Chapter 13: Crisis – New York, September 1, 2018

The United States has entered a new historical epoch. Since 9/11 and the War in Iraq, and especially now under President Donald J. Trump, the country has embraced a new way of governing abroad and at home modeled on counterinsurgency warfare. At its heart is the deliberate construction of internal enemies on domestic soil—a central tactic of counterinsurgency warfare—as a way to centralize and unleash unbounded executive power. We are now living through a new period that can only be properly described as the American Counterrevolution. Few grasp the magnitude of this historical shift.

The seeds were planted at the birth of the Republic, when Black slaves and Indigenous peoples became the country’s first internal enemies. The gestational period extended over decades, or rather centuries—from the Trail of Tears to the demise of Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and the era of lynching, through the Asian Exclusion Act and quotas on Arabs, Italians, and Jews, to the Japanese internment camps and the Vietnam War.

But it was at that time specifically—in the 1960’s—that this new mode of governing took shape: Counterinsurgency warfare emerged as a new way of pacifying populations abroad and citizens at home. Counterinsurgency strategies were honed during the brutal Western colonial wars in Indochina, Malaya, Algeria, and Vietnam, and rapidly brought home to the United States to surveil and repress minorities. With the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO, its targeting of civil rights leaders, and the brutal repression of the Black Panther movement, counterinsurgency methods were domesticated.

Since 9/11 and the War in Iraq, this warfare paradigm of government has been perfected, expanded, and turned into an art form. In a three-step movement of world historical proportion, America’s political leadership has brought home and now governs through the logic of counterinsurgency warfare.

It started abroad, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the United States military retooled those counterinsurgency tactics from the colonial wars and embraced those very strategies—waterboarding and stress positions, indefinite detention, targeted assassinations—this time on Muslims in the war zone and at “black sites” and secret prisons around the world.

The United States government then extended those counterinsurgency strategies more widely throughout its foreign policy in international affairs, using targeted drone strikes outside of war zones, rendition of suspects for torture to complicitous countries around the world, and total information awareness on all foreigners.

American leaders then brought those techniques home to roost. Covert operatives began infiltrating mosques and college student groups, and surveilling Muslim businesses—without individualized suspicion. The NSA turned its total surveillance apparatus on ordinary Americans, bulk-collecting all their telephony metadata, social media, and digital traces. Local police forces became hyper-militarized, with excess counterinsurgency equipment and techniques—military-grade assault weapons, armored vehicles, tanks, night scopes, grenade launchers, and more.

The surprise Electoral College victory of Donald Trump, and the right-wing populist wave that ensued, has crystalized this new mode of governing and propelled it to its ultimate and final stage: a perfected model of domestic government through a counterinsurgency warfare paradigm despite the absence of an active insurgency at home. A counterrevolutionary method of governing without a revolution. A counterinsurgency without an insurgency, through the creation out of whole cloth of internal enemies—by transforming religious and ethnic minorities into dangerous threats.

And the United States Supreme Court just placed its constitutional seal on this new and radical way of governing. The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Muslim Ban constitutionally whitewashed President Trump’s explicit and open discriminatory animus. It placed the highest court’s constitutional imprimatur on the historical transformation in how Americans govern themselves abroad and at home: America’s political leaders now can, and our President now does, rule through the willful demonization of minorities, through the deliberate construction of internal enemies and, more broadly, through a counterinsurgency warfare paradigm of government. By failing to censure the President’s hate-filled rhetoric, or to pierce his administration’s pretext and smokescreen, the Supreme Court pushed the country further down this extremely dangerous path. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement and imminent replacement will only make matters worse. A solid decades-long conservative majority at the Supreme Court will entrench the immunity that the court just bestowed on our political leaders.

Behind this new and radical way of governing, a populist wave of social reforms are waiting in the wings: restrictions on women’s reproductive choice, limits on health care regulation, expanded religious exemptions, the elimination of affirmative action in education, exclusionary policies against sexual minorities, and virulent law and order policies that will further target and destroy minority communities.

