Throttled by fear, America lost its mind. An overwhelming majority now agree on this point—a Pew poll in 2019 found that 62 percent of respondents thought the Iraq War was “not worth fighting” (even 64 percent of veterans concurred). So scarring were the failed attempts at nation building that strong isolationist strains run through both major American political parties today. But certain parts of the left could never see the War on Terror as a deviation. What it laid bare for them was what they’d always felt to be true: that the United States was a racist, hungry hegemon anxious to maintain its imperialistic power and economic hold on the world. For the extreme fringes (of the left, but also the right), the leap toward imagining 9/11 as a false-flag operation seemed logical, a perfect excuse for America to manifest its essential evil.
The War on Terror reinforced a paranoid style on the left that has stunted progressive politics, a Chomskyite turn that sees even the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as too incremental. If America is irredeemable, this thinking goes, then justice demands no less than a complete reboot of the country. In time for the 23rd anniversary of 9/11—and two years after America’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan—a new book offers an exhaustive version of this story of fundamental depravity: Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life.
“The most important political story of the past two decades isn’t the intensifying conflict between Republicans and Democrats,” Beck, a writer at the literary magazine n+1, states near the end of his 500 pages, in what can be read as a summary of his book. “It is the story of an empire, a world-spanning political and economic system, that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs to in order to stay there.”
In its claustrophobia and pessimism, Beck’s book itself can be read as an artifact. If he’s looking to gauge the War on Terror’s effect on “American life,” he need look no further than his own worldview. He witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers on television when he was 14, and his generation came of age under the presidency of George W. Bush and the wars he began. What impressions might that leave on a young person? It might make him come to see the United States as a kind of Mafia boss whose violence is so great that it can be undone only by violence. It might make him dismiss the compromises and slowness of politics as pointless. It might make him categorical and essentialist, convinced that systems must collapse and towers must fall for any change at all to occur in the world.