He won—but he won ugly.

The same US president who first captured the White House in poetry and governed in competent—if lackluster—prose has been re-elected despite an appallingly mean-spirited and gaffe-prone campaign. Barack Obama may have earned another four years after stabilizing an economy on life-support and winding down unpopular wars abroad, but the attack ads circulated in his name sullied a leader who presumed himself a brand above the empty suit who opposed him. Both men cheapened an already squalid political culture more or less in equal measure. Obama, however, directed his billions of dollars worth of vitriol from the same encampment throughout the campaign, rather than switching from one rampart to another like his challenger. That may have made all the difference.

Perversely, the president’s re-election on the heels of such a shabby bid represents something of a mandate for his agenda despite the narrowest of electoral advantages. Having displayed little of the elegance and charisma that propelled him to victory four years ago, it can be fairly said that most Americans are happy enough with his style of governing to elect him anyway. However thin and dubious, it is a mandate worth redeeming. The question is how.

Domestically, he must persuade his political enemies—it would be too generous to characterize them as mere opponents—as to the perilousness of America’s condition. The country lags behind developed-world standards in sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, and social mobility, while leading it in income inequality, gun violence, and criminal incarceration rates. (In some areas, such as infant mortality, the US ranks below countries like Cuba and Greece.) As he struggles with a still-divided Congress to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” that looms in January, Obama must resist Republican pressure to bankrupt civil society in the name of budgetary rectitude. He should assure the nation that, Republican alarmism notwithstanding, the bond market has made clear its willingness to give Washington sufficient time to right its accounts. After all, what use is a balanced budget to a country where adequate schools, health care, and roads are increasingly confined to its wealthiest enclaves?

Overseas, Obama must confront not partisan lawmakers but policy elites from both parties who have a professional interest in preserving America’s empire despite its ruinous financial and diplomatic costs. He should embrace as a starting point the conclusions of his own deficit reduction commission that called for the withdrawal of some US forces in Europe and Asia. He should not stop there, however. Washington’s alliance system, largely a Cold War relic, has become a geopolitical welfare state in which rich countries like Japan, South Korea and Germany are encouraged to neglect their core national security obligations in return for supporting US counter-terror policies and other misadventures. Early in his next term, Obama should revive the Nixon Doctrine that, had its architect not been thwarted by the Watergate scandal, would have effectively emancipated Americans from the moral and financial burden of global hegemony.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is time for the US to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and demobilize its ground troops in Asia. At the same time, Obama should work with China for a diplomatic channel aimed at defusing potential conflicts in disputed Asian waterways and use it as the basis for a negotiating round to resolve the thicket of conflicting claims that lurk as the flashpoint for war; he should make it the policy of his administration to convert the Middle East into a nuclear-weapons free zone that, by implying the dissolution of Israel’s atomic stockpile, would deprive Iran of the imperative to develop its own. Similarly, he should make it a top priority to leave as his legacy a Palestinian state with a viable economy—with Palestinian control of its borders, airspace, and ports—as its foundation. In doing so he would earn himself the respect and admiration from the entire non-Likudnik world.

Closer to home, Obama should declare the end of America’s war on drugs, which has militarized US foreign policy in Latin America, and ally himself to the movement gaining traction across national borders and the ideological spectrum to legalize marijuana.

With luck, the recent cycle of positive economic indicators that brightened Obama’s re-election prospects will sustain themselves into a recovery strong enough to fuel enhance his presidential authority and vision for the next four years. Time will tell if the small-bore preoccupations of his first term were the consequence of Republican obstructionism or a crisis of his own imagination. Let us hope it is the former, which—however formidable—can be overcome.

US Army soldiers operating under the NATO-sponsored International Security Assistance Force patrol along a dirt road in Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

Like the living dead, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization refuses to expire despite chronic neglect of its security commitments, the facts of which were most recently detailed in a confidential report by the Danish Defense Force (DDF) on last year’s air assault on Libya. The report, accidentally released last week to the press, faulted NATO’s inability “to provide reliable intelligence on targets or to conduct bombing raids” as well as “accurate assessments of collateral damage” inflicted on civilians. As a consequence of NATO’s dereliction, according to the study, allied forces had to restrict the scope of their operations.

