I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward.
—Barack Obama
At the beginning of October 2016, with just over a month to go before the presidential election, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, was trailing Hillary Clinton by three percentage points in the polls. He had managed to trim down his opponent’s lead in the middle of September, after Clinton said that one could reasonably describe “half” of Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables” and also was caught concealing that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia. Her performance in the first general election debate on September 26, however, helped to reestablish the polling advantage she held throughout the entirety of the campaign. Still, a 3 percent lead was hardly comfortable, and not just because of the margin of error. Though Americans generally didn’t have a favorable view of Trump, they didn’t like Clinton, either, and the prospect of voters heading to the polls thinking of Clinton as the least bad option didn’t inspire overwhelming confidence. If Clinton and her supporters were going to get any real sleep before Election Day, they needed something to break in their favor.
They got it. On October 7, The Washington Post published a video from 2005 that showed Trump in conversation with the Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. The two men were on a bus driving slowly through a parking lot, and although the camera was outside the bus, its audio feed was plugged into the microphones that Trump and Bush were wearing, and it captured everything they said. For thirty seconds or so, Trump recounted trying to sleep with a married woman who rebuffed his advances and then got breast implants. “She’s totally changed her look!” he said. Then someone on the bus noticed the woman waiting for them in the parking lot and changed the subject, saying, “Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit!” General exclamations of agreement followed. While the other passengers disembarked, Trump and Bush stayed behind so that they could exit on their own and get the shot they wanted. Trump said he should eat some breath mints “just in case I start kissing her,” and then he expanded on his tactics for sleeping with women:
You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss, I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Bush, cackling along, said, “Yeah, look at those legs, all I can see is the legs.” A few seconds later, the pair stepped onto the pavement, met the woman they had been ogling, and walked into the studio, where Bush asked her which of the two she’d take on a date if she had to choose.
The Republican nominee for the presidency had been caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault. He was already trailing in the polls, he would have to face Clinton in a second debate later that weekend, and there was just a month left in which to undo the damage. Trump released a video apologizing that evening, but his tone made it clear the apology was strictly pro forma, and he also accused Bill Clinton of actually abusing women (as opposed to just talking about it) and Hillary of attacking her husband’s victims. Nothing like it had ever happened during a presidential campaign before. Conservative commentators feared, and liberal commentators hoped, that what came to be known as the Access Hollywood tape would be the final “nail in the coffin” of Trump’s political aspirations. As we all know, it wasn’t. Another of Trump’s remarks from earlier in 2016 turned out to be more prescient: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible!”
Trump was an unprecedented candidate in a number of ways, but to many commentators the real novelty of his campaign came down to his shamelessness, the eagerness with which he would admit serious and even criminal wrongdoing as though it were something to be proud of, his absolute indifference to being caught in a lie, his willingness to state the ugly parts of his appeal plainly rather than alluding to them, and his diamond-hard confidence that he would get away with and even be rewarded for his worst behavior. While much of Trump’s self-regard is unjustified, that confidence was well founded. As the past fifteen years of American history had made clear, powerful people really could get away with almost anything.
In February 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney went on a hunting trip at Armstrong Ranch, a fifty-thousand-acre property to the southwest of Corpus Christi, Texas. He was accompanied by Pam Willeford, a longtime friend of the Bush family and then ambassador to Switzerland, and Harry Whittington, a lawyer and Texas politico who had worked for George W. Bush’s father as far back as 1964. The trio were hunting for quail. It was late on a Saturday. The “hearty ranch breakfast,” lunch “under a huge oak tree,” and siesta that structured each day’s fun had all come and gone. Cheney was waiting for the quail to flush from a covey when a single bird took off to his right. Willeford was to Cheney’s left, and Cheney didn’t know where Whittington was. He turned toward the bird to fire his 28-gauge shotgun, and by the time he realized Whittington was standing there, it was too late. Cheney shot his friend in the face.[1] When Whittington was released from the hospital six days later, he spoke to the press wearing a navy suit and a tie the same color as the bruises that covered the right side of his head. Then Whittington apologized to Cheney. “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”[2] In his memoirs, Cheney wrote that he “appreciated the grace with which he handled the situation. He was a true gentleman.”[3]
Just three months prior, a group of Marines had been on patrol in Haditha, a city in Iraq’s Al Anbar province, when an IED exploded near their convoy, killing one soldier and wounding two others. In response, the Marines killed twenty-four unarmed civilians. They raided homes in a nearby village and killed everyone they found inside, including women, elderly people, and four children under the age of six.[4] At some point, the Marines also noticed a taxi approaching. The driver was bringing four students from the technical institute in Saqlawiyah to stay with one of their families for the weekend. When the driver threw the car into reverse and tried to retrace his route, the Marines opened fire and killed all of the passengers. The Marines initially lied to an Iraqi doctor about how the civilians had died, claiming that shrapnel from the IED was to blame, and then they lied to military investigators, saying that the IED explosion had been followed by a firefight with “insurgents.”[5] Eight members of the squad were charged in connection with the massacre, but charges against six of the killers were eventually dropped, and a seventh was found not guilty. In 2012, the eighth, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, was convicted of just one count of negligent dereliction of duty. His rank and pay were reduced, but he was not discharged from the military. He served no jail time.
In the summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the low-lying city of New Orleans, breaching its network of poorly maintained levees and putting 80 percent of the city under as much as fifteen feet of water. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow to send help, leaving people stranded in their homes and in a football stadium that became more squalid and chaotic with each passing day. When FEMA did finally send help, it was the wrong kind—the agency had spent the past several years preparing to respond to a terrorist attack, and authorities in Baton Rouge who had prepared a field hospital for victims were surprised to receive supplies for responding to a chemical attack, including the drug Cipro, which is used to treat victims of anthrax. Officials called in the Louisiana National Guard, but three thousand of its eleven thousand members, along with most of its heavy equipment, had been shipped over to Iraq.[6] Two days after the storm, a FEMA official emailed the agency director, Michael Brown, from the Superdome and said that people were likely to die within hours if help didn’t arrive immediately. Brown’s press secretary replied that the director wasn’t available at the moment, writing, “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.”[7] On September 2, as New Orleanians remained trapped in their houses and the Superdome, Bush told Brown that he was doing “a heck of a job.”[8] Brown resigned a week and a half later, transitioning into several years of work in disaster response for the private sector, plus a job as a talk-radio host.
In 1998, 120 countries voted to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC), a judicial body intended to serve as a venue for prosecuting people accused of war crimes. Though President Clinton refused to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification, citing America’s “fundamental concerns” about the ICC, he was willing to sign the Rome Statute, a hopeful sign for the court’s future. The Bush administration “unsigned” the statute in May 2002, and then Congress passed a law prohibiting the U.S. government from cooperating with the ICC in any way and authorizing the president to use “all means necessary,” including military force, to free any American or allied person detained by the ICC. The bill was colloquially known as the Hague Invasion Act. The Bush administration then began signing Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs) with allied countries, ensuring that “current or former government officials, military personnel, [and] citizens of the other party” could not be extradited to the ICC. The United States had signed more than a hundred of these BIAs by 2018.[9]
The same year Congress signed the Hague Invasion Act, President Bush issued the notorious presidential memorandum denying al-Qaeda and Taliban POWs the protections required by the Geneva Conventions.[10] This was the crucial step in establishing the Bush administration’s legalization of torture. Four years later, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to establish a replacement for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The act prohibited both enemy combatants and detainees (that is, prisoners whose status had not yet been determined) from using habeas corpus to challenge their detention as unlawful. It applied going forward as well as retroactively—all pending habeas corpus cases in the federal judiciary were put on hold. Subsidiary provisions of the law allowed the government to present evidence in court that had been obtained through torture or other abuses, and it largely granted immunity to U.S. officials who had signed off on torture in the past.[11] John Yoo, the author of the February 7 memo, is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and those who had more hands-on involvement in torture also avoided punishment. Though the torture program spanned several continents, and though there has been no shortage of testimony from victims able to describe their experiences and the people who abused them in voluminous detail, John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee to serve prison time in connection with the agency’s black sites program. He went to prison not for torturing anyone but for alerting journalists to the fact that torture was occurring in 2007. Before he went to the press, he went to his superior officers. “Look,” he said, “I have a moral problem with this. I think there’s a slippery slope, I think somebody is going to get killed. There’s going to be an investigation. And a bunch of people are going to go to prison, and I don’t want any part of it.” He was wrong about a bunch of people going to prison, and he remains aghast that many of his co-workers are still walking free. Of Gul Rahman, the Afghan detainee who died after being stripped naked and chained to the wall of a thirty-six-degree brick factory the CIA called the Salt Pit, Kiriakou says, “The man was murdered in cold blood, so where’s the prosecution? You come home, you murder somebody in cold blood, you get a promotion and a $2,500 bonus.”[12]
Many legal scholars, international observers, and human rights activists viewed the Military Commissions Act as an attempt to provide amnesty to Bush administration officials who were involved with the torture program. Between 2005 and the end of Bush’s presidency, Human Rights Watch, the head prosecutor for the ICC, and the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture had all argued that prominent members of the Bush administration, including Bush himself, should be investigated and prosecuted for war crimes. As if torture and unlawful detention in the Middle East and Guantánamo weren’t bad enough, the invasion of Iraq constituted a war crime in its own right, because wars of aggression are illegal under international law. The legal scholar and UN rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak told German television in 2009 that Bush no longer enjoyed head of state immunity, meaning that President Obama was obligated to initiate legal proceedings against both the former president and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. “The evidence is sitting on the table,” he said. “There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture.”[13] When the ABC News reporter George Stephanopoulos asked President Obama whether he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s potential war crimes, Obama began by saying, “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” but his very next sentence began with the words “On the other hand.” He said, “I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward.” No federal legal agency ever opened investigations into Bush or any member of his inner circle during Obama’s two terms. Obama also declined to push for the prosecution of any of the high-level financial executives whose reckless repackaging of junk mortgages into attractive and allegedly safe securities sparked the global financial crisis and put one out of every fifty-four American homes into foreclosure in 2008 alone.
