Bernard Harcourt, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens.

• Date: 22 June 2020
• Author: Schrader, Stuart

Bernard Harcourt, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (Basic Books, 2018)

THE COUNTERREVOLUTION IS EXCELLENT. A LAW PROFESSOR, BERNARD Harcourt is analytically incisive, and his prose is pellucid. Assign this book to your students. Suggest it to reading groups. In brief, Harcourt argues that the US government, with corporate assistance, is engaged in an effectively limitless counterinsurgency campaign against its own citizens, acting as if there were an active, ruthless, and disciplined insurgency now threatening to overthrow the state. But there isn't one--yet.

Harcourt outlines a model of counterinsurgency as the de facto paradigm of contemporary governance. Counterinsurgency theory assumes that the governed can be divided into three groups, and counterinsurgency practice acts upon them in tailored ways. Counterinsurgency, argues Harcourt, attempts to eliminate (a) the minority of enemies, while turning (b) the apathetic masses into (c) reliable supporters of the state. Beyond eliminating the revolutionary minority, whether by prison cell or police bullet, counterinsurgency relies on two other modes. The state gathers copious intelligence data on everybody, and it convinces people not to dissent using propaganda, psychological warfare, and distraction. These two tripartite divisions, forms of population and modes of governance, combine into repression that is extensive and intensive, foreign and domestic.

Getting Counterinsurgency Right

Because I endorse this book, it may seem churlish to point out a micro error. But pressing on this mistake leads to the discovery of a greater analytic problem, like a TV detective who notes a tiny bit of mismatched plaster covering what turns out to be a huge hole in the wall, at the end of which lies the secret to unraveling the mystery. My intention is simply to make Harcourt's case stronger.

The mistake is only partially Harcourt's fault. It concerns the date of the founding of John F. Kennedy's Special Group (Counter-Insurgency), which occurred in January 1962, not January 1961, before his presidency actually began (p. 240). Harcourt cites a brief biographical account of the French counterinsurgency theorist David Galula. That book's author, Ann Marlowe, misread a confusing paragraph in a classic account of counterinsurgency during the 1960s by Andrew Krepinevich. His argument was that the US Army was ill-suited to adopt the Kennedy team's fervor for counterinsurgency. The result was a colossal mismatch: a conscript army attempting to learn new tricks on the fly against disciplined and experienced Vietnamese guerrillas.

The date doesn't matter much, but the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) does. Harcourt makes a cogent argument about counterinsurgency theory as developed in the 1950s and 1960s and another about the security apparatus in the post-9/11 moment. But he never quite illustrates the connection beyond highlighting resemblances between the tripartite theory of population and the practical effects of post-9/11 security practices. He...