Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin’s sentence is doing two forms of mobilization at once: naming the force of Bush-era nationalism after 9/11, then trying to conscript Americans into a counter-mobilization that doesn’t forfeit the flag to the state. The verb choice matters. “Mobilisation” frames the post-attack political mood as something engineered and directed, not simply felt. That’s a sociologist’s tell: emotion becomes infrastructure, a public made legible and steerable through fear, grief, and shared ritual.

The pivot is the phrase “has to be fought.” Gitlin isn’t pleading for polite dissent; he’s arguing that the post-9/11 rally-around-the-president effect is an adversary with momentum. Yet he’s careful about who should do the fighting: “at least by Americans.” That qualifier acknowledges the optics and legitimacy crisis of critique. Foreign condemnation can be dismissed as hostility; domestic opposition can’t be so easily exiled from the moral community. He’s also dodging the trap of appearing anti-American, which in that period was a reputational death sentence.

The subtext is a battle over the definition of patriotism. Gitlin concedes the emotional need for national belonging, then insists it be “wise, honourable and democratic” - a triplet that quietly indicts what he sees as its opposite: reckless policy, dishonorable tactics, and executive overreach. The brilliance is that he refuses the binary of patriot versus traitor. He argues that dissent isn’t a betrayal of the nation; it’s an attempt to rescue national feeling from becoming a blank check for power.