THE DAY WE FORGOT: “Fourteen years later, Americans have learned no great lessons from 9/11,” Ben Domenech posits today, and reluctantly, in many respects, I think he’s absolutely right:
Nor did 9/11 prompt a great debate and rethinking of what risks freedom entails, what its nature is, and what the need for heightened security demands from our government and from us. What does it mean that government exists to secure our liberty, and what should we do with that liberty, once secured? Today people take it for granted that we will be frisked, poked, and prodded in all sorts of ways, but that it mostly amounts to pointless security theater. They take it for granted that our established security state is so unsecure that it can be easily penetrated by foreign governments with no consequence for them. They assume our government spies on us, but also assume that it is not very good at it.
Think back to other epochal moments in American history: the moment Americans learned of Lexington and Concord, or Fort Sumter, or Pearl Harbor. What did Americans do on hearing that news?
At bare minimum, they were forced to take a stand within their communities in reaction to the great event. They had to make a choice. They had to change their lives.
Nothing like that happened on 9/11. It came and it went. We wept and we forgot. The indictment of our society today is that 9/11 wasn’t a date that changed everything for us, not for the elites, and not for the people.
But the previous battles that Domenech mentioned were all fought against clearly-labeled enemies. While it’s now reached near-British levels here in America, political correctness had already started reshaping our language by September of 2001. Rather than punching back at the very moment he could reshape the culture, President Bush allowed himself to be hamstrung by the language police in the immediate wake of 9/11.
Thus, instead of being labeled as a war against radical Islam or a war against Al Qaeda and its allies, it was simply called the “Great War On Terror.” But terror is a tactic, not an enemy; as Daniel Pipes noted as early as 2002, calling such an existential struggle a “War on Terror” is like calling World War I the War on Trenches or World War II the War on Submarines. And today, PC, the attitude of “better dead than rude,” as John Derbyshire memorably wrote, also in 2002, has gotten so bad that former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is insulting the GOP base from the pages of the Washington Post, on this of all days, noting that “Republicans’ fringe tone on Islam shows a sharp turn since 9/11.”
But that will happen when no progress appears to made against an enemy that elites won’t even name, let alone willing to conceive of any other exit strategy than “declare victory and go home” as Mr. Obama did in order to secure the 2012 election. While our mid-20th century elites were very much big government socialists in the Obama mode, in some key areas, they were made of far sterner stuff.
Or as Iowahawk noted last year at this time, and retweeted today:
