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Cowboy Masculinity, Globalization
and the US War on Terror

Abstract

The shift of the US government under George W. Bush from a Cosmopolitan Multilateral image to a unilateral Cowboy Masculinity in its dealings with other nations indicates a shift in form between one kind of patriarchal state to another, one which better reflects neo-liberal priorities and the interests of global powers in a period of increasing corporate globalization. In the last 20 years, the US government has been changing its image from a paternalistic capitalist welfare state toward that of a neo-liberal lean and mean state, while global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been imposing structural adjustment policies on loans to poor countries. However, the development of the neo-conservative policy of preventive war under George W. Bush, which has been used to justify the so-called “wars on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11 2001 bombings of the World Trade Towers, has involved a massive increase in military spending and a shift toward a more militarized state. The increase in state spending to finance these “preventive” wars on terror contradicts the logic of neo-liberal structural adjustment policies which advocate a massive reduction in state spending. The ideology of Cowboy Masculinity has been one strategy used by neo-conservatives to obscure this contradiction. The Empire-maintaining process of the US is an important part of the process of corporate globalization, with the US continuing to act as the world’s policeman for the unfettered invasion of corporate capital into as many spheres of human life as possible. In the process, corporate globalization continues to weaken and impoverish women even more than men, thus supporting the perpetuation of other patriarchal traditions and controls.

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The George W. Bush administration in the U.S. came into power with a new rightwing agenda that was given a tremendous boost, particularly in its foreign policy plans, by the events of September 11, 2001. With a coalition of fundamentalist Christians, rabid pro-Israel supporters, and pragmatic Real Politik diplomats and oil interests businessmen, the Bush presidential campaign appealed to isolationist sentiments of the American people. Bush claimed to be opposed to U.S. humanitarian interventions of the sort attributed to the Clinton administration in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet after 911, Bush’s foreign policy took a 180 degree turn toward American interventionism, with the so-called wars against terrorism in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The Bush administration has been criticized for not following through on its obligations to re-build Afghanistan after further pulverizing a poor country whose infrastructure was already damaged due to previous wars. But it has taken a very different policy of reconstruction after the war in oil-rich Iraq which involves a commitment to nation-building.

These apparent inconsistencies in US stated and operational foreign policy yield the following questions: 1) What caused this dramatic shift in US foreign policy and how does it connect to corporate globalization ? 2) Why did the American people, in spite of a substantial anti-war minority, eventually throw majority support behind both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? 3) Why have the Democrats had so much trouble speaking out against the Bush administration’s new pre-emptive war doctrines and actions? And 4) How does this US foreign policy affect women?

In answer to the first question I maintain that the Neo-Conservatives within the Bush administration, who advocate unlimited support for Israel and for a new American stance as Empire (with the attendant unilateralism and foreign intervention this requires), convinced others in the administration to adopt a new interventionist pre-emptive or preventive war policy. The reasons for this change are many, including oil interests, support for Israeli interests over Palestinian ones, and a new political strategy to support neo-liberal economic programs for capitalist hegemony. However, one effect of the policy shift is that it is a way to present the President and his men (and token woman Condoleza Rice) as taking a tough and protective stance against the world terrorist threat. The oil businessmen saw that their long term interests in controlling access to, and profits from, oil production in the Middle East could be served by eliminating the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and setting up putative capitalist democracies in these countries which would be loyal to US business interests. The neo-conservative ideologues (Bush, Wolfowitz, Perle) were convinced that US intervention would pave the way for American-style democracies in the Middle East.

Some might dispute whether Bush Junior’s foreign policy is that different from previous administrations. Noam Chomsky points out that “the basic principles of the [ US] imperial grand strategy trace back to the early days of World War II. Planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar world the US would seek ‘to hold unquestioned power’, acting to ensure the ‘limitation of any exercise of sovereignty’ by states that might interfere with its global designs” .

But the present National Security Strategy on pre-emptive war (see www.newamericancentury.org), announced as new administration foreign policy in the fall of 2001, was previously quashed in 1993 by President Clinton, whose foreign policy position was more in the multilateralist, pragmatic negotiation style of the previous father Bush administration. While the earlier US multilateralist strategy might be said to have had the same ends as unilateralist strategy—maximum power for the US government, and promoting the interests of the political elite and their capitalist class supporters)--the means and style it used to obtain these ends were importantly different.

This shift is an important one in the self-presentation of the US government. With both the multilateral and unilateral strategies, our masculine political elites have presented themselves as the male protectors of the population against outside adversaries and enemies. On one feminist model of the state, the nation state has always been patriarchal, and citizens in time of outside threat are expected to play a role analogous to submissive wives to strong husbands, and unite patriotically behind our strong benevolent fatherly male leaders. [cf. Iris Young 2003. “Feminist reactions to the contemporary security regime” , Hypatia, v. 18 #1, p223].

