But the great Victorian year of protest actually feels more recent than it has for decades. In its chaos and its power, it resembles our own historical moment, buffeted by populist uprisings and social turmoil, climate rebellion and violent insurrection. “We can take that place,” one man said confidently as he pointed to the Capitol on January 6. “And then do what?” responded his partner in crime. “Heads on pikes!” the first replied without really having the slightest idea of what to do next. As in 1848, radical and even violent protests are now expected, sometimes even desired, but without any clear programme or manifesto. Revolution doesn’t seem unlikely anymore, but at the same time, it’s hard to concretely envision a post-capitalist world.

Whether it’s the bolsonaristas invading the Brazilian National Congress, the gilets jaunes assembling spontaneously in the streets of France, or the “square movements” following the 2008 crash, the more traditional repertoires of contention that characterised the past century seem to be changing both on the Left and the Right. But far from being on the verge of a carefully planned coup d’état or a new social order, contemporary revolts instead resemble that tumultuous mid-century upheaval: “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” as Christopher Clark notes in his gripping new history, Revolutionary Spring. “The people of 1848,” he adds, “could see themselves in us.”

While the inter-war period and the rise of fascism has often been raised as a comparison for our present, Clark offers us a different and more accurate analogue. Far from being a failed revolution as Karl Marx had thought, 1848 successfully transformed Palermo, Paris and Vienna, and reverberated in Chile and Martinique. The year progressed not as chain or domino effect, but more like our own “populist revolts”: nearly simultaneous, interconnected and rooted in common socio-economical changes, but without being directly caused by one another. It was the “particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century”. “People, groups and ideas,” Clark says, “flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities” with “profound consequences for the modern history of Europe”. The world, as Bismarck recalled in his memoirs, would never be the same after. Of course, at the time, the hopes of radicals were crushed. Many fled into exile in the United States or London, like the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, or Marx himself. For them, the disillusion was intense and the prospects of an immediate socialist transformation had rapidly vanished. But in the years to come, 1848 transformed how liberals, conservatives and socialists alike would relate to politics.

In response to the revolts, which were largely defeated, significant constitutional changes were passed, that slowly defined our modern representative politics and shaped for good the nature of the state and government. These new political constellations were more open to reform and to the aspirations of the moderate elements of society, but the state apparatus was significantly expanded, with the establishment of armed police forces trained to combat insurrections. The armed civic state is taken for granted now, but it was a marked novelty after the period spanning from the Vienna congress of 1815 to 1848. Most regimes had obviously been repressive, illiberal and change averse, but were also, as the historian Paul W. Schroeder has noted, inefficient and quite reluctant to use brute force against their own citizens. This allowed for a proliferation of conspiracies and popular revolts.

For a long time, ordinary people did not demonstrate, rally or strike, but would rather parade in mocking routines, seize grain, invade fields, attack tax collectors, destruct tollgates or sack machines. Conflicts unfolded generally at a local level, with a narrow focus and without coherent political aims. And revolutions themselves were rather the preserve of austere figures such as the Italian Robespierrist Philippe Buonarroti, who favoured revolutionary dictatorship over mass movements, convinced of the difficulty of involving the multitudes. Despite censorship, it was, in fact, Schroeder observed, “relatively easy and safe to promote revolution”. As a result, in 1848, the authorities of Europe weren’t ready to respond properly to the insurrections, used instead to small and carefully-planned uprisings.

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In that year, something quite different emerged for the first time. As Clark writes, the uprisings were “inchoate, multifocal, socially deep” rather than anchored in the “seditious conspiracy” characteristics of the 1830s. The revolutionary ideas “reverberated in cafés and political clubs, circulating in communicative networks that were incomparably denser, socially deeper and more sophisticated than their late-eighteenth-century predecessors”. Even if there weren’t yet “political parties capable of disciplining their members or binding them to commonly agreed positions” or “doctrinally authoritative ‘ideologies’”, it marked the beginning of the end of a certain form of protest. From here on, not only the middle classes and liberals renounced revolution for good, but the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades.

As the sociologist Charles Tilly later argued in the case of France, 1848 therefore stands in the middle of two crucial intertwined changes that would transform the repertoire of collective action for the following century. The first involved the centralisation of the state into a more complex apparatus, internally coordinated and with enhanced means of coercion. This was coupled with an unprecedented expansion of capital, producing a large and modern working class which populated large units of production. And within this new nexus of capital and state, social movements as we know them began to take hold within an emerging civil society. Change couldn’t be the product of a few heroes dedicated to the revolution, but had to come from organised and ideologically-driven masses. If class struggle was the steam of History, it would now require strong and sophisticated engines to move forwards and channel collective struggles into specific directions. The “social”, as Clark notes, could now “be grasped as an autonomous category, irreducible to politics”.

This transition wasn’t just a concern for revolutionaries. Even conservatives, as Eric Hobsbawm noted, “would have to defend themselves in new ways” and “to learn the politics of the people”. “Public opinion” — a distinctively liberal notion — could not be ignored any more. Defeating insurrections or censoring the press was not enough, and influencing and controlling the masses would become increasingly important over the next decades, shaping a new form of statecraft and political activity. It marked, Hobsbawm argued, “the end…of the politics of tradition”. As the rate of literacy increased, all political forces had to develop their own ideological apparatuses to shape the mentality of large groups, through political newspapers, youth movements or rallies. Politics was slowly embedded in a “thick” civil society, with a large range of deeply networked organisations and institutions that served as intermediaries between citizens and the state. Parties became not just machines to conquer power, but mediators between institutions and citizens, embodying the interests of mobilised and conscious social groups.

This kind of politics, that culminated with the total mobilisations of the first half of the 20th century, would shape the whole political spectrum. From socialists and communists creating their own counter-society within capitalism, to fascists who, while they crushed unions and labour organisations, still tried to fully integrate a broad range of voluntary associations and organisations within the fascist state. In that sense, everything was political, from the sport club to the local newspapers. This held for much of the 20th century, where even during the post-war period, politics remained transactional, and programmes and reforms generally reflecting pre-electoral deals with specific constituencies. It’s only with the more individualised ethos following the century’s own year of global protest, 1968, that this settlement began to unravel, opening the space for the more speculative and public relations-driven public sphere of the Eighties.

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And with the demise of social democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, collective engines to define human needs and collective endeavours slowly disappeared in favour of a more atomised civil society. That is why, as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe recently argued, “our political world…retained its external appearance, but if you crack open the shell, there’s nothing inside”. The formal institutions of democracy are still there, but are “divested of popular energies and innovation”. The populist explosions of the 2010s marked therefore what we could call the final disintermediation of politics, an exit from the associative structures that shaped politics for a century: parties, unions, mass organisations. And while the era of apathetic citizens characteristic of the Nineties has come to an end, the renewal of social turmoil and ideological battles hasn’t brought back such engines. People assemble and demonstrate not on the orders of parties and unions leaders but through the spread of messages and call for action posted on social media. We have been plunged back into the spontaneous, disorganised and unpredictable world that shaped 1848.

In the newly digitalised public sphere, political figures combine a strong and charismatic authority with a less mediated relation with their base. They speak to them through Facebook, Twitter, or even their own social media platform, rather than the outmoded bureaucratic structures of the mass parties. Within such a shift, in a sense ending the dynamic that began in 1848, even ideologies are not stable but rather, like in the era of Tocqueville, “an archipelago of texts and personalities across which [are] plotted quite idiosyncratic courses”. Large and influential newspapers have been replaced by a proliferation of media platforms, shaping the ideas of evanescent crowds on specific issues rather than precise political projects. Even the decorporation that went along the proletarisation of labour echoes this. Rather than a labour movement built upon a formalised labour market, we have witnessed a proliferation of the “working poor” and the “Uberisation” of workers. Social conflict has itself deserted the workplace, where the “great resignation” replaced coordinated strikes and mass labour militancy.

Whether it be the syncretic nature of their ideas, the irruption of spirituality into politics, the resurgence of violence, the tension between representation and direct forms of democracy, or even the rise of influential feminist figures and writers, our past decade has allowed the rebirth of the radicalism that ended with the mid-century revolutions. A world that would probably appear more familiar to Blanqui than Jaurès. Politics is now everywhere, but in a very different and more elusive sense than during the mass mobilisations of the 20th century.

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But among all these similarities, there is a difference. If 1848 led to an ascendency of the centre and the idea of superseding politics through technocracy and scientific government, our time appears to be heading the other way. Technocracy has been shattered, and the ability of the state to effectively govern is at its lowest since the late Sixties. Even if the idea of revolution has made a comeback, we still lack of engines to actually allow collective forms of decision making and to politicise human needs. Despite the development of new forms of digital engagement, the participation of citizens remains narrow and unable to sustain enduring political participation. There isn’t a week without headlines mentioning a riot or spontaneous assemblies or demonstrations. But the question still remains: what’s next?

