TRS Sunday Post: Forgetting the Lessons of 9/11
Or worse, perhaps we are taking the wrong lessons from the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Today it is raining or overcast across much of Virginia.
Yet 21 years ago, the skies were a cool and crisp blue. For many of us travelling to the Washington D.C. area, road rage was a thing on September 10th. By the end of the week, that phenomenon had gladly yielded to common courtesy and held for a good number of years.
Things today are somewhat back to normal. Much as our grandfathers described the impact of either Pearl Harbor or the assassination of JFK, MLK Jr., or RFK — the moment seems to have lost its poignancy for too many. Most college students have no idea what it was like to live in a pre-9/11 world where loved ones could meet you at the terminal rather than wait outside a hedgerow of security personnel.
Worse still, the lessons of counterinsurgency are bleeding into our politics. The insipid danger of treating half of America as we might treat the Taliban notwithstanding, the problem writ large is that the lessons of counterinsurgency work — at least, if the intention is to disrupt the opposition.
Yet oppositions adapt.
Today’s narrative is different. The Biden administration yielded Afghanistan to the same Taliban who harbored Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Iraq turned from de-Baathification into ISIL. Arab Springs turned corrupt if functioning Arab democracies into security states. Ukraine’s Maidan is presently turning the country into a second Syria, with millions of refugees in Poland and tens of thousands of dead civilians and soldiers.
Domestically, the same tactics used to instigate the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011 and the Maidan revolution in 2014 are the same tactics used during the BLM/Antifa uprisings in 2020. Getting into the OODA loops of other campaigns, administrations, non-profits, media outlets, pollsters, and political systems — rather than honest debate — is the norm rather than the exception.
More concerning than the propaganda, the threat of violent kinetic action — whether it was Washington D.C. boarded up in November 2020 in the event of Trump’s re-election, the attempted storming of the US Capitol in 2018 during the Kavanaugh hearings, or the quasi-successful storming of the US Capitol in 2021 as the Electoral College tallied the vote — are all outcomes we should be assiduously avoiding.
Yet as we see in our own politics, the option for violence (or at least the threat of using it) is becoming far more common.
On the left, we saw it come to the forefront during the Bush-era anti-war protests, the Obama-era “Call ‘Em Out” campaigns spearheaded by the White House, the lawfare and violence of progressive activist groups during the Trump administration, and finally with Biden’s speech in Philadelphia calling precisely one half of the nation enemies of the state — this has been the normative practice of the political left since the Vietnam era.
On the right, we have a tradition of rights that go all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon era. Where once subjects tugged around cannon inscribed with the words Ultima Ratio Regum, today we are citizens entrusted (and who trust one another) with the final argument of kings. Democrats are eager to paint every racist as right-wing, yet the predominance of left-wing violence and their readiness to reach for direct or kinetic action when political processes do not go their way is a problem that is uniquely theirs — and they don’t see it.
Violence is not an extension of politics. Violence is the failure of politics. This failure is what inspired the attacks of 9/11. It has inspired assassinations, revolution, civil war (what the Greeks called stasis) and partisan action from Thucydides to the present era.
If there is one thing that worries me about politics today, it is this option for coercion that our unelected institutions seem so willing to engage in when it doesn’t go their way. They resist, hold out, wait, coerce, condemn, object, challenge, but they never operate as non-partisan and objective actors preserving what is good, beautiful and true. They rarely if ever operate in good faith. Yet no one elects them to represent the rest of us.
Those of us who do object are treated as pathogens to the body politic, and as one Loudoun County parent whose daughter was sexually assaulted so painfully learned, are to be considered as domestic terrorists by the Biden-led Department of Justice.
On par with al-Qaeda, folks.
So back to the wider question. Did we forget after 9/11? Some of us certainly did, while others never learned the lesson in any serious way. Others took a more cruel sort of lesson from the last two decades.
Benjamin Franklin reminded those asking about the form of government the Constitutional Convention created in 1787 with the remark that it would be a republic — if we could keep it. John Adams remarked that our form of government was suited for a moral people and none other. The Roman Republic lasted nearly 500 years before surrendering to empire. Athenian democracy only lasted 200 years. The British parliamentary system has been around since Magna Carta in 1215 yet has only existed in its present form since 1832. The US Constitution has had a good 235 year run; self-government in Virginia over 400 years.
For those of us educated in the classics, it is a reminder that the best laws, decent statesmen, and most noble form of governance will never survive an immoral and decadent people. As Ronald Reagan reminds us, nowhere is it written that the American experiment — and it truly is an experiment in human liberty — will endure forever.
September 11th should be a reminder of that fact. That this web of institutions and power rests on a fundamental principle that self-government is possible, and that the manipulations of mass media, marketing, political operators, and agitators — the tools of coercion — are extremely dangerous in an environment where citizens are more easily swayed by being acted upon and emoting rather than acting through themselves rationally.
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LINGAMFELTER: Jus in Bello
What It Means To Be Human by O. Carter Snead
Though cloaked in bioethics, Snead makes it clear that his is an exercise in anthropology and not politics or bioethics, though there are implications for both. Rather than considering the human person in the light of rigid individualism, Snead invites us to consider persons as embodied beings whose happiness is predicated on the wellbeing of other embodied beings. There’s a bit more to it than this, but if you’re interested in either bioethics or personalism as a concept, this book is for you.
From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks
For those familiar with the name, Brooks was the former head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who has reinvented himself as an academic at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. The salient point in this book is that one’s creative powers “max out” in the first half of your life, while your explanatory powers maximize over the second half. Hence the reason why inventors are young, and historians are older. Worth a read.
John Norton & Sons: Merchants of Virginia edited by Frances Norton Mason
Good luck finding this one. Published by Colonial Williamsburg in 1937, it consists of about a third of the correspondence to John Norton in London and his son John Hatley Norton of Yorktown in the time period just before and during the American War for Independence. One striking lesson is that the ability of the Virginia gentry to be able to purchase luxuries from England — both in terms of quality, availability, the price of tobacco, and the interference that politics brings to commerce — and its impact on their own thoughts concerning independence is marvelously put on display.
Is Russia Fascist? by Marlene Laurelle
The short answer is no — which flies in the face of the shortcuts provided by thinkers such as Timothy Snyder who have done yeoman’s work in trying to accurately describe what is ideologically driving the Russian Federation. Laurelle is careful to diagnose the patient in order to best address the disease.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.