Homeland Book Reviews

Homeland by Richard Beck Book Summary

A groundbreaking argument on how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of democracy down to what we watched on TV—by an acclaimed n+1 writer

Floating in and out of awareness, with all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, the War on Terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, a kind of water that people noticed just every so often even though they spent their lives swimming in it. Life in America did change, though. In Homeland, Richard Beck unfolds a gripping exploration of how the war changed people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, their coworkers, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. It changed what they watched, read, and listened to. It changed how they traveled from place to place, how they inhabited the places where they lived, and how they decided what was safe and what wasn’t worth the risk. 

Though much has been made of the damage Donald J. Trump’s presidency did to the American political system, Beck argues that his presidency came to pass because the United States was already beset by crises either triggered or exacerbated by the War on Terror. This book brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the War on Terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture”—the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the US government relates to the people it governs, and how they relate to one another. 

To see American life now through the lens of Homeland's sweeping argument is to understand acutely much of the root of our current condition. In its startling analysis of how the War on Terror drained American citizenship of much of its essential content, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the rending of America’s social and cultural fabric.

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