Absent significant US help, the report confirms that NATO’s European constituents would have been incapable of sustaining the bombing raids that helped topple Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi. So under-resourced were European forces, the report states, the Danish Air Force was obliged to purchase ordinance from Israel, a fact that is sure to give pause to those calling for NATO intervention in Syria. The defense spokesman for Denmark’s Socialist People’s Party called the study, “embarrassing and revealing,” not least because of its admission that the Danish government “bought munitions from Israel to bomb an Arab-world country.”

The scandal of NATO deficiency dates almost to the genesis of the alliance, though it was obscured by the expediencies of the Cold War. It was not until 1999, during the US-led bombing campaign against Serb forces in Kosovo, when the magnitude of the problem was finally revealed. NATO so badly lacked the means to transport men and material into battle it had to rent cargo aircraft from Russia, its old Cold War nemesis. NATO armies could not deploy as a single, cohesive force as their weaponry and command-and-control systems operated on different standards. Intelligence networks were wholly inadequate or non-existent.

Reporting in Brussels at the time, I interviewed many NATO bureaucrats who vowed that the Kosovo debacle would jolt the alliance into reforming itself. Exasperated US officials assured me their patience was wearing thin. Within months, a flurry of new initiatives were unveiled that committed both sides of the Atlantic to reform NATO into an well-oiled, interoperable force that could operate in distant theaters independent of a dominant US role.

The Libya campaign exposed such pretensions. In response to the DDF report, a NATO spokesman said the shortcomings it outlined would be addressed as part of the alliance’s “Smart Defense project and redesigned command structure.” Among the issues to be reconciled, he said, was “the stockpiling of sufficient precision munitions by partner nations.”

History suggests this is nonsense. So does a consultant who works closely with NATO and its arms suppliers, who told me recently that US defense contractors are still waiting for their European clients to refresh stocks of ordinance spent during the Libyan war.

Instead of expiring gracefully along with the Soviet empire it was created to deter, NATO has been kept alive unnaturally by Washington, which is willing to subsidize its partners’ indolence in exchange for basing rights and diplomatic cover for its next Middle East war. NATO, the undead alliance, shuffles on.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney shake hands after the final presidential debate.

Republican challenger Romney all but endorsed his incumbent rival’s competent, if uninspired, record as commander-in-chief, though we may never know if that reflected his true convictions or his decision to re-animate himself as a moderate in the campaign’s decisive final weeks. What is certain is that both candidates lack the vision and courage needed to demolish the canned reference points that have sucked the imagination out of US foreign policy over the last six decades.

The candidates’ respective world views may differ in degree, but not in kind. Though both would likely launch a pre-emptive assault on Iran—Obama, after all, has committed his government to preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and the mullahs show no sign of backing down—a President Romney might give the order sooner and with relish; while Obama’s support for a viable Palestinian state may be sincere, he’d lack a second-term mandate strong enough to resist a Likudnik-controlled Congress eager to entrench Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land; throughout the campaign, both men have promiscuously bashed China, apparently unaware that Beijing is too busy with its own leadership transition to parse America’s political theater from its reality.

A fiscal abyss, Americans are told, is poised to swallow the US economy should automatic spending cuts kick in early next year if Congress cannot pass a budget. Yet neither Obama nor Romney have signaled they are prepared to dismantle Washington’s infrastructure of empire abroad in order to revive its economy at home. Neither Democratic nor Republican leaders have displayed a willingness to share the burden of global security with its allies, many of which are now among the world’s richest countries. Despite alarmist talk about how the Obama administration’s proposed defense cuts will leave America dangerously exposed—to whom or to what is never clearly spelled out—it is easer for Washington to cut funding for education and health care, particularly in urban areas, than military bases overseas.

Throughout the campaign, the visions expressed for America’s role in the world have been maddeningly small-minded. The country’s diminution as a superpower should be embraced rather than disparaged as an opportunity to consolidate its resources, reinvest in the homeland and contribute to the world as a wiser, if less militarized, nation among others. Sadly, and at ruinous cost, Washington’s foreign policy elites would rather America be feared than respected, a bipartisan myopia that has done as much as anything to hasten the country’s growing irrelevance.

France’s President Francois Hollande delivers a speech at the Senegalese National Assembly in Dakar

Of course, there were baser motives to Mr. Hollande’s visit, coming as it did a half century after Charles de Gaulle dissolved what was left of the French empire in the 1960s. Like many world leaders, the French president is angling for pole position in the race to exploit Africa’s vast reserves of precious minerals and energy supplies, as well as its huge, underdeveloped consumer markets. If today’s industrialized giants are not quite as ruthless in their pursuit of Africa’s riches as their nineteenth-century forebears, they are just as covetous of them.

