Pink Police State: An Anatomy of the New American Regime

In the minds and experience of many, America changed on 9/11, and not in a superficial way. The commonplace way to view that change, however deep, is through the lens of politics: even cultural change wrought by the terror attacks is cast as an outgrowth of the fear of insecurity that has, since Hobbes, explicitly taken pride of place in the modern political project. To the degree that culture, not politics, has been placed at the foundation of post-9/11 perspectives, it has come courtesy of Samuel Huntington's heirs, for whom a global clash of civilizations fundamentally pits contending sources of authority, rather than contending arrays of power, against one another. Yet even this possible insight into the alteration of the American regime begins by looking outside of American life. Adapted from the source document.