Homeland
The War on Terror in American Life
Richard Beck
Crown
ISBN: 9780593240229
RICHARD BECK WAS FOURTEEN WHEN THE PLANES HIT, the impact sites in Manhattan, Arlington, and Shanksville forming a triangle surrounding the Philadelphia suburb in which he grew up. In early October 2001, on a school choir trip to Manhattan, he saw two young women in the alto section tearfully embrace at the announcement of the first US airstrikes on Afghanistan, an emotional scene he didn’t fully understand at the time and would never shake. I’m three years older than Beck, and our shared generation has witnessed a series of cataclysmic events, but for many of us, 9/11 was the most indelible. More than two decades later, it’s hard not to feel like the fall of 2001 was when everything started to go terribly wrong.
But Beck, now in his late thirties and a regular contributor to n+1, is well aware that the crises of twenty-first-century America have much deeper roots than a single day of terror. In his wildly ambitious second book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, Beck argues that the US response to 9/11 is both the logical culmination of American history dating back to the first white settlers on the continent and the backdrop of all that has followed. As he guides the reader through a generation’s still-unresolved collective trauma, he links it—for the most part, convincingly—to seemingly every aspect of contemporary American life.
IN HIS INTRODUCTION, Beck writes that Donald Trump’s presidency and the constellation of reactionary forces it represents were made possible by the 9/11 attacks. Homeland is not the first book to make this argument; three years ago, Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump was organized around the same premise. But Beck seems to strain against the Trump framing as soon as he brings it up: “In fifty, twenty-five, or even ten years, Trump may look more like a precursor to larger social and political fractures,” Beck writes. “I would rather not gratify Trump’s narcissism by making a multi-decade, global war entirely about him.” And he doesn’t—relatively little of Homeland is concerned with Trump, and some of the strongest sections of the book situate the war on terror as part of a primordial American crusade against perceived alien threats, rather than a departure from a mythologized age of national innocence.
While Ackerman approached the war on terror as a seasoned national security reporter, Beck approaches it as a cultural critic. He observes that most Americans experienced 9/11 as a televisual spectacle, perhaps the largest such event that ever was or will be, watched in real time by two billion people worldwide. Beck rewatches the ABC News broadcast from that morning and devotes several pages to unpacking everything from Peter Jennings’s shock at the unbelievable story unfolding before him to the frivolous news items—“a man whose cell phone had continued to work even though his kayak had overturned”—that were interrupted by the explosions in Lower Manhattan. Of the camera crews that arrived downtown after the first tower was hit but before the second was, Beck writes, “They understood themselves to be reporting the news, but at 9:03 they learned that they had been unwittingly pressed into service as publicists for terrorism.” Al-Qaeda, in other words, managed to enlist the American media as producers and distributors of the world’s most widely viewed snuff film.
Americans’ pervasive feeling of helplessness after the attacks seemed to have few precursors, but Beck finds earlier parallels, drawing on the insights of Susan Faludi’s 2007 book, The Terror Dream, and Richard Slotkin’s earlier trilogy of histories on the myths of the frontier. In a long digression about the popular “captivity narratives” produced in response to the extended pre-Revolutionary wars between Puritan colonists and Indigenous peoples in New England, Beck recalls that for centuries, Americans have told versions of the same basic story: “savages” inexplicably attack our blameless, vulnerable Christian civilization. Over time, iterations of this narrative developed a genre of American hero who responds with righteous violence, “the figure who would serve as the template for all the myth heroes to follow, from the cowboys and outlaws of the American West all the way down to Batman. That figure was the hunter.” There is a straight line, Beck persuasively shows, from the exploits of Daniel Boone to the celebrated Special Forces who became the defining real-world heroes of the war on terror, as well as the various fictional archetypes who came out of the same era, from 24’s Jack Bauer to Robert Downey Jr.’s rendition of Iron Man. The fantasy Americans embraced, and that the Pentagon spent billions trying to make real, was one in which small teams of high-tech, heavily armored superheroes patrolled the deadly frontiers to protect American innocence at home.
