Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

Spencer Ackerman

An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian directionFor 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.

AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST: Ackerman is a highly regarded and decorated political reporter with a wide social media following (over 150,000 Twitter followers) and experience as a national-security correspondent on the staff of a number of publications, including WIRED, The Guardian, and currently, The Daily Beast. In 2014, he was part of a team at The Guardian that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism, for reporting on Edward Snowden and the NSA's surveillance programs.HOT BUTTON PANDEMIC TOPIC: As government data tracking has proven necessary to curtail the rise of COVID-19, issues of privacy and surveillance have become ever more newsworthy. This book was originally published well into the pandemic landscape, but mass surveillance and the subject of privacy have continued to be at the forefront of public concern.SELLING SUBJECT MATTER: Book about the rise of the surveillance state have been consistent strong sellers (Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide, Shoshanna Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, etc).