By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, September 11, 2026
My mother called, of course. She would call to tell me
about the weather where I lived, nearly 2,000 miles from her, and I would
patiently (I hope) remind her that I was both the editor of the local newspaper
and a man with windows and, as such, generally au courant on the
weather. On that infamous day, as she watched the bloody events unfold in
Manhattan and in Washington, she called to make sure that I was safe and to
inquire how close I had been to the terrible scene. I told her the truth, which
on an ordinary day might not have been all that reassuring but which should
have settled the matter on September 11, 2001:
“Mom, I live in Philadelphia.”
There is a strange human emotional need to feel closer to
important events—and especially to terrifying events—than we actually are. I
suspect that feeling closer to the event makes us feel more like participants,
which seems to put us in a stronger position than that of being people that
things simply happen to. But, mostly, in reality, we are people that things
simply happen to.
For the first couple of hours, my 9/11 unfolded in the
same way it did for many other people. I heard that an airplane had crashed
into the World Trade Center, and I pictured something about the size and shape
of a Cessna turboprop. “Hell of a thing to not be able to miss,” I thought. And
then I learned that it had been an airliner. I continued to assume that it was
some kind of unlikely accident until I saw—I was watching the television news
like everybody else—the second airplane strike the second tower.
From there, I spent the day in much the same way as the
few thousand other Americans working in news media: I threw out what we had
planned for the next issue and got to work. We looked for local connections, of
course—that is much of what local newspapers do—but there were not very many,
at least of the headline-generating kind. A few residents of our affluent
suburb were semi-regular Manhattan commuters, but we did not identify any that
had been killed in the attack that day. The story was different in Yardley,
Pennsylvania, on the northeastern side of Philadelphia, where at least three
residents died in the World Trade Center. Michael R. Horrocks, co-pilot of
United 175, was from another suburb to the west of the city and died when his
flight crashed into the south tower. Over time, the web of local connections
would grow, as, indeed, such connections reached into communities across the
country: a brother or a sister or a cousin who died in the World Trade Center,
a colleague who lost her life when her flight was crashed into the Pentagon, a
high school friend who had rescued men and women from the burning buildings and
lived to tell the story. In time, these would be supplemented by the
experiences of men and women serving in the military or intelligence agencies
and deployed to Afghanistan. But for most of us, what touched us most directly
was an agent of the newly constituted Transportation Security Administration.
At some level, we wanted more. We did not want to be spectators.
Life did go on. And, yet, it is true that everything
changed.
Beyond the literal bloodshed, the attacks were a cultural
catastrophe for the United States, unleashing waves of paranoia, resentment,
and sourness that have permanently defaced American public life. The effect
probably was intensified by its timing, coming in the wake of the extended
contestation of the 2000 presidential election and shaping a particularly ugly
political period, the final months of which were consumed by the 2008 financial
crisis.
Just as we feel a need to be directly connected to
dramatic events, we also feel an evident need to believe that we live in
remarkable times. Allow me to posit something different: We live in the most
ordinary kind of times. Murder, war, economic and social upheaval, domestic
insecurity, predatory authoritarianism, political corruption—these are the most
ordinary things in the world. People sometimes speak about the damage done by
“normalizing” Donald Trump and his brand of politics, as though these required
normalizing, as though they were not absolutely normal in the same way poverty
and malaria and child abuse are normal and have been for most people at most
times.
What was unusual was the period that might be narrowly
defined as running from November 9, 1989, to September 11, 2001—which is to
say, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until 9/11—or perhaps more generously
defined as beginning in October 1946, when the World War II draft came to an
end and Americans began to enjoy the emerging postwar reality, which was
defined by an American-made, American-led, and, at times, American-enforced
world order based on economic liberalism and international democratic cooperation
that merited—how easy it is to forget—the use of that much-abused word unprecedented.
We now talk a great deal, and generally stupidly, about
“unity,” but there was little of that commodity to be had in those remarkable
postwar years, certainly not among such figures as Harry Truman, Dwight
Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Sam Rayburn, and Barry
Goldwater—every man on that list despised at least one of the others and had
slight regard for most of the rest—but from the point of view of the degraded
present, it is impossible not to see that each had more in common—a world
more in common—with his most bitter political rival than any of them would have
in common with such a contemptibly decadent figure as Donald Trump, Joe Biden,
Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer, or Ron
DeSantis, each of whom is, in his own especial way, emblematic of the post-9/11
American condition.
With due respect for the efforts of the excellent men and
women in our intelligence and national security agencies, the reason we have
not had another 9/11-level attack is because no one has decided to inflict such
an attack on the United States. As regards the original Al-Qaeda, that was, I
am told, an unexpected benefit of the group’s ideology: Osama bin Laden et al.
were disinclined to carry out another terror spectacular unless it could exceed
9/11 in scope and carnage, and it never had the opportunity. It is much more
difficult to orchestrate a large and complex conspiracy than it is to fight an intifada.
