Reviews
Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
glowe2's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
The author argues that the response to the 9/11 attacks allowed Americans to persecute Muslims and people from Arabic countries without regard to human rights or due process. The pressure to monitor external hate groups resulted in both the Republican and Democratic party leaders allowing the further development of a surveillance state that grew to encompass both suspected terrorists and the American public. He believes the breakdown of civil liberties and release of racial hatred ultimately leads to the Trump presidency and the continuation of the Forever War on Terror.
The book is critical of both political parties - Bush for skirting laws using 9/11 as an excuse, Obama for believing the security state abuses could be contained by implementing legal controls, Trump for trying to use the intelligence agencies to advance his political career and finally all of them for making excuses for the abuses that occurred under their administrations.
The book is interesting to read and you quickly see how easily humans will take advantage of situations to act like barbarians while justifying their behavior to others as being "necessary". However, the book tends to skim important subjects like can democracy and security co-exist that probably should have been expanded further. The author acknowledges this in an appendix that he felt torn between multiple stories and he decided to concentrate on the racial hatred that 9/11 unleashed.
The book is critical of both political parties - Bush for skirting laws using 9/11 as an excuse, Obama for believing the security state abuses could be contained by implementing legal controls, Trump for trying to use the intelligence agencies to advance his political career and finally all of them for making excuses for the abuses that occurred under their administrations.
The book is interesting to read and you quickly see how easily humans will take advantage of situations to act like barbarians while justifying their behavior to others as being "necessary". However, the book tends to skim important subjects like can democracy and security co-exist that probably should have been expanded further. The author acknowledges this in an appendix that he felt torn between multiple stories and he decided to concentrate on the racial hatred that 9/11 unleashed.
miocyon's review
3.0
Really 2.5 stars. I had heard/seen interviews with the author on a number of podcasts and blogs, and really liked what he had to say, so had high hopes for this book. I had expected a discourse on how racism has infused our foreign policy since before 9/11. It certainly starts off that way, with a discussion of the white supremacists that fostered the Oklahoma City bombing, but it quickly devolves in a blow-by-blow account of America's missteps of the post-9/11 "War on Terror" and how it was a product of attitudes and policies from both sides of the political aisle. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, although the writing is often breathless and convoluted, and consequently hard to follow. To paraphrase a friend's thoughts on it, "it sounds like a really long mediocre Atlantic think piece". If you've been following this sort of topic for any amount of time (i.e., you're a very online progressive like me) none of what was presented is particularly new. He has moments of insight, and the book starts and ends better than it middles. He acknowledges the shortcomings of the book in the postscript, especially his inability to put much of the topic in a broader context, and probably sums it up best with, "That's probably also a function of the difficulty of writing about the previous twenty years, a period that's too old for journalism and too young for history." Someday a better, less frenetic book on this era of American history will be written.
surelyinthefountain's review
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.0
It builds its case well of a direct through line going into the 9/11 era and marching into the modern day. While I lived through these events, I was too young for a lot of the earlier stuff to fully understand how that tied into what has been happening in the present, and this provides a clean, good summary without getting too bogged down in detail from a leftist perspective. I don't know that I enjoyed this book. Does anyone really "enjoy" the fact that these events happened? But it's a good modern US history book with a specific focus, and I am glad that I finished it.
jbriaz's review
2.0
Ackerman has written a book with such a clear anti-war progressive bias that even I found it over the top. He also fails in the title's central aim to explain how 9/11 and the War on Terror created trump. Instead, this book serves as a progressive screed against establishment liberals and conservatives actions over the last 25 years in the War on Terror and various domestic policies. Ackerman doesn't appear to weigh any evidence objectively or try to find anything that could counter his view.