Trauma. Fiction writers love it. Filmmakers can't resist it. "The notion of trauma," wrote Parul Sehgal for New Yorker Magazine, "has become all-engulfing."

In this book, Jerry Lembcke argues that trauma now provides the animating imagery for a victim-nation narrative that drives the American political culture and foreign policy, as well. The spectacles of traumatized veterans is used metaphorically to stir the resentments, and anxieties left by a half-century of lost wars. They are the same sentiments that demanded retribution in Europe between World Wars I and II-an unsettling thought.

Lembcke drills into the long duree of failed boundary-constructions between spectacle and science, emotion and rationality, tradition and modern in mental health studies. Shell shock's diagnostic properties were overshadowed by its cultural and political utility; PTSD medicalized veterans' dissent; TBI has yet to reveal the AWOL biomarkers promised by its champions. The cultural influence of agent orange and moral injury outweigh their clinical significance.

The MAGA movement birthed in America's lost-war culture trolls the boundaries of modernism and traditional beliefs. Its skepticism of science is palpable; its lean to tribalism unmistakable; its attraction to conspiracist explanations for national setbacks is evident. This book connects the dots.