The Enemy From Within Is US
Only the United States Can Defeat the United States
In the wise words of Donald Trump, “I always say, we have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” Less wisely, Trump identifies this internal enemy with such malevolent figures as… California Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. While there are indeed, in Trump’s words, “radical left lunatics” in the United States, Schiff and Pelosi are far from the top of any objective list. Clearly, when Trump says “we” have enemies, he is following in the grand tradition of French King Louis XIV: L'État, c'est moi.
James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, wrote a rather more thoughtful piece entitled “The Enemy Within.” In it, Mattis references a speech by Abraham Lincoln that reads like Trump’s remarks if filtered through the mind of a statesman:
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?—Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!—All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
For Lincoln, as for Mattis, the real enemy from within is not any individual politician. It is the rancorous, lawless “mobocratic spirit” that can divide and destroy a nation. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t embody the mobocratic spirit. The hammer-wielding man who attacked her husband does. Trump’s would-be assassins, too, represent the enemy from within. After his brush with death, when Trump seemed like “the world spirit on a golf cart,” he had a brief opportunity to transcend partisanship and deal that enemy a severe blow. But the moment, and the better angels of his nature, passed on by.
Nevertheless, though Trump’s identification of the enemy is wrong, his unwitting evocation of Lincoln’s speech is apt. Russia, China, and Iran, even in concert, can’t bring down the United States. They can only exploit its pre-existing divisions; and, if they’re lucky, pick at the remains of a nation dead by suicide. Some of these divisions are exacerbated by the left, like an identity politics that puts race (or “racialization”) before country. Others are manipulated by the right, such as the tendency to view elites as not simply misguided or out of touch, but actively seeking to destroy America. Yet regardless of their origins, enemies often seek to exploit a nation’s internal divisions. Before invading, Russia encouraged separatist sentiment in Georgia and Ukraine. Israel’s conflict over judicial reform factored into Hamas’s timing for the October 7 attacks. Of course, “Fortress America” is less directly vulnerable than countries with aggressive neighbors. Still, the United States is on another continent, not a whole other planet, than its foes.
In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln beseeched reconciliation between North and South, proclaiming “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Nevertheless, the South seceded, and national unity was only regained after bloody war between mutual “enemies from within.” But today, the country is not divided by so profound an issue as slavery. Rather, most Americans are broadly centrist or center-left economically and centrist or center-right culturally.
and argue that both the Democrats and Republicans are capable of building enduring political majorities. However, to do so, they would need to prioritize broadening their coalitions over indulging their most partisan supporters. A visionary leader, one capable of identifying the enemy within as the mobocratic spirit—cancel culture on the left, election denial on the right—could depolarize the nation.Demographically, too, America is less divided than alarmists believe. It lacks ethnic separatist movements, unlike Iran with its restive non-Persian minorities. It has no tectonic religious fault lines, unlike those between Sunnis and Shi’ites in the broader Islamic world. It is not a multinational empire ruling over more fecund subject peoples, unlike the Russian Federation.1 Historically, America’s primary demographic divide has been racial. Yet despite their differences, black and white Americans are largely culturally adjacent, speak the same language (or dialects thereof), and practice the same religion. Regardless of socioeconomic issues, there is no serious black secessionist movement and limited race-based political violence.2 Even in 2020, a recent nadir in American race relations, many more Indians were killed in religious rioting than Americans died during Black Lives Matter protests. The American electorate is also becoming less racially polarized, with blacks and Hispanics increasingly voting Republican: a sign that progress doesn’t always mean “progressive.”
Hispanic immigrants do, of course, speak a different language than other Americans.3 But for the most part, they also seek to work and assimilate into mainstream American culture. Unlike Europe, America does not have immigrant-majority, low-employment banlieues prone to riots and the occasional beheading. Illegal immigration from Mexico is a real issue; terrorism by jihadist Guatemalans is not.4 By many economic and cultural measures, Hispanic immigrants are following the same journey to the middle class as Irish Americans once did. And leaving aside the “poor huddled masses,” America continues to attract elite human capital, including from its enemies: Chinese scientists, Russian programmers, Iranian entrepreneurs. That’s not an argument for open borders: too many immigrants coming in too quickly can impede their assimilation and damage social cohesion.5 However, given enforced borders and a sensible immigration system, newcomers to America are more likely to join us than replace us.
Against the divisiveness of the mob in an America torn apart by slavery, Lincoln recommended that “reverence for the constitution and laws” become “the political religion of the nation.” While America’s divisions are real, so is the durability of that political religion, which survived its great schism and continues to attract new converts. After Pearl Harbor, Hitler unilaterally declared war on the United States because he viewed it as weak and unstable: “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together?”6 But the American experiment has outlasted German Reichs, French republics, and worker’s paradises. Despite the possibility that a winter of political violence and slapdash authoritarianism awaits, I remain bullish about the nation’s long-term prospects. After all, Rome survived the reigns of Nero and Caligula by centuries. Both Lincoln and Trump, despite himself, are right: no foreign foe will defeat America. The country’s most serious enemy comes from within. But properly recognized, that enemy can be defeated.
While some argue that the United States behaves “imperially” on the global stage, it fits the mold of a nation-state, not an empire (with the possible exception of overseas territories like Puerto Rico).
Black nationalism is a political posture, not a secessionist movement.
Interestingly, Hispanics who predominantly use English (a sure sign of assimilation) are more likely to vote Republican.
As David Frum writes, “Reducing immigration, and selecting immigrants more carefully, will enable the country to more quickly and successfully absorb the people who come here, and to ensure equality of opportunity to both the newly arrived and the long-settled—to restore to Americans the feeling of belonging to one united nation, responsible for the care and flourishing of all its people.”
By treaty, Nazi Germany was only bound to defend Japan if it was attacked, not to join it in a war of aggression. And, of course, Hitler didn’t take treaties seriously anyway.
Not me.