The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens

A distinguished political theorist sounds the alarm about the counterinsurgency strategies used to govern Americans
Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States--one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror.
The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency's principles--bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda--have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age. Seeing it clearly is the first step to resisting it effectively.

• Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements
• Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police
• Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
• Torture (Framing 21st Century Social Issues)
• Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age
• How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
• Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Justice, Power, and Politics)