The titular homeland itself, meanwhile, would never feel safe again. Beck chronicles the expansion of security theater in the post-9/11 years, noting the ineffective obtrusiveness of both airport screenings and the NSA’s notorious surveillance programs. Those come in for plenty of criticism, of course, but Beck extends his indictment to include less obvious topics like the soaring popularity of SUVs, which were simultaneously symbols of consumerist excess, expressions of stubborn indifference to US dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and machines that provided the illusion of individual security while making everyone else less safe. “Now the world was a dangerous place where terrorists could strike without warning, and SUVs, because they were taller and heavier than anything else on the road, made people feel secure,” Beck writes. “The vehicles’ military origins returned to the foreground—this was the car to drive when the homeland was a potential war zone.” Meanwhile, there was a rush to privatize public spaces and establish security zones in major US cities—Beck notes that the number of Neighborhood Watch groups nationwide increased by 85 percent after 9/11, and that large sections of San Francisco and other major cities were subsequently closed off and blanketed with surveillance cameras to prevent the non-wealthy from loitering or congregating—producing “an environment in which the public can barely function at all.” None of this made anyone more secure, Beck argues: “When the terrorist threat has been so wildly exaggerated, the only remaining explanation for the security zones is that their purpose is to monitor the public itself.” While relatively few Americans have served on the front lines of the war on terror abroad or been victimized directly by it at home, all of us can feel its unsettling presence in the architecture of our quotidian lives.
Beck also devotes a large section of the book to documenting the xenophobic racism against Muslims and Arabs that came directly out of 9/11. Much of this is familiar: soaring hate crimes, FBI entrapment schemes, routine violations of civil liberties, and innocent lives destroyed by a zealous prosecutorial apparatus operating in a state of exception. Beck has a fine sense of the ultimate stakes of these abuses. “For Muslims themselves,” he writes, “one of the most devastating effects of these campaigns was that it became difficult and sometimes impossible to participate in civic life—to speak your mind freely in a student group, attend public discussions at a mosque, respond to a bigot on a Facebook thread about politics, or even argue with someone who was being a jerk in public.”
He spotlights the story of Adama Bah, a Muslim immigrant from Guinea whose life became a Kafkaesque nightmare from ages sixteen to twenty-five after she was caught up in an FBI dragnet that resulted in her father’s arrest and deportation and in her being interrogated, imprisoned, forced to drop out of school, and placed on a no-fly list. While she eventually won an ACLU lawsuit restoring her rights, irreparable damage had been done. “The story’s ‘happy ending’ notwithstanding, the United States successfully delivered a message to Adama and people like her: You are not a full and equal member of our society,” Beck writes. “Whatever dreams and aspirations you might have cultivated as a child must now take a backseat to the smaller dream of staying out of trouble.” While Arab and Muslim communities felt this domestic terror most acutely, Beck demonstrates that precedents were being established for targeting other groups, including Black and Indigenous activists and their allies.
HOMELAND’S MOST ORIGINAL AND PROVOCATIVE SECTION, and the one Beck claims that he enjoyed working on the most, offers a theory of the political economy of the war on terror—the deeper materialist explanations for why all this happened. Never one to go small, Beck immerses readers in a five-hundred-year history of global capitalism, in which an economic system premised on permanent GDP growth has always depended on hegemonic states to protect and advance it, from the Italian city-states to the seafaring Dutch Republic to the British Empire and finally to the United States. To Beck’s mind, the standard Marxist explanations for post-9/11 US foreign policy—blood for oil and public subsidies for defense contractors—are unsatisfying and insufficient. They certainly factored in, but they weren’t causal. Rather, Beck argues, the attacks occurred at a moment when “the United States found itself at the head of a global economic order that had been founded on a growth surge that was slowly but surely running out of steam.” Here he draws on a wide range of thinkers—Mike Davis on the slums of the Global South, Aaron Benanav on secular stagnation, Giovanni Arrighi on the cyclic nature of capitalist accumulation, and Pankaj Mishra on the rage of the developing world—to argue that the war on terror has functioned as a kind of extended police action against restive surplus populations that the US-led global economic system can’t provide prosperity for.