Still, the congress in Dakar between former ruler and formerly ruled is a refreshing reminder that empire is by no means a terminal affliction and that imperial powers can leach themselves of the urge to unilaterally subdue resource-rich states and menace emerging rivals. Empires die hard, however; France lorded over its colonial possessions for centuries before war and overstretch ended its mission civilisatrice. Similarly, it may well take an economic crisis to relieve Americans of their imperial burden.

On the same day that Hollande’s visit to Senegal was reported in Le Monde, the Financial Times featured a short article about how a small delegation of US military officials and diplomats had arrived in Myanmar to negotiate a normalization of military ties that will no doubt include officer exchanges, arms sales, and frequent calls by US naval vessels. Thus Myanmar—which until only recently was run by a brutal military dictatorship—becomes the newest link in the Pentagon’s ring-fence around China, a barbed cordon that can only lead to conflict.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration was deploying military trainers to Libya to set up a counter-terrorist force to pre-empt the kind of attacks that killed four US diplomats, including ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, in Benghazi. (Speaking of which, it was good to see US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally take responsibility for a tragic consequence of her own neglect.) The elite force under consideration, according to the Times, would be the centerpiece of “a broader package of American security assistance.” If history is anything to go by, such assistance will mushroom along with Tripoli’s dependence on US largesse, a reliance that will foster weakness rather than self-reliance and will guarantee America’s new African-Arab ally an unlimited supply of adversaries.

By itself, there is nothing pernicious about Washington engaging with and enhancing the armed forces of friendly nations. Such commitments, however, when regarded within the context of America’s ambition to control the “global commons”—a pleasant Beltway euphemism for most of the known world—tend to become ends in themselves rather than the means of fostering ally self-sufficiency. (Prominent examples include the Pentagon’s smothering embrace of Japan, South Korea, and members of NATO.)

That is why Hollande’s remarks in Senegal this week were significant: they provided a competing narrative to the American conceit for absolute hegemony and the endless war that sustains it.

US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney

Romney then sketched the contours of an aggrandizing, militarized foreign policy that would have horrified Marshall, a model of sobriety and restraint and a skeptic of entangling alliances and the huge deployments of force that go with them. As a junior officer stationed in pre-revolutionary China, for example, Marshall and his comrades sniffed at the enforcers of imperial England as “treaty-port Brits.” In the Red-baiting 1950s, Marshall fiercely rejected calls by right-wing Sinophobes—the neoconservatives of their time—to wage war on communist China. Such a campaign would require a half million men, he told an aide, “and once I get them in how will I get them out?”

Yet there was Romney, ticking off a list of national security threats—China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela—and calling for a vastly-enlarged military budget when even the Pentagon has acknowledged that the most formidable threat facing the country is fiscal dissolution.

Romney punctuated his address with references to Israel and what he regards as America’s scared obligation to defend it. Yet it was Marshall who, as America’s secretary of state, emphatically opposed then-President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the infant state of Israel in 1948 for the danger it would create for US interests. George Kennan, a senior Marshall deputy at the State Department, blamed pro-recognition forces for forcefully advocating “objectives which could scarcely fail to lead to violent results.” Marshall famously admonished the president for politicizing foreign policy by appealing to pro-recognition groups, which he told Truman during a staff meeting was reason enough to vote against him. (As a civil servant loyal only to the institutions he served, Marshall did not vote.)

Romney argued that America’s foreign policy should be invested with its “values” and he assured listeners his policy proscriptions were not the brew of perpetual conflict. Marshall, in contrast, dismissed indulgent talk of American exceptionalism and he understood that unqualified military commitments assume lives of their own. (He would have demobilized the bulk of U.S. forces after World War II had Truman not opted for the ruinous policy of containing the Soviet Union and China.) Like Dwight Eisenhower, one of the Republican Party’s most popular twentieth-century presidents, Marshall’s hard-boiled realism would be irreconcilable with the party’s imperial ambitions of today.

