Where Have the Grown-Ups Gone?

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

There’s been a lot of “Where were you when … ?” And “9/11 changed everything …” talk this week. And that’s appropriate. Indeed, some of the finest samples of it can be found here at The Dispatch.

 

I’ve done a lot of that in the past, and I don’t want to do a lot more of it. Yes, the War on Terror succeeded if you define it as preventing another 9/11-scale attack; the pulverizing, if not quite eliminating, of al-Qaeda; or the killing of Osama Bin Laden. No, it didn’t succeed if you choose as your metric the defeat of Salafism, or sustaining the momentary sense of national unity 9/11 aroused.

 

But in the course of thinking—and talking—about all of this stuff, I’ve been noodling on not so much how 9/11 changed my life, but how much my life has changed since 9/11.

 

What I mean is, I don’t think I “grew up” because of 9/11, but I have grown up since 9/11. This is in no small part because I got married a couple weeks before the towers came down. When I left D.C. to get married out west, I left one world. When I came back from my honeymoon, I returned to another.

 

I bought my first house six months after 9/11. My daughter was born a year and a half after. These are the things that make people grow up—or should.

 

Also, on 9/11 the family I grew up in was alive. Now, they’re all gone. That, too, is part of growing up.

 

One of the things young people don’t understand very well about grown-ups, is that grown-ups never fully feel like they’ve grown up. The person we were when we were kids doesn’t go away, it just sort of shrinks inside us. It’s not another person or personality. It’s more like it’s one slice of the pie of who we are. It’s hard to explain, but I think middle-aged people know what I mean. We’re all a portfolio of commitments, passions, interests, perspectives, and theories of the world, and the stocks that make up our youthful personalities stay in the portfolio—they just become a smaller part of our holdings over time. This is why I often roll my eyes when young people claim that older people “just don’t understand” this or that. We know what it was—what it is—like to be young; we just also know what it’s like not to be, too.

 

Maybe the portfolio analogy is wrong, betraying the corrupting influences of Late Capitalism’s neoliberal colonization of my soul. Maybe a better analogy is an iPhone app. When we’re young, the youth app or apps dominate, but as we get older we acquire life management apps having to do with health, finances, etc. But anyone who’s seen a grandparent play with their grandkids knows that old people know how to access the youth apps when necessary.

 

Or maybe that’s stupid, too.

 

Regardless, one of the things I believed about grown-ups when I wasn’t one was that grown-ups are, almost by definition, serious and responsible people. For me, my father was the ultimate grown-up. If I had to guess, he had been a grown-up since he was 12. He was the most solid, rational, dependable man I’ve ever known. He, more than anyone else, defines being a grown-up for me. But I think his traits are generally what we mean when we call someone a grown-up. And when I was younger, I thought most adults with serious jobs and serious responsibilities were grown-ups, too.

 

The thing I can’t stop thinking about is how I got that wrong. Looking and playing the part of a grown-up doesn’t necessarily mean you are one.

 

I mean this in a bunch of different ways. One example that might get me in trouble is women. Three of the most impressive women I’ve ever known are my mom, my wife, and the late Kate O’Beirne. Each in their own way, they gave me an insight into women. When I was in high school and college, girls were very often cliquish and gossipy. I assumed that this was a function of their age. “Mean Girls” and all that.

 

What mom, Jessica, and Kate explained to me is that this tendency doesn’t really go away, it just becomes more sophisticated and the terms of the competition change. There are exceptions, of course. There are always exceptions. But they tend to prove the rule.

 

I don’t mean this in a misogynist way. I love strong, smart women. And I will happily concede that in the battle between the sexes, the ranks of the fairer sex have many more grown-ups among them than the ranks of the men.

 

Indeed, I’ve also learned that men really never stop being idiots the way boys are. They just learn to get better at resisting the seductions of idiocy that come with hormone poisoning. But the temptation is always there. If you give a keg of beer and some fireworks to a bunch of middle-aged bankers and accountants with some free time on their hands, don’t be surprised when the fire trucks or ambulances arrive. I’ve long argued that the story of civilization is largely the story of civilizing men to not be idiots. And that’s hard.

 

Anyway, I should get to the point.

 

The fabric of civilization.

 

Since Donald Trump came to dominate American politics, one of the major conversational pastimes among many of my friends is the question of “Was so-and-so always crazy or did they become crazy?” Rudy Giuliani was once one of the most grown-up people in American life. Indeed, his high-water mark was almost exactly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, when he became “America’s Mayor” and Time’s “Man of the Year.” Since then, he’s gotten crazier and crazier. Or maybe he always was crazy, but the Trump era gave him permission to let that formerly checked part of his personality run amok.

 

I only bring this up because I think 9/11 had a similar dynamic that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Shocking events by definition shock us. But they also redefine our sense of the possible. I think we can all see that. What we sometimes miss is that redefining the possible also scrambles our theories of the plausible.