But as Tocqueville had himself experienced, the end of an era is always an unpredictable process. “I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end,” he wrote in his Souvenirs, “and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever”. If the agony of the old can be a long and a painful thing it also, as the story of 1848 demonstrates, opens history to unexpected turns and innovations.

These new school paranoiacs divide into two camps: a progressive one and an anti-progressive one. While diametrically opposed politically, they nonetheless share the same conviction that the sin of their enemies is everywhere and must be vanquished to save the soul of America. And, like all moral panic entrepreneurs throughout history, their deepest concern centres on the purity of young people, who they claim are being “groomed” into demonic tribes, whether of the Left or Right.

The liberal version of apocalyptic alarmism is by now all too familiar: the broad gist of it is that Donald Trump is a tyrant who has unleashed the atavistic and peculiarly American impulses of white rage that will inevitably lead the country to civil war and ruin — unless he and his base are repelled by the valiant Democrats. In his bestselling book On Tyranny, published just after the 2016 election, Yale historian Timothy Snyder sternly warned that America could descend into fascism under Trump. By the time Trump had all but completed his first term in office and was seeking another, the liberal prophets of doom had gone into overdrive. “I can’t say this more clearly,” Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times in late September 2020. “Our democracy is in terrible danger…”

The events of 6 January served to confirm their darkest warnings: it was an attempted coup! It didn’t matter that most of those who broke into the Capitol had not the slightest idea what they were going to do once they got inside the building, or that the only lethal shot fired during the whole ludicrous debacle was at a Trump supporter, or that there was zero chance that Trump would be violently returned to power. It didn’t matter that Trump, despite new testimony that he wanted to join the protesters in marching toward the Capitol, had scurried back to the White House, where he returned to his usual state of lethargy, or that one of the defining traits of his presidency was ineptitude. None of that mattered, because it complicated the preordained narrative: Trump and his supporters are an existential threat to the republic.

Once Biden moved into the White House you would have thought that the apocalyptic fantasy surrounding Trump would have eased up a bit. It didn’t, and the crack-pipe of progressive paranoia soon flared up again. In May last year Slate published a piece on how “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time”. But the crack-pipe was at its hottest in the editorial traphouse of The Atlantic, which ran a cover-story in January proclaiming that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”.

More recently, the US Supreme Court’s decision to revoke Roe v. Wade has served to refocus progressive premonitions of doom. The Guardian reported that the revocation of the 1973 ruling, which enshrined Americans’ constitutional right to abortion, “could drive the biggest wedge yet between what appear to be two irreconcilable nations coexisting under one flag”. “Some wonder if the country’s social fabric, frayed by four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, can survive.”

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A persistent thread in much of this alarmism is a deep preoccupation with children and their “safety”. The concern is not so much that children, or indeed their children, will grow up under tyranny, a “terrifyingly real” prospect according to Snyder. The fear, rather, is that children might become the tyrants: they are in danger of being “groomed” into fascist little monsters, whether it be through video games, Instagram or even online fitness groups. And if you don’t treat extremism like it’s a virus and inoculate your kids against it, then you’re part of the problem.

On the other side are the equally shrill and hyperbolic anti-progressives, who think the Democrats and their supporters are trying to stage a socialist coup by stealth and that anything but Republican rule will spell disaster for the country.

Trump’s style, of course, was nothing if not apocalyptic. In the run-up to the 2016 election he had warned, invoking one of his favourite rallying points, that: “Right now, we don’t have a country, we don’t have a border.” By the time the next election came round, he was warning about the existential threat of Biden. “He’ll bury you in regulations, dismantle your police departments, dissolve our borders, confiscate your guns, terminate religious liberty, destroy your suburbs,” Trump thundered at a campaign rally in late October 2020. On Twitter, he said that the election was a choice between the “TRUMP BOOM” or “Biden’s plan to kill the American Dream!”

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In a recent article in The Washington Times, David Bossie, a conservative activist and long-time Trump adviser, declared that the “Democrats are purposefully trying to destroy our country as we know it in their quest to change America into the world’s next failed socialist state”, citing the rise in violent crime across American cities and the incursion of critical race theory into schools as “part of the Left’s grand plan” to destroy America as we know it.

Bossie didn’t mention children, but many conservatives in America can’t keep off the subject, believing that legions of Left-wing activists and sexual deviants are “grooming” children into the cult of woke zealotry. “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centres for gender identity radicals?”, Fox News host Laura Ingraham demanded to know earlier this year.

A few months ago, the focus of the story shifted to how Disney had positioned itself as one of the country’s preeminent grooming hubs. According to The Federalist: “Disney’s Obsession With Grooming Children Is Nothing New, But Their Openness About It Is.” More recently, the focus has switched to taxpayer-funded Drag Queen Story Hour events at city schools. “Progressives may have no problem with child grooming and sexualisation, but I do,” protested Vickie Paladino, a New York City Council member.

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What explains the current upsurge in apocalyptic alarmism and its insistent encroachment into the centre of American political life?

Part of the answer is that it’s strategic: sounding the alarm about impending catastrophe is what political partisans do, especially if they can’t persuade a good number of people on the merits of their policies. And, of course, alarmism about extremists has been used everywhere by politicians of all stripes to clamp down on critics and infringe their rights in the interests of “security”.

Alarmism is also a well-rewarded grift, especially for extremism experts and journalists who have perverse incentives for amplifying threats. In a recent article on the new-Right in America, James Pogue made the point in this way:

“Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories and honestly describe political upheaval. But within the Cathedral [Curtis Yarvin’s phrase for an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press], the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order, which includes nationalists, anti-government types, or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts on issues like vaccine mandates, in as alarming a way as I possibly can…”

Another possible explanation for the rise of apocalyptic alarmism is the warping effect of spending so much time looking at extremist material on the internet. As someone who studies violent extremism as part of my job, I’ve thought a lot about how over-exposure to violent imagery and hateful propaganda can affect the mental health of those who do this work. Some researchers and journalists claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen, while others worry about the spiritual harms they may have incurred.

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But I also wonder whether those who spend so much of their time in highly radicalised online spaces might slowly, bit by bit, succumb to the warping impact of that exposure. If all you do is read online forum posts praising the murderous actions of Elliot Rodger, you just might start thinking that men really are monsters or potential ones, in the same way that if all you do is watch extreme porn, you just might think that women are sexual objects to be used and humiliated. Or, if all your news about woke liberals comes from the derangement porn of Libs of TikTok you just might start thinking that demented woke people really are everywhere and bent on destroying Western civilisation.

The problem with apocalyptic alarmism, whatever its stripe, is not just the self-aggrandising melodrama that usually accompanies it, or the hypocrisy of sounding like the “semiotically aroused” fringe the alarmists loath. It is its lack of proportion and basic common sense. As Matt Welch has noted: “the moral of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is not that there is no wolf, but rather that warnings should be saved for when the beast actually arrives.”

That got my attention. At the time, I was a member of the White House staff. I ate lunch almost every day in the White House Mess with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Deputy Chief of Staff John Erlichman, and a crowd of other political aides. I wondered if any of them were involved in this very strange political espionage operation.

Fortunately, my presidential appointment had nothing to do with domestic politics. Along with receiving a White House pass, I had been confirmed by the Senate as an ambassador and in practice was working as the president’s chief trade negotiator. Although I carried a diplomatic passport issued by the State Department, Nixon distrusted State. He often used me as his personal representative for sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and officials.

I had served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in several posts since 1962 and had decided, when Nixon was elected, to leave my assignment in the Office of the US Trade Representative. But shortly after Nixon was sworn in, a stranger wandered into my office, whom I soon discovered had been sent by the White House personnel office.

The stranger said his name was Murray Chotiner and that he had been Nixon’s campaign manager in California and during his first run for president in 1960. Murray said Nixon had originally planned to give him a presidential appointment after entering office, but the press had characterised him as Nixon’s “dirty tricks manager”, making Senate confirmation problematic. So he was assigned as general counsel in the USTR.

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Murray said he had been advised by several members of Congress that I was the best informed official on political and trade disputes with European nations. Could he accompany me on my visits to foreign capitals?  I told him I was planning to resign but would stay three months to bring the incoming Nixon team up to speed. Murray travelled with me for about 10 weeks. After a while we became travel buddies, and I came to like his humour and deep insights into politics.

Two years later, in mid-1971, Murray called me to ask if I would be willing to be a consultant to Nixon on international issues, and I agreed. At the start of 1972, Murray called again and said “the President needs you”. I agreed to join his staff full-time and my name was sent to the Senate for confirmation. When I met the president alone, he said he had several international tasks in mind that would likely be subject to political controversy in Washington. When I needed his approval for my decisions or initiatives, he said I could bypass the Haldeman bureaucracy and just tell Murray, who would notify him. “Just don’t tell anyone you have direct access to POTUS.”

