S.? No doubt Bowman meant the former (though “the testing has been a bit spotty,” as he tactfully put it).

But the whole project, with all its ballyhoo and its $1 billion price tag, makes no sense unless the Pentagon also has high confidence that North Korea might indeed attack the United States.

Seriously? North Korea is unlikely to have the technical means to attack the U.S., at least not for many years to come. If they ever get that capacity, their nuclear arsenal, like their military capability as a whole, would still be infinitesimal compared to ours. It takes a microscope -- or whatever equivalent CIA analysts use -- even to see it. That’s not going to change.

Any gesture of attack would give the U.S. license to devastate the small, poverty-stricken Asian land. The exercise would be rather effortless for the U.S. North Korea’s leaders must know that attacking the world’s mightiest nation would mean instant national suicide.  

The whole idea of the North Korean mouse attacking the American elephant seems rather absurd, to say the least. Yet the “threat” is widely reported in the U.S. mass media as if it were an undeniable fact. Why?

Bowman offered an important clue when he said that U.S. anti-missile missiles “are the ones that would actually hit an incoming enemy missile from, let's say, North Korea.” His “let’s say” implies that we are defending against a generic threat, of which North Korea is merely one example. North Korea is just the current actor filling the role of “enemy attacker” that the generic script calls for.

It’s much the same mythic scenario that white Americans have been acting out, and basing policy on, ever since the first colonial militias were formed to fend off the Indians -- the scenario 20^th century Americans came to know (and often love) as “cowboys versus Indians.” Now, some nation or other has to play the role of Indians.

Since the United States was created, only one other nation -- Great Britain -- has actually launched an attack on U.S. soil. That was a full two centuries ago. But the mythology of homeland insecurity, with its picture of an America constantly at risk of enemy invasion, remains powerful. This deeply-rooted and long-regnant mythology -- with America playing the cowboys and some (any) enemy nation the Indians -- is the lens through which the mainstream of American culture sees the world. It seems totally natural. That’s one reason it’s so easy for the U.S. media, and so many American people, to believe in “the North Korean menace.”

What’s more, in our traditional national narrative the “bad guy” enemy is, by definition, “savage” and thus bereft of reason. So he might well do something as totally self-destructive as attacking us. How often have we heard that North Korea’s leaders are erratic, irrational, and indeed “crazy”?   

Digging deeper we find other, more paradoxical, sources for this old myth’s staying power.

It’s getting harder to see the world through the familiar lens of fear. After the cold war ended, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, complained: “I’m running out of demons.” He knew that an enormous military budget needs “demons” to sustain it.

A mythology of insecurity needs those “demons” just as badly. American culture is deeply invested in its mythology. Many millions of Americans can hardly imagine what it would mean to be a patriotic American if we did not have potential attackers to resist at all costs. In America, the sense of security that comes from a taken-for-granted mythic narrative needs some nation or other to play the Indians.

But if Powell worried about the absence of “demons” twenty years ago, how much more might a Chair of the Joint Chiefs worry now. The whole tradition of courageous resistance to enemy nations may soon be just a quaint relic of a bygone era, unless we keep on finding “threats to our national security.” North Korea may be just what we need to save the worldview of American patriotism.

Let’s go another level deeper. I’ve been re-reading Alan Trachenberg’s fine study of the “Gilded Age,” The Incorporation of America. Trachtenberg makes a key point about the “cowboys versus Indians” narrative. The story depends on a cowboy using his unique combination of skill and courage to save a whole (white) community from “savagery.” The mythic cowboy is a throwback to the knightly bravado of Launcelot and Galahad. He is popular culture’s way of celebrating the same heroic individualism that Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated academically in his famous “frontier thesis”: “that dominant individualism ... that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends.”

Guns were certainly high on the list of material things that the frontier hero masterfully grasped -- and used, though only in self-defense, to effect great ends, as the story assures us. 

Here’s the paradox that Trachtenberg points out: The “cowboys versus Indians” narrative first came to dominate popular culture precisely when the era of rugged individuals determining the destiny of anyone or anything in the West was in rapidly dying. The real emerging power in the post-Civil War era was the corporation: the ever-growing army of anonymous technicians, managers, and accountants who, each day, gained more and more power over the resources, the culture, and the lives of people in the West.

The growing supremacy of corporations triggered a cultural crisis because it raised such a fundamental question: How could Americans continue to base their lives on their familiar worldview and values? Those had grown up at time when Americans still had reason to believe that they might control a substantial part of their lives through their own choices and actions. Would that old way of life have to be abandoned altogether? Or could some part of it be saved?

One way to save it, Trachtenberg argues -- perhaps the only way -- was in imagination, by creating the mythic tale of the heroic cowboy: “Through such popular fictions, the West in its wildness retained older associations with freedom, escape from social restraint, and closeness to nature.” The ultimate, though unseen, point of the story was to hold on to an old worldview precisely because new realities were rapidly rendering it irrelevant.

That may well be the point of today’s popular story, too -- the one that casts North Korea as the “bad guy” who must be defeated by the heroic U.S. military. Enemy “demons” have disappeared because resistance to U.S. - led multinational corporate capitalism has been largely extinguished in the few places it remained: Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan. Apart from North Korea, only Iran remains on America’s list of inarguably evil nations. And the Obama administration still insists that it might be possible to negotiate our difference with Iran.

