Militarized cops with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are areas of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States-one rooted in the settings of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, recently, to prosecute the battle on terror.

The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a armed service strategy but increasingly as a means of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency’s principles-bulk cleverness collection, ruthless focusing on of minorities, pacifying propaganda-have used hold domestically despite the lack 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.