Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn't lost the War on Terror

The successful regulation of the first period of the War on Terror by political, economic and military elites has been contingent on a reifying of the contexts in which the current crisis has come about. The first period of the War has been reified and regulated in various ways; by the formation of a post-apocalyptic sensibility in the US; by the dissemination of a new doctrine of austerity and a mini-revival of Keynesian economics; and by a reassertion of older discourses of national innocence and national mission. Combined, these ideologies have helped legitimate both a new authoritarianism on the domestic front of the War, and an aggressive expansion of US imperial power on the global stage. But the extent to which the meanings of the War can be reified and regulated by elite opinion in the longer term may depend on other, established, historical trends; in particular, the coincidence of the War on Terror with the latest phase of the long downturn in US and world capitalism, whose current period suggests a developing crisis in the neo-liberal response to the earlier breakup of Fordism in the 1970s. Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn't lost the War on Terror was written in April 2002.