The form of American imperialism jump-started by the attacks thus served a holistic function: it became a tool for managing and suppressing the wretched of the earth in places where capitalism itself had failed to deliver. Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics honed in Iraq and Afghanistan could be just as useful in the Sahel, or on the Mexican border, or in American cities like Ferguson, Missouri—or, as we’ve seen dramatically demonstrated in the past year, in Gaza and the West Bank. All of these deployments of state violence, Beck stresses, “are part of the same project, the same larger effort to preserve American supremacy at the expense of the global poor even as America loses the economic capabilities that legitimized its global leadership in the first place.”
Beck also contends that the most enduring legacies of the war on terror include a sense of elite impunity and a corresponding sense of hopelessness among younger Americans. His account of the journalistic failures that manufactured consent for the Iraq invasion is expansive and unsparing, if perhaps familiar to media junkies by now. We see how Susan Sontag was pilloried for her measured response to 9/11, how the New York Times was criminally negligent in publishing Judith Miller’s anonymously sourced stories about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and how even ambitious young progressive bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias understood, correctly, that it would help their careers to endorse the war and apologize later. Beck doesn’t want to pick on anyone in particular; the failure, as he sees it, was systemic. “The very idea that the American news media, in its current form, can just decide to cultivate a consistently adversarial relationship with the government it covers is a fantasy,” he writes. Corporate conglomeration and the perverse incentives of audience and access make it difficult for journalists to act as an effective check on power. This is why even today, when it’s generally understood that the Iraq War was folly and many onetime advocates have recanted, few seem to have internalized any deeper lesson. We are condemned to keep making the same mistakes, in what Beck aptly characterizes in Freudian terms as “a repetition compulsion carried out on a national scale”—in which the war on terror’s supporters, its opponents, and the majority of Americans who try to ignore it and carry on with their lives all find themselves implicated in its endless, self-sustaining logic.
HOMELAND COMES OUT TO AROUND FIVE HUNDRED PAGES (not including endnotes), and the range of topics it covers, from Black Lives Matter to mass shootings to the 2008 financial crisis to the Standing Rock protests, amounts to an exhaustive survey of the past quarter century and the news events our generation followed in real time. Though Beck’s judgments are largely earned, at times the expansiveness of his interests undermines what could have been a tighter focus on the war on terror as conventionally defined. There is a trend in nonfiction publishing wherein a book must promise to explain everything about our times; whether Beck was encouraged to do so or took it upon himself, he is insistent that everything that has happened since 9/11 has been, in some sense, a product of it, even though he also often gestures at important trends that predate the attacks and whose ongoing salience didn’t depend on them. John Ganz’s recent book When the Clock Broke locates the roots of today’s populist right in the underbelly of early 1990s politics, which, if we accept the argument, suggests that America was headed in a certain direction regardless of whether a few terrorists armed with box cutters managed to slip through airport security in 2001. Similarly, the housing bubble that popped in 2008 was largely the product of a series of neoliberal economic policies that either preceded the 9/11 attacks or would likely have been enacted regardless. The war on terror may have affected everything, but that doesn’t mean it caused everything.
Still, it’s hard not to admire Beck’s ambition and the clarity of both his prose and his moral vision. Homeland is less an explanation of the precise ephemeral moment that is 2024 than an extended reckoning with a whole era of American history, one that will remain relevant to readers who didn’t live through the events it revisits. Beck seems to anticipate these future generations in his conclusion, in which he writes, “In the decades to come, some of those people are going to find ways of changing and living in society that don’t require a militarized world of swat teams, armored police vehicles, fortified borders, surveillance, night raids, secret prisons, and bombs, if only because they have no other choice.” We may still be living in the long imperial shadow of 9/11, but Beck can see a faint light in the distance.
David Klion is a journalist and cultural critic working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism.
