Editor’s introduction

It is not difficult to argue, as Jeffrey Bennett and the authors he reviews do, that there is a through-line connecting 9/11 with 1/6; indeed, we can go further back than that to the bombing of the Murrah Building in 1995 and, earlier still, to stirrings of the militia movement and the rise of rightwing populism in the early 1990s. Indeed the past three decades, since the end of the Cold War, have seen the rise of a new type of politics in the US and Europe, and increasing military adventurism abroad. This has been the product of the intersection of both internal and exogenous forces, in complex ways, with unpredictable consequences. Many of the elements that define Trumpism were present in that long-ago time when elite America was complacently enjoying a “peace dividend,” which never actually materialized, including Donald J. Trump himself. His shameful intervention in the Central Park jogger case was an early indication of his tendency to stoke racial fear and incite violence and vigilantism. At about the same time, H. Ross Perot ran the most successful third-party campaign in history, largely on the basis of anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade rhetoric. Everything changed in the wake of 9/11 of course; but only to the degree that these trends were intensified by the accelerant of the War on Terror, which by its very ambiguity, permitted much that before had been considered taboo, including the use of torture and the increasing, unchecked power of the executive. Indeed, what was produced resembled nothing so much as a modern imperium that wielded almost unopposed global power outside the actual immediate spheres of influence of its main rivals, China and Russia. Domestically, the War on Terror fed the already-existing Nativist wing of the Right; while George W. Bush rhetorically opposed this, the actions of his administration seemed to confirm the existential threat that Muslims/those with dark skin/those from the Middle East or other “shithole” countries posed. By painting with such a broad brushstroke, the Nativist Right was able to stigmatize anyone not of northern European descent, including Indigenous Americans and, inevitably, American Jews, as the boogie men of the “Great Replacement.” This takes us to the early days