Perhaps Obama hoped to set an example that his successor might be willing to follow as well, because Obama, not Bush, was responsible for the war’s single most brazen assertion of executive authority. Anwar al-Awlaki was a Muslim American imam and U.S. citizen who led mosques in San Diego and Northern Virginia in the 1990s and early 2000s. Originally viewed by the government as exactly the kind of Muslim moderate the country needed, Awlaki fell under government suspicion shortly after September 11 when the FBI discovered that two of the hijackers had attended his sermons. He left the United States in 2002, first for the U.K., and then for Yemen, where he also had citizenship. His views became increasingly hard-line. He praised successful attacks against the United States and described America as the enemy of Islam around the world. Broadcasting his sermons over the internet, Awlaki cultivated a growing militant following. Though it never presented any evidence that Awlaki actually helped to organize any attack, the government became concerned that he was serving as a recruiter for al-Qaeda, and it began looking for a way to kill him.
Between January and April 2010, Obama and his lawyers decided that assassinating Awlaki was legal. The National Security Council signed off on the decision, and Awlaki was placed on Obama’s notorious “kill list.” He was killed in Yemen via drone strike on September 30, 2011, executed by a country that had never charged him with any crime, while living in a country with which the United States was not at war. Two weeks later, another drone strike killed Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman. The Obama administration said he was not the intended target, that he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put the blame for Abdulrahman’s death on his dead dad: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.” Six years later, Donald Trump authorized a raid on a Yemeni village in which special operations forces killed between ten and thirty civilians. One of them was Nawar al-Awlaki, Anwar’s eight-year-old daughter. Murdering one guy because he won’t stop talking shit about you is one thing, but when the murderer then spends the next six years taking out two of the guy’s kids as well, it starts to sound like something out of a mafia movie.
Evidence of war crimes continued to pile up throughout Obama’s presidency. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and two United Nations special rapporteurs all criticized the lack of transparency around Obama’s drone warfare campaign in Pakistan and Yemen. This lack of transparency made it impossible for Yemenis and Pakistanis to seek justice for the wrongful deaths of their loved ones, and because Yemen and Pakistan were not “defined conflict zones” under international law, civilian deaths caused by drone strikes likely constituted extrajudicial executions. On top of that, Obama’s drone fleet often carried out both “signature strikes” and what came to be referred to as “double taps.” The former involved bombings that targeted people whose identities were unknown but whose behaviors were thought to indicate that they were insurgents. One of the most notorious signature strikes involved drone operators who obliterated a convoy of families in Afghanistan after they stopped to pray on the roadside, killing twenty-three people in the process. The latter were bombings that occurred in two stages. First, drones would target a building believed to contain Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters. Then they’d wait a little bit for rescuers to arrive and kill them as well.[14] Obama’s drone strikes killed at least 324 civilians, and potentially more than 800.[15] No American has ever been charged or prosecuted in connection with these deaths.
Journalists and human rights advocates found the secrecy around Obama’s drone program to be particularly galling. A minute after his 2009 swearing in, the White House website pledged that his administration would be “the most open and transparent in history.” Then Obama spent the next eight years doing something like the opposite. His White House stalled on making improvements to operations at the federal government’s Freedom of Information Act office and forcefully opposed FOIA requests at every turn. “Of the six [administrations I’ve worked with],” one Washington lawyer said, “this administration is the worst on FOIA issues. The worst. There’s just no question about it.” Egregiously high document retrieval and reproduction fees and confusing guidelines at agencies around Washington, especially the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, made it more difficult for the public to access government records. When whistleblowers took transparency into their own hands in order to publicize war crimes and illegal government surveillance, the Obama administration pursued them with a frightening intensity.[16] Edward Snowden, a Russian citizen as of 2022, can never return to the United States without risking life in prison. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks, spent seven years living in Ecuador’s London embassy, never setting foot outside, in order to avoid extradition to the United States. After Ecuador withdrew his asylum in 2019, the British government approved Assange’s extradition, which he is appealing as of this writing. Chelsea Manning, who provided hundreds of thousands of government documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, was charged with aiding the enemy, a crime that carried a potential death sentence, and spent seven years in prison. None of the people who committed the crimes documented in the files released by these whistleblowers faced a similar degree of government antagonism.
In 2014, four former Blackwater contractors were convicted of first-degree murder and manslaughter for killing fourteen unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007. In December 2020, President Trump pardoned all four of them. Trump also pardoned First Lieutenant Clint Lorance (convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians) and Major Mathew Golsteyn (charged with the 2010 murder of an Afghan civilian) in 2019, saying at the time that the pardons would provide America’s troops with the “confidence to fight.”[17] Other beneficiaries of Trump’s forgiving spirit included Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, who had been convicted of bribery, extortion, and wire fraud (among other charges) in connection with his efforts to sell a seat in the Senate; Bernard Kerik, former commissioner of the New York Police Department, who had committed tax fraud and made false statements in an attempt to conceal his involvement with a mobbed-up contractor; Scooter Libby, who committed perjury and obstruction of justice during his involvement with the Plame affair; Joe Arpaio, former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, whose time in office had been dedicated to a vicious and racist campaign of harassing, humiliating, and “rounding up” immigrants; and Michael Behenna, a former Army first lieutenant convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner his superiors had ordered him to release.
The war on terror has involved criminal activity at every level, from its conception and legal justification in the White House all the way down to the actions of individual soldiers on the battlefield. The invasion of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression. John Yoo’s memos justifying indefinite detention and torture violated both the Constitution and various treaties to which the United States is a signatory, particularly the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. American soldiers’ treatment of detainees and civilians has in many instances involved assault and murder.
Yet despite the mountains of evidence and the clarity of the applicable laws, the architects and executors of the war on terror don’t seem too weighed down by their misdeeds. George W. Bush remains a welcome guest at almost any ceremony, conference, panel discussion, or talk show he wishes to grace with his presence. His media image is that of an affable grandfather with an adorable hobby (painting), and former First Lady Michelle Obama considers him a “beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man.”[18] Democrats miss Barack Obama so much that his wife is regularly urged to run for the presidency herself, the only way left to get Barack back in the White House in an official capacity. And Republicans have not just excused but embraced the brutality of the country’s most bloodthirsty Special Forces operators. Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher was accused by two fellow Navy SEALs of murdering an injured, seventeen-year-old Islamic State fighter with the last name Abdullah during the 2017 battle for Mosul. According to the SEALs, Gallagher said, “He’s mine,” over a radio, walked up to the boy and the medic treating him, and stabbed him with a hunting knife, after which he posed for photos with the body. Other soldiers testified that he killed at least two other Iraqis—the first an old man in a robe, the second a young girl—while working as a sniper and that he threatened to kill SEALs who were considering reporting his actions. Gallagher was acquitted of murdering Abdullah thanks to another SEAL who, after receiving immunity from the government, testified that he’d killed Abdullah himself, a story uncorroborated by any other testimony or physical evidence. After his acquittal, President Trump ordered the Navy to reverse Gallagher’s demotion and called him “one of the ultimate fighters” at a campaign rally. Trump considered making him a speaker at the 2020 Republican National Convention.[19]
This is something larger than a collection of shoddy prosecutions, botched investigations, or powerful individuals tending to their self-interest. President Obama was not looking after a partisan ally when he declined to ask his Justice Department to investigate Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and Rumsfeld. This is a systematic refusal by the U.S. political system as a whole to pursue any measure of accountability for the crimes committed during a war that most people agree was detrimental to the country’s international reputation and its capacity for global leadership. Accountability would have been very much in the larger national interest. Consistent prosecution of American soldiers who murdered Afghan and Iraqi civilians might have helped to uproot the hyper-macho culture of arrogance and unrepentant violence that many reporters agree now pervades the Special Forces. Jail time or, at a minimum, professional death for the legal architects of torture and mass surveillance could have allowed Obama to fully turn the page on the Bush administration’s global messiah complex as opposed to spending most of his two terms finding new ways to rationalize and institutionalize it. And aggressive investigations of either Bush or Obama—which would have been fully justified by the principle of command responsibility in international law—could have diluted the corrosive concentrations of power amassed by the executive branch during the war’s first decade.
