Purchase

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Apple Books

Google Play

Powell's Books

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Ripped Bodice

Add to Wish List

Also by Spencer Ackerman:

Reign of Terror, August 2022
Paperback / e-Book

Reign of Terror
Spencer Ackerman

How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

Penguin Books
August 2022
On Sale: August 9, 2022
448 pages
ISBN: 1984879790
EAN: 9781984879790
Kindle: B08NFTPQDP
Paperback / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction Political

For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, it has pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance, as well as detaining people indefinitely and torturing them. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized, paranoid feature of American politics and security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home. A politically divided country turned the War on Terror into a cultural and then tribal struggle, first on the ideological fringes and ultimately expanding to conquer the Republican Party, often with the timid acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today's nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era.

Reign of Terror will show how these policies created a foundation for American authoritarianism and, though it is not a book about Donald Trump, it will provide a critical explanation of his rise to power and the sources of his political strength. It will show that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. That mistake turns out to have been portentous. By the end of his tenure, the war metastasized into a broader and bitter culture struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it.

A union of journalism and intellectual history, Reign of Terror will be a pathbreaking and definitive book with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on its civic life.

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!