Look, it doesn't really matter what people are afraid of.

Hell, even with an external threat (such as it is) we're well on our way to imploding and fragmentation.

the problem there is that the threat is running stale and impossible to see.

the sovjet one was effective for so long because it was so visible. one could point to it and say "there it is".

now, if a 9/11 incident where to happen again...

Ha, you must be new to planet earth. Politicians and other salesmen have been using the threat of boogeymen to push us around since the dawn of time. Read about the Cold War, MacCarthy's Red Scare, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials...I could fill several pages.

Just when you think people have read enough history to have learned from it, the masses fall for the same trick again and again.

As the head of Richard Nixon said during the 3002 election: "Computers may be twice as fast as they were in 1973, but your average voter is still as drunk and stupid as ever."

There's a sleight of hand there, in which you turn the people of the USA and american foreign policy into a single entity. Same trick the Israeli government pulls when they try to represent any criticism of themselves as anti-semitic. I've visited the USA. I found the people there extremely warm and friendly. I still despise the actions of the US in the middle east going back far before the invasion of Iraq. I dislike deliberate conflation of one aspect of society with a national identity because it's been the justification for a lot of poor people dying to support a lot of rich people throughout human history.

Now...

Muslim terrorists exist. Are they representative of the 1.5 billion muslims in the world today? No. If they were, then the USA would not be standing. But the US is not facing millions of Usama bin Laden's. It's a handful. So is the hysterical fear of muslim extremists useful? No, it's vastly counter-productive. Look at what has happened because of this fear.

Around the time the US government was gathering troops in the Gulf, ready to invade Iraq, a survery found that more than 50% of the US people thought Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attack. Iraq had nothing to do with it and furthermore Al Quaeda was a natural enemy of Saddam's regime. But using fear of Muslim Terrorists, a fear propagated by the White House on countless occasions, a war was justified and executed. If the US wanted to place the blame anywhere, the most accurate place would be Saudi Arabia, but then the US has supported the disgusting regime there for decadees. The US kicked out the King of England centuries ago, but your government has been happy to provide military support to a royal family to keep them in power when it suits their oil needs. And how do they get away with all this military activity? Through people seeing muslims as terrorists.

The fear of muslim terrorists creates its own enemy by demonising colossal numbers of people and creating a cycle of fear. Any fear that is irrational (and any fear that led to an invasion of one country in response to support for a terrorist attack by the government of a different unconnected country is irrational), clouds judgement and leads to greater problems.

As to communism, Western Europe played a big role in shaping how the Soviet state developed. There was a terrible fear of communism spreading in the early days which led to military invasions of the fledgling USSR and this was followed by severe trade restrictions and economic warfare that crippled what might have been a very different revolution. The early soviets were very keen to trade with the rest of the world and be part of it. Of course then the US government pushed the development of nuclear weapons which, of course, spread to Russia and the cycle of violence escalated. Ultimately, once the cycle gets going, it just keeps getting bigger. And fear is the fuel that drives it.

So yes, I do take exception to your sarcastic parodying of those who try to defuse some of the fear that is choking the world today. It's not about "cool kids being anti-american." It's about praying that my kids don't have to grow up in a world where people think arab = mad bomber.

I swear there is something wrong with me, in the head. That should've stopped being funny a long time ago, but damn it, I still love anything in the "I'm in ur <noun>, <verb>in ur <plural noun>" It's the best MadLib ever.
*sigh*

According to some sources they're twice as likely to die, crushed by a freak vending machine accident. Ya gotta play the odds and prioritize what you worry about.

Me? I worry about zombie armageddon.

I will agree that RL influences might make some time or another better than others for certain published material.
However, I don't think that our current political climate is in any way unique, and that this is the only time in history that people have been irrationally afraid of things. It's a delightfully charming facet of humanity, but irrational fear and hatred are pretty darn timeless.
I will say that this is a particularly good time for a book like Emergence, however I disagree that it couldn't have been written at any other time in history.

Major red scare was over by then -- really, the witchhunt aspects of it ended with Watergate: and we're looking at irrational societal-wide fear, here. By 1980, the beginnings of glasnost had even started to emerge. Wasn't Reagan known as the Great Communicator in part because many firmly believe he was the cause of just that? (No contrasting debate on that, please: I said "many" and "believe" for a reason, which should cover both polarities.)

mfb -- would you accept that, while horrific, the bombing you reference didn't have anywhere near the domestic societal impact that later events did? For that matter, even the first WTC bombing seems to have been largely forgotten, though people died in that one too.

SR focuses tightly on domestic societal impact of events.

First: Huh? Wha?
Second: I've skimmed all of it. I'm only 80% through my cover-to-cover every-word read-through.

Because while we're being told that virtuakinetics are dangerous monsters, in the same breath we're being told, "Nah, not really, those people are just hate-mongering." Maybe if they had a year/book or two to be mysterious and scary NPCs that we could all hate before a book came out showing us what they're really like and letting people play them we'd be able to identify with them.
Instead we get the core book telling us that they are just another character creation option, followed by Emergence which says, "OMG hack ur brain terrorists nah just kidding they're mostly okay. Be afraid."
It's a shame they didn't get the chance to be introduced properly, like Otaku and Drakes, first as stories, then as NPCs, with vague stats for the GM-only, then as optional character options for the daring, etc. Instead, they just got dropped on us like any other character option, and surprise surprise, they're being treated just like any other character option. There was no mystery in the original presentation. Confusion, but no mystery.