Instead, most politicians with aspirations to national office over the past decade have made a series of promises to “change the system” while leaving it under the control of the exact same groups of people. That such accountability was not seriously pursued tells you something about the political system’s lack of confidence in its own ability to adapt; a government that feels it cannot afford to hold serious malefactors responsible for their actions is a brittle government, one that understands itself as fragile despite the persistence of its outward trappings of strength and power. Insofar as the government’s unwillingness to hold war criminals accountable manifested itself in other areas as well (as with the country’s financial institutions after the financial crisis), one might say it became a part of the country’s larger political culture. Call it impunity culture.
One might object that impunity culture isn’t unique to the war on terror. Haven’t governments attempted to evade responsibility for their wrongdoing throughout history? Don’t many governments cover up crimes? Didn’t the United States bomb Cambodia in secrecy, and didn’t that campaign’s architect, Henry Kissinger (RIP), still find himself invited to state dinners and lauded as a foreign policy wise man by bigwigs like Hillary Clinton? Maybe so, but impunity culture flourished during the war on terror because the war itself was impunity culture on a global scale, waged with no regard for international law, little regard for the civilian casualties the United States inflicted on other countries, and contempt for the idea that any other people or government might have legitimate grievances about the whole project. It represented a turn away from the Cold War era, a period during which American policy makers knew that military violence on its own would not be enough to defeat the Soviet Union. If communism’s ambitions were to be checked, America would also have to demonstrate to other countries that capitalism’s ultimate victory would benefit them as well, and not just the United States. After the fall of the U.S.S.R. and then especially after September 11, that kind of thinking disappeared from American strategic thinking. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make,” President Bush said on September 20, 2001. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” That’s not diplomatic outreach or a sales pitch. It is a threat. America demanded allegiance from the rest of the world and offered nothing in return in 2001, because America no longer felt it owed the rest of the world anything—not democracy, not economic growth, and certainly not accountability when its drones blew up some farmers driving down the road or obliterated a wedding party. 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.
As for Americans themselves, they certainly thought that impunity during the war on terror was something that needed addressing in its own right. All of the major protest movements that emerged following the invasion of Iraq have been focused squarely and specifically on impunity as such. Occupy Wall Street didn’t set up camp in Zuccotti Park because banks crashed the financial system and threw the economy into a recession. The magnitude of the crash was clear by the end of 2008, and Occupy didn’t start until the fall of 2011. What changed over those two and a half years was that it became clear that the Obama administration wasn’t going to go after any of the bankers who caused the crash. There was more than adequate precedent for him to do so. After the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, which contributed to a recession in the early 1990s but didn’t cause anywhere near the damage wrought by the global financial crisis, more than nine hundred people went to jail. Only one executive saw prison time in the United States as a result of the financial crisis, and his trial didn’t even take place until 2013.[20] In the early stages of the Obama presidency, many people believed that impunity culture was confined to the Bush administration rather than pervading the political system as a whole. When Obama’s failure to punish the banks dashed those hopes, people’s anger exploded.
Similarly, Black Lives Matter didn’t take to the streets after George Zimmerman gunned down Trayvon Martin on the streets of a Florida suburb in February 2012. There were petitions and tweets and several protests, but nothing that coalesced into a movement. Black Lives Matter only got its name and turned into a national project after a jury acquitted Zimmerman of both second-degree murder and manslaughter. Several years later, impunity culture sparked a series of feminist protests as well. The Women’s March was organized after the country put Donald Trump in the White House despite his being caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault. #MeToo took off when it was revealed that Harvey Weinstein’s methodical abuse of women hoping to work in his movies, abuse that was among the worst-kept secrets in the industry, hadn’t done anything to harm his position as one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers. These movements were all separate and distinct from one another in important ways, but it is not unreasonable to also think of them as a single, broad-based fight against impunity culture and its consequences.
One of the virtues of Occupy Wall Street was that it served equally well as a disruptive protest movement and as a self-renewing pedagogical project. It was confident and tentative at the same time, and both aspects of its personality increased its appeal. It was confident in the way it seized space without asking—and privately owned space at that. Zuccotti Park belonged to the commercial real estate firm Brookfield Properties, so in occupying it, the protesters realized on a small scale one of the movement’s larger aspirations, which was to return the country’s public and civic life to the actual public. The occupiers also didn’t hesitate to make demands they knew were perfectly reasonable even if the political system was likely to reject them out of hand: a reversal of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which had diluted citizens’ free speech rights by extending them to corporations; forgiveness of student loan debt; increased taxation to narrow the country’s surging wealth and income gaps; and relief for those whose homes were under foreclosure. (Many in the news media didn’t even bother rejecting these demands. Instead, they just pretended to believe or else deluded themselves into thinking that Occupy didn’t have any concrete proposals.) The movement was tentative insofar as many of the people who spent time in the park and participated in its general assemblies had no prior experience of a protest movement whose demands and actions hadn’t been planned and scripted in advance. The leaderlessness of protest movements around the globe since the Arab Spring in 2011 has often been described as a mere aftereffect of the “revolution” that social media and the internet are supposed to have enacted on how people communicate with one another—why bother taking orders from some organizer when everyone can just decide that the march starts at 2:00 p.m. on Facebook? But for a generation of young people who grew up in the end-of-history 1990s or the fearful and politically repressive 2000s, that leaderlessness had a more substantial political valence. Leaderlessness forced protesters to take responsibility for the movements in which they took part, from small decisions concerning what the signs should say all the way up to larger questions about what the movement’s goals were. It allowed protesters to experiment with flexing civic muscles that had atrophied over the prior two decades. One can’t obey a leader’s instructions and retain a feeling of self-respect unless one already has a sense of individual and collective civic selfhood. To constitute a public and make democracy happen in real time was a novelty, not the kind of thing one knows how to navigate in advance. The absence of charismatic authority figures meant the protesters had no choice but to educate themselves and one another.
The incremental learning process that unfolded between September 17 (when the park was occupied) and November 15, 2011 (when police cleared the park in a midnight raid), was sensitively documented in Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette, a short-lived newspaper that published news reports, first-person accounts, polemics, cartoons, interviews, and historical essays from Zuccotti Park and other occupations around the country. The wonder and uncertainty of political discovery pervade the Gazette’s articles. There was initial skepticism upon arrival. “The first day I arrived and, surveying the scene, was totally dispirited,” one contributor wrote. “Same old same old, and not very substantial.” September 17: “As 7 p.m. approached, my friends and I left thinking the cops would clear everyone out in no time.” But as the occupation proved to have more staying power than originally assumed, optimism grew. September 25: “Nine days is nothing to sneeze at. I know people keep complaining that the occupiers don’t have a platform, but any real deliberative convention takes time, and these folks were strangers nine days ago.”[21] There were feelings of pleasure and exhilaration as the occupation maintained its organization and got more ambitious: “Maybe only someone as ignorant of strategy—of history—as I am would be impressed by this. But people—the ones who figured out how to do these things, the ones doing them now—are impressive!”[22] There were text message exchanges between friends trying to figure out where the next march was going, whether one could get arrested without getting fired for missing work the next day, how to find one another in the crowd. There were gripes about people who came to the park for entertainment rather than politics, such as the drummer who played for half an hour beyond the agreed-upon two-hour limit because “2 hours was not enough for my soul,”[23] or the woman who became the only protester the press had any interest in once she started walking around topless.[24] There were rumors, reports on other actions inspired by Occupy, op-eds analyzing key episodes from economic history or arguing against the folly of trying to dismantle the Federal Reserve. After ten years during which the government had gone out of its way to discourage any form of political expression more subversive than informing police officers about unattended luggage in a train station, the movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was as much aspirational as it was declarative. If an atomized public wanted to reclaim its place at the center of political life, it would first have to learn how to recognize itself as a public. For just under two months, Zuccotti Park, along with dozens of other parks and plazas across the country, from Philadelphia to Oakland, was simultaneously a public square, a stage, and a school.
