Selective fear by Edoardo Moretti

America once described its war on terror as a global struggle against violent extremism. Presidents wrapped the campaign in solemn language about liberty, civilization and security. Airports became fortresses. Surveillance expanded quietly but relentlessly. Civil liberties organizations warned that emergency powers, once normalized, would eventually be turned inward. Two decades later, that warning no longer sounds theoretical. The machinery built in the name of national safety increasingly appears aimed at the vulnerable, the inconvenient, and the politically disfavored.

The modern performance of American counterterrorism often feels less like national defense than social sorting. Immigrants, asylum seekers, foreign students and even children encounter a government that treats paperwork errors, border crossings or protest activity with the vocabulary and posture once reserved for existential threats. Raids are televised like military victories. Families become symbols in ideological campaigns. Fear itself has become institutional policy, not because fear produces safety, but because it produces obedience.

Donald Trump did not invent this system. He inherited it, sharpened it, personalized it, and transformed it into political theater. His genius, if it can be called that, was recognizing that Americans conditioned by twenty years of terrorism rhetoric would accept extraordinary treatment of designated outsiders. Once a population becomes accustomed to hearing words like invasion, infestation, sleeper cell, or radicalization, almost anyone can be recast as a threat. The target merely changes according to political convenience.

That shift has become especially visible whenever Trump identifies critics or opponents. Federal power suddenly adopts the emotional logic of a vendetta. Universities, journalists, activists, prosecutors, immigrants and bureaucrats are folded together into one giant atmosphere of suspicion. The distinction between national security and personal grievance starts to disappear. Loyalty becomes patriotic. Dissent becomes dangerous. An accusation alone creates contamination.

The tragedy is not simply the cruelty directed at migrants or political enemies. It is the broader moral exhaustion underneath it. America has spent years teaching itself to confuse harshness with seriousness. Politicians who sound punitive are treated as realistic adults, while anyone discussing rights or due process is dismissed as naïve. The country that once lectured the world about democratic values now regularly debates whether certain groups deserve constitutional protections at all.

Children waiting in detention centers become abstractions. Refugees become statistics. Protesters become extremists. The language of counterterrorism flattens human beings into categories requiring management rather than empathy. Bureaucracy finishes the emotional work politics begins.

None of this means genuine threats do not exist. Violent extremism remains real, unpredictable, and deadly. Governments have an obligation to prevent attacks and protect civilians. But a nation that permanently governs through fear eventually loses the ability to distinguish between danger and discomfort. That confusion is where democracies become brittle.

The most alarming feature of American anti-terrorism policy today is not its strength but its elasticity. Powers created for rare emergencies now stretch easily toward ordinary politics. Once fear becomes a governing instinct, the definition of terrorist expands conveniently alongside it.

Perhaps that is the final lesson of the post-September era: institutions built without restraint rarely remain limited to their original purpose. They search constantly for new enemies, because systems justified by permanent emergency cannot tolerate normality. Eventually the border between counterterrorism and political intimidation dissolves altogether, leaving behind a republic that calls itself free while governing through suspicion, spectacle and fear.uences are measured in lives rather than headlines, that is a gamble the world can ill afford.