We’ve Forgotten What the Days After 9/11 Were Like 

Twenty-five years ago this month, the country we love did something it rarely does: It stopped arguing with itself. For a few weeks after the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, there was no red America or blue America. There was just America, standing in line to give blood, enlisting in numbers recruiters hadn’t seen since Vietnam, hanging flags off overpasses in towns that had never flown one.

A generation of young men and women who had never set foot on a battlefield signed up to fight a war on the other side of the world because they understood, without needing it explained to them, what it meant to be an American. That instinct, service before self, nation before party, is part of the legacy of 9/11. It is also what we appear to have lost over the last quarter century.   

A stranger reality has dawned on Americans on this anniversary: Not only have we lost the sense of what it means to be American, but we are once again faced with a new wave of radical anti-Americanism—one that is popular among the most educated and seemingly assimilated of our youth. Some of our traditional European allies are bastions of anti-American Islamist sympathy, while our Middle East partners appear most aligned with us on the threat from Islamism and other anti-American ideologies.   

We face a crisis over the very definition of assimilation. Just as we expect new citizens to understand and embrace what it means to be American, we must at the same time focus on familiarizing those born and bred in America with what that heritage means.  

A nation that cannot control who enters it, and that treats assimilation as an afterthought rather than a precondition, cannot expect newcomers to inherit its habits of citizenship. 

We want to be careful here, because this isn’t an argument against immigrants; generations of immigrants have earned their place in this country. It is an argument against a past policy regime that stopped asking new arrivals to become Americans and started merely processing them as caseloads.

Citizenship used to be something you earned; increasingly it has become a status you’re issued. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and pretending otherwise is how a country loses its center of gravity.   

Nowhere is that loss of definition more visible than in New York City, now governed by democratic socialist policies and leaders who intend for their America Last movement to expand across the country. 

It is worth noting that these harmful policies were not hidden from voters; the policymakers ran on this platform, and New Yorkers elected them. But an anniversary like this one is exactly the moment to say plainly what those policies get wrong.

Socialism does not build; it nationalizes the returns on private risk-taking and then wonders why people stop taking risks. The businesses that fled New York during the pandemic did not return to a city promising rent freezes and government-run grocery stores. Instead, they went to states like Texas and Florida, where the tax bill doesn’t read like a punishment for succeeding. 

A city that poured this year’s most intense energy into how to spend other people’s money never got around to asking what happens once there’s less of it to spend. This is a poor governing philosophy. 

When the 9/11 terror attacks happened, ordinary Americans didn’t wait for a committee to convene. They just moved, and what moved them was the oldest American idea there is: that free people, unafraid of risk and unashamed of ambition, build things no command economy could, and that when free people are attacked, they don’t ask the government’s permission to fight back.

That idea is what separates American exceptionalism from every alternative on offer, and it is precisely the idea a generation raised on institutional apology has been taught to distrust.   

We spent the 2010s teaching kids that the country that produced Iwo Jima and the Berlin Airlift was a project to be deconstructed. We are now watching what that teaching produces: an officer corps that has to run ad campaigns to explain why young Americans should answer the call to serve, in a nation that used to have to talk them out of enlisting.   

Twenty-five years on, the real test of this anniversary isn’t how well we remember one September morning. The test is whether we can recommit to what that morning briefly made us: a country confident enough in itself to insist that citizenship carries obligations as well as rights; reject the fantasy that socialism is compassion; and raise its children to believe, correctly, that they were born into the freest, most self-correcting, most worth-defending nation in human history.

That is the only foundation from which a country goes from woke back to warfighting—and wins. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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