How the War on Terror Warped the American Left

Three now infamous paragraphs from Susan Sontag stung like a slap to the face in the disorienting days that followed the 9/11 attacks. Asked by The New Yorker to reflect on what had occurred only 48 hours earlier, Sontag found “stupid” the “confidence-building and grief management” that filled the media. “Where is the acknowledgment,” she asked, “that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

Most anyone with a heartbeat, and certainly anyone who could smell the acrid air of Manhattan at the time, clouded with the ashes of thousands of people, took offense at Sontag’s coldness. Her first error was one of timing and tone—surely there was a deeper context for the attack worth unpacking, but maybe wait just a couple of days? But even more appalling in retrospect was the shallowness of Sontag’s context, as predictable and one-dimensional as what George W. Bush would yell through a bullhorn at Ground Zero: To her, 9/11 was not a moment of American victimhood, but actually a revelation of American malignancy, proof of the country’s own victimizing nature.

In all that would transpire in the years after 9/11, Sontag and others who shared her immediate reaction would have reason to consider themselves prophets: the invasion of Iraq, carried out under false pretense; the expansion of the surveillance state; the obscene torture at Abu Ghraib and massacre of women and children in places like Haditha; the whole extrajudicial existence of Guantánamo Bay; the dangerous expansiveness of phrases such as enemy combatant and even terrorist.

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.

[Graeme Wood: The never-ending Guantánamo trials]

“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.

I thought at first, based on his subtitle, that Beck would be presenting an account of the insidious ways that the War on Terror, particularly in its early and deadliest years, leaked into culture and society. And he does do this. He looks at how the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq made SUVs and Iron Man and shows like 24 popular in the United States; how social media’s business interest in collecting personal data converged with the National Security Agency’s desire to do the same; how the number of mass shootings, articles of clothing we had to remove at airports, and anxieties (about Muslims and immigrants) increased. These close readings of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the war came home, even though the fighting itself was far away and mostly invisible to Americans, are the most successful parts of Homeland.

A number of studies in the years after 9/11 found an increased prevalence of PTSD and other signs of trauma even among those who only watched the massacre live on television. The sense of collective fear, the worry that another terrorist attack could—that it most likely would—happen again, shaped the American response, and explains so many of the pathological excesses. Fear makes you act irrationally, makes you more suspicious of your neighbor or even tolerant of torture if it gives you the illusion that you can walk into a public space without panicking. Beck may have been too young to remember, but I recall what it felt like to step onto a train or an airplane in 2002—after months that saw anthrax attacks and the shoe bomber, not to mention the MISSING posters still up everywhere in New York City. You looked around at who else was there. You shamefully engaged in your own acts of profiling.

This does not excuse the way the government acted, the PATRIOT Act’s disregard for civil liberties, or the numbers of hate crimes against Muslim Americans (or the hell that those Americans surely encountered making their way through an airport). It does not excuse the rush to war in Iraq, or the demand for a conformity of opinion that (momentarily) halted the career of people like Bill Maher (who echoed Sontag’s thoughts on cowardice) and the members of the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks (who insulted President Bush). It definitely does not excuse the torture and indefinite detentions. But it does explain what happened in psychological terms that are entirely human. These societal and political failures did not occur in a vacuum. They were a reaction to an event in which 2,977 people were killed before the eyes of everyone in the country.

Beck never acknowledges this fear as a universal response to terror. What he sees at work is specific to Americans, an enactment of a “national mythology” forged in the 17th century. There is nothing very original about this analysis, which follows a narrative thread back to the helplessness of the early European colonists as they faced a forbidding wilderness full of Native people who did not exactly want them there. As Beck recounts it, the shame and vulnerability, articulated in captivity narratives in which white women were stolen by American Indians, transformed into an embrace of righteous, no-holds-barred violence to bring back civilizational order—Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo, Davy Crockett, and John Wayne became the stars of these shows.

