The DOTIGOTUS (or: You can't get there from here)

Michael Cohen (a former speechwriter for the US ambassador to the UN) illustrates why so many Americans are incapable of understanding US foreign policy:

I believe that America is inherently good. That goodness, if you will, comes from the basic values that I believe underpin this nation, from not only our founding documents and in particular the Bill of Rights, but from the ongoing efforts to ensure the spread of freedom and opporunity  [sic] to all our citizens. If you think this sounds hackneyed that is your right - you have as much right to hate America as I do to love it, but I apologize to no one for my patriotism and basic faith in America and its people.

The belief that America is inherently good is what makes so many people impervious to mountains of evidence that the United States is, in fact, exactly like every other powerful nation throughout history: driven first and foremost by its interests (namely the interests of those who govern it and the groups they represent); bent on extending its control and influence; and concerned with human rights and international law mainly to the extent that they can be used to rationalize and provide cover for those actual underlying motivations.

When this Doctrine of the Inherent Goodness of the United States is fixed firmly in someone's mind, they literally can't get there from here.  They've foreclosed the possibility of arriving at one entire set of conclusions before the questions are even considered.  It's like asserting categorically that nothing heavier than air can fly under its own power, and then trying to explain how a jumbo jet gets from London to Rome; it's literally impossible to arrive at the correct explanation.

Adherents of the DOTIGOTUS are constantly faced with cognitive dissonance, which can only be resolved through increasingly tortured rationalizations and outright rejection of reality.  The overthrow of Iranian democracy and support for the Shah of Iran (along with a host of other tyrants), the killing of millions of Vietnamese, the sponsorship of and bipartisan support for the genocidal Indonesian invasion of East Timor, the instigation of mass slaughter in Central America throughout the 1980s, the refusal even to call what was happening in Rwanda in 1994 "genocide" and the shameful lies that were offered for the failure to act--these are just a few of the endless examples in which reality and the DOTIGOTUS conflict.  In each of these cases (and in the dozens I didn't mention) you'll find true believers doing everything in their power to avoid the simple, obvious conclusion that the US acts without any regard for human rights or international law.

I'm speaking from experience here, because I wholeheartedly embraced the DOTIGOTUS for most of my life.  I believed, reflexively, that the United States was inherently good, and I interpreted everything the US did on the basis of this belief.  This was not in any way a considered position; it was just my birthright as an American, and particularly so as the son of a military officer.  It was as unquestioned and natural to me as breathing.

My embarrassingly naive beliefs collided violently with reality in 1991, after I'd just finished watching the US decimate Iraq in the name of freedom and human rights. I'd soaked up the news coverage gleefully night after night, cheering each bomb and every cruise missile we fired at the enemy, impatiently flipping channels to try to catch the good bits one more time.  Here was America fulfilling its "basic values" and displaying to the world its willingness to fight for the cause of freedom.

But after the inevitable US victory (and by extension my own personal victory as well), something inexplicable happened.  Iraqi Shiites and Kurds listened to George H.W. Bush's call to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and Hussein responded with predictably brutal force, killing tens of thousands.  But the US did nothing to block Hussein or assist the rebels in any way, despite the rising death toll and increasing criticism.  The news reports that used to validate my viewpoint were now contradicting it at every turn--and the hollow repetition of official excuses by the talking heads didn't soften the impact at all.  There was simply no way to square what the US was doing (and what US officials were saying) with my beliefs, and I felt deeply unsettled and genuinely confused.

So how did I resolve the conflict?  The way any good DOTIGOTUS believer would: I assumed that there must be more to it than I was hearing, and that if I knew what government officials knew I might see that their approach was the one that would actually do the most good in the long run.  At the worst, I thought that they were acting out of a caution that sacrificed our lofty values on the altar of pragmatism, and that while this may have been a mistake, it was only a momentary diversion from the path of righteousness (soon to be rejoined when a Democrat took over the White House).

The simple truth--that the lives of those Iraqis mattered not one whit in the political calculations of the US government--was unthinkable to me, and wouldn't be for many years, when I finally started paying close attention to politics in general and US foreign policy in particular.  It's still amazing to me how simple it became to understand the US's role in the world once I was willing to follow the facts wherever they might lead rather than trying to bend reality to a predetermined conclusion.

