In the 15 years since 9/11, a new generation has grown up in the shadow of the War on Terror. To get a sense of what impact this ongoing crusade has made upon the millennial cohort and on U.S. society in general, it may be helpful to compare it to the experiences of the large group that came of age during the Cold War.
Much has now been written on how events of the Cold War — atomic weapons tests, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, etc. — shaped the politics of the post-1945 era and the psyches of the baby boom generation. During the Cold War, children and teens were taught to fear the alleged Soviet drive for world domination as well as the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. Communism supposedly sought to subvert U.S. democratic institutions by disrupting society from within, via hidden cells. Movies such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) captured the belief that dreaded aliens (that is, communists) sought to turn free-thinking Americans into mindless automatons. Such angst both reflected and shaped the evolving Red Scare. In its most malignant form (McCarthyism), the Red Scare led to the widespread suppression of civil liberties, the weakening of movements for social change — ranging from the labor movement to civil rights — and the fear of anyone who questioned the status quo. The suppression of dissent ensured, at least initially, popular acquiescence to the militarization of the U.S. economy and to the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Yet within 20 years of the onset of the Cold War, significant segments of teens and young adults, along with an older cohort of social activists, challenged many of the assumptions and practices of the Cold War. Frustrated with the Cold War’s failures at home and abroad, new social movements emerged, demanding peace and nuclear disarmament, the end of poverty, environmental consciousness and equal political and economic rights and opportunities for African Americans, Hispanics, women, etc.
In a similar vein, today’s millennials seem poised to challenge the contradictions of their own time. Their lives have been shaped, however, not just by the events and policies set in motion by the 9/11 attacks, but by longer historical forces. In particular, the triumph of what some writers call “neoliberalism” — that is, the policy of championing the sanctity of the private marketplace and individual avarice over the public good — has been central. Most pundits forget that neoliberalism and the threat of global terrorism were cornerstones of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Officials argued that the former was one way to counteract the latter. With the lessening of Cold War tensions, American leaders required a substitute for the threat of international communism, and a global war on terror fit the bill — years before 9/11.
The War on Terror that developed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks produced many of the worst violations of civil liberties and human rights since the Cold War. But it was not just the Patriot Act and executive branch actions that posed dangers; equally unsettlingly were the “normal” operations of private sector corporations spying on their employees and mining information from each and every user of the internet.
In one sense the world in which the millennials have matured seems contradictory. They have witnessed increased state/corporate surveillance and, at the same time, have been bombarded with the message that the marketplace excels in deciding how to deal with everything from education to health care to retirement to the environment. Taking higher education as an example, administrators, boards of trustees, politicians and business owners (these are often one and the same) argue that universities exist primarily to serve the economic needs of the private sector and thereby their consumers; they have little interest in producing an independent-thinking citizenry.
There are signs that a large number of millennials, like their cohorts of the 1960s, see the fallacy of a society predicated on the fear of an external enemy posing an existentialist threat to their way of life and on the mantra that the marketplace contains solutions for every problem. But historical context is important here. Baby boomers who protested for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam lived in a fairly prosperous era. This is not true of millennials. They confront a dysfunctional economy and environment produced by militarization and neoliberalism and manifested in economic stagnation, growing inequality and vast debt for a majority of the population.
The Cold War and the War on Terror have been rooted, not in fundamental battles between the forces of “good and evil,” but rather in the very structures of the global economy. Indeed, as the Cold War clearly demonstrated, the needs of the American political economy frequently dictated policies that violated the freedom and human rights that U.S. rhetoric claimed as its goal. All this is just a way of saying that like the Cold War, the War on Terror hides as much as it reveals and that millennials, about to vote for president for the first time, need to look beneath the rhetoric of the War on Terror and neoliberalism.
Nathan Godfried has taught U.S. history at the University of Maine for 21 years and has authored numerous books and articles dealing with American politics, labor and the mass media. Elizabeth McKillen has taught U.S. foreign relations and labor history at the University of Maine for the past 24 years. She is the author, most recently, of “Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism” (University of Illinois Press, 2013).