What is most disturbing about Romney’s manifesto is not its deviations from current US foreign policy but its consistencies. Despite efforts to distinguish himself from his White House rival, there was little in Romney’s speech that distanced himself from the policies of President Barack Obama, who in his own way has done as much to militarize America’s posture abroad as any of his predecessors. This is not surprising, given how US foreign policy is charted largely by the Defense Department except in the Middle East, where it is driven by the voting patterns of Christian Zionists and their Jewish counterparts in thrall to Israel’s Likud Party.

It would take political reformation led by citizen-soldiers like George Marshall to change that. Sadly, we will not see his kind again.

Members of Mexico’s Caravan for Peace call for an end to the Drug War at Freedom Plaza in Washington, 2011

While in Washington last week I served as a panelist at a conference about the Obama administration’s Latin American policy, the defining element of which is a quarter-century old war on drugs.

Like its war on terrorism, the U.S. is fighting the drug trade by meeting the enemy at its source, deploying expeditionary units to far-flung places for indefinite periods of time. It works closely with proxy regimes, which are often illiberal and corrupt. Success is elusive; when one front is pacified, another opens elsewhere and resources are diverted appropriately. The war’s human costs are born largely by innocent victims of drug-related violence while the financial burden is underwritten with borrowed money from rich developing countries like the People’s Republic of China.

The day before the conference I joined a group of fellow panelists – human rights monitors and journalists from Miami, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile and Argentina – as they met with senior Congressional aides, diplomats and military officers to discuss the consequences of Washington’s drug war. The U.S. is so consumed with smashing dope rings, they said, it overlooks the endemic crime and corruption abetted or committed outright by regional governments, many of which are on Washington’s payroll. Meanwhile, marijuana, cocaine and heroin remain as cheap and plentiful in the United States as they were when Congress declared the war on drugs in the 1980s.

At the time, the Defense Department had no appetite for drug interdiction, considering it the domain of law enforcement officers, and it took on the mission with great reluctance. Today, however, it is the war’s most enthusiastic proponent. Pentagon officials have negotiated with Latin American governments for a growing network of purpose-built bases, airfields, and seaports. It has also trained local police and paramilitary groups in the art of interdiction and counter-insurgency. Indeed, U.S. officials are so pleased with the Colombian government’s anti-drug efforts that they are promoting that country’s initiative to train neighboring crime fighters. This despite the fact that Bogota’s efforts to stem drug trafficking has managed mixed results at best. Though Colombia’s rate of cocaine production and related violence has declined, it is still the world’s no. 1 cocaine producer and its murder rate is double that of Mexico’s. Warlords continue to thrive alongside a high frequency of extrajudicial killings, kidnapping and rape.

A senior Defense Department official who served as a panelist at the conference acknowledged Colombia’s record in the drug war was less than spotless even as he hailed Latin America’s “opening market for security services.” In an era of tight budgets, the official suggested, what better way to carry on the struggle against narcotics than by outsourcing interdiction work to pliant allies?

Later, a conference cosponsor told me that both the Pentagon and the State Department have invested so much of their resources and credibility in anti-drug programs that they’ll seize upon anything they can claim as a dividend. Here is the next generation in the militarization of U.S. foreign policy: compromised by budget constraints, the Pentagon is conceding slices of its global hegemony to proxy states who are committed to sustaining U.S. policies even at the expense of their own people.

President Obama and Speaker John Boehner’s failure to reach a spending and revenue agreement would see automatic cuts to defense programs.

What common sense could not kill, something called “sequestration” might at least tame.

Under this arcane but conclusive budgetary mechanism, the U.S. government will endure automatic and draconian spending cuts if it can’t cobble together a budget by January. Even the U.S. Defense Department, the epicenter of empire, will not be spared. As the largest government agency, the Pentagon is expected to suffer dearly under the sequestration sickle, and that has concentrated minds in a city that has made a survival instinct out of inertia. For the first time in a generation, security planners are wondering aloud if the world could survive a diminution of American military might.

“We never had to prioritize,” a retired intelligence officer and an old Cold Warrior told me in Washington this week. “Now we do. This threat of sequestration and all it implies is changing everything. It’s forcing everyone to compromise on roles and missions.”

Not so fast. This is about the Pentagon after all, which shrewdly allocates production lines of its major weapons systems throughout the nation, the better to insulate itself from cuts by jobs-minded legislators. It has been targeted by budget hawks before, only to dodge the bullet. The relatively modest reductions in defense spending that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the raison d’etat for America’s Cold War hegemony, were restored within a few years. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Defense Department’s budget has more than doubled and the U.S. military’s reach has never been deeper or more deadly.

