The Legacy of Sept. 11... So Far

I was in Washington, lingering in that immortally perfect fall weather as I walked to work. A friend from Boston called my cell to tell me "not to go near anything." Then I saw that half the people I passed didn’t know, and were blithely planning dinners and video rentals. The other half had blanks for eyes. Two blocks later, I hit a store window with a television, just beginning to replay the image that would never go away.

Everyone has a story like that, many of them full of danger and loss. But the feeling that the world changed that morning was a mistake, a natural projection of overwhelming personal feeling. Instant prophecies foretold the death of irony and the rise of a new national unity. But everyday life is persistent, political venality is rational, and irony can be a tonic for both. Between them, Karl Rove and Jon Stewart soon laid the prophecies to rest.

What did change was the potential of politics. In the 1990s, government flatlined in scandal and trivia, and all the action was in money and technology. Sept. 11 brought a sense of danger that made politics urgent again. Leaders could try things that would have been impossible before the attacks. They did. The real legacy of Sept. 11 is five years of bold mistakes that have narrowed our choices, made problems worse, and brought the national mood full circle from complacency to wounded cynicism.

Iraq, where Washington now hopes to snatch mere failure from the jaws of total catastrophe, is only the jewel in a fool’s crown. The deeper mistake is the conceit that fighting Islamic terrorism could guide American foreign policy. The power of that idea is rhetorical and, for those who need Tolkienesque clashes of good and evil, psychological. It is not strategic. Unlike the Cold War, this war gives no guidance on such problems as Chinese and Indian power, Latin American drift and unrest, or even the fate of Russia, let alone new problems such as climate change. Never mind whether terrorism should be the centerpiece of American foreign policy: it cannot be, and pretending otherwise for five years is a terrible waste of time.

At home, Republicans’ naked partisanship since Sept. 11 has birthed a doppelganger. Since President Bush opened his second term with an ill-starred plan to privatize Social Security, Democrats have practiced vulture politics, circling the dying beast while hardly moving a wing. Some reluctance to make nice is understandable among politicians who were all but called traitors for raising frank questions about Iraq, domestic surveillance, or growing executive power. What voters have cause to regret is not partisanship, but the absence of a clear Democratic alternative on any of these issues. It is as if, denied the chance to be a constructive opposition, Democrats have forgotten how.

But the trouble is deeper and more ironic. Democrats’ electoral appeal amounts implicitly to saying they would not have launched a failing war in Iraq, driven up deficits, or ignored FEMA and New Orleans until the two met in a grim embrace. Probably not. But, picking up at the end of a train of disasters, what do you do? Who has a proposal for Iraq that does not involve some blend of admitting failure and swallowing more bloodshed -- Iraqi, American, or both? Domestically, who can do something about the nearly 46 million Americans without health insurance, when the government has to dig itself out of debt -- probably without the economic boom that powered the fiscal recovery of the 1990s? If you were an opposition leader, what would you do but grab for power and hope solutions would follow?

This morass has produced, out of a moment of rare national unity, the farcical debate over whether American politics is bitterly divided. Some declare today’s partisan animosity unprecedented, while others point out that Americans are nearer agreement on most issues than at most times in history. This seeming paradox is what comes of disappointment without solutions. The country is politically divided, not least over the personality of the president. But it is not divided over anything that its politics, right now, can do much to repair.

The legacy of Sept. 11 is not something magically produced at the moment of the attacks, but what we have done in the space those terrible events opened. The national response to the attacks briefly renewed politics as something necessary and full of possibility. The waste we made of that moment is the legacy of the first five years.