We are now living the American Counterrevolution. The evidence is all around us. First, practices of terror integral to counterinsurgency strategy—torture, indefinite detention, summary drone strikes—have become normalized. So much so that President Trump could appoint to head the C.I.A. a woman who herself personally oversaw a black-site prison in Thailand during the heyday of the Bush torture program. We Americans now prize rather than revile the brutal excesses of the “war on terror.” We reward, rather than penalize, those who carried them out.

Second, indefinite detention, which President Barack Obama had pledged to end, has now become entrenched. President Trump has left vacant the position at the Department of Defense that approves any transfers out of the Guantánamo Bay camp. As a result, even those men who were approved for transfer before his inauguration are still indefinitely imprisoned.

Third, targeted drone assassinations have become so routine that Americans no longer pay attention to them—despite significant increases under the Trump administration. There has been a dramatic decrease in public information about drone strikes, and less and less news reporting about civilian drone casualties. Soon we will no longer even recognize or acknowledge the summary executions and the innocent casualties.

Fourth, total information awareness—the cornerstone of counterinsurgency theory—is now achieved on all of the American population. The groundwork was laid in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 with the bulk collection of all telephony metadata of American citizens through programs such as Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and the myriad NSA tools exposed by Edward Snowden. Those programs remain virtually unchanged since then.

Fifth, counterinsurgency tactics and logics now pervade policing and law enforcement across the United States. With the NYPD surveillance of mosques and Muslim businesses, the DOJ targeting of Muslims for suspicionless interrogations, the FBI crack-down on Pakistani neighborhoods in New York City, and hyper-militarized police forces, we now live the Counterrevolution on Main Street USA.

Sixth, President Donald Trump has successfully and deliberately constructed phantom internal enemies on domestic soil—another core tactic of counterinsurgency warfare. With his campaign pledge for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” his unambiguous Islamophobic propaganda, and his crystal-clear innuendos about “political correctness,” Trump methodically turned Muslim-Americans and Muslims into internal enemies who need to be contained and eliminated.

The Muslim Ban was the centerpiece of that strategy. “Islam hates us,” Trump declared, “we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States . . . [a]nd of people that are not Muslim.” With his call for a database or even worse, for the registration of Muslims and for the renewed infiltration of mosques, Trump demonized Muslim-Americans and turned them into a dangerous insurgency. Other groups as well. The F.B.I.’s designation of “Black Identity Extremists” converted ordinary African-American and #BlackLivesMatter protesters into dangerous internal threats. Trump’s derogatory remarks about Mexicans and Hispanics, and his persistent effort to build a wall on our Southern border, turned Latinos into criminal social enemies.

The evidence is indeed overwhelming: Since 9/11, but especially under the presidency of Donald Trump, governing through counterinsurgency has become entirely normalized. Our political leadership has embraced a counterinsurgency model of governing at home that operates through total information awareness, creating and targeting phantom internal enemies, and pacifying the general population—the three core strategies of unconventional warfare. We have brought home the mentalities and logics, the techniques and tactics, and all the equipment from the War in Iraq and Afghanistan. And by failing to censure these discriminatory tactics or even to acknowledge his religious animus in words and language, or to cut through the pretextual charade that Trump himself mocked (“We all know what that means!” in Trump’s words)—the Supreme Court constitutionally immunized this new way of governing.

With that new and radical form of governing, a populist wave of social conservatism is blanketing the country—fueled by Donald Trump’s unilateral interventions and knack for social media. Immediately upon inauguration, Trump seized unbounded executive power through a series of unconscionable executive orders discriminating not only against Muslims, but against all immigrants, Latinos, LGBTQ communities, and other minorities. Trump immediately began overseeing the dismantling of social structures and institutions—from the national parks, national service programs, and refugee resettlement to net neutrality and health care—in order to facilitate an even more aggressive grab on the public commons, forcing all Americans to financially contribute to his real estate empire from Mar-a-Lago to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Donald Trump spent an average of one third of his time as president in his first three months.400 Trump immediately began to govern the United States through a reality-TV Apprentice-like “you’re fired” management style, Tweeting impulsive and dramatic policy changes without even consulting his own cabinet. During the first months, Trump led a putsch of political norms—a coup d’état, not of the rule of law, which itself has always been infinitely malleable, but rather a coup of norms. From small things to large. The fact that President Trump did not disclose his federal taxes, or that he so willingly flouted the norms surrounding conflicts of interest—ditching Camp David for Mar-a-Lago—or that he effectively enthroned a royal family and a storm of palace intrigues, these all reflect a style of regal hierarchy and differentiation that resonate with his wealth accumulation and inequality. Trump and the richest Americans have become, somehow, above the rest—a class to themselves, as evidenced by Trump touting an unprecedented right to extend the presidential pardon to himself. From the moment he entered the White House, Trump has converted, in a strange alchemy, wealth inequality into power, inching the country more and more toward an authoritarian and unbounded executive reign.