While the occupiers’ confidence in their abilities to sustain a community, analyze the world around them, and describe what a better world might look like steadily increased, they had a harder time figuring out how to feel about the police. Why did the NYPD need to send so many officers to watch over entirely peaceful demonstrations? If Occupy was a movement of the 99 percent against Wall Street plutocrats, then weren’t the cops potential allies? It’s not as if cops had tens of millions of dollars stashed away in offshore accounts or drove Escalades to the station each morning. And if both the protesters and the cops understood their jobs as defending Americans’ constitutional rights, what was to stop them from being on the same side? “Dear Police,” one contributor wrote, addressing the NYPD directly, “You keep inserting yourself and distracting OWS. Could you please stay home? The conflict is between American citizens and concentrations of wealth.”[25] Another writer advised occupiers to avoid confronting the police too directly, because doing so would likely provoke the cops to start assaulting and arresting people, which would in turn make it hard for Occupy to attract new participants and realize its goal of truly representing the 99 percent.[26] Others believed, in the words of a cardboard sign taped to Occupy’s free library, that “mass arrests prove our power.”[27] When confrontations did arrive, protesters also had to figure out how best to conduct themselves. Occupy was for many people their first experience of intentionally not doing something a cop told you to do. “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” they shouted at the cops, their questions suggesting they thought that some officers might go home that evening, reflect on the day, and decide the protesters were right after all. One woman was arrested while trying to delay the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on November 17. “I was approached [by a cop] and asked if I wanted to comply,” she wrote. “ ‘We can do this the easy way,’ the cop promised. I didn’t answer and kept my head down. ‘Okay,’ he said and pulled my arm. I was flipped onto my stomach and zip-cuffed. I didn’t know how to struggle or put up a fight beyond that initial resistance. Where should my arms flail?”[28] On October 1, hundreds of people decided they would march across the Brooklyn Bridge, both as a demonstration of their organizational power and to send the message that the crisis extended to all of the city’s five boroughs, not just Occupy’s home base in the Financial District. Police allowed them onto the bridge but then prevented them from completing the crossing and blocked the way from behind as well, making it impossible to retreat. Then they cuffed everybody. More than seven hundred people were arrested, making it one of the largest mass arrests of peaceful demonstrators in the country’s history.[29]
Some segments of the federal law enforcement apparatus viewed Occupy as a terrorist event in the making. As demonstrations and encampments popped up in cities across the country, local law enforcement agencies deluged the Department of Homeland Security with requests for guidance on how to respond. While the DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties cautioned that “to a large degree, these protests are no different from any other protests/events from civil liberties, civil rights and privacy perspectives,” it allowed that “persons demonstrating illegal or suspicious behavior and attempting to use the protests to obscure their activity could be reported.”[30] Aside from the guy at DHS whose whole job was to worry about civil rights, however, the rest of the Department of Homeland Security, along with the FBI, had little problem with treating the Occupy movement like a violent threat from the beginning. As revealed in a report by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the “DHS ‘Threat Management Division’ directed Regional Intelligence Analysts to provide a ‘Daily Intelligence Briefing’ that included reports on ‘Peaceful Activist Demonstrations’ along with ‘Domestic Terrorist Activity.’ ” Regional “fusion centers” were tasked with collecting intelligence on the protests. In October 2011, the FBI’s Jacksonville, Florida, office produced a domestic terrorism briefing on the “spread of the Occupy Wall Street Movement” (focusing on municipalities in which unemployment remained particularly high), while the Domestic Security Alliance Council, which facilitated cooperation among the FBI, the DHS, and the private sector, advised major financial institutions and other corporations on how to prepare for anticipated civil unrest.[31] The government even circulated a report by the International Council of Shopping Centers, a retail trade association, warning about the potential threat that Occupy Black Friday protests posed to retail sales (the “Specific Known Threats” identified in the report included “credit card cut ups” and “free non-commercial street parties”).[32] If drawing an equivalence between protests for economic justice and September 11 seems tendentious, it was not a view that was confined to law enforcement. One maudlin opinion columnist felt that the protesters’ very presence in lower Manhattan demeaned the memory of those who died on September 11. “The fact that Zuccotti Park had been covered knee-deep in ash and debris went unremarked,” he wrote. “It was only a place to be occupied.”[33]
It didn’t take long for the NYPD to clarify which side it was on. Shortly after 11:30 p.m. on November 14, Roots drummer Questlove tweeted from a car traveling through lower Manhattan. “Omg, drivin down south st near #ows,” he wrote. “Somethin bout to go down yo, swear I counted 1000 riot gear cops bout to pull sneak attack #carefulyall.” The tweet was picked up by one of Occupy’s main Twitter accounts, and a brief online discussion ensued. Some people thought it was just the usual midnight shift change. One person thought the riot gear cops were just movie extras, because the third installment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was being filmed in New York at the time. But Questlove was right. The bullhorns went off at around one in the morning, and hundreds of cops moved in. Officers told the occupiers that they had to “temporarily” leave the park so that all of the tents, chairs, tables, and other belongings could be cleared.[34] The protesters could return in the morning, but they wouldn’t get their stuff back and couldn’t bring any new stuff with them, which meant it would be impossible for Occupy to continue occupying. The NYPD did not want the public to see the raid. Barricades kept the public, as well as reporters, several blocks away. The airspace above lower Manhattan was shut down so that news helicopters could not get a shot. Those who had responded to Occupy’s text alert about the raid and rushed to lower Manhattan were kept away by cops and told that there was nothing to see. When the protesters responded that clearly there was, some of them got maced. Gatherings and marches persisted for several weeks and months afterward, but the raid marked the beginning of the end of Occupy as a disruptive movement. The writer Astra Taylor was one of the people straining to see past the barricades that night:
While we paced the street, seething and sorrowful, tents were trampled, people’s possessions piled up, and occupiers arrested. Later I would come across a camper I had met earlier in the day sobbing on the sidewalk. A few blocks west, maybe thirty minutes after I arrived, the police line broke so two huge dump trucks could pass through. So that was it: We, and everything we had made and were trying to make, were trash.[35]
At a press conference the next day, New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, justified the raid by claiming that the protesters had been infringing on the First Amendment rights of their fellow New Yorkers. “New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” he said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said Occupy had made the park “unavailable to anyone else.”[36] It was an incredible piece of circular reasoning that did nothing to conceal, and which probably wasn’t even intended to conceal, the purely repressive logic of the raid: The public, by spending time in a public space and welcoming anyone who wanted to join, had deprived the public of access to public space.
Black Lives Matter needed much less time to figure out its stance on the police: The police were the enemy. George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin in 2012, was not a cop—he worked in insurance—but he seemed to think of himself as one. He was the neighborhood watch coordinator for the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the gated community where he lived in Sanford, Florida. Obsessed with stamping out any signs of disorder in his neighborhood, he had a close relationship and obviously identified with the local police department, which he frequently called to report loud parties, potholes, trash on the street, and people whose presence in the neighborhood he viewed as suspicious. Having lost his home and his job while being tried for murder, Zimmerman might have been expected to reconsider this overidentification following the shooting and the acquittal. Instead, he doubled down. In 2016, he tried to auction off the gun he used to kill Martin, which he described as “a piece of American history,” and he said the proceeds would be used to fight “violence against law enforcement officers.”[37]
Two years after Martin’s death, in July 2014, the forty-three-year-old Staten Island resident Eric Garner was killed by the NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was trying to arrest him for selling cigarettes on the street (a grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo, and it took the NYPD five years to take away his badge). Less than a month later, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old, for stealing a box of cigars from a convenience store. By the end of 2014, police had also killed Ezell Ford (twenty-five years old, Los Angeles), Laquan McDonald (seventeen years old, Chicago), Akai Gurley (twenty-eight years old, Brooklyn), and Tamir Rice (twelve years old, Cleveland), among others. No Black Lives Matter protester would ever claim, as some Occupy participants did, that they didn’t have a fight with the police. The police were at the root of the whole problem. Eric Garner had been hassled by cops for much of his adult life, arrested some thirty times for selling loosies, driving without a license, and possession of marijuana, but he was the opposite of a detriment to his community. His neighborhood loved him. He was generous, kind, and calm; people called him Big E. On the day the police killed him, he had broken up a fight on the sidewalk. Asthma, heart disease, sleep apnea, and obesity made it difficult for him to get around, and they also made it hard for him to hold down a job. He’d worked for the city parks department off and on in the years leading up to his death, but he still had a wife and six kids to support even when he was out of work.[38] With Mayor Bloomberg’s cigarette taxes driving prices through the roof, selling untaxed smokes on the street was a decent way to pull together some cash. He was proud of his life and family, proud to be Black. “He had me watching Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X,” his daughter recalled of her childhood. After being subjected to a cavity search in broad daylight in 2007, he filed a complaint in federal court, and he told his lawyers at Legal Aid that he wouldn’t accept any plea deals in the outstanding cases against him.[39] He was, to put it bluntly, part of America’s surplus population. The formal economy had no use for him, he could not afford the medical care he needed, and the state wasn’t going to step in to keep him on his feet. He cobbled together money and maintained his self-respect anyway, and that was his undoing. When the police approached him on July 17, he was fed up. “I’m minding my business, officer,” he said. “I’m minding my business! Please just leave me alone.” Less than fifteen minutes later, he was dead on the ground.
