ABSTRACT
It has now become something of a cliché that with the decline of a communist threat at the end of the Cold War, conservative American culture has entered a period of crisis that has raised profound questions about both national identity and purpose (Engelhardt 1995). America’s Cold War goal of containing the USSR might be understood in terms of a moving frontier between the US and this ‘foreign’ threat, not unlike the frontier narratives that characterized the nation’s initial western colonial expansion. This narrative of frontier containing difference and protecting the American nation from foreign incursion, is key to American national identity. Its absence at the close of the Cold War has made the operation of traditional identity politics problematic. With the demise of the ‘Evil Empire’ lurking beyond the frontier, arguments for consensus and discipline in the face of this accepted enemy have become less urgent. This has led to an almost tangible fear in conservative political culture that once the recognized enemy has gone, the American populace will not be able to tell right from wrong, nor good from evil.