Beck finds potency in the Freudian concept of “repetition compulsion,” a desire to play out an original trauma, in this case expiating that 17th-century shame again and again, with violence. Americans, he argues, are hardwired by these mythologies: “They let Americans know what they should expect from life, how they should inhabit the world, and what they should do when the enemy (especially a nonwhite enemy) shows up at the front door.” September 11 was thus a triggering event. The Iraqis and Afghans that American soldiers detained, Beck writes, were “a new kind of Indian.” When the guards at Abu Ghraib took photos of a dead captive, “they might as well have scalped him.”

This is history as a skipping record. It leaves little room for ethical development over time, no place for correction. Aspects of “The 1619 Project” offered the same fatalism: a country stained with the birthmark of slavery as forever and always racist. The clear implication is that the only change possible is a revolutionary one that smashes the experiment and starts from scratch.

[Conor Friedersdorf: 1776 honors America’s diversity in a way 1619 does not].

But placating a racist id was just part of the war’s story for Beck. That made it possible. To understand the real motives behind the breadth of the global War on Terror, he turns from Freud to Marx. The world economy, with America at its center, has been slowing since the 1970s. This has led to a severe dearth of formal employment everywhere, but especially in places such as Africa and the Middle East, creating what Marx originally called “surplus populations,”  people for whom capitalism has not created enough work. The central motivator for terrorism, according to Beck, is this: an economic grievance against a superpower that is unable to grow or spread the wealth but is also holding on to its position of dominance at all costs.

With this economic explanation in hand, the War on Terror appears as an excuse to strengthen America’s grip on the world’s economy and beat back any of those surplus populations that might dare to object. Why did the United States invade Iraq and refuse to withdraw even after the war had drained trillions of dollars, taken thousands of lives, and become politically unpopular at home? Easy. The invasion happened, Beck writes, in order “to force Iraq to join the twenty-first-century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economies of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America’s global leadership.” Because of stagnating growth and the ever-hungry demands of capitalism for more capital, Iraq needed a good hazing.

This is the left’s familiar catechism. Beck presents it as revelatory, but it comes off as tedious—at one point, he takes up most of one long chapter recounting the rapacious origins of capitalism, going back roughly 500 years to the Italian city-states. This thinking also verges on the kind of conspiracism that fixates on secret associations, such as the Bilderberg Meetings, manipulating economies for the sake of a neoliberal world order. Elements of his interpretation have some explanatory power—the United States is losing its footing; declining growth and ballooning levels of income inequality are an enormous problem. But he also leaves out so much texture for fear of diluting a story that can have only one villain.  

Beck does not want to take ideology or religious radicalization into account; anyone who would do so is racist. He avoids looking too closely at the interests of other countries that also seek to extend their power—what, for example, Russia or China or Iran might want. “One of the war’s fundamental goals was to confirm the hypothesis that in the twenty-first century the rest of the world would automatically defer to America, simply by virtue of America’s overwhelming military strength,” he writes. But if you ask the Houthis or Xi Jinping, I’m not sure that experiment worked out. The War on Terror had instead a humbling effect on America’s willingness to project its might: At the moment, the United States spends the same amount of its GDP on defense—about 3 percent—as it did in 1999.

When Beck applies his fixed worldview to 2024, his blinkers become obvious. In Russia’s war to swallow Ukraine, he spares some sympathy for President Vladimir Putin, who must deal with an American government that has “lavished Ukraine with military aid while simultaneously looking to expand NATO’s membership.” That the Ukrainians themselves have asked for this help in order to preserve their sovereignty seems irrelevant to Beck. What he recommends for Ukrainians and their American backers is “restraint, serious diplomatic engagement, and caution.” No such moderation applies when he turns to the Palestinians. Their enemy, Israel, is an extension of America in the region, a “snarling dog,” a “nation of settler colonialists” that is doing nothing more in Gaza than quenching its “bloodlust.” His analysis ends there; because Palestinians are “the contemporary world’s paradigmatic example of a surplus population,” no other interpretation is needed—nothing, for example, about Iran’s interests as expressed through its proxies, or Israelis’ own legitimate desire for safety, given those proxies’ eliminationist goals.