That leaves North Korea as the sole irredeemable “bad guy,” the only nation left to play the role of Indian in our long-cherished national tale of global “cowboys versus Indians.”  

In a more theoretical vein, analysts of world affairs have been debating for many years whether nation-states will remain significant actors on the global stage in an age of multinational corporate capitalism. Some argue that even now national borders have become, for all practical purposes, irrelevant as they’re swallowed up by the multinational monoliths. Headlines announcing an increase in U.S. anti-missile defenses to meet the North Korean threat may seem to prove them wrong.

But the lesson Alan Trachtenberg draws from the 19^th century cowboy narratives teaches just the opposite: Stories may well become prominent precisely because they are irrelevant to, and stoutly deny, the actual facts of life.   

That lesson is all the more convincing if we look at another, closely related aspect of the “Gilded Age”: the growing call for a more “muscular” American military. The president who trumpeted that call the loudest was the “Rough Rider,” Theodore Roosevelt. TR saw the military as one crucial way to revive “the strenuous life” of rugged individualism and its masculine virtues, which he claimed to have learned from the cowboys on the South Dakota frontier.

It’s no coincidence that TR was also the first president to fight against the monopolistic practices of corporations. For him and many of his generation, corporations threatened to sap the individualistic vigor that was essential to the American way of life. Tales of heroic cowboys and soldiers, both defending Americans against savages, pointed the way toward averting the threat posed by the corporate way of life.

Now, with this threat grown global, stories of a muscular American military response to a savage enemy may serve much the same purpose: reassuring Americans (even if unconsciously) that they, as individuals, still matter and still have some control over their ever more corporatized lives.

The ultimate irony, which was already becoming evident in the “Gilded Age,” is totally obvious today: In the story that Americans tell, their security depends on highly technological weapons built by multinational corporations and wielded by anonymous, bureaucratized military managers. The 21^st century military “cowboy,” the mythic figure so many depend on to resist total corporate domination, has been completely corporatized.    

You remember those Chinese hackers, the ones we are all supposed to be so terribly worried about just a few days ago? They’ve disappeared from the headlines; apparently we’re not supposed to worry about them any more, at least for now. But they’re bound to be back back in the headlines sooner or later, and probably sooner. So we ought to take a close look at the story.

The joke is on the hackers, says Washington Post wonk blogger Ezra Klein. They’ve been suckered in by a great myth -- the myth that there’s some secret plan hidden somewhere in Washington, the script for everything that the American government and American corporations do. The Chinese think that if they hack enough computers, somewhere buried in that mountain of data they’ll find the master key that unlocks the plan.

The joke is that there’s no key because there’s no plan, says Klein. Everyone in Washington and in corporate America is just bumbling along, buffeted by each day’s endless compromises and unexpected twists and turns that make our system run.

I imagine Klein is describing the American system pretty accurately. But I suspect the joke is on most Americans too, including many in positions of power, because we too have been suckered in by a great myth -- a myth about China that’s a mirror image of the myth Klein says the Chinese hold about us.

All the headlines I’ve seen about the alleged hacking suggest that there’s some great monolithic monster out there -- some say it’s the Chinese army, some say the Chinese government, some just call it “China” -- doing the electronic snooping. Its tentacles are everywhere across America (though they’re especially dense inside the D.C. Beltway), scooping up vast amounts of precious data (the story would hardly matter if the data weren’t precious) and feeding it all into some superbrain that is plotting something.

Who knows what? We certainly can’t know. After all, the monster is Oriental; thus, as an age-old American tradition tells us, inscrutable.

But the Chinese monster surely knows what it’s plotting. It must have a plan. Otherwise why go to all the trouble of doing all that hacking? And the plan must be nefarious. I mean, we’re talking about foreign spies here. Whatever they’re up to, it’s always no good. Whoever heard -- or more likely saw, in the movies or on television -- a story about foreign spies who didn’t pose a threat to us?

If the spies are inscrutable Orientals, who think in ways we can’t ever understand, they are all the more threatening. And if those Orientals are agents of the world’s largest nation – a nation so vast we can scarcely comprehend its size, much less its motives – why that’s the most threatening image of all.

Wait, it gets worse.

I’m writing this a few days behind the headlines because I’ve been traveling. You learn a lot traveling. For example, from reading the nation’s most respected, influential newspapers I had learned that the Chinese hackers are a threat to our national security. But in the airport I learned that I had a lot more to worry about than that.

On every newsstand the message leaped out at me from Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “YES, THE CHINESE ARMY IS SPYING ON YOU” -- spelled out against a blood-red background in big bold yellow letters. Very yellow.

It’s appropriate that my destination was California. I’m writing this piece in the state that did more than any other to promote the notion of the “yellow peril” and the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s and 1890s.

In light of this sad history, I was hardly surprised that there would be so much fear of the Chinese spying on our government and corporations. But now Bloomberg tells me that the “yellow peril” is coming after little old me -- and you and you and you -- scooping up all the most personal private data that each one of us has stored on our home computers.