In the early days in my new post, Murray took me aside, “Be careful when you speak in or near the Oval Office”, he said. “Recording devices are keeping records of everything said.” This was Haldeman’s idea. A control freak, he wanted to know whatever Nixon was saying or doing with other visitors whenever Haldeman was not present. Murray said he had warned the president that the recordings were a bad idea that would bite him eventually, but Nixon shrugged it off.

As the months rolled on and the Watergate scandal broadened, more and more White House officials and Cabinet officials seemed to be caught covering up inappropriate or even illegal actions.

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During this turmoil, I was busy doing my own job. In 1973, for example, Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou agree to hold a Summit in Reyjavik, Iceland, to address US-French tension following Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. Nixon asked me to accompany him alongside Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Treasury Undersecretary, Paul Volcker, and other key officials. A special side meeting had been planned for Shultz, Volcker and I to speak with French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing. To my surprise, Nixon asked me to do the talking. Later, Shultz explained that Giscard deeply disliked Volcker but seemed to respect me.

When Kissinger and Shultz scheduled a trip to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev and other high Soviet officials, Nixon asked me to tag along. He also asked me to go to London to assist the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office in their negotiating UK joining the European Common Market in 1973. After Kissinger laid out a new Pacific security policy framework known as the “Guam Doctrine”, Nixon suggested I go to Canberra and Tokyo to begin dialogue on a potential US economic arrangement with Asia-Pacific nations, which I did.

During 1974, most of my time was spent shepherding Senate approval of the Trade Act of 1974. During this period of Congressional bargaining, Nixon gave me personal authority to sign off with Senate leadership the final drafts of that historic law.

As I was busy doing my job, I saw a building series of actions and cover-ups among the political appointees, resulting in the resignation of the Attorney General, and then successor Attorney Generals and their appointees. A Senate Committee was finally established to investigate the question: was Nixon personally involved in the cover-up? As Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

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It turned out that the president knew a lot. On 16 July, 1973, one of Nixon’s aides, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of the White House taping system in a televised interview, elevating the scandal from a curiosity to a national obsession. Senate investigators demanded the tapes; Nixon resisted, prevaricated, and dragged his feet, but eventually, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to make them available, and he complied. It then became clear that Nixon had long been complicit in the elaborate cover-up. Given the choice of impeachment or resignation, Nixon resigned in order to avoid further damage to the institution of the presidency.

Looking back, I saw catastrophic damage done to a president by a bunch of inept thugs bent on undermining his political adversaries. Sadly, I could not ask Murray for his opinion because he had been killed in a car crash in 1973. I thought Nixon should have fired everyone involved in the Watergate break-in as soon as the illegal raid on the DNC came to light. I remembered Murray’s warning to me that the White House recording system would come back to bite the president someday.

In some sense, history has been unkind to Nixon. Recently, Watergate has been compared to the raid on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, no doubt because both involved a presidential scandal followed by high-profile Congressional hearings. But Nixon was no Trump. His decision to cover up the break-in was a regrettable lapse in judgment, but when confronted with evidence that he was personally involved, Nixon chose his country over himself, resigning to avoid the impeachment of a sitting president. Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.

In my experience, Nixon was an excellent foreign-policy president. He was actively involved in foreign policy and demonstrated more strategic thinking in this regard than most of his successors, even pulling off a handful of impressive diplomatic coups. His domestic policy decisions, on the other hand, were often questionable. But in that — going by the record of America’s more recent presidents — Richard Nixon was hardly alone.

Watching the mainstream accept, or even welcome, such incivility, in defiance of public health directives that had banned even the smallest of public gatherings, was a dizzying experience. After months in which Americans had been cajoled and sometimes ordered into staying isolated and indoors, the script had suddenly changed.

It changed yet again after January 6, 2021, when “riot” no longer meant an eloquent expression of the “language of the unheard”, something to be championed or at least sympathetically understood, but a despicable betrayal of the nation, akin to treason or terrorism. For the establishment, norms around civility seemed to matter only as a weapon against the Right.

For the political scientist Alex Zamalin, however, the problem with America is simply that there is too much civility. A self-defeating desire for moderation and compromise at the expense of radical-Left politics, he argues in Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in America’s Obsession with Civility, is “everywhere you look”.

According to Zamalin, “a consensus narrative” has emerged in American elite political discourse. While he avers that without civility, our “everyday life” would be impossible, he argues that “politics is not everyday life” — it is a distinct “arena of power and struggle”. And our obsession with finding “common ground” with opponents and preserving “nonpolitical” spaces in our society is holding back anti-racist movements.

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Zamalin is certainly right that politics shouldn’t be everyday life. Preserving the political character of politics — that is, making sure that it remains an enclosed arena of competition over power — is as necessary as protecting everything outside that arena from politics’ crushing intensity. We might describe civility, rightly understood, as the formula that lets us keep politics in its proper place — as an intense but limited contest among rivals who see each other as belonging to the same community.

For Zamalin, however, civility is a central theme of American history, and it has always been an arm of white supremacy. In its historical sections, Against Civility offer a wearingly familiar story that pits villainous white racists and misguided black moderates like Booker T. Washington against virtuous radicals like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcom X.

In Zamalin’s telling, the failures of America’s black radicals are inevitably the result of their having adopted “white” standards of civility. When Martin Luther King, Jr. excluded the gay writer James Baldwin from the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights leader was, Zamalin argues, “applying the same standards of civility found in the white racism he denounced”. Two decades later, when Baldwin, in a public conversation with Audre Lorde at Hampshire College, declared that he couldn’t understand why Lorde, a lesbian feminist, insisted that black women faced struggles distinct from those of black men, he too was replicating the moral failures of whites.

It is hard to understand why prejudice against gay men or resistance to feminism among black intellectuals should require explanation in terms of white people’s moral failings, or what this has to do with civility. Unless, of course, one shares Zamalin’s implicit premise, common across a swath of the American Left, that only white people possess real moral agency. When black people err, it is through a kind of excursion into, or infection by, whiteness. Indeed, white people appear in this conception as the authentic protagonists of history, which they drive forward by their nefarious will to dominate.

The role of non-whites, by contrast, is to offer romantic but ultimately ineffective resistance. Every generation’s valiant struggles for justice are suppressed by open enemies and unreliable allies who insist on upholding civility rather than seeking racial equality. That this narrative might be insulting, given that repeatedly trying the same thing and failing is a sign of political ineptitude, doesn’t seem to compute.

Zamalin appears equally dense about recent history. In his account, the years since Trump’s election in 2016 saw elite moderates punish those who bravely spoke out against racism, such as former NFL player Colin Kaepernick. In fact, Kaepernick’s activism was lionised by the mainstream media — GQ magazine named him “Citizen of the Year” in 2017 — and led Nike to offer the ex-quarterback a multimillion dollar sponsorship and his own branded clothing line. Likewise, while the Black Lives Matter movement might seem to have imposed its slogans throughout many of America’s prestige institutions, Zamalin can only see it as a force at the margins of society, “dismissed” and “treated with disdain” by elites.

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It is certainly true that BLM has not managed to effect meaningful changes to American law enforcement, except insofar as violent protests and riots in the summer of 2020 lead many municipal governments to constrain the policing of sensitive neighbourhoods, causing a spike in crime that has led to hundreds more murders than might otherwise have taken place. But while it has been unable to achieve substantive legislative changes, BLM has been taken into the bosom of American elites, neutralising the movement’s radical potential while draping the country’s institutions in the moral authority of anti-racism.

Zamalin cannot seem to comprehend the double-sided nature of the contemporary politics of anti-racism. As an ethical discourse, it is hegemonic throughout US universities, corporations, offices of government, and even the military. At the same time, it appears totally impotent as a political force. Making sense of this would mean sounding the strange gulf between discourse and power in our era. It would mean, for example, asking how Donald Trump — who, as Zamalin recognises, flamboyantly transgressed norms of civility — managed to violate all the political pieties of the conservative establishment only to fail to achieve any of his goals once in office.

For the nationalist and anti-establishment Right, Trump’s orgy of incivility was the beginning not of its empowerment but of a detour into spectacle, in which the imaginary pleasures of “owning the libs” and annoying the media took precedence over winning actual political victories. The January 6 “insurrection” was the ultimate drama in this theatre of resistance. Clueless conspiracy theorists stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, as if, once freed from the shadowy forces holding him back, he might finally accomplish his stated goals.

No sensible person on the Left should wish such a fate for their own side. Or rather, sensible people on the Left might grieve that their own side has for years been caught up in the same fantasies of uncivil resistance, and the same unmooring from the realities of power, that now characterise the populist Right.