When I talk to true believers these days I'll often suggest that they suspend this one assumption, even if only momentarily or for the sake of argument.  It may be the first time they've tried looking at the US as they would any other country in the world, and if they're open-minded at all the experience will make them think--and there's a good chance it will stay with them.

Comments

[Winter Patriot]

Great post! Thanks very much.

I'm glad you chose to pay attention when the facts and the news releases didn't seem to fit together anymore. Most Americans who have reached that point have apparently decided to fall asleep. And now, as we see, waking them all up is turning out to be a big job.

[StO]

It's common to elide the articles and prepositions you wouldn't capitalize in acronyms; following this recommendation yields the briefer and more memorable "DIG US," which about sums it up.

I recall not knowing what the hell was going on in Iraq or Bosnia, seeing the TV-things so far away they were barely real, and trusting that people who knew more were doing right. I had other things to worry about. Most Americans don't suffer cognitive dissonance between DIG US and the massacre of the indigenous peoples or the invasion of the Philippines or PBSUCCESS or the war in Laos (to name a few other episodes) because they didn't notice. No one told them or wanted them to be told, and they weren't paying attention, so there's no conflict at all. You don't have to bother rejecting reality or rationalizing it if you never heard it in the first place.

A person called Dan Kervick really took apart the DIG US in the comments. It's too bad no one was won over.

[John Caruso]

DIG US does have a certain elan. But I was thinking of DOTIGOTUS (doe-tee-goat-us) in analogy to SCOTUS or POTUS. Though applying your suggestion to the latter gives us PUS, which I have to admit seems like a much more fitting acronym for Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan....

It's true that many people will never get to the deeper stages of cognitive dissonance, but almost everyone has to contend with it to some extent; consider the near-universal negative portrayal of Vietnam in popular culture, especially throughout the late 70's and the 80's. That was a case of cognitive dissonance so widespread that it has its own name: the Vietnam Syndrome (a serious malady that renders the sufferer capable of seeing non-Americans as actual human beings).

[StO]

You look at the actions, and you wonder where the inherent goodness lies; it eventually seems it can only be in the form of "a noble spirit." Then justification can flow from person to action, like in Nietzsche, I guess. Although there is a parallel to divine right of kings, too. It certainly doesn't seem to have to do much else with ethics as explored by philosophy.

School taught me the US sometimes made mistakes, but I don't recall ever questioning the DIG US. If all American politicians were bad (I was taught that very young), that didn't necessarily make America bad. One quickly comes to a very abstract view of what America is. And if you separate America from the actions of its government and from its populace, and perhaps some other things, maybe what's left, whatever that is, is inherently good. I don't know.

But I didn't live through the Vietnam War, and I didn't know what "Iran-Contra" referred to until maybe 2002, and it was pretty easy to write off various US interventions, wars, and ethnic cleansing as little itty-bitty boo-boos. And my high school history teacher gave us readings from Zinn.

I can only imagine how easy it is for most of my peer group to never get to any stage of cognitive dissonance.

The good thing about the "DIG" acronym is that one could also append it to other countries as well, much abbreviating discussions of the history of colonialism.

[Jonathan Versen]

"do as I am, not as I am doing?"

[John Caruso]

As Chomsky writes:

As in the case of Democracy and the Market, the factual record merely deals with Hegel's "negative, worthless existence," not "God's plan" and "the pure light of this divine Idea." The point has sometimes been made explicit by contemporary scholars, notably Hans Morgenthau, a founder of the realist school, who urged that to adduce the factual record is "to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality itself is the "transcendent purpose" of the nation, which is indeed noble; the abuse of reality is the irrelevant factual record.

It's amazing how much mental effort people will expend constructing these tortured rationalizations.

[StO]

I have to say that you picked the most confusing paragraph on that page to quote. So tortured indeed are these rationalizations that I had to read the whole passage to figure out what Chomsky was saying. I would have come out both on the side of Reality and the Factual Record until I learned they were incompatible.

"[T]hat to adduce the factual record is 'to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself'" is a perplexing contention to hear from something called "the realist school."

[Bill Jones]

The underlying problem is simple. These whackjobs confuse Patriotism, love of a land and its people, with nationalism, love of the State.