But the specific symbolic gendered form of the U. S. male protector state has changed from that advocated by the Democratic Party Presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton. The state has changed from the Cosmopolitan Paternalist Welfare State of the Democrats to the Just Cowboy Military Empire State of President Bush Jr. In short, we are witnessing a change in form between one kind of capitalist patriarchal state to another—from a paternalist welfare state to a neo-liberal authoritarian patriarchal state. Symbolically this is exemplified by Bush I and II as Big Daddy and Rebellious Tough Son, respectively. Going along with the change in image is a material change: a reduction of the welfare state and a shift toward a more militarized, more elitist neo-liberal state, with most services privatized and tax cuts to the wealthy that have created a much larger gap between rich and poor in the U.S.

There are economic, political, and ideological or symbolic reasons for this policy shift. The economic interests of multi-national corporations are clearly on the side of this type of neo-liberal privatization strategy, which cuts state ownership of utilities and support for public services, hence eliminating the protection of vulnerable and dependent populations. Certainly one of the reasons for the US engagement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is the desire to maintain access to Middle East oil. Another is to shift more government spending from welfare to warfare as a boon to the military-industrial complex. Further, a political backlash effect has influenced the adoption of a less paternalistic, more violent, kind of patriarchal power to counter the gains of the women’s movement and the increasing economic and political independence of women from men.

My analysis of the causes of this national domestic and foreign policy shift challenges the idea that state power is univocal. I agree with Wendy Brown (1995, States of Injury, Princeton University Press) who argues that the state is not a thing or a system. Like Michel Foucault, whose “disciplinary power” is the basis for the bureaucratic power of the contemporary US state, she argues that there are other specific modalities of power in the contemporary US state, including the liberal dimension of power (in the legal and political systems), the capitalist dimension of power in the economic system, and the prerogative dimension of power in the coercive apparatus of the state. These powers operate without a center, through discourses, rules and practices that are multi-dimensional and may contradict each other. .

The prerogative power of the nation state, first analyzed by Machiavelli in the 16 th century, takes as a goal its successful coercion of its own population and nation-states who oppose it. Its success depends not merely on actual military might, but also on the convincingness of the state’s self-representation as a powerful protector of its peoples against outside and inside enemies and threats to the peace.

Symbolic and Material Gender, Patriarchal Gender Logics, and Racism

To understand the way that gender ideology works at the level of a government’s representation of its policies and actions to its people, we need to distinguish symbolic gender from material gender. While material gender involves the actual economic relations between men and women, such as a sexual division of domestic and wage labor, and the consequent relative power men have in relation to women as a result of these divisions, symbolic gender involves the representation of men as masculine and women as feminine, with a set of gender characteristics, norms and values associated with masculinity and a different set associated with femininity. Thus, while the actual material power of men and women may vary by economic class and race or ethnicity, the symbolic gender power of men and women in patriarchal systems tends to advantage men vis a vis women across class and race in legitimizing male dominance in many legal, political and personal spheres of power, although men in subordinate race and class positions will have less power overall than men in dominant class and race positions.

In a patriarchal symbolic gender system those with symbolic masculinity (who are sometimes women) are thought to be morally and socially superior, and to be justified in having more power in relation to those with symbolic femininity (who are sometimes men). These latter are thought to be morally and socially inferior and to require the moral guidance and social and physical power of the former to keep them moral. Since this is a binary logic of representations of the good vs. evil or bad, of superior vs. inferior, of rational vs. irrational, of modern vs. backward, it can be applied to relations between entities which are not men and women, such as social groups (white vs. of color, for example) or governments and nation states (the US vs. Iraq, for example).

The way that a patriarchal symbolic gender logic is used in racist and ethno-centrist ways in our contemporary political debates about foreign policy connects to Western imperialism and Orientalism. Non-Western religions, such as Islam, are assumed to be backward religions, and evidence of patriarchal practices of the Taliban and Iranian fundamentalists are used to suggest that the West is more progressive, more liberated, than these inferior cultures, and hence that our men, our masculine leaders, are more rational and egalitarian than their masculine leaders, who are portrayed as “madmen” (Sadam Hussein) or “fanatics” (Osama Bin Laden), who oppress their women and have no regard for human life. Meanwhile, it could be argued that an unconscious patriarchal logic applies as well: that those we now label “madmen” and “fanatics” are those male leaders in the Middle East who, when they were our allies against the Soviet Union and fundamentalist Iran, were the symbolic sons to our symbolic “big daddies” in the White House; and now that they have rebelled against the Father’s authority, they must be deprived of any masculine authority by our government’s attempt to portray them as failed, irrational, hence feminine, men of color reverting to inferiority. This of course nicely positions our Cowboy leaders to assume the “white man’s burden” of saving the world from their evils.

Bush Junior’s administration seems to have decided that it could maximize its power to promote the goals of its capitalist allies and its imperial interests by changing its symbolic gender male protector image to a more authoritarian model and by using its state prerogative power to start preemptive wars. In this way, it hoped to use the fears of the majority of the U.S. population after 911 to bolster its power. It also hoped to undermine the gains of liberal feminism and thus promote tighter masculine control over women in the private sphere for its Christian and Jewish fundamentalist followers. Their new authoritarian call to a submissive patriotism has been successful: the old welfare state liberals in the Democratic Party have been by and large unable to challenge this new male protector image assumed by the Bush neo-conservatives. The old liberalism is now labeled too wimpy, too feminine, and hence too impotent to play the real tough masculine game of force now held to be necessary to protect Americans from the new brand of fundamentalist terrorism.

