What They Demand Is Victory. What We Get Is War.
Trumpism explained in Spencer Ackerman’s ‘Reign of Terror’
“The post-9/11 era,” Spencer Ackerman says, is “nothing other than a reign of terror,” and it is “increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.” That’s from his 2021 book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.
Leading Into the ‘War on Terror’
Post-Cold War, U.S. conservatives liked to say that the United States had brought about the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially that conservatives “had achieved that victory despite the liberals,” who they represented as “lacking convictions of their own.”
But who would represent the enemy, now that the Soviet Union was gone?
Not white Christian USAmericans who just so happened to be domestic terrorists. In 1997, Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people with a bomb, had a lawyer and a jury trial. “There was no demand for McVeigh to be abused in prison, held incommunicado, or moved to military custody,” and no complaint that treating him in accordance with the law would “embolden his fellow white terrorists. White America could recognize the fundamental humanity of the ordinary boy.”