Under sequestration, the Pentagon’s budget could suffer a nine-percent decline in spending over a ten-year period in addition to some $490 billion in cuts authorized by the Obama administration. That would indeed be a significant reduction. But assuming the military’s proxies in Congress fail to secure an exemption for defense spending, is prioritizing such a bad thing? Freed from the burden of restraint after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon not only enlarged its arsenal, it established new bases, expanded old ones and financed agreements for greater access to vital air corridors and sea lanes. What it couldn’t control before the attacks it assiduously tucked under its dominion soon afterward.

And to what end? In the Arab world, American interests are as vulnerable as ever and the country’s credibility, always compromised by its militarized relations with Israel, is at an all time low; Washington continues to underwrite European security even as its rich NATO allies reduce their own defense spending to a pittance of gross domestic product; in Asia, where the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars over the last decade for the sake of containing China, has only deepened alliance commitments that should have been reduced after the Soviet collapse and which now threatens to drag the U.S. into a Sino-Japanese war over underwater energy supplies and minerals.

By itself, of course, sequestration will not end a superfluous empire and reacquaint America with its nineteenth century republican ideals. The post-sequestration era may, however, finally expose the fraud, peddled by a vast array of monied interests, that the only way for Washington to keep the nation safe is to outspend the known world on arms and the means of administering them. Having fed the beast unconditionally for more than a decade, automatic spending cuts may represent the first step towards reducing and domesticating it.

Angry protests in the Middle East over a US made film mocking the prophet Muhammed

Muslim anger, conservatives bloviate, is the harvest of President Barak Obama’s failure to stand up for friendly dictators. From Rabat to Baghdad, U.S. diplomats will continue to huddle inside walled embassies, estranged from their host peoples. Back home, American lawmakers indulge the worst instincts of Likudnik Israel, abetting an occupation of Palestinian land that remains the wellspring of Muslim antipathy to the West. Though holding firm against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands for a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama has staked his credibility on his promise that the mullahs will never be allowed a bomb, which makes a U.S. strike all but inevitable.

The motivations behind this week’s protests, which included a tragic and inexcusable attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya that killed the American ambassador and three other diplomats, range from the cynical to the sincere. Certainly Islamist groups, now empowered politically by the Arab Spring and expert in the black arts of cultural warfare and the politics of fear, seized upon a primitive anti-Muslim video as proof that Islam is under an apostate siege. (In America this is called “red meat for the base.”) Others are simply tired of Westerners defiling their faith, be they oafish film makers or lunatic preachers burning copies of the Koran.

The roots for this most recent Arab uproar, however, extend well beyond a puerile depiction of the prophet Mohammed. A century ago, European governments partitioned the Levant to control its oil and to create a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world. In doing so it extinguished a city-state based system of trade and commerce that dated back to the Roman Empire. Gradual economic decline was hastened by the political chaos that followed the West’s war on Arab nationalism along with the Non-Aligned Movement generally. Dispossession and occupation, residuals of the Arab world’s failed wars with Israel, discredited what was left of the nationalists and created a vacuum for political Islam. To counter the Islamists, Washington bankrolled a fraternity of secular autocrats who plundered their nation’s treasuries and criminalized dissent. Much of the region’s secular professionals and intellectual elites – Jews and Christians as well as Muslims – emigrated, taking their wealth and expertise with them and leaving behind a desiccated and Islamized Middle East.

Sadly, the politicians and pundits in America who interpreted last week’s violence as proof that Arabs are congenitally incapable of ruling themselves are as politically potent as they are historically illiterate. The notion that President Obama or any other U.S. president can manage events in that benighted land, compromised as he or she may be by the nation’s close association with an aggrandizing and increasingly illiberal Israel, is absurd.

If nothing else, the asperity expressed in Arab cities last week provided a sample of what may come should Obama make good his pledge to attack a nuclearized Iran. Imagine the specter of U.S. Marines deployed throughout the Muslim world to protect American embassies and to evacuate their non-essential personnel on the eve of such an attack. It may well happen. Largely because of pressure from its political right, the hole that Washington has dug for itself in the Middle East may as well be a bottomless pit.