But why has the majority of the US population accepted this dramatic shift in the strategy of US foreign policy: from multilateralism to unilateralism, from the US as a democratic leader in a world of nations to the US as the preemptive ruler of a world empire of Justice against the forces of Evil? The short answer to this question is the fear and trauma caused by the bombings of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 and the irrational desire to be protected by a stronger type of patriarchal leader from America’s mythic past, the Good Guy Cowboy Avenger. Also relevant are the cultural conflicts around “the woman question” in the US today raised by the women’s movement, the cultural backlash against this movement, and the ideological conflicts in American values expressed by the belief in equality for all, including women, yet the persisting gender logic that assumes women, since they need to be protected by men, are inferior to them.

Once we understand the gender logic through which the state represents itself to the American people, we can also understand that there is a similar symbolic gender struggle at work in foreign relations. US masculine or masculine-identified leaders, as leaders of the new world-dominant imperial power and governed by a new symbolic gender of Cowboy masculinity, personalize struggles with adversarial governments by portraying their leaders as the “bad guys” , the evil ones. Foreign armies (typed as masculine institutions) must either be a part of our “posse” , hence under the command of our good guys [often blatantly identified as the good Christian and Jewish soldiers], or they are the evil guys, who represent an inferior racialized Other and an inferior religion [Islam]. Theirs is thus a more primitive, lawless masculinity that must be brought under the reign of the righteous Empire of freedom and democracy, controlled by the U.S. government of the world and not by the United Nations [The United Nations is seen to be a “bad” type of democracy, since it is not always controllable by the U.S. and hence is subject to takeover by a majority of nations governed by inferior masculinities.].

In the current Mid-East crisis our masculine leaders, and their feminine sidekicks, such as the President’s wife Laura Bush, represent themselves as coming to the aid of women oppressed by their inferior “backward” culture of fundamentalist Islam headed by a more primitive and evil masculinity. They thus claim, paternalistically, to be laying the groundwork for so-called modern gender equality in the countries we “liberate” . This ideological maneuver also renders invisible those indigenous forces within these cultures, such as RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, which has opposed the gender oppression of the Taliban from within Afghani culture, or OWFI, the Organization for Women’s Freedom, which opposed Saddam Hussein in Iraq and opposes Islamist fundamentalism as well.

Capitalist Globalization, the US War on Terror, and Women

If we turn now to the economic system of neo-liberal capitalist globalization that the US wars on terror is determined to support, it is obvious that such globalization has made things much worse for poor women all over the world, in the context of the effects of material gender relations. That is, with a world-wide patriarchal sexual division of labor in which the majority of women work a second shift of unpaid domestic and caring labor in the home while being paid less for their wage labor. Many such women are forced to work longer hours for less money. Some are left by migrating husbands to support children in the home country by themselves. Others come as migrants forced to leave their own children at home to earn money to send back as remittances. It is mostly young women who are recruited into the global assembly line of maquilas, where their health and safety are undermined while their non-unionized labor is exploited. Hence, there is a strong contradiction between reality of worsening effects on women and the ideology of progress for women which is touted by neo-liberal politicians like George Bush as the effect of corporate globalization and the imposition by war of “democratic” regimes subservient to the US. Meanwhile many women within the US continue to be led by the politics of fear and the desire for a male protector state to support US neo-liberal and imperialist foreign policy. Such policy is ultimately against their own gender interests: the cutbacks in health, education and welfare services effected by neo-liberal structural adjustment in the US affects women worse than men, because of women’s greater responsibility for children and elders due to their gendered caring labor.

Conclusion

I have argued that the Bush Jr. administration has been successful up to the present in combining a “real politik” unilateralist strategy of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with a switch in patriarchal symbolic gender from a paternalist multilateral image to a unilateralist cowboy macho image. But this policy is by no means invincible. There are signs that some segments of the capitalist elite are rejecting Bush’s unilateralist war policies, for example, multi-millionaire George Soros donated 10 million dollars to a campaign to defeat Bush in the 2004 Presidential elections. The large global anti-war movement has been successful in marshaling many Americans and much of world opinion against Bush’s war politics. The Anti-Globalization movement continues to educate people, including Americans, about how the policies of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are blatantly in the interest of First World-based multi-national corporations. This creates an oppositional moral argument against the US Empire and those who rule it. So while we cannot assume that the rational interests of voters will win out over fears, traumas and comforting representations of the American state as the good father and the citizens as his protected children [cf. Lauren Berlant 1997 The Queen of America goes to Washington city, Duke University], the continued contradictions between the various ideologies and powers of the American state may allow for a conjunction of forces that can forge a winning oppositional discourse and strategy against neo-liberalism and Cowboy Masculinity in years to come.

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