This profligate spending on America’s militarization, coupled with tax cuts for the rich and “preemptive” strikes on Iran, laid bare just how little US conservatism has actually changed in the era of Trump. Samuel Moyn observed that Trump had revealed himself to be a “politician of American continuity” rather than a harbinger of change. Like his Republican predecessor, Trump has fused militarism with neoliberal economic policies (deregulation, privatization, tax cuts), which last time around produced a global financial crisis and two failed wars that enriched a select few. In the Bush era, contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater became the brazen faces of disaster capitalism. Today that mantle has been passed to private prison firms like CoreCivic and surveillance tech companies like Palantir , which has quickly become the new avatar of the burgeoning police state. Two decades after the war on terror, we are in danger of entering what has been described ...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51