Barbarism Starts at Home on Can’t You Read

Barbarism Starts at Home

How important is one simple word? Can a book fundamentally concerned with rising American fascism, that refuses to actually say the word fascism, still be great? Is it fair to critique an author for failing to pen the book you wanted him to create? These are the questions I’m asking myself as I write this, and I must confess that even after reading today’s well-received volume twice, I’m still not sure I know the answers.

In today’s book blog, we’re examining Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump; published by Viking, here in 2021. Overall, it’s safe to say that my feelings about this work are mixed. Don’t get me wrong; Reign of Terror is by no means a bad book. But for one persistent blind spot however, it could have been a great book; and that’s a tragedy. Let me try to explain.

In Reign of Terror, the author starts with a deceptively simple thesis; the War on Terror helped elect Trump and thereby enabled the rise of Trumpism. I say deceptively simple here because I think some mainstream reviewers have unfairly criticized Spencer’s work for reductive ideas he’s not actually proposing. Specifically, Ackerman is arguing that the War on Terror was the primary factor in delivering the Trump presidency; not that it was not the only factor. Indeed, the author postulates that the War on Terror acted more like a skeleton key, unlocking barely restrained fascist impulses at the core of the American experience. From the introduction:

“The War on Terror was by no means the only factor enabling Trump’s rise. But it was the path to power for the others. It revitalized the most barbarous currents in American history, gave them renewed purpose, and set them on the march, an army in search of its general.”

It is in the context of these impulses or “barbarous currents” that Ackerman’s thesis becomes extraordinarily complex. After all, if one acknowledges that the War on Terror affected American life in a nigh-infinite number of ways, then each of those changes represents a potential brick on the road to Trumpism. Our multi-generational forever war operates on its own logic, and generates a cultural gravity capable of creating its own unreality; an unreality we all live in today. This book is no mere reduction, but rather an attempt to craft a unified theory of modern American politics and place it in the proper context of the dark history that fashioned it.

If anything then, the scope of Reign of Terror‘s argument is too broad for a single volume, but Ackerman gamely tries to identify and explore each of the threads binding Downmarket Mussolini, the War on Terror, and American white supremacy together. Touching on themes such as the deployment of politically useful Islamophobia, the rise of the security industrial complex, and the expansion of a functionally racist police state, Reign of Terror does a good job of exploring the structural factors that not only allowed Trump to win an election, but crucially empowered him to deploy authoritarian suppression measures against his perceived political enemies.

Importantly however, Reign of Terror also delves into the psychological trauma an unending, unwinnable, and inescapable war inflicted on a culture wholly unprepared to accept its own imperfection and fallibility. The War on Terror’s fundamental reliance on American exceptionalism to justify its own existence, made its own prosecution a referendum on not just American empire, but on the national character itself. When combined with latent American chauvinism, nationalism, and white supremacy, the mixture became toxic. Failure to win the unwinnable war, and defeat the hated brown other not only discredited the leadership class, it called for revenge against those responsible for the humiliation. And as Ackerman notes, Trump purposely positioned himself to personify that vengeance:

“Trump understood something about the War on Terror that they did not. He recognized that the 9/11 era’s grotesque subtext – the perception of nonwhites as marauders, even as conquerors, from hostile foreign civilizations – was its engine… Being unable to defeat this something-Islamic was intolerable for a people accustomed to thinking of itself as exceptional, for whom uncontested American supremacy had existed long enough to appear as inevitable as the weather. The painful condition of neither peace nor victory, against an enemy seen as practically subhuman, itself required vengeance. Trump offered himself as its instrument.”

Frankly, this is all good analysis; and I’m not just saying that as a woman who once wrote that Trump is simultaneously both a product of, and an accelerant for, Americanized fascism. You could quibble with the fact that the War on Terror portions of the book are more fleshed out and documented than the parts about Trumpism, but that’s probably to be expected from a guy working as a national security reporter for the Daily Beast. Ackerman even avoids the classic pitfall of laying all the blame at the foot of the American right; both the liberal establishment and his own co-workers in the media are held to account in Reign of Terror.

Furthermore, from a readability perspective, this book really delivers. Although boomer pundits have critiqued Ackerman’s breezy writing style as “extremely online,” I found the frenetic pacing and free-flowing outrage entirely indicative of the historical period in question. This particularly stood out during the author’s description of the last surreal year of the Trump presidency; the closing chapters of Reign of Terror actually felt like reliving the final (for now) stand of the Pork Reich. Quite frankly I don’t know that a more traditional writer could have done this story justice; all in all, there’s a lot to like about Spencer’s offering here.

So what’s the problem? In a word, it’s fascism. Specifically, Ackerman refuses to use the word “fascism” to describe what Trumpism actually is; even though Reign of Terror was published after the January 6th coup attempt by Trump-supporting American fascists. Even when describing Tom Cotton’s fascist op-ed in the New York Times, Bill Barr’s Homeland Security militia in Portland, or the assassination of anti-fascist activist Michael Reinohl, our author simply will not use the f-word. Racist? Yes. Nativist? Yes. White Supremacist? Occasionally. But he never calls Trump, or Trumpism itself, fascist.  In Ackerman’s telling, fascism is something that Dickie Spencer does alongside the GOP, it’s not the actual authoritarian repression, or erosion of democracy that facilitates his actions.

Why would Ackerman do such a thing? That’s actually a very good question. Given that Reign of Terror explicitly connects Trumpism with neonazi militia terrorism in the 1990’s, and the author repeatedly alludes to the fascist nature of the forces supporting Trump, the omission is so conspicuous as to raise alarms. Perhaps that’s just the price of tea in China? It’s entirely possible that the only way to get this book published through a mainstream market printing house, is to maintain the final fig leaf separating fascism and Americanism.

Whatever the reason, the simple truth is that this refusal to name the beast harms both the book, and the important discourse surrounding it. Ackerman is correct; the political culture produced by the War on Terror will inevitably split out more, and worse, versions of Trump. In that context, tip-toeing around the wholly accurate descriptor of fascism, seems like an unforgivable concession to reactionary power. At its core, Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror is a book about the poisonous fruits of American exceptionalism. It is altogether ironic then that the work itself avoids uttering its own most damning conclusion, out of deference to that same exceptionalism.

In the final analysis, Reign of Terror is a pretty solid three out of five star kind of book; but it could have been so much more than that, and that’s disappointing.

 

• nina illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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