An argument on how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of democracy down to what we watched on TV.
Beck’s central argument is that our current moment, in all its horror, can best be explained by the militarism, xenophobia, and impunity that the War on Terror helped unleash, understood against the backdrop of the United States’ decline from economic hegemony.
Exhaustive ... Beck’s book itself can be read as an artifact ... This is history as a skipping record. It leaves little room for ethical development over time ... This is the left’s familiar catechism. Beck presents it as revelatory, but it comes off as tedious ... 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.