There is, in effect, a revolution happening around us—one that is making significant inroads. Donald Trump has captured the GOP and Republican voters, who overwhelmingly support him now, with approval ratings at 90%. Trump has just turned the Supreme Court conservative for decades to come. And if the Republicans maintain a majority in the House and Senate through the 2018 midterms, the entire government would be Donald Trump’s.

Alongside these developments, and fueling them, have been decades of economic neoliberalism that have had long-term economic effects of wealth concentration and elite consolidation. As Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Anthony Atkinson, and their colleagues demonstrate, the United States has experienced a steady concentration of wealth by the wealthiest beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present—as evidenced in Figure 1.

Source: Figure I.1 from Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: “Income Inequality in the United States, 1910-2010.”

The result is disparities and inequalities that are unimaginable. Today, the three richest Americans hold more wealth than the combined wealth of 50% of Americans: three men, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet, have more wealth than half the population of the United States.401 The 100 richest Americans hold about as much wealth as all of the country’s 42 million African American residents; the 186 richest hold as much wealth as all of the country’s 55 million Latinos.402 America’s 400 wealthiest individuals hold more wealth than about two-thirds (or 64%) of Americans.403

Whereas most Americans, for instance, believe that the compensation ratio for a CEO compared to a low-skilled factory worker should approximate about 6.7:1, and while most Americans estimate that it is probably more like 30:1, the actual ratio of CEO compensation to unskilled workers today hovers around 354:1.404 Back in 1965, it stood at 20:1.405 Since then, the disparity has increased almost 18-fold.

Source: Institute for Policy Studies’s report, Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us (2017)

Meanwhile, in the United States, we have implemented a carceral state that parallels the slavery of the past. We incarcerate at rates that would be considered inhuman most anywhere else, and that distribute life consequences along racial and ethnic lines. The life changes of a young Black man between the ages of adolescence and young adulthood of being incarcerated are one in three. Prisons and jails are filled with young men and women of color.

We know that the carceral state was the product of deliberate political choices. What Piketty and his colleagues have convincingly shown is that the economic transformations as well were not the product of inherent laws of capital, autonomous forces of economics, or natural historical developments—but are instead the product of deliberate human choice: the product of our actions and politics.406 In this sense, Karl Marx was wrong to think that there were inherent processes of capital accumulation; twentieth-century economists, such as Simon Kuznets, were wrong to suggest that primitive or mature capitalism have specific tendencies toward accumulation or not.407 The differing trends are the product, instead, of political and legal choices. The sharp increases in inheritance taxes in the United States in the early twentieth century, and the later elimination of such inheritance taxes in the late twentieth century, are political choices with significant economic impact.

Choices we made and continue to make. So, for instance, the famous Beveridge Plan in 1942 promised social welfare benefits to soldiers in exchange for their willingness to put their lives at risk: this pact founded the welfare state in England during the war at mid-century, and it had significant redistributive effects. Similarly, the elimination of inheritance taxes in the United States under President George W. Bush at the turn of the twenty-first century had significant distributive effects. All of these political choices shape the equality curves—and all of them are the product of our individual actions and inactions. Not of economic laws or political determinism. They are the outcome of political actions and choices of ordinary women and men. And they have frightening consequences, insofar as these wealth accumulations may explain in part the rise of extreme right-wing populist movements and the alt-right in the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century.

