They Didn't Win

Teresa Wiltz writes on 9/11's eighth anniversary for TheRoot.com:

We lost ... something else, too: an opportunity to be expansive. To shed the fear, to look beyond our narrow borders and see others as we see ourselves. We've lost our civility. Instead, we've turned inward, tearing at each other with oft-times savage intensity, ripping up posters at town hall meetings and calling the president a liar in the middle of a joint address before Congress. After 9/11, there was a lot of talk about, "If we do this, then they will win." And now, looking at our bifurcated nation, I can't help but wonder if they did.

With only a few minor changes in wording, this could have been written by any number of Bush supporters from 2003 onward, when the honeymoon wore off and "irony is dead" no longer ruled the day. As I wrote in 2006, five years after the attacks:

Is nothing sacred? Not in America. Not since the Puritan era. The patriotism of World War I brought us suffrage and the ACLU; the patriotism of World War II brought us second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement. We have never been a nation in lockstep; that's not what the American experiment is about. As we look back on this national crisis, we should remember the qualities that have made America what it is--and we should be proud of those qualities.

This doesn't mean that we were wrong to grieve. It is entirely appropriate to respond to a national tragedy by lowering the flag to half mast. But when a suitable period of mourning is over, we need to raise the flag high again so that we, and the rest of the world, can see it.

People like to talk about how wonderful it was when Congress joined together and sang "God Bless America," but the truth is that self-serving partisan acrimony is the American way, going all the way back to John Adams' attempts to censor Jefferson supporters in 1798. There is no reason to be ashamed of that; self-serving partisan acrimony has made us the most powerful nation on Earth.

Now, it is true that right-wing extremism is on the rise. But it was also on the rise during the Clinton administration. Right-wing extremism is on the rise whenever right-wing extremists notice their influence over our national culture is dwindling. They've gotten angry. They may get angrier still.

But that's the American way. We can't praise anger when it comes from the left, and then condemn it when it comes from the right. If a Democratic congressman shouted "You lie!" during a Bush speech on the Iraq War, I wouldn't have minded, partly because Bush did in fact lie about the circumstances surrounding the Iraq War. It's Rep. Joe Wilson, disputing Obama's claim that the health care reform bill won't cover undocumented immigrants, who's lying this time around; an entire section of the health care bill is titled "No Federal Payment for Undocumented Aliens." That's an error of fact, not an error of methodology. "You lie!" doesn't mean the terrorists won.

Of course, the terrorists did win in one sense: for a time, they terrorized us. Mission accomplished on that front. That doesn't mean we did anything wrong; a country that doesn't respond to an act of violence on that scale with some degree of terror is a heartless country. But it does mean that terrorism initially generated the emotion that al-Qaeda probably wanted.

In the long run, though? Rather than turning into the permanent hawkish, xenophobic political climate that some predicted, in 2008 voters elected a moderately anti-war Democrat, with the middle name of Hussein no less, by the largest margin of any Democratic candidate since 1964.

No, the terrorists didn't win. They didn't terrorize us into becoming a nation of right-wingers, and they didn't terrorize us into permanent, complacent civility either. As a nation, we moved on. The trajectory from members of Congress singing "God Bless America" together on the front steps of the Capitol to Rep. Wilson shouting "You lie!" in a presidential address is a proud one, reflecting a return to the most basic principles of our system of democracy: divisiveness, acrimony, and a profound lack of respect for authority. Yes, God bless America.

See also: "Never Forget"