A girl listens to Republican vice presidential candidate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan speak at Westlake Recreation Center on September 4, 2012

Most likely, such overindulgence would ultimately impair the child with megalomania, narcissism, religious zealotry if not messianism, and an acute intolerance of anyone who does not humor his delusions. Untreated, he is likely to age into a state of permanent adolescence and social isolation.

I often think about this whenever the US presidential campaign exposes symptoms of America’s own cult of exceptionalism. The disasters inflicted by ex-president George W. Bush – an unnecessary war and a global financial collapse to name just two – and his successor’s lackluster performance have done nothing to dispel the myth of America as not only a global power but a higher one. In his bid for the presidency, the Republican Party’s Mitt Romney makes rote declarations that America is “the greatest nation in the world.” His rival, President Barack Obama, scorned as an unbeliever in American divinity when he ran for president four years ago, is now an enthusiastic congregant. Last week, he told Democratic Party regulars that “providence is with us, and we are surely blessed to be the greatest nation on earth.”

Of course, Americans has always had an evangelical faith in their “manifest destiny,” that elegantly imperious term for the country’s continental thrust westward in the early nineteenth century. Had they satisfied themselves with settling California and the Oregon Territory, the notion of American exceptionalism might not be so malign. Since then, however, a host of politicians and presidents eager to expand US hegemony have successfully played the “New Jerusalem” card. In 1898, Teddy Roosevelt described American empire as the only thing standing between “liberty and civilization” on one side and “tyranny and savagery” on the other. A century later, President Bush implied his counter-terrorism policies were inspired by God.

Delusions of American exceptionalism stifles candor, doubt and serious enquiry in the making of domestic and foreign policy while fostering arrogance, paranoia and belligerence. By definition, for a country to be truly and uniquely favored by the Almighty its adversaries must be agents of Satan. (A corollary of good is that it cannot exist without evil; as the preacher-politician proclaims in the play Inherit the Wind, “If St. George had slain a dragonfly instead of a dragon, who would have remembered him?”). It also serves as a kat-like stimulant to distract voters from the demands of complex and pressing issues. As Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote this week, both President Barack Obama and his Republican Party challenger, Mitt Romney, are “indulging in a national denial.” Better they should explain how they would salve America’s myriad debilities than bother with jingoist paeans to its sublimity.

(credit: CAIR, UC Berkeley)

What is so compelling and unnerving about the Nation’s investigation is how industrialized the effort to root out an Islamic “threat” to America, which, by all sober-minded and informed accounts, does not exist. In America, when particularly odious occasions of bigotry and racism enter the public domain, civil society demands that the offending party be censored and punished. CEOs and four-star generals who make anti-semitic, misogynist, or homophobic comments, for example, are liable to lose their jobs. (Conversely, gay-bashing is alive and well in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign bid.)

The network of agencies that target Islam, however, is so vast, relentless, and multi-pronged as to resemble that most elusive of political phenomena: a conspiracy. According to The Nation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation manipulates young Islamic men to spy on their own; state legislators pass anti-Sharia laws even though only a handful of Muslims live in their districts; an heiress of the Sears Roebuck fortune, an intimate of Israel’s most militantly racist constituencies, spends millions of dollars patronizing the likes of Geert Wilders, the Dutch white-supremacist who denounces what he calls the “Islamicization of Europe,” and the Muslim-hounding Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and former Pentagon official.

Of course, such a state of affairs is not new to the world’s oldest democracy. Fear-mongering is a blunt tool but effective. And most of America’s non-white racial and ethnic persuasions have at one time or another been held to account on trumped-up charges of treason. The same is true of gays and communists, which were conflated to maximum advantage by Senator Joe McCarthy during his “Red Hunts” of the mid-1950s.

Here is how academic Richard Hofstadter described the culture of fear and ignorance that haunted America during the McCarthy era:

Today, when Communism has been reduced to a negligible quantity in American domestic life, the cry for a revival of this scapegoat is regularly heard in the land, and investigators who are unable to turn up present Communist affiliations have resorted to stirring up the dead husks of fellow-traveling memoirs or to obscuring as completely as possible the differences between liberals and Communists. The truth is that the right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up. The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage … or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities who roots lay elsewhere than the Communist issue itself.

Replace the words “Communist(s)” with “Jihadi(s)” and “liberals” with “Muslims” and you get the idea.

Weeks after The Nation special edition appeared, the New York Police Department acknowledged in court testimony that six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods and eavesdropping on conversations and mosques had never generated a single lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.