At Harry Kreisler’s Conversation with History, an interview with Ian Lustick (Real Player) on his new book Trapped in the War on Terror. From the transcipt.
[Kreisler] This sense of a threat that this war is addressing shows up in all the opinion polls when you look at the attentive elite and when you look at the broad population?
[Lustick] Yes. As a political scientist you don’t just look at public opinion, and you don’t just look at the answers that people give to opinion polls, because the answers that people give to opinion polls are very much driven by how the questions are framed. So, what social scientists do, what I like to do, is to look at the questions that are asked. If you look at the questions that are asked of elites, whether by the Pew Foundation or the American Foreign Policy Association [to see] what opinion leaders in the United States think, or if you look at the Harris polls and Gallup polls of mass opinion, what questions are asked and how are they asked? The type of question that’s always asked since 9/11 is, “Is the government prosecuting the War on Terror well, or not? Are we winning the War on Terror? Are we losing?” No one asks, “Should there be a War on Terror? Is there an enemy that could be fought effectively with a war?” No one asks that question publicly.
That’s the sign of how deeply embedded the expectations are, and if those deeply embedded expectations are wrong, the country has a hard time correcting its course. Here’s why: our government is built on a Madisonian system. Every interest group and every ambitious politician is supposed to go out in the arena and fight for everything they can get based on what’s good for them. Even if they talk about what’s good for the national interest, the way you get ahead in American politics, whether you’re George Bush or anyone else, is to fight for your constituency and build coalitions and fight for those constituencies. The Madisonian system assumes that the whole country will go in a direction that is the outcome of everyone doing that, so it will never lurch too far in one direction, because everyone has an interest that’s slightly different than mine, and we tend to cancel one another out.