His dying words, “I can’t breathe”—he repeated the phrase eleven times—became Black Lives Matter’s first major rallying cry. The second came out of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, the following month. Although the exact circumstances surrounding Michael Brown’s death remain unclear today, everyone agrees that he was unarmed when Darren Wilson shot him, and in the immediate aftermath of the shooting some witnesses reported that Brown had his hands up when the bullets left Wilson’s gun. Hence the second chant: “Hands up, don’t shoot!” The protests that followed Eric Garner’s death were almost entirely peaceful. The protests that swept through Ferguson after Michael Brown’s were not.
If Eric Garner’s death illustrated America’s treatment of its surplus populations on an individual scale, Ferguson illustrated the same phenomenon on the scale of a whole municipality. In 2014, Ferguson was a city of some twenty-one thousand people, situated toward the north end of the St. Louis metropolitan area. Its population was nearly 70 percent Black, and its poverty rate hovered around 25 percent. As the Justice Department documented in an incendiary 2015 report, Ferguson city officials had systematized the exploitation of their most vulnerable residents, with the police department tasked not with maintaining public safety but with implementing what amounted to a municipal extortion racket. “City officials,” the report said, “have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity.”[40] The city fined residents $102 for parking violations, whereas fines elsewhere in the St. Louis area were as low as $5. Citations for “weeds/tall grass” ranged from $77 to $102. City officials carefully tracked how much revenue law enforcement brought in, and treated any dips in income as potential municipal crises in the making. “Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year,” the city’s finance director wrote in a 2010 email. “Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” The chief of police responded that he was in the process of hiring more police officers as well as tweaking shift schedules to keep as many cops on the street as possible, “which in turn will increase traffic enforcement per shift.”[41] The police department made it clear to officers that they wouldn’t be picky about how these fines and citations were imposed—the important thing was to keep the numbers up.
The result was a city in which residents effectively no longer had First or Fourth Amendment rights. Officers stopped people “without reasonable suspicion” and arrested them “without probable cause.” If someone objected to being detained on the street for no reason, they would be charged with “failure to comply.” In October 2012, Ferguson police pulled over a man and ticketed him for a broken brake light. The man knew this was nonsense, as he had replaced the brake light recently. The cops refused to let him out of his car so that he could demonstrate that the light worked. Detentions like these were fishing trips. Once they detained somebody, Ferguson police could run their name through the system for unpaid fines or outstanding warrants. One man was sitting at a bus stop when a police car pulled up:
Lieutenant: Get over here.
Bus Patron: Me?
Lieutenant: Get the fuck over here. Yeah, you.
Bus Patron: Why? What did I do?
Lieutenant: Give me your ID.
Bus Patron: Why?
Lieutenant: Stop being a smart ass and give me your ID.
When the officer failed to find any outstanding warrants for the man after running his name through the police database, he returned the ID and said, “Get the hell out of my face.”[42] Another man was cooling off in his car after playing basketball at a public court one day in the summer of 2012 when a police officer approached. He “accused the man of being a pedophile…and ordered the man out of the car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe he was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint.” Among other things, the officer charged the man with making a false declaration because he’d said his name was “Mike” when it was really “Michael.” The man lost his job as a result of the charges.[43] Another man was pulled out of his apartment by Ferguson police in August 2014. “You don’t have a reason to lock me up,” he said. The officer responded, “N*****, I can find something to lock you up on.”[44] Ferguson was a place where police threats like these were also statements of fact.
Ferguson residents had learned to tolerate a lot, even if they’d never accepted police persecution as just or fair. But Michael Brown’s death crossed a line. It wasn’t just that Darren Wilson killed him. Police allowed Brown’s body to lie on the pavement for four hours in the summer heat. When they finally did take him away, they left his blood on the street, in callous disregard of both Brown’s family and the wider community.[45] Several months later, someone destroyed a memorial the community had built for Michael Brown, running it over with a car in the middle of the night. When a reporter called the Ferguson Police Department to ask whether there would be an investigation, a public relations officer said, “A pile of trash in the middle of the street? The Washington Post is making a call over this?”[46]
Ferguson residents knew exactly what their lives were worth to the people who ruled over them, and they responded accordingly. “It’s a bunch of bullshit,” one young woman told a reporter following the announcement that Officer Wilson would not be indicted for Brown’s murder. “There’s a lot that’s going to go on to retaliate to this injustice. It’s unreal. That’s all it is….They do this all the time. We have blacks getting pulled over so much.” The reporter asked if she lived in Ferguson. She said she used to. “You don’t want to be a part of a fucking community like this. This is a bunch of bullshit.” Her eyes began to well with tears. The reporter asked how you move on from something like this. “You don’t move on from something like this! With the Trayvon Martin case they moved on from ‘something like this’ and they let something else like this happen!” By this point her voice was breaking as well. “You’re not supposed to move on from this. You’re supposed to stand up for your rights.”[47]
The city was consumed by protests well into 2015. Some of the protests were violent, though in a limited way. Protesters threw batteries, bricks, and rocks at police, and they also destroyed property, smashing the windows of several cop cars, looting a handful of businesses, and torching the gas station whose employees they falsely believed had called 911 to report Michael Brown on the day he died. This kind of property destruction is par for the course in countries with stronger contemporary traditions of worker protest, such as France. But American political officials responded as though the government’s very survival hung in the balance, and for the first time, the arsenal the United States had amassed to fight the war on terror was deployed to its full extent on America’s streets. Ferguson police patrolled Florissant Road in Humvees and BearCat armored tactical vehicles. The city imposed a curfew, making it illegal for anyone to be on the streets after midnight, and the airspace over the city was closed, keeping news helicopters away. The governor of Missouri twice called in the National Guard—the first time during the days following Brown’s death, and the second in anticipation of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson. Documents produced in the planning of the National Guard’s operation referred to protesters as “adversaries” and “enemy forces.” They urged the guard to use its intelligence capabilities to “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities,” and they warned that the protesters had formidable intelligence-gathering capabilities of their own: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities,” a fancy way of saying that protesters had the ability to read social media, access public documents, and listen to conversations being carried out on the street. Protesters and reporters were attacked with tear gas, beaten with clubs, and shot with rubber bullets. Hundreds were arrested. When asked about the guard’s inflammatory rhetoric, a spokesperson said it was just the military’s standard, boilerplate language, but Ferguson protesters had little difficulty figuring out what the troops thought of them. “Y’all learn how to be peaceful!” one protester yelled at police during the one-year anniversary vigil for Brown. “Don’t keep telling us about being peaceful; you be peaceful….We want the world to know that y’all are treating us like ISIS, and you wanna put a mic in front of my mouth and ask us how we feel? How the hell you think we feel?!”[48]
“The latest images of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, evoke scenes from a battlefield,” ABC News wrote: “heavily-armed officers in camouflage, carrying rifles in armored vehicles, firing at civilians.”[49] “Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests,” The Guardian added. “The police response to a series of protests over [Brown’s] death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.”[50] Police officers in camo gear pointed M-16s at protesters, and images of the two armored vehicles police brought to the protests each night proved to be particularly fascinating.
Across the country, police forces were outfitting themselves in gear that had originally been used by Marines patrolling in Mosul or Special Forces teams carrying out nighttime raids in rural Afghanistan. Beginning in 1997, the federal government had authorized a Defense Department initiative called the 1033 Program. Intended to provide Defense with a means of off-loading surplus equipment so as to lower inventory costs, it required branches of the military to make various kinds of gear available to local law enforcement agencies. Much of this gear was the sort of thing you would find at a hardware store or outdoor supply shop (flashlights, electrical wire, cold-weather clothing, sleeping bags), but much of it wasn’t. The single most popular item requested by police agencies was a magazine cartridge, and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles, or MRAPs, also proved a hit.[51] Originally intended to help police ramp up the war on drugs, the program was supercharged by America’s shift to full-on war footing after September 11. A political mandate to retool policing toward combating “terror,” along with the profligate distribution of federal grants to local law enforcement, meant that the federal government was giving police departments both the permission to outfit their officers like Navy SEALs and the money they needed to afford the makeover.