Who would have imagined it, even in the heyday of the “yellow peril” panic? No matter how much you fear the foreign evildoers at your doorstep, it seems, there’s always more to be afraid of.

If the Chinese are absorbing data from each and every one of us, they are obviously looking for more than just Washington’s master plan. Surely they know that nothing on personal computers in Keokuk or Kankakee can yield the mythical key. No, it’s obvious that they want everything that America has to offer, absolutely everything, wherever it is.

I mean, think about it. China keeps on expanding in every way imaginable -- just like the Borg. So, like the Borg, it must intend to absorb us all. Absorbing our precious data is merely the first step in the plan.

And while we Americans merely bumble along chaotically, the Chinese Borg must have a plan. All this hacking can’t be happening at random. Even Ezra Klein, who usually makes his living promoting healthy skepticism, assumes that everything in China is guided by some master plan.

Indeed, that’s the vital difference between the two great powers, Klein concludes, and the key to America’s superiority. Since we don’t have any great plan, when things get screwed up (as they inevitably do) we are flexible enough to get along pretty well anyway.

But the Chinese depend so heavily on “the plan” that when it gets screwed up they are stuck. In other words, the Chinese are just too regimented, as if the whole nation were one big army. As in any army, when things get snafu’d no one knows what to do next, because the underlings have never learned to think for themselves.  Everyone must simply follow orders. Resistance is futile.

Which brings us back to the “China as the Borg” myth. But this Borg isn’t brave enough to confront us boldy, declaring with supreme self-confidence, “Resistance is futile.”

No, this is a Chinese Borg. So it must be not merely inscrutable but sly, devious, duplicitous. Real (read: white) Americans have always been fascinated by what they imagined went on in the alleyways of our Chinatowns, the kitchens and back rooms of our Chinese restaurants, and -- the most fascinating mythic realm of all -- the smoky, gauzy netherworld of the opium dens.

We could never know what they were doing. But whatever it was, like the deeds of foreign spies, it could bode no good for real Americans.

Now, it seems, that inscrutable “yellow peril” has morphed into a perilous yellow cyber-Borg, aiming its e-tentacles at each and every one of us. For lovers of political mythology, China is the gift that keeps on giving.

Seriously, I’d bet the farm (if I had a farm) that the joke is on us. Of course China has hackers who scoop up as much data as they can from us -- just like the American hackers who are aiming their e-tentacles at China. When the New York Times first reported that the Chinese hackers were probably working for the army (probability was all they could offer) their only source was “American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years.” I should hope so. That’s what we pay them, with our tax dollars, to do.

And just as our government and military analysts sift and organize the spy-collected data in endless ways, constantly arguing about what it all really means, no doubt the Chinese do the same, bumbling along in the same way with the same random, chaotic results.

It’s spy versus spy. I imagine it has been going on ever since the Sumerians faced off against the Akkadians well over four thousand years ago. It’s the obvious thing for great powers to do too. And for all those four millennia, I suspect, every spy has tried to convince his (or her; see “Homeland”) boss that s/he’s got the master key to the enemy’s grand plan. How else can a spy hope to get promoted or given a juicier assignment?

Mad Magazine’s “Spy Versus Spy” cartoons captured the essential comedy of the game for a whole generation of youth growing up in the heyday of the cold war. No doubt, if the Sumerians or Akkadians had a Mad Magazine the basic joke would have been the same.    

But while my generation was laughing at “Spy Versus Spy,” our elders were avidly supporting a government that was heading toward the Cuban missile crisis, when the president’s closest advisor (his brother) could only estimate the rough odds on avoiding an all-out nuclear holocaust. No joke.

So while we laugh at the funny side of the “Chinese hackers” panic, we also need to take it, and talk about it, very seriously. Understanding its deep roots in American mythology is a useful first step. Resistance to even the most deeply entrenched myth is never futile. 

Claire Danes in "Homeland."

In our home the State of the Union address was not followed by the Republican reply. We skipped Marco Rubio’s rebuttal in favor of watching a DVD of old “Homeland” episodes. We’re finally catching up on the first season of the “CIA versus terrorists” drama that everyone else has been watching and raving about for the past two years.

The incongruity of watching the SOTU and “Homeland” in the same evening was a stark reminder of how much has changed in America in just a few years. “Homeland” would have made a wholly congruous nightcap to any SOTU speech by George W. Bush.

That’s not to say Obama’s “war on terror” policies are so different from W.’s. The similarities as well as differences have been parsed at length by the pundits, and similarities there are a-plenty. But the tone of American life has changed so much now that we have a “hope and change” president instead of a “war president.” 

“Homeland” takes us back to the dramatic world that W. invited us into: a world where evildoers lurk unseen beneath the surface of American life, a life that is constantly (if sometimes only slightly) on edge, because no one knows for sure where and when sudden death may strike again, as it did on September 11, 2001. W. fit easily as an actor in that world. Indeed he gave himself a leading role in the drama.

We may not have been happier in that world of so recent yesteryear. But “Homeland” reminds us why so many Americans found it gripping and exciting: It seemed like a matter of life and death. That’s the stuff great theater is made of.

