Editor’s introduction

It is not difficult to argue, as Jeffrey Bennett and the authors he reviews do, that there is a through-line connecting 9/11 with 1/6; indeed, we can go further back than that to the bombing of the Murrah Building in 1995 and, earlier still, to stirrings of the militia movement and the rise of right-wing populism in the early 1990s. Indeed the past three decades, since the end of the Cold War, have seen the rise of a new type of politics in the US and Europe, and increasing military adventurism abroad. This has been the product of the intersection of both internal and exogenous forces, in complex ways, with unpredictable consequences.

Many of the elements that define Trumpism were present in that long-ago time when elite America was complacently enjoying a “peace dividend,” which never actually materialized, including Donald J. Trump himself. His shameful intervention in the Central Park jogger case was an early indication of his tendency to stoke racial fear and incite violence and vigilantism. At about the same time, H. Ross Perot ran the most successful third-party campaign in history, largely on the basis of anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade rhetoric.

Everything changed in the wake of 9/11 of course; but only to the degree that these trends were intensified by the accelerant of the War on Terror, which by its very ambiguity, permitted much that before had been considered taboo, including the use of torture and the increasing, unchecked power of the executive. Indeed, what was produced resembled nothing so much as a modern imperium that wielded almost unopposed global power outside the actual immediate spheres of influence of its main rivals, China and Russia.

Domestically, the War on Terror fed the already-existing Nativist wing of the Right; while George W. Bush rhetorically opposed this, the actions of his administration seemed to confirm the existential threat that Muslims/those with dark skin/those from the Middle East or other “shithole” countries posed. By painting with such a broad brushstroke, the Nativist Right was able to stigmatize anyone not of northern European descent, including Indigenous Americans and, inevitably, American Jews, as the boogie men of the “Great Replacement.” This takes us to the early days of the Trump administration and the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, where the chant “Jews will not replace us” was heard.

By the time of 1/6 the lines had hardened further. Trump spent four years in office personalizing and becoming the face of White grievances. These grievances—many based on increasing economic inequality, ironically exacerbated by the tax bill passed by Republicans and signed by Trump—metastasized with the rise of Q-Anon, and the increasingly loony Trump rallies. It has often been mentioned that these phenomena are the marks of a cult, and, indeed, I would argue that they can be understood in terms of Anthony F.C. Wallace’s model of revitalization movements (Wallace 1956).

In Wallace’s terms, the mazeway followed by previous generations of men (and this ideology is highly gendered) to achieve success and respect, were no longer effective. Military service, for example, was as likely to lead to a life of opioid addiction and poverty as to a successful career, as some of Osnos’s West Virginia informants attest. Moreover, there was an overwhelming sense among many of these men (and I have worked with some of them in Wyoming) that no matter what they did, including using the GI Bill for college, they would not have access to the rewards that the children of the elite did. In this, of course, they were correct, although the specific manifestations of this belief were delusional and represented a systemic displacement of reality (Harkin 2021).

Thus, a key tenet of the Q-Anon conspiracy is that a massive cabal of elites conspires to procure and rape children in non-existent basements of pizza joints, for example. The reality is that a man named Jeffrey Epstein did procure underage girls, and among his associates were truly powerful men from the political and business elite, representing both political parties in the US. But rather than face this scandal directly—there has been very little media coverage since Epstein’s death—it has become a symptom of the Trump cult’s deep paranoia.

Wallace acknowledges that many revitalization movements, unlike that of Handsome Lake, fail. Indeed, I have argued that many are designed to fail (Harkin 2004). With the restoration of Trump by extra-legal means or in the 2024 election remote at best, and his life expectancy limited, his cult is bound to end in failure. A key function of such failed revitalization movements is abreaction, a cathartic acting-out of trauma. When this happens we will know that the period of history culminating in Trump has ended.

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A mere half century after the beginnings of historical approaches to the field of American anthropology, it has become a growth industry, one in which a variety of historical, theoretical, and indeed political claims and counter-claims are enthusiastically wielded (Stocking 1968). This is true in all national schools of anthropology, but nowhere is the argument more heated than regarding Franz Boas and his Germano-American school of anthropology. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Boasian anthropology to American society in what was shaping up to be the American Century. From Boas’s own interventions in American politics in the early 20th century, including his support for civil rights and liberal immigration policies, through his anti-Nazi efforts leading up to the Second World War, and his providing comfort to refugee scholars such as Claude Levi-Strauss during the war, to the contributions of his students in the war effort, to the shaping of postwar American society, it represents perhaps the greatest practical effect that social science has had on a society. Indeed, one can argue that Boas’s vision, which he developed with his colleague and co-teacher of a seminar on comparative ethical systems, John Dewey, was much more perfectly realized than Emile Durkheim’s similar vision. The idea of a democratic, pluralistic, enlightened state, what Richard Rorty calls “postmodern bourgeois liberalism” was the driving ideal of postwar America (Harkin 2017).

To take the example of just one of Boas’s students, Margaret Mead, it would be difficult to find any scholar in any discipline who had such an impact on her own society. Her comparative study of the human lifecycle (childrearing, adolescence, and old age primarily) led to various interventions in American society. Her collaborations with Dr. Seuss and Dr. Spock fundamentally changed the way that many American children were raised. In a Cold War twist, Mead and her colleagues argued for children to be raised in an open environment, in which they were free to develop their own personalities, as opposed to “swaddling cultures” where infants were restrained and later developed authoritarian personality traits. Mead’s commentary on contemporary issues in American society, such as “women’s lib” and civil rights, were effective precisely because she took a perspective that her Redbook readers and viewers of her many television appearances could view as located within this developing matrix of liberal postwar, but decidedly anticommunist societies. She took to these tasks with the zeal of an evangelist. One of my earlier memories, and certainly the earliest of any academic event, was attending her lecture to a roomful of young women at San Bernardino Valley College in the early 1960s. For those of us who have forgotten, that is the way you change society.

And yet, valid critiques can be made of Boasian anthropology, especially its relationship to the societies it has studied. What is the endpoint of Boasian anthropology? It is, I think, a modern, liberal, democratic society such as I have described, in which the main role of anthropology is to preserve and curate, in museums and similar settings, ways of life that are obsolete. This is where Audra Simpson’s critique, which I heard her make at the 2012 Yale conference on Boas, bites. The tribal life, and even the agrarian life based on gemeinschaft—or direct personal relations—studied by Zora Neale Hurston and Allison Davis, two other significant Boasians, are rendered obsolete. Anthropology itself is rendered virtually obsolete, apart from the curatorial function, and the possibility of new cultures being discovered. And ultimately the ethnographic gaze is utilitarian. Can we find a society in which adolescents do not suffer so much stress? Well, then, let’s borrow that part of their culture. Can we find a society in which the genders are equal? By all means! This gives new meaning to the old critique of Boasianism as consisting of “shreds and patches.”

This pinched view of anthropology fails to take the “I” or the “we” into account. We too are embedded in cultures which, in the words of the late Bruno Latour, “have never been modern.” Those consumers in capitalist societies rushing around to purchase goods at an advantageous price are, as Marshall Sahlins argues, driven by cultural forces beyond their comprehension. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, we are all suspended in a habitus, not a Matrix, and somewhat of our own making, but there nonetheless. Language and discourse confine us to certain mental structures that exercise power over its subjects, as Michel Foucault avers. Thus, while postmodern bourgeois liberalism may be a desirable state, especially in our present circumstances, it too is a form of false consciousness.