Local officials couldn’t sign up quickly enough. In December 2011, the mayor of Keene, New Hampshire (a small city of around twenty-three thousand people), leaned toward one of his colleagues at a city council meeting and whispered in his ear, “We’re going to have our own tank.”[52] Keene, New Hampshire, didn’t need a tank—the town had experienced only two murders since 1999—but terror hysteria meant that no expense was too great for law enforcement. “I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, ‘That isn’t a likely terrorist target,’ ” a spokesperson for an armored vehicle company said. “How would you know? We don’t know what the terrorists are thinking.” Then, previewing the self-pitying logic that “Blue Lives Matter” conservatives would adopt toward the end of the Obama administration, he said, “I can’t help but think that the people who are trying to stop this just don’t think police officers’ lives are worth saving.”[53] Billions of dollars’ worth of equipment have since been handed over to America’s cops.[54]
Six years after Eric Garner’s death, American law enforcement put on an even bigger spectacle while putting down a new wave of antiracist protests. The rallies, marches, and riots that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis represent the peak of twenty-first-century American protest so far. Protests took place in all fifty states, with as many as twenty-six million people participating. Once again, people’s disbelief at the impunity of America’s police both amplified and focused anger at their treatment of African Americans. To watch George Floyd repeat Eric Garner’s dying words as his life ended under the knee of the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin—“I can’t breathe”—was to understand that American law enforcement still regarded the scope of its punitive authority as unlimited. The repetition, in the words of the writer Tobi Haslett, “lent the instant rage and hurt a humiliated futility.” This time, however, millions of Americans decided that it was the cops’ turn to experience a little humiliation. Though still officially a “leaderless” movement, it is probably more accurate to say that Black Lives Matter in 2020 had more leaders than anyone could count—the protests demonstrated a flexibility of tactics and a level of institutional organization that hadn’t been seen since Vietnam. In Minneapolis and Portland, protesters occupied downtown areas, barricaded them off, and announced that police were forbidden in the newly founded “autonomous zones,” which they proceeded to successfully defend for weeks. On the West Coast, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union shut down ports for a day. In Minneapolis, protesters burned down the police station where Floyd’s murderer worked, though it later became clear that the fire had been incited at least in part by members of a far-right white-supremacist group looking to kick off America’s second civil war. In midtown Manhattan, where the streets had already been emptied out by COVID-19 lockdowns, things got even more surreal as blocks of glittering luxury storefronts were covered up by plywood in anticipation of looting. The word “protests” doesn’t really capture what happened that summer. “Rebellion” and “uprising” hit closer to the mark. “The whole country seemed to tilt,” Haslett wrote:
Sacked shopping malls in Los Angeles and pillaged luxury outlets in Atlanta, a siege on New York’s SoHo and flaming vehicles from coast to coast. Pictures of Philadelphia and Washington DC showed whole neighborhoods bristling with insurgency, crowds smashed the lordly windows in Chicago’s Loop, and rioters set fire to the Market House, where slaves were bought and sold, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the town where Floyd was born.
In just a few months, he continued, the rebellion spread to “one thousand seven hundred US towns and cities—the number was absurd,” a number to make one laugh with elation, fear, or both.[55] For the first time in a young generation’s living memory, ordinary people—poor people, especially—seemed to be the ones pushing history forward, and no one could say with any certainty where history would end up. The standard line that peaceful protest was the only kind Americans would ever endorse also looked absurd in the summer of 2020: In a national poll asking Americans for their opinions on the destruction of the police station in Minneapolis’s Third Precinct, 54 percent of respondents said the burning was justified.[56]
The government fought back with almost everything it had. While America’s mayors and congressional representatives scrambled to assemble a package of reforms that would mollify the insurgents now making an open play for citizen control of the country’s streets, the police and the military did their best to scare people back into quarantine. On June 1, several military helicopters hovered low over different crowds of protesters in Washington, D.C. The maneuver was ordered by President Trump and went under the official designation “Operation Themis,” the name of one of the titans from Greek mythology. The ostensible purpose of hovering low was to use the powerful downdraft from the helicopter’s rotors to disperse the protesters, blowing them away like so many leaves, but the maneuver was also simply a show of force. It was a way to make the protesters aware that they were vulnerable, that the full might of the world’s most powerful military was close by and ready to strike. It was a death threat. A Predator drone circled over Minneapolis, and armored vehicles rolled through the streets of Salt Lake City. In one widely circulated video from Minneapolis, a woman filmed a Humvee rolling down her residential street, followed by a crowd of police officers in riot gear. In the video, she is standing on a porch with several other people. A sprinkler attached to a hose sits on the lawn. The strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street is overgrown, and the evening light is soft. “Look at this,” she says, “they just keep coming.” She says this in the same tone of voice one might use to point out a line of ducklings wandering down the block. She doesn’t yet understand that the soldiers and cops and trucks are there for her. Then the police spot them and begin screaming at them to “get inside.” When they hesitate, an officer says, “Light ’em up,” and shots go off. The woman and her companions hurry indoors. One of them has been hit, by either a rubber bullet or a beanbag round. When the woman turns the camera back to the glass-paned door, a bright light is visible, shining up from the street. The police are waiting to see whether the “threat” will reemerge.[57]
In early June 2020, the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton published an op-ed in The New York Times. “The rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd,” he wrote. “On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction.” He called on the Trump administration and the rest of the federal government to “employ the military” to mount “an overwhelming show of force.”[58] Perhaps he had not noticed that a majority of the country’s governors were doing just that. More than thirty states mobilized some thirty-two thousand National Guard reservists to join the police in attempting to suppress the protests.[59] Short of using live ammunition, which would have escalated the situation past the point where it could still be contained, these soldiers and police officers made use of every means at their disposal. In Philadelphia, cops drove protesters off a highway running through Center City and then blasted them with tear gas and pepper spray while they were trapped against an embankment. In Iowa City, they threw flash-bang grenades at people who were kneeling on the street. In Indiana, they shot a reporter in the face with a tear gas grenade, causing him to lose an eye. In Salt Lake City, they pinned a homeless man to the ground and shot him in the back with an “impact projectile.” They drove police SUVs into crowds in Brooklyn, and they surrounded protesters in the Bronx and then beat them with batons.[60] In Washington, law enforcement violently cleared protesters from Lafayette Square, after which President Trump walked through the area and posed in front of an Episcopal church while holding a Bible. Police partially blinded eight people across the country in a single day, and twelve over the course of that week.[61] In the four weeks from May 27 to June 22 alone, police arrested more than fourteen thousand people, with some outlets reporting arrest numbers as high as seventeen thousand. Less than 4 percent of that year’s protests involved even property damage or vandalism, much less violence.[62] The arrests were more like roundups. More than seventy people who participated in the demonstrations were later convicted of federal crimes, receiving prison sentences that averaged just over two years.[63]
Protest activity decreased as the weather cooled, government officials promised reforms, and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic began to rip through a country that still lacked a working vaccine. Police succeeded in pushing protesters whom President Trump described as “domestic terrorists” out of their autonomous zone in downtown Seattle, and they also succeeded in preventing new autonomous zones from being established in Oregon, North Carolina, and Tennessee.[64] As with Occupy Wall Street, the protests had been too widespread and too consequential for politicians to dismiss them wholesale after the fact, as much as many Republicans would have liked to do just that. Local, state, and federal officials promised all kinds of reform packages, including the establishment of citizen review boards that would have some kind of disciplinary authority in cases of police abuse; the implementation of national policing standards; the end of qualified immunity, under which police officers cannot be held personally liable for violating the rights of citizens; restrictions on the use of “no knock” warrants; and a mandate that all federal police officers wear body cameras while on duty. At the federal level, none of these reforms became law, because Senate Republicans were able to block their passage. States and municipalities had slightly more success, though mostly in the area of more rigorous training. In response to Black Lives Matter’s central 2020 demand, however—that police departments throughout the country be substantially defunded, so as to decrease the influence police have over the daily lives of the working poor—government at all levels delivered a clear, resounding “no.” Defunding the police was rejected by every major presidential candidate during the 2020 campaign, including the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. And while the country’s fifty largest cities reduced their police budgets by around 5 percent in 2021, that was almost entirely due to wider post-pandemic cuts to municipal budgets. As a share of total government spending, police funding increased.[65] By the end of 2022, police funding was increasing again in absolute terms as well, a development championed by the Democratic president, Joe Biden. “The answer is not to defund the police,” he said at his 2022 State of the Union. “It’s to fund the police. Fund them!”[66]
This is not to say that police reform or even abolition is dead as a political project. But over the past decade, the government’s response to two of the largest protest movements in the country’s history has been telling. The central demand of Occupy Wall Street was an end to the wealth and income inequality that has turned daily life into a constant, low-grade anxiety attack for millions of people. That didn’t happen. Wealth inequality has persisted and even worsened: From 2007 to 2019, household wealth decreased for all but the richest 20 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 10 percent of households now own nearly 70 percent of the country’s wealth.[67] Similarly, the central demand of Black Lives Matter was that police stop killing so many Americans. That didn’t happen, either: The number of Americans killed by police increased every year between 2016 and 2022.[68] These two movements against impunity culture have had enormous and tangible effects on the country’s political discourse, its citizens’ understanding of the forces that shape their daily lives, and the views of millions of people. The government’s specific remit, however, is policy, laws, and outcomes. On those counts, the government has made it clear that it is not willing to negotiate with its citizens at all.