Barack Obama’s SOTU, like every SOTU, was meant to be great theater too. Yet there was something less than satisfying about the show. Watching “Homeland” made it clear what was missing in Obama’s show: The death-dealing bad guys were nearly invisible. The “terrorists” got a very brief mention, mostly to assure us that they could be defeated by technical means, like any other technical problem, without any compromise of our cherished American values.

The real bad guys lurking constantly between the lines of the speech were the Republicans. But they were never called out by name. And their evil -- the fact that their proposed policies would kill many more Americans than “terrorists” ever will -- was hidden so deeply between the lines, it was practically invisible. So they could hardly perform effectively as the villains in the piece.

The Republicans’ evil had to be hidden because the world that the president created in his address was such a utopian world, where everything wrong in American life is just a technical problem that can be fixed with relatively little effort. In Obama’s world evil is simply a temporary error, a lapse in clear thinking, easily corrected under the guidance of a skillful tutor.

Obama took us back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, when all we had to do was to reason together. We would surely recognize the logic of his proffered solutions, he seemed to say with every breath. Then, with only the slightest application of good will, all our problems could be quickly resolved. He made it all sound so simple, so obvious.

The world of “Homeland” -- W.’s world -- is the world of Franklin D. Roosevelt (and Winston Churchill), where evil is far more than a mistake in logic. It is a permanent, intractable element of human life. We cannot reason together, because some of us are moved by an impulse to evil that defies all reason. So evil is not a problem to be solved. It is an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary -- perhaps even extra-constitutional means, though that remains a matter for debate.  

Few Americans watched the SOTU and “Homeland” in the same evening. But all got a taste of this stark contrast in national narratives when they watched the evening news, where Obama had to share the headlines with an evildoer defeated in the mountains outside Los Angeles. Any TV news editor worth his or her professional salt would probably lead with the story of the dead LA ex-cop, not the SOTU. The battle of good against evil is the heart and soul of all television drama, even on the news.

Yet the utopian impulse can create great theater, too. After all, it rests on imagination and fantasy, which are the root not only of theater but of all entertainment. Utopia is only entertaining, though, if it offers a vision of a completely perfect world that can be attained some day, no matter how distant, without compromise.

Barack Obama will not give us that emotional satisfaction. He is a self-confessed disciple of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who battled fiercely against the utopian political impulse -- created largely by Christians -- that flourished in the days of TR and Wilson. Niebuhr accused Christians of being “unrealistic” because they ignored the classical doctrine of original sin: evil is a permanent fact of life, which we must wrestle with forever. It’s a testament to Niebuhr’s enduring influence that being “unrealistic” and “utopian” remains the cardinal sin of American political life.

Obama danced on the edge of that sin in his SOTU. The tone he set left an  unmistakable sense of utopian aspiration. Yet it remained merely a vague impression because every time he approached the edge of utopia he backed away, as he always does, for the sake of “realistic” compromise with the GOP evildoers.

The question Obama's SOTU speech poses is whether the utopian impulse can be resurrected in a nation that has been gripped for so long by the drama of good against evil, a nation that has made the war against evildoers the essence of its national narrative.

Obama himself can never be the agent of utopia’s resurrection.  But John F. Kennedy was certainly far from a true utopian either. And his rhetoric played a role -- a major role, some historians think -- in creating the brief era of the late 1960s, when the utopian impulse flourished throughout the land once again. 

Of course JFK had MLK to do the heavy utopian rhetorical lifting. Dr. King had studied Niebuhr carefully, and he too asserted the reality of evil. But he threw in his lot with the faith of the Christian utopians who were convinced that some day evil will be overcome, not by war but by the reason and good will of humanity. No one can say how long it will take. The arc of the moral universe is long. But it bends toward justice and the perfection of the beloved community.

Obama has no one with nearly the stature of MLK to offer such a message to America today. So his tantalizing hints of utopia must do their work on their own. We don’t yet know what that work will be. Just as no one in the days of JFK could predict what effect his words would have, so we cannot predict the long term effects of Obama's turn toward utopian imagination.

Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.

The on-again, off-again debate is on again: Does the executive branch of the United States government ever have the right to assassinate American citizens without due process of law? A brave soul, who hopefully will remain nameless, has leaked an internal Justice Department “White Paper” outlining the Obama administration's reasons for answering “Yes.” A chorus of critical voices answers, just as loudly, “No.”  

But most of the critics agree with the administration and its supporters on one point: The question here is about the executive’s power in wartime.

If that is indeed the question -- a big “if” -- history offers a certain kind of answer. Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all pushed their constitutional authority to the limit during war -- and beyond the limit, critics in their own day and ever since contended. Yet the overreach of these three presidents (if overreach it was) did little to tarnish their reputations.

Even their critics generally place their actions in a larger context: It’s understandable, though regrettable, that war subjugates all other concerns to the overriding goal of victory. And imagine if the United States had lost any of those wars. Where would we be now? The “White Paper” assumes much the same question as its foundation: Who would countenance a president risking the security of the United States in wartime?