In the 21st century, the dramaturgies of protest against the Iraq War led by groups like Code Pink were as elaborate as they were ineffective. These protests were the template for the Left’s resistance to Trump a decade later — both were noisy, lame, and brought Nancy Pelosi to power as Speaker of the House.

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Incivility of this sort is dangerous precisely because it is impotent. Theatrical gestures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the Met Gala in a “Tax the Rich” dress and Trump’s mockery of journalists share with the BLM riots and January 6 a common perversion of the difference between politics and everyday life. Performative incivility disrupts our normal, non-political lives with attention-seeking dramatics while at the same time draining politics of its specificity and substance.

What we need is not more incivility — more self-aggrandising antinomianism by narcissists posing as radicals — but a painstaking recommitment to a kind of civility that, by keeping politics off the streets, out of schools, and out of our private lives, channels it back into contests over policy.

If we want real change, from the Right or the Left, we need to depoliticise everyday life and repoliticise politics. If we do not, we will remain stuck together in an unbounded arena of shrill, but pointless, symbolic struggle.

The overwhelming focus from authorities, political leaders and the press has become the personal and psychological dramas of the perpetrators. After every incident, the attackers’ pasts are combed and every twist and turn in their tangled biographies is retrospectively injected with significance and relevance to their (often much later) decision to kill.

Of course, the personal profiles of perpetrators are important, but the resultant disconnection of the spate of stabbings, vehicular attacks and, less frequently, shootings and bombings across Europe leaves us in danger of prematurely writing off the lingering jihadist threat.

We should know by now that militant Islamism in the West has long horizons. It was eight years between the 7/7 bombings and the murder of Lee Rigby; the following year, Isis proclaimed itself a “Caliphate” and instructed Muslims worldwide to migrate to their bloody utopia — at least 6,000 from Europe answered the call. France and Belgium suffered terribly in the years to follow, while Britain saw a wave of jihadist attacks three years later.

There is no reason that lulls should be interpreted as a waning threat, yet today attention seems elsewhere. Last October, political leaders in Britain greeted what looks like the jihadist assassination of one of their colleagues with a very serious debate on online anonymity. And only this month, thanks in part to the Americanisation of political discourse, the bloated cottage industry of which I am a part was more comfortable gorging on year-old events 3,600 miles away at the US Capitol building than discussing threats closer to home.

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In the wake of America’s withdrawal from the region, much has been made of the danger of Afghanistan once again becoming a terrorist safe haven threatening the West. Such concerns are certainly legitimate. Whenever they have controlled territory, jihadists have made the West pay: from the archipelago of training camps in Afghanistan which churned out the “Magnificent 19” hijackers, to the commandos dispatched from the Isis caliphate to gun down revellers and commuters in Paris and Brussels.

The more urgent concern, however, should be on Europe, and how the jihadist movement reconstitutes itself inside the continents borders after the Islamic State. The principal concern for security services has been the threat posed by Isis returnees, and with good reason. There is nothing new about Europeans travelling to jihadist conflict zones, but more travelled to Syria and Iraq for jihad than every previous jihadist insurgency combined. Not all made it home, but many did or will in future.

Available evidence does suggest that only a minority of foreign fighter returnees attack at home, but this should not necessarily be a cause for complacency. The statistics alone do not account for the constant ideological transformation and evolution of militant Islamism in the West: when commuters were murdered in London in 2005, or when Mohammed Merah executed Jewish schoolchildren and soldiers in France in 2012, these acts sparked internal debates on legitimacy within salafi-jihadist circles. Today, thanks to the work of salafi-jihadist scholars, there would be no such debate.

Nor do low rates of attack tell the whole story of the impact of returnees. Each generation of returnees from conflict overseas has successfully helped to cultivate a new and larger generation of extremists. Isis hotspots in Europe often directly overlap with recruitment hotspots for jihadist insurgencies from decades ago. If the Isis generation is able to socialise a new, more violent, more extreme generation of salafi-jihadists then it may be years, or even decades, until we feel the full force of the most recent returnee wave.

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That isn’t to say these jihadis are driven by pure rage and bloodlust, reflexively likely to slaughter the first infidel they see. Like any terrorist group or movement, jihadists learn from their tactical and strategic mistakes, and some believe they overplayed their hand with the attacks of 2015-17. Many believed a tipping point had been reached, and that such bloodletting would spark the civil conflict on the continent they desired, in doing so drastically and disgracefully overestimating their support within Western Muslim communities. Meanwhile, the attacks on the West also served to accelerate the aerial bombardment of the “caliphate” on the ground, only hastening its demise. This helps explain why the main jihadist groups are no longer claiming or orchestrating major attacks in the West: it isn’t only a sign of weakness, but of the movement adapting to realities.

Hakim el-Karoui and Benjamin Hodayé’s recent extensive study of European militants suggested two possible scenarios for the future of jihadism in the West: the first, as hinted at above, sees the veterans of the Syrian jihad and their future cohorts turn their crosshairs primarily towards Europe, rather than some distant war zone.

The second, arguably more unsettling, prospect, is the jihadist population in Europe reconstitutes into a social movement, accelerating what European governments term separatism. At the very least, it’s possible a faction of Europe’s salafi-jihadis remain committed to mass casualty violence against civilians and their dreams of a caliphate. Recognising the shortcomings of ISIS need not lessen commitment to the utopian ideology: “real communism has never been tried.”

In this scenario, salafi-jihadis would establish closed communities withdrawn from and hostile towards the ignorance and sin of wider society. Perhaps they would only occasionally lash out, but more people would certainly die in Europe over ‘blasphemy’ and cartoons. There is precedent here in the monastic communities established in some of the global jihadi hotspots, from Toulouse and the surrounding countryside to the isolated salafi-jihadi communes in the Caribbean.

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Another French academic, Hugo Micheron, recently spoke to dozens of imprisoned jihadis and some hinted at this change in strategy. Instead of simply radicalising others for attacks, their aim is rather the total homogenisation of Western Muslim belief under their interpretation (the only true Islam, as they see it), before encouraging or enforcing separation and withdrawal from the surrounding unbelief. The objective, according to the incarcerated extremists, is to insert a salafi-jihadist project at the heart of Europe instead of a faraway battlefield. If this strain of thought becomes dominant then, as Micheron writes, jihadism becomes a social, intellectual and political challenge “before it ever picks up a Kalashnikov”.

For now, Western Jihadis have gone quiet. But it could prove a major miscalculation to interpret this lull as jihadism finally on the wane, to be usurped by some other ideological challenge. As expert Suzanne Raine recently warned, when terrorists have gone quiet in the past, it usually means they are planning. The challenge is syncing the terrorist planning cycle with the resource and short attention cycle of Western governments and publics.

Perhaps we’re lucky that many of Europe’s most committed jihadis and thinkers — ones with real experience and connections — are in prison, or stranded in Syria. Thus the residual attacks are perpetrated by losers and the misfits without links to formal cells or networks, so we put it down to mental health and soothe ourselves into believing this is all that is left of Western jihad. But those in prison will soon get out and others will make it back from Syria. They now know better than to blunder into more confrontations with Western states from a position of weakness. A movement that thinks in centuries will not rush into its next move.

Of course, the jihadist movement could collapse or fade into irrelevance. It’s just that there’s no reason to think it will, and that all the indicators — mostly from historical precedent — point the other way. Jihadis are not some nightmarish omnipotent force as they were too often portrayed during the Isis years. But while there is no call for alarmism, there may well be cause for pessimism.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

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Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

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None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

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More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

Yet when, towards the end of Trump’s presidency, a radical friend of mine told me that he thought America was headed for civil war, I dismissed the argument out of hand. Why? How? It takes a unique confluence of mistakes and crises for civil war to appear possible, and an even longer list of mistakes, crises and elite screw-ups for them to happen.

But 2021 is a different world to 2015. Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill. It’s entering the fringes of polite society. Some support this ‘national divorce’; others are opposed to it. Others claim they would actually prefer to declare war on their recalcitrant countrymen rather than let them go their own way unmolested.

None of this morbid interest in civil conflict is irrational, given the times. The year 2021 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another. Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.

Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order. Still, the question to be answered at the end of the day is quite simple: how likely is civil war, or national divorce, or a ‘troubles scenario’ really? To answer this question accurately, a few misconceptions about it being impossible have to be dealt with.

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One of the most worrisome aspects of contemporary American political discussion is the sense one often gets that many participants are possessed by a thinly-veiled bloodlust. Sometimes, that bloodlust is not even thinly-veiled; after the unarmed USAF veteran Ashley Babbit was fatally shot through a locked door in the Capitol building, many anonymous (and some less anonymous) commentators intimated that perhaps the problem with police violence in America wasn’t that officers were shooting and killing too many unarmed people — but rather that maybe they just weren’t killing enough of them. Following a wave of destructive riots that tore through many cities in the United States last year, this turn toward open celebration of equally useless violence when it is visited on the enemy team speaks to a dangerous sort of polarisation.