I have tried in this book to use the war on terror to bring several distinct but related crises into focus, and to describe how those crises have shaped what it felt like to be an American during the early years of the twenty-first century. From drone campaigns over Pakistan to armored police vehicles idling outside government buildings, the war’s militarism fueled a social climate of overriding anxiety and dread, and it made a mockery of the idea that democratic governments use military violence only as a means of last resort. The war’s racism shored up and strengthened one of the ugly cornerstones of what one still must call (for lack of a better term) the national psychology. Forged in the crucible of a centuries-long race war that pitted white settlers driven by visions of unlimited wealth and freedom against dark natives who supposedly disdained the very idea of civilizational progress, America lurched into the new millennium hunting new groups of savages across unfamiliar landscapes abroad and obsessively scrutinizing and policing nonwhites at home for any signs of political dissent. The war exposed the country’s inability to cope with slowing global growth and the end of America’s unquestioned economic supremacy in a constructive way. Capitalists gobbled up a larger share of the national wealth even as they lost the ability to help it grow, and economic upstarts abroad were increasingly threatened with air strikes and occupation rather than wooed with financial incentives and treaties. The war was neither the sole cause nor the sole effect of any of these crises, but it has decisively molded all of them.
Historic militarism, resurgent racism, and levels of economic inequality that have no precedent in living memory have all made life worse for most people and made it harder for the political system to function. Despite the political destabilization wrought by these crises, however, the American system of government views their continuation as essential to its survival. With the United States unable to muster the economic strength to maintain even semi-consensual hegemony around the world, militarism is the next best option for managing discontents abroad and at home. If some growing portion of the globe’s working-age population has to be excluded from formal employment due to slowing growth, racism provides the most efficient sorting mechanism for determining who is to be left out in the cold. Increased income and wealth inequality is a necessary consequence of the end of the twentieth-century economic expansion that launched the United States to superpower status, just as it was during the Gilded Age that signaled the approaching collapse of the world economic system centered on the U.K. and Europe.
Managing those contradictions is the purpose of impunity culture. A democratic government that was truly accountable to its citizens would never have suggested invading Iraq in the first place. It would not have discarded the whole edifice of human rights law in order to justify torture and the indefinite detention of thousands of people who were never charged with a crime. Its surveillance machine would have gone unbuilt, and its soldiers would have left Afghanistan at least a decade earlier than they actually did. Some portion of the obscene river of money that irrigates the Pentagon each year would have been diverted toward repairing the country’s disintegrating social safety net and providing for the general welfare of its citizens with a national health-care program. Every single element of the alterative national history I’ve outlined in this book has enjoyed clear majority support from America’s citizens, but impunity culture means that the government doesn’t have to take its citizens’ desires into consideration. By enabling and supercharging this impunity culture, the war on terror has degraded citizenship itself.
For all Americans, but perhaps especially for those Americans who came of age during the war, the rise of this impunity culture has been a dislocating and alienating experience. It has made voting in elections, the foundational act of democratic self-rule, seem hollow. It has made society something to be endured rather than shaped by the people who live in it, and it has made protest feel useless even as the reasons for protesting multiply. In 2014, two political scientists published a paper titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” “Who governs?” they wrote. “Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless?” The authors wanted to find out who actually influenced government policy in the United States. Measuring “key variables” for nearly eighteen hundred different policy issues, they found that wealthy people and business-based interest groups had “substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.” They also found that “average citizens and mass-based interest groups”—the latter including protesters—“have little or no independent influence.”[69] In other words, public opinion didn’t change anything about how the government acted, nor did protest, nor did voting. What mattered, they found, were the desires of wealthy people and the businesses they owned.
The paper was an instant sensation, with news outlets from the political left, right, and center all reporting its findings with some variation of the headline “U.S. No Longer an Actual Democracy.”[70] Some scholars criticized the study’s methods,[71] and the pundit Matthew Yglesias wrote, with blithe self-assuredness, that it didn’t matter: “Pining for a world in which policy outputs precisely reflect the views of the public is neither here nor there in terms of obtaining a better political system.”[72] Nevertheless, the paper struck a nerve. People read about it, learned of its conclusion that American citizens exercised no material control over the national life, reflected on their own recent experiences of citizenship, and thought to themselves, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” Whatever the paper’s methodological weaknesses, that response is meaningful.
Prolonged exposure to impunity culture and the political paralysis it engendered was not sustainable. It was depressing and enraging for people to live in a place where they had little to no effective control over what happened to their lives, and when their lives also seemed to get harder with each passing year, the experience could be deranging. The past two decades have been characterized by the intensifying feeling that something has gone wrong with life in the United States. The last time 70 percent of Americans described themselves as “satisfied” with how things were going in their country was December 2001, immediately following the invasion of Afghanistan. The last time national satisfaction topped 50 percent was December 2003, the month America captured Saddam Hussein.[73] Except for these evanescent moments of militaristic exuberance, national satisfaction has trended down, averaging around 25 percent over the past fifteen years. The feeling wasn’t so much that anything in particular had gone wrong as that everything had gone wrong, all at once, and it registered everywhere, from the surging popularity of dystopian television shows and novels to economists tracking the huge increase in “deaths of despair” since 2000, meaning all early deaths caused by suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis. In the early 2000s, music critics borrowed an idea from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and began to identify aspects of something called “hauntology” in new popular music, referring to art haunted both by the irretrievable past and, more important, by the better future whose arrival now seemed to have been indefinitely postponed. One more optimistic Harvard psychologist felt compelled to rebut this feeling by writing an eight-hundred-page book arguing that things were actually better than they had ever been. That is not the kind of book one feels the need to write if things are actually going well.
During this period, a small group of isolated and predominantly young men decided they were going to lash out. Of the 148 mass shootings that have occurred in the United States since 1982, 115 of them, and 41 of the top 50 in terms of the death toll, took place during the war on terror. The first was in July 2003, when an assembly-line worker for the aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin shot fourteen and killed six of his co-workers with a shotgun at a plant in Meridian, Mississippi. The most recent, as of this writing, occurred in December 2023, when a sixty-seven-year-old academic named Anthony Polito shot and killed three faculty members at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. The last year in which the country experienced only one mass shooting was 2003; in 2018, there were twelve. Mass shooters have targeted schools, workplaces, military bases, movie theaters, city streets, and music festivals. They have killed children as young as six at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; Black elders at Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; country music fans at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip; college students outside a sorority house in Isla Vista, California; and soldiers near the Fort Hood military base near Killeen, Texas. They have used handguns, revolvers, rifles, assault weapons, and cars. Some committed suicide after their murders, some were tried and put to death, and others are spending the rest of their lives in prison. Some wrote long manifestos or made disturbing remarks to family and friends before their attacks. Some singled out particular racial groups, some targeted women, and others killed indiscriminately. The motives of some mass shooters remain completely unknown.[74]
The causes of America’s mass shooting epidemic have been hotly debated, with people broadly taking sides in line with their political allegiances. Democrats largely blame the country’s gun laws, which made it easy for people to get their hands on assault weapons without so much as a background check. Republicans blame mental illness instead, arguing that the best America can do in response is to increase the number of metal detectors, police officers, and panic rooms inside the country’s schools. Both explanations are weak. While Americans own more guns per capita than people in any other country, rates of gun ownership have actually declined over the past fifty years. In the late 1970s, roughly 48 percent of American households owned at least one gun. By 2014, that figure was down to 31 percent.[75] The 2004 expiration of the federal ban on private ownership of assault weapons, which gave Americans access to much deadlier firearms than had previously been available, is a very likely contributing factor, but a majority of the mass shootings committed since September 11 did not involve any kind of assault rifle, with handguns the weapon of choice instead.[76] As for mental illness, just 5 percent of the country’s mass shootings were committed by someone who had ever been diagnosed with severe mental illness, a number that increased only to 25 percent even when researchers included nonpsychotic mental illnesses such as depression, diagnoses that in almost all cases were found to have been incidental to the killer’s actions.[77] If mass shooters did have anything in common (other than their gender), it was their having experienced some kind of a life crisis shortly before their attack, whether the loss of a job, the end of a romantic relationship, or the death of a loved one.[78] Most of them did not decide to kill as many people as they could in a public place because they were psychotic or experiencing delusions or because they believed God had told them it was the right thing to do. They were largely in full possession of their mental faculties, and they killed people because they wanted to.
Why did they want to? People have always lost jobs and girlfriends and loved ones, and some people, overwhelmed by those crises, have always sought ways to lash out in public, to advertise their pain and anger, to make their problems everybody else’s problems for once. The question isn’t why people feel the need to lash out but why the mass shooting has become the preferred means of expression over the past quarter century. Different kinds of public crimes become attractive at different historical moments. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Americans robbed banks, turning themselves into outlaw folk heroes by taking revenge on the institutions that had ruined the country’s economy. Beginning in the late 1960s, they hijacked airplanes and demanded money or safe passage to Cuba or Rome or somewhere else in exchange for the passengers’ safe return to earth. The promises of the revolutionary 1960s and the civil rights movement were curdling into cynicism, political violence, and economic malaise, and commercial air travel was still viewed as glamorous even as it was just becoming affordable for a plurality of Americans. To successfully hijack an airplane, therefore, promised both financial gain and escape from a country that seemed to be eating itself alive.[79] More than 130 commercial flights were hijacked between 1968 and 1972. Bank robbers and skyjackers gave voice to their anger by committing crimes they knew would resonate with millions of people. They did it for the money, but they also did it to be remembered, to create a spectacle. They understood themselves as performers and their countrymen as a captive audience.