So the document ignores the more basic question: Is this actually “wartime”? Is there a precise parallel between the situation this president faces and the wars his illustrious predecessors waged?

The “White Paper” itself admits that this is a different kind of war: “a non-international armed conflict.” But it ignores the difference. It acknowledges that this is not “a clash between nations.” Yet it consistently treats al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, as if it were a nation. And it uses all the reasoning that would apply to an old-fashioned war between two nations.

This version of reality -- call it the “We’re at war again” story -- has been so dominant for so long that it’s easy to forget how it began. After the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration made a very calculated decision to declare it an act of war. There was an obvious alternative: After the botched 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, President Bill Clinton chose to treat it as a criminal act, to be addressed by the police and justice apparatus, not the military.

A decade ago, there was still some public controversy about whether the Clinton or Bush approach was the best way to proceed. But that controversy didn’t last long. The war party’s story won out and is still winning out.

Every story creates its own world, a world spawned in imagination. The  “war against al-Qaeda” story lends itself very readily to fiction; its world has been depicted in innumerable movies, novels, and TV shows.

Now the “White Paper” offers a valuable confirmation that this imagined world has become the very real world of the Obama administration and the national security establishment. In many respects, it is the world in which all Americans live. The “White Paper” lets us take a good look at its mythic foundations.

In this world, al-Qaeda is not a jumble of separate, vaguely connected cells (as many experts describe it). It is a virtual nation, with a unified, well-disciplined army whose “leaders are continually planning attacks.” Their purported motives are irrelevant; at least they are never addressed in the paper. All that matters is their one and only activity in life: ceaselessly planning attacks.

To make matters worse, “the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qaeda plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none [i.e., no attack] is about to occur.” In other words, we must live and act as if an attack were about to occur unless we have firm evidence to the contrary. And since that evidence can never be found -- How can you prove a negative? -- the threat of attack is “imminent” at every moment of every day. That’s the pivotal premise of the story.

But who or what is always about to be attacked? Here the war story’s world gets a bit murky. On the one hand, the target is clearly the entire nation; the “White Paper” repeatedly insists that the president is acting only to protect the nation from attack. On the other hand, the document insists just as often that he is acting to protect individual Americans from attack.

The two kinds of attack are treated as interchangeable. So the war story, in effect, makes every person in America an embodiment of the nation. An attack on any one, if somehow linked to al-Qaeda (or an “associated force”), is the equivalent of a whole al-Qaeda army invading our homeland.

Is any attack on an individual American, by definition, really an attack on America itself and thus an act of war? Yes, the “White Paper” assumes -- if the attack is planned and carried out by al-Qaeda (or an “associated force”). Yet it never offers any argument to substantiate this claim. There’s no need for an argument. Within the world of the war story it’s a tautology: Since al-Qaeda is, by definition, at war with us, any violent deed it or its associates commit is, by definition, an act of war. Within another story -- say, Clinton’s story of 1993 -- the same deed would be a criminal act, calling for a hugely different kind of response.

The “White Paper” occasionally mentions a third kind of attack, on U.S. “interests.” These remain undefined. But it treats any attack on our “interests” as equivalent to an armed invasion of the nation -- even if those “interests” are on the other side of the globe. In the war story, “the nation” is an expansive concept, indeed.

Those are the highlights of the war story and the world it creates. The crucial question that the “White Paper” raises is whether this is the world we want to live in. Once we recognize that this world is a product of imagination, born from one story among several that we might have told after 9/11, we also recognize that we are not forced to live in this world. It is a choice.

The ultimate results of this choice are clear enough. There are uncounted numbers of people dead. A few of them are U.S. citizens. Some (we shall never know how many) may actually be planning an attack that might kill people on U.S. soil. And some (more than we would like to imagine, perhaps) are wholly innocent “collateral damage.” Their deaths raise powerful anti-American sentiments and motivate a few among the survivors to become active planners of attack on the United States.

Growing anti-Americanism reinforces one more inevitable result of the war story: a distant, muffled, yet very real and constant drumbeat of cultural anxiety that has become part of the soundtrack of American life.

The debate about whether the executive has the right to execute U.S. citizens without due process in wartime is certainly an important one. But isn’t it rather more urgent to debate whether we want to live in this frightening imagined world of “wartime”? 

The American people may collectively choose this world despite its perils. One sign: The public endorses the president’s policy of extra-judicial killing of U.S. citizens, according to polls. In fact pollsters no longer find it a controversial issue; the most recent poll I could find that asked the question was a full year ago.

Perhaps most Americans have forgotten that another story is possible. Or perhaps most prefer to be at war. The war story, and war itself, have undeniable appeal. And a “good war,” in which the enemy is absolutely evil and the only Americans who die are “bad guys,” is so much more appealing.

But if that’s what the public wants, at least it should be a conscious choice. Then, if there’s another attack on U.S. soil, we will have to acknowledge that the story we chose to tell played a role in making the attack more likely.

Of course we could choose a different story and a different world, one where police and judiciary action rather than war is the proper response to attacks on U.S. soil.  Then the question about the executive’s right to kill citizens extra-judicially would simply evaporate. Wouldn’t that be a simple, elegant way to end the debate?

