In his new book, “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life,” Richard Beck presents a compelling case that the post-9/11 era is still very much with us. Though not the first book to argue that the “long wars” initiated by George W. Bush resulted in the presidency of Donald Trump — Spencer Ackerman takes a similar position in “Reign of Terror” — “Homeland” is unique in its autobiographical approach to re-creating the feeling of the war on terror years.
“What makes the experience so awful when it happens on such a large scale is that it becomes impossible to grab on to anything tangible that might pull you out of the current and back to safety,” Beck writes of the post-9/11 national mood. “Where do you turn for reassurance when everyone needs reassuring? How do you avoid falling into despair when everyone around you has the same stunned look on their face?”
Truthdig spoke to Beck in early September about “Homeland” and 9/11’s enduring impact on American culture and politics. Our conversation has been edited slightly for clarity and length.
Truthdig: What about the immediate post-9/11 era made you feel like this was something you wanted to write about? What was so formative about it for you?
Richard Beck: It’s underselling it to call it formative because the war on terror went on for so long. That’s my entire conscious political life. I was not someone who had any politics I was aware of when I was 14. That develops through high school and through college.
The book is written from a pretty specific, almost micro-generational position. Because I was 14, I’m old enough to have a lot of memories from before the war on terror. I know what airports were like before Sept. 11. I know what it felt like to be in public spaces before Sept. 11. I have some memory of how people talked on the news and what they got upset about and what they worried about before Sept. 11. And then I watched all of that change over the following 10, 15, 20 years afterward.
“It’s underselling it to call it formative because the war on terror went on for so long. That’s my entire conscious political life.”
By the time you’re 14, you’ve gotten the beginning of your civics education. You’ve taken your government class in high school. You’ve learned about the country’s history — the public school version of it. And you have a sense of what America’s place in the world is — what motivates the country. This is what Americans are supposed to care about and value. And it’s not like all of that changed in an instant. But you have Sept. 11, and then we’re in Afghanistan a couple of months after that. We’re in Iraq a year and a half after that. Years later, we’re still in both of those places. It was this experience of intensifying cognitive dissonance. If the country is supposed to be one way, why are we doing this thing?
I didn’t grow up with much politics of my own. My parents were pretty standard suburban liberal Democrats. My mom wouldn’t dream of voting for a Republican. The worst day of her life, politically, is when Hillary Clinton lost. She was so excited that a woman was going to be president. And then my dad basically votes the same way, although, if there was a reasonable moderate Republican, he’d give him a hearing. I remember him being impressed with John McCain a little bit, although he still voted for [Barack] Obama. So that was the kind of politics that I was raised around.
TD: You talked about cognitive dissonance. Was there a disconnect between what you were expecting and what happened once the Democrats returned to power?
RB: The moment when the cognitive dissonance really got serious for me was when Obama ran in 2008, pretty explicitly as an anti-war candidate. Not that he said we’re bringing all of the troops home and America should never make use of military violence around the world. But he was clear that Iraq was a mistake. Afghanistan was the good war, and we’re going to give it another shot and see if we can wrap things up there. But I spent eight years around people who were like, this is George Bush’s fault. The reason that the country is in this mess is because Bush is this Texas rube who’s in over his head, silver spoon in his mouth, he’s got these maniac neoconservative ideologues pulling the strings behind him, and if we can just get Bush out, then this craziness will end.
“[Obama] gave one of these inane non-answers that ended up becoming, in a sad way, sort of a hallmark of his administration.
Obama didn’t seek any accountability for anyone in the Bush administration. No one got investigated over Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo didn’t get closed — I know that Obama tried to close it at the beginning of his administration, but that turned out not to be something that he thought was worth spending serious political capital on. I remember that interview he did with George Stephanopoulos, where Stephanopoulos said to him, are you going to go and investigate these people and consider prosecution for torture, for war crimes, for lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction? And he gave one of these inane non-answers that ended up becoming, in a sad way, sort of a hallmark of his administration.
TD: Obama said he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” adding, that “part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”
RB: That was an initial moment of, you know, what is going on here? It’s not just that certain basic parts of my primary school civics and government education aren’t quite making sense anymore. It’s that the whole political context I came out of, this suburban liberalism which has just spent eight years insisting that this is entirely down to this one maligned presidential administration. That turns out not to be the case — we got the dream candidate into office, and we’re still proceeding with this catastrophe.
TD: How would you describe the way Democrats approach politics, and how does that apply to the war on terror? How does it apply to your reasons for writing the book?
RB: Democrats have this idea that if the Republicans all vanished or got raptured, the U.S. would basically be very powerful but ultimately benign, social democracy-lite, that kind of thing. That’s part of what’s useful about really focusing on that period through the war on terror. The parties have spent most of the war on terror agreeing about how to fight it. Everyone agreed we should go into Afghanistan. Democrats, a lot of them argued for going into Iraq. A lot of them voted for it. Hillary voted for it. Chuck Schumer tried to tamp down outrage about Abu Ghraib.
Part of what I tried to do while I was writing the book, and part of what I hope the book helps readers to do, is to see those two parties not as totally opposed to one another and totally polarized. If you want to understand what’s happened in the country politically over the last 20 years, you need to understand them as two parts of a system that work together. And I think you can see that most clearly in the realm of foreign policy, and especially in the war on terror.
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