From this sort of bloodlust flows another very common assertion: that a civil war, if waged on American soil, would be over quickly, and lead to a fairly effortless massacre of any insurrectionists in flyover America. The idea here is that the US military is so advanced, and has so many tanks, gunships, fuel air bombs, and drones, that the federal government is simply assured of victory. As such, a civil war is an unlikely or impossible scenario, given the dramatic imbalance of power between the state and even a numerically large, dissatisfied internal population.

But this is a dangerous misconception. While the US military is indeed powerful and lavishly funded, it is a military designed to fight other states. Warfare between states is bound by rules and regulations; it is based on consent. This might seem a strange assertion to make, given that a country cannot just decline a war declaration from an enemy, but it holds true. There’s a formal or informal understanding of who is an actual combatant and who is not.

In contrast, warfare in primitive or tribal societies does not make any distinction between a civilian and a soldier. There are just enemies; ambushing and killing a 12-year-old girl drawing water at the creek is seen as normal as killing an adult warrior. This is where the European habit of calling uncivilised peoples “savages” comes from; rather than merely being an expression of racist chauvinism, Europeans were in fact oftentimes shocked by the habit of Native Americans and other peoples to ‘not play by the rules’.

But playing by the rules is a mug’s game. An insurgency in America has about as much reason as the Native Americans once did to follow the rules of their enemies; they are under no compulsion to wear blinking strobe lights to make themselves easier for the drones to target. And that simple fact means that a counterinsurgency effort in the US is almost certainly doomed to fail.

In counterinsurgency warfare, everything that makes the US armed forces great — high-tech weapon platforms with immense destructive power — are not just useless, but counterproductive. A tank parked outside a shopping mall in Idaho will either spend its time shooting at nothing, or be at a very high risk of killing innocent American civilians for the high crime of ‘looking suspicious’. Droning American weddings, like Afghan ones, does very little to advance the goals of a counterinsurgency. If anything, it only makes the relatives of the dead more likely to fight.

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The US armed forces are also at least an order of magnitude too small to do the job effectively. During Operation Banner, the British military deployed at most 20,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland to keep a lid on that wayward province. The US armed forces consist of about 1.3 million active duty personnel, but this is spread out over five branches (Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard), and only a small minority of military personnel are actually combat troops. It is thus very unlikely that the armed forces could scramble more than 100,000 regulars willing to do the job of holding an M4 carbine and patrolling down the main street of Anytown, Texas. To put that into perspective, Northern Ireland is about 2% the size of Texas.

Then there’s the fact that the most significant political split in America is between rural areas and coastal metropoles, and the armed forces are reliant on the very areas it would be tasked with policing as far as recruiting soldiers goes. Red America is overrepresented within the armed forces, and this won’t change. As such, the US doesn’t just have too few soldiers, it has potentially unreliable ones, and the more brutality is used against recalcitrant red states, the more these soldiers will be ordered to fight and kill their own friends and family — a recipe for serious mutiny and disobedience.

Finally, there is an even greater elephant in the room. In the case of an American drone pilot accidentally blowing up a wedding in Afghanistan, the Afghan relatives of the slain have very little recourse. If an American drone pilot blows up an American wedding, however, that drone pilot and his or her family lives in the United States. Given the likely unreliability of some significant parts of the armed forces, the names and addresses of the most hated butchers are unlikely to stay a secret for long.

In Northern Ireland, for example, the provisional IRA not only attacked soldiers; they made a habit of assassinating the officers, commanders and politicians both for revenge and as a display of might. From Lord Mountbatten to a near-miss against Margaret Thatcher herself, to a score of less well-known targets, the IRA illustrates just how difficult it is to protect against an enemy that can simply choose to not wear a uniform before their enemies visit.

Now, with that all that said, how likely is it that there will be some sort of civil conflict in the near or mid future for the United States?

Unfortunately, the correct answer here may very well be that it is not terribly unlikely. What is significant about America today is not that it’s nearing its 250^th birthday, but rather the clear and advanced signs of sickness in the body politic. The ranks of America’s military are now sullen and battered after 20 years of failed nation-building, while its higher officer corps is increasingly alienated from the world of its grunts, mirroring that same cultural, economic and social divide that is currently poisoning civilian life in the US.

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The legitimacy of its elite has been shaken repeatedly, and faith in the electoral process itself is now rapidly declining among large segments of the electorate. America is currently a malarial swamp of strange new faiths, creeds, soothsayers and itinerant prophets; from Q to vaccine scientism to various forms of psuedo-gnosticism centered around trans people. To a student of history, this should also be a familiar — and quite ominous — sign: France in the 1780s had its own scientism and mesmerism, and Russia in the 1910s and 1980s was rife with soothsayers and itinerant preachers of new strange faiths.

Most ominously of all, however, looms the growing supply crisis. This crisis would be tolerable if it merely implied a lack of variety at the grocery store. In such a case, 2020s America might just have ushered in a new golden age of Soviet-style political jokes. But it is also creating havoc in the productive economy itself, denying farmers the spare parts to run their harvesters and car manufacturers the metals they need to make cars. The longer the crisis goes on, the more broken the economy will become, and the more painful the necessary reforms will be, once America’s elites truly wake up to the danger.

If there is one time throughout history where civil wars are actually likely to occur, it is precisely when a delegitimated elite undertakes necessary reforms after letting underlying problems fester for decades. That is when states are at their weakest, and when they are vulnerable to the worst forms of internal disasters. Sadly, that might just be where America is headed today.

“It was an awful crime,” the British journalist Andrew Anthony wrote later, “but it was also, as its perpetrators would have known, an awesome televisual event.” Anthony, for his part, was in a bar in London’s Soho, transfixed to a television screen with a gasping crowd. “There was something disturbingly pornographic about the need to see more and different angles of the impact over and over again,” he noted. “I’ve never understood the question: ‘Where were you when [fill in the significant historical event] happened?’ Because the answer is almost always: ‘In front of the television.’”

Now, two decades on from the attack, the answer is almost always: on a smartphone, into which television and much else, including the spectacle of international terrorism, has since disappeared.

Terrorism, too, has changed dramatically since 9/11, and in ways that are closely related to the rise of the smartphone and the global proliferation of social media. Most obviously, its style has become more immediate and intimate. Had the 9/11 hijackers possessed smartphones, we wouldn’t have had to rely on network television for footage and speculative commentary.

The hijackers would have live-streamed their depredations inside the planes in real-time, disseminating the footage on Facebook, just as Brenton Tarrant did in 2019 when he slaughtered 51 Muslim worshippers in two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. We would have seen their wolfish smiles as they terrorised the passengers and attacked the pilots and flight attendants. We would have heard them shout “Allahu Akbar” moments before the impact, and we would have seen cockpit footage of the planes plunging into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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But of course we saw and heard none of this, and Martin Amis could only write about how “That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien”. But what about the chaos inside the plane, as it came, in Amis’s words, “sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty”?

On 11 September, 2001, we could only imagine it — or, mercifully, try not to. Today, we don’t have to imagine what it’s like to be in the midst of a terrorist atrocity, because terrorists are all-too-eager to show us their POV. Nor do we have to imagine what it’s like when a prisoner is beheaded: thanks to ISIS, we can now see this up close and in High Definition. Like gonzo porn, terrorism’s new ruling credo is to show everything. Indeed, terrorists have become auteurs of a horrifying new type of theatre, where the myth of the snuff movie becomes a grim reality.

Yet paradoxically, at the same, terrorism has also become less spectacular. When Osama bin Laden dispatched the 19 hijackers who pulled off the 9/11 attacks, he knew that the whole world would be watching, and it was. Indeed, he didn’t just want to murder vast numbers of innocent people, but to create what the sociologist Douglas Kellner has called a “mega-spectacle”.

And he was unquestionably successful in that. On NBC, within minutes of the second plane slamming into the South Tower, one eyewitness, gasping for breath, told news anchor Matt Lauer via a telephone line: “It looks like a movie… I’ve never seen anything like it.” Lauer concurred, describing the footage as “the most shocking video tape I’ve ever seen”.

No terrorist group since 9/11 has carried out an attack of such lethality and ambition or produced a propaganda image as symbolically potent as the collapse of the Twin Towers. This, chiefly, is because the soft targets of civil aviation have decidedly hardened: today, you can’t take a hip-flask on a plane, let alone Mace and a four-inch blade. Mass surveillance has also made it much harder for terrorists to plan and coordinate large-scale attacks.

More crucially, the US invasion of Afghanistan, which killed nearly 80% of al Qaeda’s core members in that country, meant that the group no longer had a sanctuary in which to plan future terrorist attacks. With bin Laden and his chief lieutenants scattered and on the run, al Qaeda’s terrorism shape-shifted into something less terrorising: what Marc Sageman called “leaderless jihad”.