I once heard a prominent expert on contemporary Islam say that Al Qaeda is not an organized group (and this was while Osama bin Laden was still alive). It isn’t even, primarily, a group of people at all. Al Qaeda is best understood as a body of discourse, a way of talking.

How do you fight a body of discourse? With another body of discourse, of course. The United States government is doing that in all sorts of ways, spreading the gospel of democratic capitalism and the American way of life.

But how do you make a movie about a war between two bodies of discourse? If you want to win awards, pack the theaters, and turn a profit, you don’t. A good movie has to start with a mythic script.  And it’s awfully hard to find the myth in a war of discourse versus discourse.

So you make a movie about a war of good guys against bad guys. That’s about as mythic as it gets. It’s the American war story that has been made in Hollywood a thousand times -- well, a thousand and one, now that we have Zero Dark Thirty. I’m finally getting around to writing about the film, after just about everyone else in the world has had their say, because I finally got around to seeing it. It turns out there was no reason to rush anyway.

After all the controversy about the torture scenes, and Kathryn Bigelow’s highly publicized claim that her film merely depicts the horrors of American behavior in the “war on terror,” letting us all make up our own minds about the moral issues, I was expecting some complexity and ambiguity -- something like what she gave us in The Hurt Locker. 

Instead I got two hours and thirty seven minutes of classic, mythic American war movie.

I suppose the difference between Bigelow’s two films is a good index of the difference between the two wars they depict, as far as public perception goes. A popular film about the Iraq war was bound to be ambiguous because, once Saddam Hussein was gone, no one could tell exactly who the enemy was. They were simply (as so many American soldiers told us on the evening news) “the bad guys.”

But as long as Osama was alive, the war against Al Qaeda was a perfectly unambiguous war. In fact it was a “good war," because it fit so well the prototype of all “good wars": the war against Nazi Germany. Both were waged against forces that had, without a doubt, done terrible things. And in both wars American forces also did terrible things. But American deeds were rarely called into question because the enemy’s deeds were so indisputably evil.

There is one major difference between World War II and the war against Al Qaeda: the Germans never made a significant attack on American soil. In that sense, the war against Japan is a better parallel to our current war.

But mythically (and thus cinematically) the war against Germany remains the prototype, for many reasons, no doubt. Zero Dark Thirty reminds us of one big reason: German forces were led by a single arch-villain, the man who remains for Americans the epitome of evil. Leadership in Japan was more diffuse. Since World War II, Americans have needed an enemy led by a single “Hitler figure” before they would sustain support for a war. Osama was the Hitler-est of them all. 

Zero Dark Thirty also fits the WWII movie mold by giving us a superhero who wins the day. Granted, a woman who defeats the enemy by brainy manipulation of digital data is a far cry from John Wayne in the trenches. She’s a fine measure of how much American culture has changed in the last half-century or so.

Nevertheless, Zero Dark Thirty fits the WWII mold: a gripping story of one purely good person defeating one purely evil person (and an inept bureaucracy on her own side, to boot). It’s a dark, dirty job the superhero must do, even if she wears a clean white collar. But, then, as long as the evildoer is at large, commanding his forces of evil, it’s a dark, dirty world. Someone has to do the dirty work to clean up and purify this dirty world. Someone has to descend into the darkness to create a bright new light for all of us to bask in. And that someone, our national story insists, must be an American.   

There’s another important parallel linking the war against Germany with the one against Al Qaeda. In both cases, neither the troops doing the fighting nor the general public knew very much at all about the beliefs, values, or ideologies that drove their enemies. They simply “knew” (that is, believed) that the arch-villain and his minions were evildoers who threatened the very existence of the United States and thus had to be stopped at all costs. That was the essence of the myth.

Zero Dark Thirty reflects that myth quite perfectly. We never get a hint of interest on the part of the American fighters in why their enemy perpetrates violence. This is Hollywood -- or perhaps I should say, this is America -- and it just doesn’t matter.  As long as there is an American superhero pitted against a foreign arch-villain and our superhero wins, no questions need be asked. Perhaps that’s why all the controversy about this film has centered on the torture scenes, not on the simplistic, superficial, conventionally American triumphalism that prevents it from being a great film. 

After the arch-villain is vanquished, though, there is one question to be asked -- the question that ends Zero Dark Thirty: Now that you are no longer threatened by the evildoer, “Where do you want to go?” I presume Kathryn Bigelow wants the audience to see Jessica Chastain, at that moment, as a symbol for America. Once we have defeated evil, where do we as a nation want to go?

The tear falling down Chastain’s cheek tells me that the question is supposed to make us all cry. Why? Finally, in the last seconds of a very long film, a note of ambiguity: You decide why.

I don’t have any trouble with that one. We Americans can unite so readily and act so effectively, as a nation, as long as we believe we are fighting an evil that threatens our country, or, to use Michael Sherry’s apt phrase, as long as we feel that we’re “in the shadow of war.”

But suppose we could escape from that shadow into a world that is no longer dark and dirty? Could we unite and choose a positive new direction for our nation? Our history since the 1940s suggests that we have largely forgotten how to do that.

