One premise of this book is that we Americans are already more divided than most of us might care to imagine, although not necessarily in the ways that some might believe.  Yes, we belong to different classes and hail from different regions.  We come at problems with differing levels of education.  Race and ethnicity make for historically tense differences, and biases and disparities still limit who has access to opportunity.  A clever adversary or set of adversaries might well try to exploit any of these latent tensions, and this is hardly an exhaustive list.  But – how would they do so?

In many regards, deep-seated differences over foreign policy will always be the smartest wedge for outsiders to hit.  Foreign policy is not only the realm non-Americans have easiest access to, but the realm Americans have the least hands-on experience with.

No politician who invokes those initial weeks after 9/11 is wrong when he or she describes how resolved and united Americans felt.  However, al Qaeda’s attacks against the United States did not continue.  They did not leave Chicago burning.  We do not know what the consequences might have been had the fourth plane reached its destination and had the U.S. government been decapitated.  Nor do we know what kind of panic might have been instilled had more anthrax-laden envelopes been delivered to offices beyond the handful of sites that received them.  What we do know is that our solidarity did not last much beyond the initial invasion of Afghanistan.  But then, American solidarity rarely does last long during wartime.

Here is yet another source of divisibility – and the source of divisibility adversaries can most easily affect: wartime unity has proved to be a vexing problem from our birth.

Subheadings

Right and Left

Disunity during Wartime

Mixed-Up Messages