Well past 450 pages, around the start of his epilogue, I found myself wondering: Where does someone like Richard Beck turn to for hope?

Not to electoral politics. He admits that he refused to vote in 2012, when Barack Obama was up for reelection. Obama had outlawed torture and was withdrawing from Iraq; in one of his first major foreign-policy acts as president, he had flown to Cairo to address the Muslim world. But Beck saw only a sleek veneer. The war was continuing more quietly—with drones—and Obama would not be holding any top Bush-administration officials accountable for their crimes. So Beck opted out.

Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter felt like what he was looking for. These major protest movements attacked “impunity culture” and displayed some of the “disruptive substance” that Beck had found lacking in the more staid demonstrations against the Iraq War—and resembled, Beck writes approvingly, a “rebellion” or an “uprising” that would overturn normal operations. But even though these movements took on deep structural issues—racism and income inequality—they were not radical enough, he now thinks, because both assumed the legitimacy of the American government, that the “system” itself could be reformed.

Hope finally appears in the shape of a movement that went even further, the 2016 Standing Rock protest, in which Native American tribes and their supporters tried to block the construction of an oil pipeline on land that contained sacred burial sites. The movement established a tent city that grew to more than 10,000 people, and as with Occupy, one of its objectives was to create a kind of alternative society. It lasted for nearly a year before being violently dispersed by a combination of National Guard forces, local police, and private contractors. What Beck found “personally clarifying” was the way the protest positioned itself. “Standing Rock didn’t just dispute the wisdom of building a pipeline; it disputed the United States’ claim to the land itself,” he writes. “It disputed the assumption on which the whole U.S. project rests.”

[Ben Rhodes: The 9/11 era is over]

It occurred to me while reading Homeland that I witnessed a very different scene on television at basically the same age that Beck experienced 9/11. A couple of months after I turned 13, the Berlin Wall came down. I watched madly joyful people taking pickaxes to the Wall and streaming through the new holes into West Berlin. What I took away on some subconscious level was not the triumph of democracy over autocracy or capitalism over communism, but something much more elemental: that a mass of regular people could together exert their political will, creating possibilities.

What Beck saw on 9/11 was a different sort of rupture—a massacre that closed down and hardened society. The men who jolted the U.S. back into history that day did so not by mobilizing people, but by creating a spectacle that in one morning led to a series of cascading catastrophes that citizens felt powerless to avoid. What followed provoked an abiding question for Beck: “Did Americans—­all of them—­get to decide what their government did?” The images I took in were of a peaceful revolution that anyone could join, whereas Beck’s formative experience was a passive one: helplessly watching a televised, world-rending explosion.

The epidemic of mass shootings snowballed during the War on Terror—of 148 such incidents since 1982, Beck writes, 115 took place during the war, including 41 of the 50 deadliest. When a teenager gears himself up like a soldier, equipped with a GoPro camera, and enters a school looking to kill, it is an event “engineered for maximum media coverage and spectacular resonance,” and Beck can’t help but feel that a society warped by 9/11 and the militaristic response lurks in the background. Each shooting, he writes, “has restaged the war’s two central traumas: the trauma of sudden and devastating victimization, on the one hand, and the trauma of committing mass violence, on the other.”

The observation sounds right, and points to the war’s invasiveness, its deadly creep into the way we think and behave. But Beck doesn’t quite see how it has conditioned his own instincts as well. His rejection of politics, his desire to rip it all out from the root, the Manichaean way he has come to see America as a force of darkness, the sense that only through the most “disruptive substance” will a better world emerge—all of this, too, is a legacy of September 11.