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Ep 218: The Siren Song of Rallying Around a 'Common Enemy' to Promote Progressive Causes

Added 2025-04-16 17:27:20 +0000 UTC

"Senate Weighs Investing $120 Billion in Science to Counter China," trumpeted The New York Times in 2021. "A New Economic Patriotism Can Help Unite Our Divided Congress," argued Newsweek in 2023. "US cedes ground to China with ‘self-inflicted wound’ of USAid shutdown, analysts say," cautioned The Guardian in 2025.

In recent years, we’ve been exposed to the latest version of a centuries-old geopolitical message: We all have a common enemy, and we all need to unite to fight it by making our own country stronger. That enemy—most commonly China—is threatening to outpace, if it isn’t already outpacing, the US in infrastructural investment, educational programs, technological development, and elsewhere, and we need to devote millions, billions, even trillions of dollars to restoring the vitality of our institutions in order to reverse this trend.

But why must defeating an "enemy" be the justification for policy that has the potential to benefit the public? Why should we just accept the premise that there must be an "enemy" to compete against and defeat? Why can’t policy be enacted for the sole purpose of improving people’s lives? And how does this messaging about the threat of a looming adversary serve the ruling class?

On this episode, we detail the timeworn trope of the common enemy as a "unifying" device, looking at how increasingly so-called progressives are appealing to feel-good sentiments of unity and to the genuine needs for sound infrastructure, robust social safety nets, corporate regulation, and functional institutions in order to sell the idea that there is, and always will be, a shadowy bad guy that must be vanquished.

Our guest is historian, professor and author Greg Grandin.

Guest

Greg Grandin (@greggrandin) is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of many books, including Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth. His new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, will be published next week on April 22, 2025, by Penguin Random House.

Show Notes

The Always ‘Lagging’ U.S. War Machine

Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi | September 9, 2020 | Citations Needed

What America Can Learn From the Americas

Patrick Iber | April 7, 2025 | The New Republic

Yellow Techno-Peril: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and anti-Chinese racial rhetoric in the US–China AI arms race

Kerry McInerney | 2024 | Big Data & Society

The ‘China Threat’: Stereotypical representations in the US competition with China

Flavia Lucenti | February 27, 2024 | International Politics

‘Great power competition’ is a dangerous narrative for U.S. foreign policy

Stacie Goddard | September 20, 2024 | Good Authority

Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress

August 28, 2024 | Congressional Research Service

The Creation of an American Enemy

David Donald | Vanguard

Anti-China Rhetoric Distracts Washington—and Boosts Beijing

Gregory W. Meeks | June 26, 2023 | Foreign Policy

Tracking Climate Securitization: Framings of Climate Security by Civil and Defense Ministries

Anselm Vogler | May 15, 2023 | International Studies Review

A Professor Who Challenges the Washington Consensus on China

Ian Johnson | December 13, 2022 | The New Yorker

The Inevitable Rivalry

John J. Mearsheimer | October 19, 2021 | Foreign Affairs

Great-Power Competition Is a Recipe for Disaster

Emma Ashford | April 1, 2021 | Foreign Policy

Welcome to the All-Consuming Great Power Competition

Robert Farley | February 23, 2021 | The Diplomat

Against Great Power Competition

Daniel H. Nexon | February 15, 2021 | Foreign Affairs

Climate Change Can’t Be an Excuse for More Militarization

January 28, 2021 | Dharna Noor | Gizmodo

Framing Climate Change as a “National Security Priority” Isn’t a Clever Maneuver to Get People to Care — It’s a Centrist Co-option Strategy to Bloat the Budgets of ICE and the Pentagon

Adam Johnson | November 24, 2020 | The Column

The Common Enemy: How the Rhetoric of Fear is Subverting Democracies

José Balsa-Barreiro and Elia Rossi | August 25, 2019 | Journal of International Affairs

Cold War Rhetoric: China and the US Today

Berkley Sanders-Velez | March 31, 2018 | Columbia Political Review

Leibniz’s Egypt Plan (1671–1672): from holy war to ecumenism

Lloyd Strickland | 2016 | Intellectual History Review

Narrative and the Making of US National Security

Ronald R. Krebs | December 2015 | Cambridge University Press

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can also find transcripts of past episodes, live shows, Beg-a-Thons, Interviews and News Briefs here.

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