Can America ever move past 9/11?

commentary 25 years later, letting go of our permanent fight response may be how America heals Published September 11, 2026 9:00AM (EDT) People walk through the Sept. 11 Memorial site a day before commemorations to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Earlier this week in Manhattan, a man stepped up to a microphone at a press conference. His hands were shaking as he added his own story to the chorus of his fellow New Yorkers, and his voice cracked when he raised it for emphasis. He got the name of the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wrong, mispronouncing it in a different way every time he said it. He clutched a photo of his late wife that had been enlarged for the television cameras. He wasn’t alone in this. Nearly everyone standing behind the podium, barring a city council member or two, held a similar picture. The early September sun made the crowd look sweaty and the speakers wan. Their gripes boiled down to a list of Arabic names, and their aim was clear: Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, should not be allowed near lower Manhattan’s “hallowed ground” on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. According to the group, 100,000 people have signed a petition demanding this. Such a request would usually make listeners recoil instinctively. That’s not how we do things in America under normal circumstances. The big, green lady in the harbor and the melting pot and all that. But under the punishing sun, you could see that these are not normal times. At the most basic level, a fever is the body’s response to something unknown, the beginning of a complex process that targets an infection to ultimately kill it. You can see something similar in the body politic, when the sudden appearance of something new and confusing kicks societal defenses into overdrive. Talking heads get bilious. Policymakers overcorrect with cures that do real harm. Citizens spread the message to be on alert, attacking anything that feels out of the ordinary. In some ways, that’s what has been happening since Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida militants killed nearly 3,000 Americans, including children, in New York City and Washington, D.C. It was the single deadliest attack on American soil in the country’s history, and the means were entirely unconventional. Eschewing the typical explosives and methods, Osama bin Laden masterminded a plan to turn commercial airliners into weapons. In addition to a catastrophic loss of life, landmarks in New York and Washington were either partially or entirely destroyed. The damage was not just physical or economic; it was psychic. Unlike the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the intent was unclear and the enemy was stateless. Not knowing what else to do, how to fight this unknown enemy, America got hot. In the days and weeks after the attacks, even as President George W. Bush made a point of visiting a mosque and proclaiming Islam a religion of peace, some conservative politicians and Americans turned to Islamaphobia. The bigoted attacks on Muslims that followed weren’t met in some quarters with the same horror they would have received before 9/11. The Bush administration and Republicans in Congress, with the cooperation of many Democrats, began curtailing civil liberties in fear that robust privacy protections and criminal rights would leave America slow to respond to the adaptable pathogen of “radical Islamic terrorism.” The previously permeable borders of the U.S. tightened. New agencies were created out of whole cloth to fight the supposed invasion of enemies who didn’t bother to wear uniforms. Legal justifications were created for warrantless spying and torture. The paranoid body fought itself while seeking out danger, leaving lasting scars in the process. As the homefront became more cloistered, the Bush administration launched a wide-ranging war. It took two decades and over one million deaths for the U.S. to admit a fight against something as nebulous as “terror” was probably unwinnable. Names of Arabic origin were increasingly met with suspicion. By 2007, six years after the attacks, some conservative politicians and commentators argued that Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — disqualified him from becoming president. As the homefront became more cloistered, the Bush administration launched a wide-ranging war. It took two decades and over one million deaths for the U.S. to admit a fight against something as nebulous as “terror” was probably unwinnable. The named wars eventually ended, but the fever never really broke. The people who gathered in Manhattan to ask Mamdani to skip the Sept. 11 commemoration at Ground Zero claimed their problems were with the mayor’s policies. But they were light on specifics. They have a problem with Mamdani because they have a problem with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate; and with Hasan Piker, the left-wing political commentator who has made and recanted provocative statements about 9/11; and with Ramzi Kazeem, New York City’s chief counsel. Laying these names out in a line, it’s hard to miss the connecting thread. If this were the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, such a request would be unfortunate, but at least somewhat easy to follow. Still caught up in thrashing grief and forced to encounter a raft of unfamiliar names from a part of the world most Americans can’t even point to, this kind of knee-jerk reaction would be viewed as a regrettable symptom. But with a quarter-century of hindsight, asking the mayor to remove himself from a solemn commemoration of the greatest tragedy to ever occur in his city is unfathomable. That the press conference was broadcast uncritically by Fox News, the largest news network in the country, is also inexcusable. Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. All these years later, America is still living with the lingering effects of 9/11 and the events that followed. The fever persists despite the fact there’s no antigens left to fight. The country’s overheated immune system has found new targets. The executive branch was reorganized in the wake of 9/11 to create the Department of Homeland Security, along with a wholly new law enforcement agency in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump has used this nebulous remit to unleash an unaccountable domestic police force against his perceived enemies.The gradual normalization of the surveillance state, unleashed by the Patriot Act, has led us to the point where the country is peppered with private-sector camera networks like Flock. Democrats have made pushing back against these oversteps a key part of the party’s midterm campaign strategy. But actually doing something about the problem itself will require clear-eyed conversations about how we got here. Democrats have made pushing back against these oversteps a key part of the party’s midterm campaign strategy. But actually doing something about the problem itself will require clear-eyed conversations about how we got here. While the country can commemorate Sept. 11 and honor the innocent victims who died and were injured that day, changing policies that were created in the attacks will require pushing past the worshipful narrative of unity in the days that followed. For one, Democrats should explain that this great tragedy did not happen in a vacuum. To succeed at this, they will have to blow through the hagiography of a blameless United States that was attacked by terrorists who “hate our freedom.” Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida operatives were responding to U.S. foreign policy decisions in the most heinous way imaginable. Sept. 11 was an event of its time and deserves to stand in history, but not entirely outside of context. Democrats should explain, patiently, that Sept. 11 was an incomparable tragedy that still can’t justify the resulting shifts in domestic and foreign policy. They will need to state, unblinkingly, that the attacks can’t be an excuse for militarism 25 years after they happened. The government’s wide-spread spying networks, ad-hoc security apparatuses and domestic police forces will object the loudest to any changes. They will paint themselves as the thin grey line between the American people and another 9/11, because moving on is an existential threat to them. After all, if the infection’s gone, what use are the antibodies? Democrats will need to lean again on reality instead of performative procedures. The theater of the Transportation Security Administration line robs us of our shampoos and goodbyes to family. ICE is a redundancy when U.S. Customs and Border Protection exists. While the inconvenience and brutality has certainly kept us angry and alert, there’s little proof it has made us safer. Convincing individuals of this, particularly those personally affected like the petitioning New Yorkers, will be the hardest part of moving forward. They are still hurting, still missing the loved ones they lost, and they must surely be forever on alert for similar devastations that could come and upend their lives again. No one should have to endure such horrible, public pain, experienced simultaneously with a nationwide convulsion. But even that can’t excuse blindly lashing out at the world’s Muslim population for existing. America can’t properly memorialize the attacks if it never moves on from that initial white-hot rage, its psyche remaining in a permanent fight response.The raw sort of hurt that inspires people to look sideways at a Muslim mayor who was still a child in 2001 has to subside, and soon. We should never forget Sept. 11 and its victims, but America’s fever has to break. Related Topics ------------------------------------------ Related Articles