We live today, in the United States and more broadly in the West—but also seemingly more and more in countries like China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and certain areas of the global South—in a political space dominated by the political ideals of neoliberalism. Dominated by a purported faith in the mechanisms of the market, as if they were autonomous or semi-autonomous from the governmental regulation that creates and maintains markets. This new neoliberal hegemony coincides with the increased wealth inequality. And not without reason. The threat of communism has dissipated, the Cold War was won, and liberal democratic regimes no longer experience the pressure that communalism placed on them. They no longer feel the need to equalize in the face of a more egalitarian society—or at least a regime that presented itself as ensuring greater equality. The threat of communism is what pushed liberal regimes like the United States toward higher taxation of inheritance and income at mid-century, and to embrace civil rights for minorities. But with that pressure gone now, there is nothing to break the growing income inequalities and wealth accumulation.

Beyond our own borders, we are witnessing a global grab for the global commons—or whatever is left of it—with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the precipitous privatization of industry, utilities, and finance in the former Eastern Bloc, the capitalization of the Chinese economy, the deregulation of the British and Western European economies, the devastating impact of the IMF’s fiscal policies across Africa and Latin America. Mainstream economists document the plummeting percentage of property held in public trust in China, Japan, and across Europe, not only in the United States—with several of these countries having effectively placed their commons in hock. In other words, the amount of commons has shrunk.408 Piketty, Saez and their colleagues document the plummeting percentage of property held in public trust in China, Japan, Europe, and the United States—as evidenced by Figure 3:

Figure 3: The gradual transfer of public wealth into private wealth, showing negative net public wealth in the US, Japan, and the UK, and only slightly positive in Germany and France.

Source: Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID.WORLD,” NBER Working Paper 23119 (February 2017), figure 2b.

At the global level, the inequalities are even more obscene. As Sam Moyn tells us, “a mere eight men controlled more wealth than half the inhabitants of the planet—several billion people.”409 We have witnessed, in effect, the decomposition of a post-war period of social reconstruction—after World War II and the wars of colonial independence—with markedly increasing inequality throughout the globe:410 a hegemonic form of economic neoliberalism no longer contained by the threat or even existence of communism; an oppressive globalized and financialized political economy run from the corporate headquarters of finance, oil, data, and commercial multinational giants and G-7 through -20 government leaders; a run on the global commons, extending even to our shared planet, the earth. Since the last third of the twentieth century, in effect, we have witnessed a structural transformation of the human condition—one that is about to accelerate with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the expected diminution, by half, of global employment.

In the wake of the recent elections of strong-men leaders around the globe—not just Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, but also Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nearendra Modi in India, Victor Orbán in Hungary—the skidmarks are increasingly global.

It is not clear how much longer these mounting inequalities can grow before triggering a political meltdown or uprising against the current political condition in this country. The dawn of the twenty-first century has already witnessed a number of uprisings in the United States, from the Tea Party challenge to a perceived consolidation of Democratic Party power in Washington, to the Occupy Wall Street movement on behalf of the 99%, to the #BlackLivesMatter and broader movement against the lived—and the fatal—inequalities of African Americans and persons of color, to the rise of an alt-right that believes that it itself is the victim of the increasing inequality in American society. “The political revolution is just beginning,” Bernie Sanders states in his Guide to Political Revolution published in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump. “The economy, health care, education, the environment, social justice, immigration: What role will YOU play?” Sanders asks.411 With graphics showing the real average income of the top 0.01%, 1%, and bottom 90%, the CEO pay disparities, starvation wages, and mass incarceration; with chapters on health care, higher education, climate change, and policing—Sanders calls for radical grassroots mobilization.412 “This is your country. Help us take it back,” Sanders writes. “Join the Political Revolution.”413

Sanders’s use of the term “revolution,” the Occupy movement’s appropriation of the notion of an “occupation,” the alt-right’s adoption of fascist and white supremacist imagery—these are fighting words and images. They represent a call to arms. They reflect the high stakes and the seriousness with which people today view their political condition. And they signal, possibly, the coming of stormier political circumstances. They make clear that we face today important political choices: Whether to combat, ignore, or defend and accentuate wealth inequalities in society? –Whether to seize the political moment or retreat to personal pursuits and cede it to others? –Whether to give in to the seemingly invincible structures of political power that now privilege PACs and the accumulated wealth of political contributions? –What to do in the face of such unbalanced and skewed politics? These are critical political choices we must make.