Mass shooters operate at a higher pitch of desperation than bank robbers and hijackers—they generally don’t expect to get away with their crimes—but in other respects they follow in their predecessors’ footsteps. Their crimes are engineered for maximum media coverage and spectacular resonance, and as the bank robbers of the 1930s tailored their performances to audiences struggling through the Great Depression, twenty-first-century mass shooters perform spectacular suicide missions for a country that is drowning in endless war. Perhaps “resonance” is the wrong word. Resonance is the sound of a plucked guitar string gradually oscillating into silence. The kind of resonance mass shooters are after is the sound of that guitar plugged into an amplifier and gorging on its own feedback, rising in pitch, intensity, and distortion until it culminates in an unbearable shriek. The first shooter to make twenty-first-century America resonate in that way was probably James Holmes, who killed twelve people and injured seventy more at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater on July 20, 2012. Holmes grew up in California, and unlike most mass shooters he had a long and well-documented history of both mental illness and unsuccessful attempts to treat it. Awkward and socially isolated since adolescence, he attempted suicide at just eleven years old, according to one of his defense attorneys.[80] He struggled with intrusive thoughts, both homicidal and suicidal, for years. He sought help from therapists, and he also tried to help himself. He graduated from the University of California, Riverside, and enrolled in the neuroscience PhD program at the University of Colorado, hoping he could learn how to repair what he described in a notebook as his “broken mind.”[81] “I made it my sole conviction,” he wrote, “but using something that’s broken to fix itself proved insurmountable. Neuroscience seemed like the way to go but it didn’t pan out.”[82] Even as he acquired a fearsome arsenal of weapons—all purchased legally—in the months leading up to the attack, he continued to seek therapy and filled his private notebook with attempts at self-diagnosis, hoping that one of them would reveal a path to a normal life: “dysphoric mania,” “generalized anxiety disorder/social anxiety disorder/OCD/PTSD (chronic),” “asperger syndrome/autism,” “ADHD,” “schizophrenia,” “chronic insomnia,” “psychosis,” etc.[83] On page eighteen of the notebook, the journaling stopped. Over the following eight pages, Holmes just wrote the word “Why?” over and over, 249 times, the words increasing in size with each page. From then on, the notebook is dedicated to planning the attack: sketched maps of potential targets, lists of weapons with notes on their utility, different ways to kill a lot of people. On the third-to-last page, above a series of doodles and diagrams, he wrote, “embraced the hatred, a dark knight rises.”[84]
In the late evening of July 19, Holmes bought a ticket for a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s allegorical Batman trilogy about terrorism and the extralegal violence that is required to stop it. He sat in the front row, his bright orange hair rhyming with the terrorist Joker’s green hair in The Dark Knight. About twenty minutes after the lights went down, he pretended to take a phone call and slipped out an exit door, propping it open behind him. He went to his car and put on tactical gear, some of which he had purchased on eBay: gas mask, vest, combat helmet, bullet-resistant leggings and throat guard, groin protector, and gloves.[85] He also gathered his weaponry, which included smoke canisters, a shotgun, a semiautomatic rifle, and a .40-caliber Glock. He returned to the theater, set off one of his smoke canisters, and started shooting. Some audience members initially assumed it was a prank, or maybe a publicity stunt organized by the movie studio for the midnight premiere. When he was done, he left the theater again and stood next to his car. He did not resist when the police arrested him. Soon after, police discovered that Holmes had also booby-trapped his apartment with explosives before leaving. After disarming the explosives with a robot and entering, they found dozens of homemade grenades, as well as a Batman mask.[86]
When Holmes stepped back into the movie theater that night after suiting up at his car, he simultaneously embodied both sides of the war on terror. First, he was a terrorist, someone who could suddenly transform a fun night out for hundreds of people into a waking national nightmare just by pulling a trigger a few dozen times. Whether or not it was a conscious part of his planning, Holmes understood that no other action would be capable of frightening so many people in so little time. The country’s obsessive fixation on anticipating, imagining, and preventing future attacks had lent Holmes’s plan an evil sheen, and he did not miss his chance to transform himself into an embodiment of everyone’s worst fears. At the same time, Holmes stepped into the theater armed and armored like a member of the U.S. Special Forces, the most admired group of men in the country. He dropped the role as soon as the killing was over, making no attempt to escape, but for the few minutes he spent looking out from inside his gas mask, it would have been possible for him to feel that he was all-powerful, taking revenge on a world that had inexplicably forced him to feel the way he felt and be the way he was. The costume was nearly perfect; when police entered the theater after responding to a 911 call, they almost mistook him for a member of the SWAT team. “There was one particular piece of equipment that he had on him that was out of place,” the Aurora police chief, Dan Oates, said, referring to his “non-regulation” gas mask. “I am so proud of my officers that they spotted that.” Perhaps it was this aspect of his performance, the way Holmes swaddled himself in all the technology and accoutrements of militarized masculine power, that had the victims’ families so concerned about his crime serving as an inspiration to others in the future. The parents of one of the victims in Aurora, a twenty-four-year-old man who died while shielding his girlfriend from the bullets, launched a campaign called No Notoriety, demanding that the media minimize the extent to which they published shooters’ names or pictures of their faces. That didn’t come until later, though, and in the meantime it wasn’t just loners on 4chan who found that there were aspects of what Holmes did that they could identify with. A local gun rights activist said he thought civilian access to high-powered weapons made the United States “a stronger country,” and he objected to proposed legislation that would limit the number of bullets someone could purchase at one time. “If I only had 6,000 rounds for my AR-15s, I’d literally feel naked,” he said. “Two handguns, a shotgun, and a rifle,” he continued, tallying up Holmes’s arsenal. “That’s the average male in Colorado.”[87]
The first year in which the United States experienced seven mass shootings was 2012. Aurora was number four. The seventh took place in December, when Adam Lanza killed twenty-six people, including twenty children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Every year since, except for our locked-down 2020, there have been at least four mass shootings in the United States, and whether or not the perpetrators wear tactical gear and wield assault weapons, each one 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. Like the war itself, mass shootings are now a normal part of the news cycle, something one expects to hear about from time to time, something one can almost forget about in between the rhythmic irruptions of a few days’ headlines. After a 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a sixteen-year-old student who went to Tallahassee to lobby for gun reform told a New York Times reporter that this time would be different. “Sandy Hook, they were elementary school kids who couldn’t stand up for themselves. Virginia Tech was 2007, a different time,” he said. “But this one, I just have a gut feeling—something is going to change.”[88] It felt awful to read those words and judge the young speaker naive.
Cynicism is dangerous because, like all defense mechanisms, it is useful. It is a way of avoiding the pain of being surprised when something bad happens again. In the middle years of the war on terror, when President Obama was ramping up troop numbers in Afghanistan while trying to keep the conflict out of the headlines as much as possible, small but determined antiwar activist groups regularly warned Americans against becoming “numb” to the violence the U.S. military was continuing to deal out overseas. More recently, a new wave of mass shootings has given rise to the notion that Americans are now similarly “numb” to gun violence. But Americans are not numb—they are trapped. For more than twenty years, millions of them have appealed to their government to reduce the amount of violence it commits abroad and tolerates at home, and for more than twenty years those appeals have been ignored. That Americans have continued to make their appeals could easily be praised as persistence, but this persistence can also be unsettling. In 1914, Freud wrote an essay in which he outlined a psychological phenomenon he named “repetition compulsion,” which refers to the way that people will unconsciously reenact traumas from earlier in life without realizing what they are doing. Someone who grew up feeling uncared for by an emotionally distant father may find themselves repeatedly dating emotionally distant men. A humiliating experience at school may later become the subject of recurring dreams or the basis of a sexual fetish. A child subjected to violence may hit their own children decades later. Someone under the sway of a repetition compulsion has not given up on the possibility of change—in fact just the opposite. In forcing themselves to relive or reenact a moment of fear or helplessness, they ultimately hope to master it, to produce a different result and triumph over a situation that previously wounded them. But this hope usually goes unfulfilled. The compulsion becomes self-sustaining, and visions of change and renewal are slowly replaced by anxious resignation: This is just what life is like.
One might think of the war on terror as a repetition compulsion carried out on a national scale. Those who launched and supported the war have carried out a series of failed attempts to exorcise the country’s founding trauma of victimization by setting out into the wilderness in search of savages to dominate. Those who opposed the war have found themselves petitioning a government that has long made obvious its contempt for their desires. And those who mostly tried to take the Bush and Obama administrations’ advice and live as though the war weren’t happening in the first place have nevertheless found their lives gradually falling in time with its rhythms. For each of those groups, living through the war has felt like a single wish, a single desire, a single drive, pounding like a hammer that never stops. “Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own ‘war aims,’ ” Simone Weil wrote in her great essay on the Iliad. “It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.”