We do fine when we are acting out our mythology of national insecurity. But if we try to think about acting out a mythology of hope and change, we don’t know how to change or even what to hope for. That is indeed worth shedding a tear for. 

Camels in the Sahara near In Aménas, the site of the hostage crisis. Credit: Flickr/albatros11.

Barack Obama and his political advisors surely thought that gun control would dominate the headlines for days to come after the president announced his controversial proposals. But some armed men in a remote gas drilling site in the Sahara desert had other ideas.

The pundits love to tell us that a president who focuses on domestic policy is inevitably frustrated, because there are bound to be unexpected crises abroad that demand his, and the nation’s, attention. But there’s really nothing inevitable about it. It’s a choice that the public, and the news media who must sell their wares to the public, make.  

Certainly the lives of the people at risk in the Sahara are important. It’s a tragedy when anyone is killed. But let’s face it. A handful of American lives may be lost in Algeria; maybe not. Whatever the outcome, this incident will soon disappear down the American memory hole.    

In the gun control debate, on the other hand, we’re talking about a continuing threat to a huge number of Americans. Thousands of lives will surely be lost this year, and next year, and the year after that, ad infinitum, if the laws aren’t changed. Yet the gun control issue was quickly eclipsed by the public’s rapt attention to the hostage drama in the desert.

Historians may not be surprised. White Americans have been fascinated by stories of their own people being taken hostage by “bad guys” ever since the  seventeenth      century.

Back then, many colonists were captured by native warriors. To the native Americans it was perfectly logical: Whenever some of their people were killed by whites, they would capture -- not kill -- a roughly equivalent number of whites to replace the lost members of their community. It wasn’t about good destroying evil. It was about maintaining an approximate balance.

But the whites didn’t understand that. As most of them told the story, absolutely good (white) people were locked in an endless struggle with absolutely evil (native) people. When whites were taken captive by natives, whites typically saw it as a violation of the most basic moral rule: good should triumph over evil. When whites escaped, it was easy to explain it as an act of God, restoring the proper moral order of the universe.

That’s how Mary Rowlandson told the story of her captivity in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), a book that quickly became a best-seller and continued to be widely read for more than a century.  But Rowlandson’s is only the most famous of the many so-called captivity narratives that have captivated the imaginations of white Americans ever since.

What makes these stories so compelling? Historians have made a cottage industry out of finding new answers to that question. One intriguing theory begins with a well-documented observation: Plenty of captured whites were in no rush to go home. A good number chose to “go native” and live out their rest of their lives among the Indians.

This widely known fact freaked out a lot of white people; it turned their world upside down. If the “good” voluntarily chose to blend into the “evil,” how could anyone be sure anymore where the line was that separated the two? And if that line was blurred, how could there be any moral order at all?

What these whites needed, above all, was reassurance that the moral line dividing them from the native people was absolute, impermeable, and immutable. That’s why captivity narratives were so popular (this theory goes): In these tales, the whites were always absolutely good and the natives absolutely evil. Telling and reading the stories over and over again was a way of reaffirming the simplistic moral fantasy as the true reality, which made it easier to treat the observable, empirical world as if it were not real.

Is it still going on today? The parallel is far from perfect. There’s no evidence that armed Muslim forces want to capture white Americans to populate Muslim communities. Yet white America still has an insatiable appetite for captivity narratives.

And the reasons behind that appetite may very well be much the same.  Even if very few white Americans have visibly “joined Al Qaeda” (whatever, exactly, that might mean), lots of white Americans feel increasingly unsure that they can see a clear-cut, absolute line between good and evil.

The gun control debate is a fine example. While some Americans are sure that stricter gun laws would be good, and some are sure those same laws would be evil, a vast number in between aren’t quite sure of anything. So the public as a whole is in a state of moral confusion. The same is true, of course, about so many other issues.

On at least one point, though, there is an overwhelming consensus: Al Qaeda (whatever it may be) is evil. So when America is attacked by, or pitted against, Al Qaeda, America is self-evidently good.

Ditto when Americans are captured by Al Qaeda -- especially if the capture is “masterminded” by a fierce-looking, black-turbaned, one-eyed Muslim with the exotic name Mokhtar Belmokhtar, AKA “the Uncatchable.” It sounds too wicked to be true, like something “straight out of central casting,“ as the Times of London said -- although in a grade-B Hollywood movie, where we would expect to find him, he would be called simply “the Evil One.”

It’s precisely the mythic quality of this story, and of all captivity narratives, that makes them so fascinating. In myth, as in Hollywood, all the world’s shades of grade can be boiled down to simple black and white.

There’s a perverse sort of advantage when good people are captured by evildoers rather than killed outright. Attacks and battles are usually short-lived affairs. The story is told, and then we’re quickly on to the next story. Nothing is as stale as yesterday’s news.

But a hostage crisis can continue for a long time. Day after day we get to see or read the captivity narrative. And each repetition offers more reassurance that, despite all our disputes and uncertainties, the struggle of good against evil goes on. So we know there are still some absolutes to provide order in our moral universe.

