The War on Terror's Autocratic Legacy

Rosa Brooks argues that the response to the 9/11 attacks created a blueprint for autocracy in the United States. By expanding executive power and militarizing domestic politics, the 'war on terror' eroded the democratic norms necessary to prevent events like the January 6th riot. The article suggests that the road to modern political instability began with the security-focused shifts of the early 2000s.

Key Points

• The 9/11 attacks established a permanent state of national emergency that significantly expanded executive authority.
• Legal frameworks and surveillance tools created to fight foreign terrorism were eventually adapted for domestic use, weakening civil liberties.
• The militarization of political rhetoric and a binary 'us vs. them' mentality shifted focus from foreign enemies to domestic political rivals.
• The institutional changes of the last two decades directly facilitated the political climate and conditions that led to the January 6th insurrection.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment is strongly critical of the war on terror and broadly sympathetic to the article's warning, though many commenters think the article starts too late or explains too much with one cause. The dominant mood is pessimistic and historically fatalistic: commenters see emergency politics, executive power, surveillance, and militarized institutions as durable damage that can be repurposed across administrations. Disagreement centers less on whether the war on terror harmed civil liberties and more on whether it was the decisive cause, an accelerant, or merely one visible symptom of older American and imperial dynamics.

In Agreement

• The Patriot Act and related post-attack policies permanently traded civil liberties for promises of safety, making intrusive state power easier to normalize.
• Emergency powers and terrorism labels created for foreign threats can be redirected against citizens, protesters, immigrants, and domestic political enemies.
• Permanent war and empire tend to centralize government, strengthen the executive, and make republican self-government harder to sustain.
• The war on terror produced moral and institutional blowback through Iraq, Afghanistan, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, surveillance, and militarized enforcement.
• Bush-era institutions such as Homeland Security and ICE gave later leaders tools that could be intensified without needing to invent a new authoritarian apparatus.
• The attacks succeeded strategically if the goal was to provoke the United States into self-damaging overreaction, polarization, and loss of legitimacy.

Opposed

• The article is too monocausal; American decline is also driven by social media, economic inequality, housing costs, deindustrialization, party dysfunction, and elite self-interest.
• The United States is polarized and unstable, but not an autocracy in the same sense as countries where dissenting articles and open opposition are impossible.
• Authoritarian tendencies long predate the war on terror, with roots in slavery, Reconstruction, Cold War anti-communism, internment, imperial expansion, and corporate power.
• Corporate surveillance and platform power may be a more immediate threat to everyday freedom than state surveillance alone.
• Some commenters reject the article as partisan or establishment revisionism, noting that institutions that once defended interventionism now criticize its consequences.
• A few argue that recent foreign-policy failures show imperial weakening rather than a strengthened domestic autocracy.