On 9/11, the American Belle Epoque was undone, almost by a single administered shock.
On 9/11, the American Belle Epoque was undone, almost by a single administered shock.
T he 25th anniversary commemorations of September 11, 2001, rightly focus upon the day’s fallen. The roughly 3,000 Americans who died in terrorist attacks that day are still a great sorrow, as are the several thousand more American dead in the subsequent wars. Their absence constitutes a scar that will remain felt and present until the last witness passes. Given how these things work — the last Civil War veteran died in the 1950s, and the last First World War veteran in the 2010s — the remembered agony of 9/11 should exit our national consciousness sometime in the 2090s. That is a long time to live with it.
Yet lives were not the only things lost that day. The morning of September 11 was the final bright hours of the American Belle Epoque, the golden era that began with our victory over the Soviet Union and ended with our defeat at the hands of al-Qaeda. Those twelve bright years went too swiftly and were too prosperous and too successful for Americans, afflicting us with the “victory disease” that has crippled our strategic thought and self-assessment since. Americans of a certain age don’t remember what it was like to be optimistic by default, to be confident their nation was the strongest on earth, to feel essentially invulnerable to history, to assume an upward trajectory for themselves and their country, and to live in a (comparatively) high-trust society. We had all this, and it ended on that bright blue day of death.
This is explanatory of the difference between the massacres of September 11, 2001, and the only comparable day in American history, the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Speaking with those who witnessed both, it is impossible not to see the contrast. Pearl Harbor, though a tragedy and a shock, incepted more American power, not less. American civics was infused with a mission in response to the Japanese attack. Compare that with the civic leadership lamely urging Americans to shop after 9/11. Americans were mobilized, of course, after Pearl Harbor. By contrast, the embittered quip characterizing the so-called Global War on Terrorism held that “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the mall.”
Finally, and most significant, the problem that led to Pearl Harbor was emphatically solved. Twenty-five years after December 7, 1941, no one worried about a Japanese attack any longer. Twenty-five years after 9/11, Americans are still just as concerned about Muslim terrorists executing a massacre as they were on 9/12. The fear is neither theoretical nor confected, as it has happened many times since.
This is a massive failure of policy, of course, at scale and across time. It is something else besides: a symptom of the changed society in which we live. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Americans woke up into a world in which the security state hardly — if ever — intruded upon their lives. Grandparents used to be able to meet visiting grandchildren at the airport gate as they came off the plane. (Why would anyone restrict access to the gates?)
Cities generally didn’t spend money installing bollards outside entrance to important buildings. It occurred to few that they might be necessary, that a certain class of person driving cars into public gatherings with the intent to kill over and over would become endemic. There was no such thing as a mandatory travel-sized container for toiletry items. There was no such thing as a Department of Homeland Security. There was no need for internal defense. Yes, there was domestic terrorism, but the Atlanta Olympics bombings and the Oklahoma City bombing were regarded as terrible exceptions to a rule. Visitors to the United States Capitol entered freely and wandered freely, meeting senators and congressmen as they came and went. I know — I did it.
Overlaid upon all of it was a sense of optimism, of endless plenty and options. A young man in his twenties could ride the dot-com economy in New York City, or Miami, clocking in mere weeks at one job and then jumping to another. Extended unemployment, which was months at worst, was easily covered by contract work knocking out PowerPoints and the occasional business report. Affordability was an issue, but not much of one. I know; I did that too.
When it all came to an abrupt end by midday on September 11, 2001, many declared that it was because seriousness, whatever that was, had reentered our civics. But we mistook the onset of tragedy and the constriction of American society for seriousness. The elite response was for the most part unserious, and the unseriousness spooled out across the next generation, culminating in wars lost and an economic life still unrecovered from its multiple falls. The rise of populism across the past decade is in no small part a reaction to this. So too is the rise in the absurd and the evil, from the return of measles to the reemergence of antisemitism. The massacre that al-Qaeda pulled off was its own doing, but the harm that has occurred since then is all our own fault.
This is the tragedy of the American Belle Epoque: that it was flimsy and undone almost by a single administered shock. Our golden decade was a culmination of American dynamism and American victory. In a single bleak and bloody morning, we chose to forsake both, embracing a security society that was sclerotic upon inception, and looking away from strategic solutions in favor of the tactical — and the spurious. We awoke that day a nation with a tradition of victorious ascent and went to bed a nation committed to managed decline. Much of the tumult of American politics now is simply explicable by the yearning of nearly everyone born around 1990, everyone who knows the Belle Époque happened but has been denied it at every turn: why not us?
The answer to the question is a poor one. Why not you? Because of us. We had a society in which the specter of massacre was not ever-present, general homogeneity of mores and values was assumed, and security was an element of civics rather than its defining quality. We gave it all up in favor of something else, mostly so we could tell ourselves that nothing had changed. This was supposed to be the failure of the attack, although everyone knew that everything had changed, no matter what we said out loud. We also wished to prove to ourselves that America was infinitely capacious, not a culture and civics in itself, but a container capable of encompassing all the others. But it isn’t, and it was never supposed to be.
The message and the consensus on the evening of September 11, 2001, was that we have to live like this now.
The upheaval that is coming is predicated upon a simple truth: we don’t.