This was the jihad of the self-financed and self-trained terrorist whose headquarters was his bedroom. It was the jihad of the “jihadi next door”, who, to their neighbours, were just ordinary guys, if a little quiet and reserved. While these “inspired” killers proved deadly, they lacked the skills, resources and support to wreak havoc on the scale of 9/11; their jihad was more squalid than spectacular.

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In the summer of 2014, when ISIS rose to power in Syria and Iraq, that all threatened to change: the leaderless jihadis now had a leader (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and territory (the caliphate) to profess allegiance to and defend. Some of them returned to Europe, carrying out large-scale attacks in Paris and Brussels. Jihadi terrorism, for a short period, became “directed” again.

Even so-called “lone wolves” who had never been to Syria or Iraq could communicate with ISIS operatives online and receive operational guidance and support from them. Others, who had neither been to ISIS-controlled territory nor received guidance from the group, nevertheless took “inspiration” from it, using cars, trucks, or knives to conduct killing sprees against random civilians in Western cities.

Today, this seems to be the dominant form of jihadi terrorism in the West: low-tech, amateurish attacks devoid of any real logic or political rationale. Indeed, this type of terrorism seems more performative and personal than instrumental and political.

What, for example, was the point of Usman Khan’s rampage at Fishmonger’s Hall in London in November 2019? What set of political demands did Khan have? Given that Khan’s violence was directed at those associated with the “Learning Together” programme, a liberal-minded prison education initiative he took part in, and given his desire to become a martyr, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Khan’s motives were more personal than political or a complex combination of both. Perhaps terrorism has always been like this, but in its current incarnation it seems that the gap between terrorist atrocities and real-world politics has never been so far apart.

Yet as terrorism in the West has become more banal and less lethal, the response to it, in contrast, has become insistently more hysterical. ISIS, as the recent attack in Kabul has demonstrated, remains a potent threat in Muslim-majority countries, but its military defeat in Syria and Iraq has massively hampered its ability to direct and inspire attacks in the West.

This has left a large void which our over-bloated security state and counter-extremism industry has tried to fill by amplifying the threat of far-Right groups. Not so long ago they were sounding the alarm about the dangers of “slick” online ISIS propaganda, and how vulnerable young people were being radicalised by it. Today, widely respected extremism scholars are sounding the alarm about far-Right online “echo-chambers” and writing feverish articles on: “How parents can learn to recognize online radicalization and prevent tragedy – in 7 minutes”.

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While far-Right violence is certainly a serious issue in America and Europe, it’s nonsensical to compare it to the far greater global threat of jihadism – or to exclude 9/11 from your calculus in an effort to show, as one terrorism expert recently did, that “excluding the coordinated attacks of 9/11, domestic right-wing terrorism has caused more harm to American citizens at home than radical Islamist attacks over the past two decade”.

It’s also hysterical to believe that far-Right terrorists are using the internet to turn children into white supremacist terrorists, or to think that a meme or an ironic joke “can be a gateway to extremist views”. This is part of a deeper confusion, where the counter-extremism industry, instead of focusing on specific violent groups and their kinetic threat level and capabilities, has sought to expand its remit (and potential revenue) by inventing useless and nebulous categories like “hateful extremism” and “extremist narratives”.

The cartoonish notion that terrorists are “hateful” has somehow caught on among policy-makers post-9/11, but it has little to do with how and why people decide to kill themselves and others in service to a sacred cause. While hate and reductive thinking are clearly bad, they’re useless as predictors of terrorism, which, as every terrorism scholar knows, is rare and committed by very few individuals.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of today’s confusion about terrorism came after the breaching of the Capitol Building on 6 January, 2021. “This is terrorism,” scholar John Horgan gravely tweeted on the day of the riots. Kathleen Belew, another expert, was similarly emphatic and self-certain, tweeting on the day of the riots and about the rioters: “They are certainly anti-democratic, since they are using terrorism to attack fair electoral process. The word you want, I think, is fascist.”

But whatever happened on 6 January, it wasn’t terrorism; if by terrorism we mean, in accordance with standard non-politicised definitions, violence aimed at civilians to achieve some political goal. No civilians were deliberately targeted and harmed in the Capitol building, except for one of the rioters who was shot dead by the police. According to the FBI, the motives of the vast majority of the rioters were unclear since they had not given any thought to what they would do once they were inside the Capitol building, and there was scant evidence of any plot or coordination among them.

The world has changed markedly since 9/11, and in no small part because of it. Terrorism remains a potent global threat. But we should not overstate the threat, still less pretend that people who disgust us with their ideas and hatreds are really terrorists.

“Terrorism is theatre,” the seasoned terrorism expert Brian M. Jenkins observed more than 40 years ago. He was referring to how terrorist atrocities “are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press”. He was right about that, but I doubt that even someone as prescient and sharp as Jenkins could have envisaged an act of terrorism as theatrically spectacular as 9/11.

Today, however, terrorism is still a spectacle, while no longer being all that spectacular. Indeed, while terrorists continue to horrify us with their violence and contempt for life, most — like the fool who tried to blow up a group of gendarmes on the Champs-Élysées in 2017, but only managed to asphyxiate himself after the gas canister in the car he was driving failed to properly explode — will be half-remembered and enjoy no infamy whatsoever.

If you were Priti Patel, of course, this was, if not exactly a desirable ending, certainly a helpful illustration of what the Policing and Crime Bill can claim to be defending the public from. Of course the right to protest is a sacrosanct part of an open democracy, she said; but not this thuggishness, not this criminality, not this violence. Whoever argues against the bill now — and there are serious arguments to be made — will have to make their case against the image of a police van blazing in the night while protesters cheered the destruction.

But while you can make a cynical argument that the scenes in Bristol serve Patel’s more authoritarian interests, you can’t accuse her of having willed them into being. There was violence in Bristol because some people came out wanting violence, and they got it. Protests attract a kind of hanger-on who don’t truly care about the politics, but love a ruck. They don’t usually have anything as ostentatious as a homemade spear to give themselves away, but they’re always there, a shadow of aggro trailing every left-wing demonstration.

Violence is exciting. That crackle in the air, the surge of adrenaline: it feels good. The pure purpose in making a weapon of yourself. The very few times I’ve successfully faced down a physical confrontation (and being five-foot-one and female, it’s not exactly something I’ve gone looking for) it’s always left me shaken but elated. Staying on my feet when muggers tried to snatch my handbag, or shouting something sarcastic at masked anti-feminists who’d turned out to disrupt a talk I was giving then scampering to safety — those are things I remember with a shiver of pleasure as well as fear.

So I suppose I can understand a little of what drives the troublemaking element. I can understand, too, why some people are so infatuated with violence that they look for ways to justify it. Someone broadly supportive of the Bristol protests has two options when it comes to the subsequent riots: you can defend the principle of dissent while deploring the bad actors, which sounds mealy-mouthed and prissy even if it is right; or you could go big and argue that not only is the violence justified, but it actually further demonstrates the justice of the cause.

It’s that latter approach that you’ll find on the far-Left of British politics. After the 2011 riots, there was an impulse to weave the looting and destruction into a story about the deep suffering in British society: if people were compelled to act so outrageously, went the reasoning, they must have something powerful to be outraged by. One of the more bizarre examples of this was the claim that, because most of those arrested in the riots were men, they must have been revolting against the “feminisation” of the economy — as though it isn’t always men who commit most of the violent crime.

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In the same spirit, this week saw hard-Left outlet the Canary claiming that: “The people who besieged Bridewell Police station were fighting against state violence and authoritarianism, standing up for freedom and for the oppressed.” In this circular logic, the fact of the riots proves that the riots were legitimate: the violence of the rioters is evidence that they were reacting to the violence of the state.

Sisters Uncut complained that “the media drew a contrast between a moral majority and a small number of violent protesters”, and then set themselves resolutely on the side of the rioters: “The stigmatisation of protesters is a tactic of division that we won’t stand for. It is a fearful response by a state that thrives on division and scarcity.” Meanwhile, Novara hosted a discussion about the “utility of riots”: perhaps this had been counterproductive in the short term, it was mused, but would go on to drive a wider movement.

It’s always easier to see the “utility” in the violent actions of someone you suspect might be on your side, of course. None of these outlets were offering apologias for the Capitol rioters in Washington at the beginning of the year: the violence then was not obvious evidence of a populace confronting a state’s oppressive force, but of entitlement and delusion. Instead, the Bristol riots were blessed with comparison to the Poll Tax riots, the prime example of explicable political resistance expressed as destructive impulse.