But the United States remains an open and liberal society offering a rich
selection of soft targets, and anybody with a decent array of financial and
political resources—to say nothing of the state power of Russia or China—could
inflict five times the death toll of 9/11 on any given Tuesday, if they chose.
We ought to consider it likely, if not certain, that someone at some point will
choose to do that.
We are not ready. We are not ready militarily,
logistically, politically, or financially. We are not ready morally. We
are, at the moment, ill-prepared for even the ordinary challenges facing an
ordinary liberal democracy: demographic pressure on public spending and the
general economy, the burden of public debt, managing the movement of people,
capital, and data in a technologically empowered, low-friction world.
Whatever kind of vandalism the populists may get up to,
we will continue to live in a world that is technologically and economically
integrated to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine in 1989, to
say nothing of 1946. The trauma of 9/11, amplified by the financial crisis and
aggravated by factors such as mass migration, deepened the socioeconomic rift
between the so-called elites and Michael Brendan Dougherty’s emblematic disability fraudsters
in Garbutt, New York. What we call, for lack of a better term, globalization
presents itself to the former group mainly as a set of economic and cultural opportunities
and to the latter group mainly as a set of economic and cultural burdens,
real and imagined. And so the quadrille of American politics today is defined
by the left and right wings of the so-called elite that alternately compete and
coordinate with each other and with left and right wings of the considerably
larger group of incoherent populists who believe that their lives can be
improved by pillaging those who are financially better off and by inflicting
ritual humiliation on those occupying superior social positions. As political
conditions go, that is pretty normal, too: The arrangement would have been
recognizable enough to Cicero or to Julius Caesar, a patricians’ patrician who
knew something about coopting the plebs.
One short decade after that 9/11 telephone call with my
mother, I was living in an apartment in Lower Manhattan from which I could
watch, from my kitchen window, the continuing work on the tower at One World
Trade Center. I got a phone call from someone claiming to be Donald Trump’s
publicist—I assume it was Trump himself, in the persona of his imaginary friend
“John Barron,” though I do not remember precisely—informing me that the
celebrity game show host was planning to run for president in 2012 and was eager
to speak with me about his economic ideas. Would I be interested in
interviewing him? “Of course,” I said, thinking to myself: “This will be hilarious.”
The interview did not happen—Trump abruptly decided against running. I thought
of the episode as nothing other than a missed opportunity for me as a
journalist.
These things can be unpredictable.
It was not necessary that the post-9/11 political
reality would be one dominated by a honking bridge-and-tunnel demagogue (or two), with the president lying about how he spent that
day, trying to intensify his personal connection to the events while waving
around the promise of $5,000 checks with his name on them, a “Trump dividend.”
It is only in retrospect that things seem to have the quality of inevitability.
But one can see the shadow of the thing early in the post-9/11 era, for
instance in the Kulturkampf fight over a proposal to build an Islamic
cultural center near the ruins of the World Trade Center, the so-called Ground
Zero Mosque, a controversy that helped to make a big figure out of Fox News
personality Greg Gutfeld and which inspired Trump to stage a publicity stunt, offering to buy out the
project’s investors. The Republican Party quickly lurched from millennial
optimism to embrace a coalition of the fearful and resentful—people who had not
thought much about free markets or regulatory reform, who had not read much
Buckley or Hayek, but who knew who they feared and hated: Them. Things
were more complicated for progressives, with their cultural and financial
investments in elite institutions and the professional prestige conferred by
them, but a politics of Them fit—and fits—easily enough with a politics
of grievance-led redistribution and left-oriented economic resentment, all that
dumb talk of the “1 percent” and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “allah-garks,” as he
pronounces the word.
The politics of Them has been the dominant theme
of American public life ever since.
More than a third of the U.S. population today is under
30 years of age. This is the only America they ever have known. They may have
seen the new World Trade Center, which is, in a kind of perverse victory for
continuity in aesthetics if nothing else, about as ugly as the old one, but its
symbolic status is mostly lost on them. Those of us who are older want to tell
them that this is not normal, but, of course, it is we who are the outliers, we
graybeards with our books and our memories. This is not the “new normal”—it is
just normal, from the wider historical point of view. What we should be trying
to make them understand is not that this is not normal but that normal is not
good enough. The thing to get at is the truth that finally confronts every
philosopher and every alcoholic: that the great enemy cannot be put down on the
battlefield because that is not where we meet him. We meet him at home, at
work, in our most private thoughts, in the mirror. Today, on the anniversary of
that terrible day, we will have flags and flags and flags and a barrage of
treacly social media commentary. In an older age, we would have called for a
day of prayer and fasting. And that is what is really called for—that is the
beginning of the thing that needs doing, the long and uncomfortable work of
renewal.
A quarter of a century in, it is time at last to begin
the real work of rebuilding.
No comments:
Post a Comment