This theory that explains the popularity of captivity narratives also explains why the public would so quickly switch its focus from gun control to the drama unfolding in the Sahara. The gun debate only reinforces the sense that no one knows any longer what’s good and what’s bad. The endless news about the hostage crisis eases that disturbing feeling and replaces it with a satisfying reassurance that, ultimately, all is still right with the world -- even if a bunch of people have to die to prove it. 

(For a look at the mythic qualities of the gun control debate, see my recent post on ReligionDispatches.org.)

The New York Times has just published an expose on Fix the Debt, “a group of business executives and retired legislators who have become Washington’s most visible and best-financed advocates for reining in the federal deficit.” It turns out that “close to half of the members of Fix the Debt’s board and steering committee have ties to companies that have engaged in lobbying on taxes and spending, often to preserve tax breaks and other special treatment.” The Times gives plenty of examples to support that charge.

I’m shocked. Shocked. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow’s Times reveals that there’s gambling going on in the back room at Rick’s Café Americain.

Actually, the analogy with the film Casablanca may not be a bad one. Mr. Rick certainly makes enough money from his business establishment to live quite comfortably, dress impeccably, and keep his place among the city’s elite. But we know that he’s in no way just a greedy money-grubber. He aims to be a useful citizen, providing a service that his city needs and offering it at a high level of quality.

I suspect that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-founded Fix the Debt to promote economic policies along the lines of their Simpson-Bowles plan, would probably say much the same about themselves. So would the other leaders of Fix the Debt who were outed by the Times.

They would make the case that they aren’t merely out to engorge their own bank accounts. Smart people who go into government or lobbying know that they are not going to get truly rich that way. They are going to help other people get truly rich, though they’ll be well-paid for their services along the way.

Nor, they’d probably claim, are they hypocrites. Though the Times article never uses that word, it’s the word that will spring to the minds of many readers. The article leaves a clear impression of men (they’re all male) who claim to be serving the public good while actually serving their own private interests.

Fix the Debt leaders might well protest that this view rests on a false dichotomy, as if one must choose between public good and private interests. On the contrary (I suspect they’d argue), the genius of capitalist democracy is to erase the conflict between those two. Our system is set up so that the only way to improve material life for everyone is to let the truly rich get even richer. Call it “a rising tide” or “trickle down.” Either way, if we limit the wealth of the truly rich we all suffer. So enriching private interests is the best way to serve the public good.

If they are historically minded, they might point out that most of the Founding Fathers saw things this way, too. Alexander Hamilton articulated this view at great length on behalf of the Federalists, who didn’t think a fledgling democracy could survive unless it had a strong central government making thoughtful arrangements for the very rich to get richer. 

Jefferson and Madison refuted that view on behalf of the eighteenth-century Republicans. But they came from the wealthy, slave-owning elite of Virginia. Jefferson argued against abolishing the slavery that made him rich because it would bring the whole socio-economic system crashing down upon everyone -- rich and poor, white and black, alike. And as president he used the power of government in many ways that helped the truly rich get richer, because he saw those policies necessary to serve the public way. Every president since has done the same thing.

There are many good arguments, both economic and moral, against the view that our society, or any democracy, must or should or really does work this way. But Simpson, Bowles, and the rest of the Fix the Debt crew probably have never taken those arguments seriously; perhaps never even heard them. Nor did most of the Founding Fathers. The rich and their top-flight hired hands generally live in a restricted social circle, where they meet and hear only other economic elite figures like themselves.

As in any social circle, their conversation is based on shared premises. It constantly reinforces their shared story of how human life works. In other words, they hang out with each other and keep telling each other the same myth. They never get a chance to hear any other myths. So why shouldn’t they genuinely believe their own? I’m not saying they do believe it. I’m just suggesting they might.

It’s worth considering because, if the rest of us assume that they are merely money-grubbers, most of us may easily dismiss the Times’ story with the same mock shock that was my first reaction. Of course they are gaming the system for their own profit, we’ll say. That’s how the system works. It’s the way of the world. So we’ll have our few minutes of righteous indignation and then go on our way, reaffirming our own myth about the selfishness of the rich.

But suppose a major newspaper ran an expose on the mythic worldview of Fix the Debt’s leaders. Suppose it was clearly explained and traced back to its roots in the worldview of the Founding Fathers. Then at least some of us would feel that we ought to start thinking about it.

Just what is wrong with their assumptions? If we don’t want our society based on those assumptions, can we reform the current system but still keep its basic structure? Or is their elite worldview the foundation of that structure? If we challenge their way of thinking, must we soon find ourselves talking about a revolution?

Back in the 1790s, the Republican attack on the Federalists raised these issues, albeit in a restricted way. Jefferson and Madison never seem to have taken a really long, hard look in the mirror. But even if they had a disturbing measure of hypocrisy, they did spark a debate about whether the United States really needed a federal government helping the truly rich get richer. Sometimes, at least, that debate was conducted on a fairly sophisticated intellectual level.

In the past year the United States has flirted with at least a few threads of that debate, and even that very limited flirtation has been very healthy for us. We should take every opportunity to continue it. If we cut it off with a curt “They all do it,” we steer ourselves toward an intellectual and political dead end, which cuts off any possibility of meaningful change. We ignore the myths of the economic elite at our peril.