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The point here is not that the Left is uniquely enamoured of its own aggression, but that the hard Left is labouring under a specific kind of hypocrisy — a hypocrisy that allows people to claim to be against violence while at the same time celebrating, relishing and instrumentalising it. It is a recipe for bad faith. It means never having to ask the question “is this violence politically justified?”, because you’ve always already decided that any violence is really the responsibility of the “other side”; and if the other side hasn’t committed anything close to actual violence, you can always upgrade words or even beliefs to the status of “symbolic violence”.

Whatever “your side” does is vindicated in advance, so long as you can make it part of your preferred story. The stories can be flexible here, because they have little to do with principle: the only principle is the pleasure of destruction, the longing to warm your politics in the glow of arson.

As for the people who actually have to live in the wreckage, well, they hardly count: after the 2011 riots, the Left fostered a particular strand of contempt for local residents who went out to tidy their own streets. (“Symbolic cleansing”, one blogger called it, as though the proper Left-wing thing to do was pick your way through broken glass in your neighbourhood indefinitely.)

The ecstasy of violence in Bridewell will probably have ensured support for the Policing and Crime Bill, but the point of the riots was clearly never to persuade parliament. The point of the riots was the riots themselves, the pleasure of destruction, the joy of the flames, the satisfying crunch of a body against another body. The point of the riots was to claim violence, and the point of those defending them is to turn that violence to their own ends.

The case of Britain’s youngest ever terror offender is profoundly disturbing, reigniting serious concerns over young people and their vulnerabilities to radicalisation. But it also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on how we talk about terrorism, particularly in the highly politicised context of today’s post-Trump world.

In a saner time, I suspect we would hesitate to call a 16-year-old who has not actually committed any acts of political violence a terrorist at all. The boy in question was convicted under the “encouragement” and “possession” instruments in British terrorism legislation (two and ten counts respectively).As serious as this is, it isn’t terrorism as we conventionally understand it. It isn’t, for example, the same as carrying out a suicide bombing at a pop concert, or beheading a school teacher.

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But even if one accepts that possessing bomb-making manuals and sharing violently hateful messages on WhatsApp is terrorism, one would surely hesitate to call a disturbed and misguided 16-year-old who didn’t realise he had recruited an undercover police officer a “terrorist mastermind”. My colleague Keith Hayward, a professor of criminology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has a word for this species of rhetorical slippage: adultification – the application of adult categories to those who are not yet adults. (Interestingly, the term is commonly used by sociologists to describe the racial bias against black schoolgirls in America, where they are unfairly viewed as more mature and “less innocent” than their white counterparts.)

The sensationalisation of terrorism is, of course, nothing new. But the coverage of Britain’s youngest “terror teen” intimates at a decisive shift in reportorial protocols around terrorism. This shift doesn’t reflect any real changes in the behaviour and threat level of terrorists, but is instead a direct consequence of the ever-tightening choke-hold of progressive taboos around race and Islam in contemporary western societies.

These taboos demand that we talk about terrorism in two distinct ways: on the one hand, we catastrophise its far-right variant, ramping up the agency and vileness of its perpetrators; while on the other, we infantilise its jihadi incarnation, playing down the agency of its instigators and forbidding any discussion of the religious motivations behind their violence.

As part of this juggling act, we are required to pretend that far-Right terrorism in America is far more problematic than jihadi extremism (this isn’t to deny the significant recent uptick in lethal far-right terrorism in America). We are also asked to believe that while the ideology of the far-right is a primary driver of terrorism worldwide, the ideology of violent jihadism and its links to fringe interpretations of the Islamic faith has little or nothing to do with jihadi violence and conflict. This hypocrisy amounts to “ideology for thee but not for me”, as Graeme Wood has acidly put it.

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Take, by way of illustration, the case of the three East London schoolgirls who left Britain in February 2015 to join ISIS in Syria. The response that followed was hysterical in many ways, but the girls and their families were given a mostly fair and lenient hearing. The consensus was that the girls — the youngest of whom, Shamima Begum, was 15 — were victims who had been “groomed” by manipulative male online recruiters and bewitched by dangerously seductive ISIS propaganda.

For example, Sara Khan, the current head of the UK’s Commission for Countering Extremism, wrote that “just like child abusers groom their victims online and persuade them to leave their homes and meet them, male jihadists contact women through social media and online chatrooms, and build trust with them over time”. That consensus, however, was wrong. The real-life and online peer-groups in which they were radicalised were strictly women-only; the so-called online “groomers” were in fact other ISIS-supporting women. And, of course, the vast majority of the pro-ISIS British girls were on the verge of womanhood, making the comparison to sexual grooming somewhat overblown. They may have been young, but it seems misguided to deny them any sense of agency.

Yet even when, aged 19, Begum surfaced in northern Syria and boasted to a reporter that seeing a severed head in a bin didn’t really faze her — she told another that the Manchester Arena suicide bombing was justified — many liberals remained firmly in her corner, insisting that she was still a victim of grooming, and that she should be given a second chance.

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This urge is noticeably less strong among progressives when it comes to far-Right terrorists. And I suspect this points to a politicisation of terrorism that makes it almost impossible to talk about it in a coherent and serious way.

Traditionally, the liberal-left consensus on terrorism was founded on three principles. The first concerned the fundamental illegitimacy of the word itself; it was, they said, simply a label used by the powerful to demonise and control the weak. It was a term and tool of repression, a way of legitimising the ever-widening net of social control against dissidents and rebels with a righteous cause.

The second part was concerned with the legitimacy of terrorism itself and the moral standing of the terrorist. While some — notably Leon Trotsky and Frantz Fanon — sought to brazenly justify “red terror” as a weapon of the last resort in times of asymmetrical conflict, others were more equivocal, condemning the murder of innocents while at the same time making sure to situate such atrocities into a wider context that made it morally understandable (“This is wrong, but…”). From this perspective, the terrorist was not a monster, but instead a misguided soul who was “pushed” or “driven” to commit atrocious deeds. And whatever else he was, he was essentially forgivable; he was still one of us.

This is connected to a third and final aspect of this liberal-left consensus, which relates to the way that society should respond to acts of political violence. It took the form of the following cautionary wisdom: do not over-react to terrorism. Doing so not only tramples on human rights and sets in place a dangerous precedent for further rights-infringements, but it also risks alienating and further radicalising people, provoking a lethal “blowback”.

Much of this worldview remains in place on the liberal-left, but in recent years it has been brought into conflict with the emergence of a second, contradictory consensus. According to this new paradigm, there is actually nothing wrong with the label “terrorism”; what’s wrong is that it’s selectively applied to Muslims and other minority groups and not applied nearly enough to the white majority.

Moreover, the “real” terrorists — whether they’re storming the US Capitol or hiding on neo-Nazi online forums — really are monsters and deserve not an ounce of forgiveness. Indeed, they should be purged from the social order. And anyone who tries to contextualise or understand, still less give a platform to, these terrorists should be roundly condemned.

But the problem for liberal-leftists is that this consensus cannot co-exist with the other one. You can’t implore forgiveness for Shamima Begum while at the same time scream for the metaphorical lynching of the Capitol rioters.

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None of this would be much of a problem if the pathologies and contortions of the liberal-left’s terrorism discourse simply remained there, but since this political tribe is now ascendant in elite institutions in America and parts of Europe, it’s becoming a problem for the rest of us. Indeed, so culturally prevalent and deep are the progressive taboos around race and Islam in the West that it has become difficult to talk about terrorism in a sane and rational way. Even traditional centres of power — like the police and civil service — are seemingly incapable of talking plainly about the threats we face. Last summer, for instance, the Met Police considered dropping the term “Islamist” when describing terror attacks carried out by jihadists.

Meanwhile, anyone who tries to understand the root causes of far-Right rancour is dismissed as a rank defender of the far-Right. The investigative journalist Naama Kates, for example, has told me that she regularly receives censure from so-called progressives for giving a platform to misogynistic “involuntary celibates” on her superb Incel podcast; Kates’s offence is that she uses a methodology called empathy to better understand incels.

Moreover, if you’re not Muslim and study or report on jihadist violence, you run the risk of being accused of Islamophobia. Even Thomas Hegghammer, one of the world’s leading experts on jihadism, has recently been accused of perpetuating “stale and harmful notions of Muslim essentialism” — all because his focus on the conservative, non-violent and strongly religious cultural practices of otherwise violent Muslim militants is regarded as perpetuating a dangerous conflation between conservative Muslims and jihadists. Which is a bit like saying that if a person points out that Tommy Robinson eats dirty fry-ups, they are smearing all fry-up-eating Brits with the taint of white supremacy.

Plainly, this is nonsense. But it is also dangerous nonsense. The implication is that any reference to the Islamic religiosity of jihadists is off-limits. And the result, as we can see, is the creation of a schizoid terrorism discourse that leaves us dangerously ill-equipped to face common threats to peace and security.

