>...according to Hardt and Negri's Empire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist....In the "new order that envelops the entire space of... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order"[2]).[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_%28Negri_and_Hardt_book...

That's the thing. "Terrorism" like "communism" previously is described as threat where regular laws are not strong enough and here needs to be an exception. Communism went away but terrorism will most likely never go away.

In fact if we end up patrolling Muslim neighborhoods as some presidential candidates have suggested, I suspect we'll only end up increasing terrorism.

I'm pretty sure that's the whole point. Politicians are generally asses, but not dumbasses.

The part of the US government that does this bullshit has no endgame except "more power". It's quite ridiculous.