 

In the wake of 9/11, I was stunned to discover how some grown-ups were either revealed to be crazy or had been made crazy. Reagan’s former assistant treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, a stalwart conservative in the pre-9/11 days, became obsessed with the idea that it was all an inside job. “There is no doubt whatsoever” that Building 7 was a controlled demolition. Morgan Reynolds, a very sober and serious economist I knew quite well in the 1990s, became convinced that no planes were used at all in the 9/11 attacks. There were many, many others, and not just on the right.

 

But the right-wingers disturbed me more because I naively associated being conservative with being more grown-up. At National Review, we kept a level head. But some readers and occasional contributors I was friendly with became quite unhinged. I’ll never forget when a prominent author on Islam who was irate about not getting the favorable treatment he thought he deserved reached out to me to ask if Andy McCarthy(!) and the editors had “gone dhimmi.” In War on Terror parlance, this was akin to accusing William F. Buckley Jr. of being a secret communist.

 

The analogy is deliberate, because it dawned on me that the response of some people to the very real threat of Islamism or Islamic terrorism was a post-9/11 version of the Bircher-style paranoia and overreaction to the very real threat of communism.

 

This is one of the lessons I’ve taken away from growing up since 9/11. Simply being an adult, even an accomplished one with impressive credentials, didn’t necessarily mean you were a grown-up or would stay one given permission to go a different way. Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia taught me that elites—a fancy word for the people I used to consider grown-ups—were just as prone to the “paranoid style” of moral panics.

 

“Civilization” sounds so highfalutin, but if you simply think of it as the tapestry of rules, customs, institutions, and incentives that keep people civilized, you can appreciate how much more fragile and threadbare it can be. We tend to understand this about violent crime and pathological behavior at the margins of society. That’s fair enough. But thinking this way can be deceptive. If that stuff happens at the outskirts of civilized society, that implies for many of us that the fabric of civilization is thicker and stronger closer in. But it doesn’t work that way, because the sharp and pointy desires of the human heart can poke holes in that fabric anywhere. Jeffrey Epstein offers proof of that, but so do Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker, and countless others.

 

I’m not saying that deranged “influencers” are guilty of the same transgressions as Jeffrey Epstein. I’m saying that, given the right opportunities and incentives, people can very easily resist, reject, or rend the civilizational fabric for their own satisfaction. The explosion of antisemitism these days is proof enough of that.

 

But I’ve come to appreciate that it was ever thus.

 

Henry Ford’s antisemitism is well-known, but his crackpottery isn’t. Inspired by the “Eternalist” philosopher Orlando J. Smith, Ford was a devout believer in reincarnation. He also wanted to eliminate cows and morally regenerate America by teaching it to dance properly. King Camp Gillette, the industrialist and inventor of the razor, was obsessed with a utopian scheme of creating a continental, even global, socialist megacity. Vice President Henry Wallace wasn’t just a communist sympathizer, he was a theosophist nutball. The number of prominent 20^th century Americans who were into seances and Ouija boards is too long to list here.

 

Now I recognize that I’m being a bit promiscuous here with my categories. Grown-up isn’t an exact synonym for sane, and civilization has a lot of room for eccentric views—and it should. But the thing I’ve learned since 9/11 is that a society run by grown-ups needs a thick cultural ecosystem that rewards grown-up behavior and grown-up decision-making, by which I simply mean making arguments and choices based on facts, reason, empathy, and a sense of responsibility for their actions. Such a system can tolerate a lot of eccentricity so long as the center holds. It requires leaders who care about consequences and it requires “followers” to demand responsibility and accountability of leaders.

 

What I’ve learned since 9/11 is that this asks more of people than many are willing to give. It should be obvious that this lesson has been driven home to me in the Trump era. Just this week, I’ve watched as elected officials rail against the left’s socialism while defending a president who wants to bribe Americans with a “dividend” we cannot afford and that will never be provided. A video at the faux convention in Dallas begins, “On June 14^th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” The “convention” ended with that “caretaker” asking the assembled faithful to repeat after him: “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe …” That “caretaker” has taken a great deal of care in getting vastly richer while in office.

 

Shortly after 9/11 I gave a talk about the future of conservatism in the post-9/11 era and then wrote about it here. It’s an interesting read for me, because it drives home how some of my thinking has changed, but even more how much the world has changed.

 

I guess when all is said and done, what I really mean by grown-ups is good people. I don’t mean that in some Manichean, good-versus-evil sense. Good people can disagree on important things. Good people can have wildly divergent points of view about God, government, and what constitutes a good life. I mean reliable people, steady people, reasonable people. I mean good as in solid, dependable, responsible—the sorts of people we’re supposed to think of when we say, “this job is important, let’s make sure we get someone good for it.” And as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned not only that such people are rarer than I thought when I was younger, but also that you get far fewer of them in a system that doesn’t sufficiently reward being good. You get more of something when you subsidize it, and less when you tax it. We have been living in an era of heavy taxation on good people and massive subsidies for unserious people.

 

Edmund Burke never said all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, but he did say, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” What is true of evil is also true of stupidity, irresponsibility, corruption, and immaturity. And that’s perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned since 9/11.