We desperately need to better understand why and how people — from all backgrounds and faiths and ethnicities — embrace ideologies that command and license them to kill other people for political ends. And we must try to do so with an open mind and in a spirit of curious inquiry, accepting our findings wherever they lead. To abdicate this responsibility from fear of offending the shallow pieties of what John McWhorter calls “the elect” is not only cowardly, but ultimately dangerous, given the very real threats that menace us.

First, a surreal copy of Baghdad’s Green Zone was built in central Washington to prevent any of them ever taking selfies in Nancy Pelosi’s office ever again. Then a consensus began to develop among America’s elites — a “Domestic War on Terror” must be launched against the Trumpists.

Michel Foucault would have been amused by the situation. In 1976 the Frenchman delivered a lecture, Society Must be Defended, about the relationship between war and the state. What stigmata, he asked, does warfare leave on the national body?

In the case of European colonial powers, Foucault identified a unique type of scar tissue. Colonial practices had a “boomerang effect” on Western states; Europeans experimented with “techniques” of control on the Imperial periphery, which went on to influence “apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” in the West itself. You must not forget, Foucault told his audience, that one result of colonialism “was that the West could practise something resembling colonisation, or an internal colonialism on itself.”

It was not quite an original thought. Foucault may have been inspired by Hannah Arendt, who, in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), draws a fairly straight line between Cecil Rhodes’ activities in South Africa and Adolf Hitler’s in Eastern Europe. Arendt was the first to use the phrase “imperial boomerang effect”, whereby authoritarian forms of social control, developed in colonies, are eventually turned on oppressed groups in the homeland. Totalitarianism was the consequence.

Imperialism, Foucault and Arendt thought, whirls back on itself. Given the right pressures, a Green Zone in Baghdad can become a Green Zone in Washington. The War on Terror comes home.

In the days after 9/11, Foucault wasn’t being consulted much by the architects of the new war. “Never again” was the phrase on their minds, not “imperial boomerang effect”. The Bush administration was laying the groundwork for policies like enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, mass digital and telephone surveillance, arrest without warrant — and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Partly from disgust with these policies, Americans elected Barack Obama in 2008 to end them. Here was someone who had read Foucault — in a failed attempt to get a girlfriend — in college, sitting in the Oval Office. In a 2013 speech, Obama warned that force could not be deployed everywhere extremist ideologies took root. Perpetual war would “alter our country in troubling ways.”

As was so often the case, Obama eloquently outlined a problem, and never quite solved it. The War on Terror rippled out into new frontiers — Yemen, Syria, Libya, Niger. He deployed his special forces in at least seventy countries. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, was killed by a drone strike in 2011. This execution without a trial — even if it was ordered by the former president of the Harvard Law Review — was an extraordinary violation of the Constitution.

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Americans wanted a reduction in the number of terrorists who intended to do them harm. But blanket judgments based on pervasive fear took them somewhere else, and the scope of the anti-terror leviathan is enormous: nearly a million contracted security personnel; at least 33 facilities for these top-secret intelligence workers with the floorspace of three Pentagons; technology that can hack Angela Merkel’s phone and launch four Hellfire missiles at a Yemeni marriage procession from 60,000ft in the air. The US government appears to have given up on building infrastructure for its citizens — but it can spare $1.7 billion for the National Security Agency to build a data storage facility in Utah the size of seventeen football fields. When completed, it will store the virtual equivalent of 500 quintillion pages of text.

Panopticon doesn’t do that justice. The administrators of America’s security state have engineered a hideously overgrown octopus, entangled in everything digital, that can stretch and sniff in all directions, that can ooze into every crack and crevice of society. The NSA knows what porn Muslim radicals watched, and nobody but Edward Snowden and a few difficult journalists really seemed to care.

Perhaps these “apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” could be justified if they prevented further terrorist attacks on US soil.  As President Bush was so fond of saying throughout his first term: “We are fighting them over there so that we won’t have to fight them here at home.” And at least the hardest edges of it fell on the borderlands of the Empire.

But following 6 January the boomerang is arrowing back to the Imperial centre. The atmosphere at the FBI earlier this month, according to Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s program on extremism, was like the aftermath of 9/11. Across American media War and Terror analogies flourished.

A former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo called one Republican congressman who supported the “Stop the Steal” rally more guilty than “95%” of his old detainees. “It’s time we start a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists,” he tweeted. Former FBI director James Comey declared that homegrown terrorists were a bigger threat to America than Islamic extremists. His former deputy, Andrew McCabe, compared those who stormed the Capitol to the Americans who trickled into Syria to join ISIS. Retired Army General Stanley McChrystal had his own analogy. The rampaging Trumpists were an insurgency — just like Al-Qaeda in Iraq. John Brennan, the ex-CIA chief, agreed: this was a homegrown insurgent movement.

Some ideas of how to extirpate it were less bloodthirsty than others. Katie Couric, former co-anchor of NBC’s Today, only wanted to “deprogram” the rioters. Instagram’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez merely wanted to “reign [sic] in our media environment” to combat “disinformation and misinformation”. On ABC’s light entertainment chat show, The View, Meghan McCain admitted that she wasn’t against sending the Trumpists to Gitmo. “They should be treated the same way we treat Al-Qaeda.” Her father — who loved war — would have been proud.

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There was action as well as talk. Trump was muted while he was still President. Parler was removed from the internet entirely. The largest gun forum in the world was taken offline. Corporations ranging from AirBnB to JP Morgan paused or blocked donations to Republicans who queried November’s election result. The Biden administration made passing a law against domestic terrorism a priority on January 7th. Career liberals, progressives and questionable men who gave the approval for “black sites” in Pakistan cheered all this on. The boomerang wasn’t heading towards them. “Techniques of control” — the kind of digital purging that was a feature of the war against ISIS — were flowing back home.

Had Americans forgotten where secrecy had taken Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan? Did they remember the blowback that administration had generated by underwriting a jihad against the USSR, or the generation of radicals (and the flow of migrants to Europe) that were the dividend of Bush’s War on Terror?

No, apparently not. The connection between actions and their consequences is still thinly perceived. “Sweep it all up” Donald Rumsfeld had mused the night the towers fell, “things related and not.”

The MAGA rioters, the QAnon cultists, the whole Trumpian miscellany, was, according to one (unsympathetic) terror academic, “waking up” the actual Deep State, not the one in their conspiratorial nightmares. All those billions and all that hardware may be trained on them. “Terrorism is terrorism” one official familiar with the Biden administration’s security plans told Politico. QAnon will get the Al-Qaeda treatment. The final irony is that those who are being swept up are themselves a legacy of the War on Terror.

Five people died in the Capitol riot. One of them was Ashli Babbit. She’d served fourteen years in the Air Force, and in the livestream she made as she walked towards the Capitol, referred to Trump supporters as “boots on the ground.” She stands for the rest — nearly one in five of those charged after the riot had a military history — far better than the “Q Shaman”. Among the arrested were an Army veteran with sniper training, and a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. A retired Navy SEAL boasted about storming the Capitol on Facebook. Fluttering above the crowd on January 6th were multiple United States Marine Corps flags.

Other banners — and they are too easily dismissed as kitsch — showed an incarnation of Trump as John Rambo, the character from Sylvester Stallone’s action movie franchise. Rambo is a veteran, broken in Vietnam, who travels to a town to pay his respects to a fallen comrade. He is hounded by the police and unable to find a job. Rambo starts to see the society he fought to defend as corrupt, decadent, and vile. “For me civilian life is nothing! In the field we had a code of honour… Back here there’s nothing!”

The veterans of small, pointless wars are vulnerable to feelings of betrayal. Trump knew how to speak to them. “We’ve destabilised the Middle East,” he said in South Carolina in 2016, “they lied.” Or as he put it in a later rally: “We’re all victims. Everybody here… They’re all victims.” It is not difficult to imagine how groups of unsettled veterans, estranged from their society, hardened with the knowledge that scandalous abuses are commonplace, could come to believe that their government stole an election from them.

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The historian Katherine Belew, author of Bring The War Home, a study of the growth in White Power movements after the Vietnam war, told an interviewer that the Capitol riot was a “ricochet of warfare.” There is a resonance too with the 20th century, when numerous European revolutions were stimulated by the return of unhappy soldiers to disintegrating polities.

What will happen if MAGAstan is treated like Afghanistan? Both the development of a networked armed anti-government underground, and the methods legislators, former spooks and talking heads want to use to destroy it, are boomeranging consequences of the War on Terror. Two decades and unlimited means did not end Islamic terror, which flourishes from French suburbs to Nigeria’s border with Cameroon.

Going after Trumpists with no-fly lists and secret prisons, dressed up in vague and open-ended rhetoric, will not be an effective treatment. It’s trepanning a skull to lift the “stone of madness” from the patient’s head. If there was an effective salve for political extremism, it would have been found a long time ago. Above everything, there is a wider sense that in America history is returning, and means to collect its debts.