9/11 Generation Rises in American Politics

The September 11 attacks are one of those events — like Pearl Harbor, the 1929 stock-market crash, or the fall of the Berlin Wall — that marks a sharp discontinuity not only in our history, but in how people who lived through those events understood the world around them. That is true even if, unlike me, you weren’t there. For people around my age (I turned 30 a month after the attacks), they marked the end of the “holiday from history” that had marked our 20s, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet empire. Even when America went to war in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, it was possible for an ordinary American to remain only vaguely aware of what was happening there. But after 9/11, everyone felt that everything had changed. That sentiment was vivid for the next two or three years, and really only began to fade after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan at the hands of Navy SEALs.

For the generations of Americans already in positions of political power in 2001 — mainly those born between 1925 and 1960 — their view of America’s place in the world was already set by the Cold War and its aftermath, and the lessons they applied to the post-9/11 world were largely those derived from the Cold War, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. That explains a lot about why neoconservative theories of remaking the greater Middle East were so widely adopted: Not only did they provide an off-the-shelf framework for interpreting events, but one that accorded with the experiences of policy-makers who had seen the Cold War through to victory. It was natural to think that a combination of American hard military power with the soft cultural, economic, and political power of America’s superior example in its way of life would undermine the appeal of our enemies. That’s mostly not how things played out.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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The September 11 attacks are one of those events — like Pearl Harbor, the 1929 stock-market crash, or the fall of the Berlin Wall — that marks a sharp discontinuity not only in our history, but in how people who lived through those events understood the world around them. That is true even if, unlike me, you weren’t there. For people around my age (I turned 30 a month after the attacks), they marked the end of the “holiday from history” that had marked our 20s, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet empire. Even when America went to war in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, it was possible for an ordinary American to remain only vaguely aware of what was happening there. But after 9/11, everyone felt that everything had changed. That sentiment was vivid for the next two or three years, and really only began to fade after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan at the hands of Navy SEALs.

For the generations of Americans already in positions of political power in 2001 — mainly those born between 1925 and 1960 — their view of America’s place in the world was already set by the Cold War and its aftermath, and the lessons they applied to the post-9/11 world were largely those derived from the Cold War, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. That explains a lot about why neoconservative theories of remaking the greater Middle East were so widely adopted: Not only did they provide an off-the-shelf framework for interpreting events, but one that accorded with the experiences of policy-makers who had seen the Cold War through to victory. It was natural to think that a combination of American hard military power with the soft cultural, economic, and political power of America’s superior example in its way of life would undermine the appeal of our enemies. That’s mostly not how things played out.