Americans take off their shoes at airports. ID badges are required to enter office buildings. Security barriers protect shopping centers. Video cameras and surveillance systems are a part of daily life.
But there has been a more subtle change since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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“I think the biggest impact of 9/11 was psychological,” said John Green, director emeritus of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “Rightly or wrongly, Americans felt suddenly very vulnerable that a fairly small and extreme group could inflict such major and public damage on the country.”
Suddenly we realized that the great might that we had, militarily and economically, the huge technological advances that we enjoyed, didn’t keep us safe, Green said. In fact, they made us vulnerable in the most basic way. Terrorists turned passenger jets into weapons.
“It was a shocking moment for Americans,” Green said. “We see in our social and political life the lingering effects of that shock. As a people, we don’t feel as secure as we used to before 9/11.”
A lot of things since 9/11 reflect that psychological shift, he said. Americans are less trustful and feel unsafe. There has been an outbreak of tribalism — whether it’s ethnic, racial, political or religious.
“There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of the reasons is this pervasive sense of insecurity that came about because of 9/11,” Green said.
9/11 woke us up about fundamental conflicts
The terrorist attacks upended the U.S. view of the world and shook up foreign policy.
Jeffrey Sikkenga, executive director of the Ashbrook Center and a professor of political science at Ashland University, remembers in the 1990s when a lot of U.S. scholars were predicting “the end of history.”
“They thought that the Soviet Union has fallen, the Cold War is over, there’s really not going to be any major conflict anymore,” Sikkenga said. “That democracy is going to spread around the world and that, sooner or later, everybody will be a liberal, western, democratic country and there won’t be fundamental conflicts and wars.”
The U.S. government began cutting back on defense to reap those so-called “peace dividends,” he said.
“I think 9/11 woke us up to the fact that the world can be and is still a dangerous place where there really are fundamental conflicts,” Sikkenga said.
As seen in Afghanistan, some of those conflicts still exist. The Taliban recently came back to power when the U.S. military exited the nation after nearly 20 years.
“I don’t think anybody knows exactly what it will mean for America and American foreign policy, but [the conflicts] haven’t gone away,” he said. “So that will be a continuing issue for us to deal with.”
Civilian-military divide grows wider after 9/11
Kevin Adams, associate professor and chairman of the department of history at Kent State University, said 9/11 ushered in the concept of “forever wars,” low-intensity conflicts in the Middle East and Asia that largely occur out of sight.
“The civilian-military divide has actually grown wider because of 9/11 in the sense that the people in the military have deployed numerous times for these conflicts and most civilians are barely aware they exist,” Adams said.
“The media doesn’t cover them whereas the veterans bear the burden of these conflicts. They’re the ones with behavioral health challenges and all sorts of other issues relating to those wars. They feel underappreciated, not seen.”
Whether they realize it, Americans have been living in the shadow of conflict for two decades, Adams said.
“A low-grade state of war is one of the legacies of 9/11 for sure,” he said.
Some of the countries where U.S. troops have been deployed are essentially ungovernable places, and Adams thinks Afghanistan will become one of them.
The wars on terror have dismantled larger terrorist organizations like al-Qaida but led to the creation of smaller terrorist organizations dispersed throughout the globe, he said.
“American intervention overseas hasn’t produced the world we were looking for in 2001 and 2003,” he said.
Green said Afghanistan is a country because of the accidents of history and geography. It has never been united in the way that most people would think of a modern country.
“So it’s just been extremely frustrating for Americans to have to be constantly engaged in our foreign and military policy with these less developed places where terrorists like to hang out,” Green said.
Fear of others
The 9/11 attacks ushered in a new wave of xenophobia — particularly toward Muslims — but such fears have ebbed and flowed since before the founding of the nation.
“America has had strains of great openness to immigration and to immigrants, welcoming, and then there have been moments in American history, as we all know, where there have been real outbursts of fear over immigration and immigrants,” Sikkenga said.
Before World War I, America welcomed millions of immigrants to Ellis Island. In the 1920s, U.S. lawmakers approved restrictive laws on immigration.
“That’s been part and parcel of the flow of American history,” Sikkenga said.
Our national sense of insecurity isn’t just about terrorists and international relations, Green said.
“It’s about how we do or do not get along with each other,” he said.
Racial tensions have intensified in recent times, and Green believes it’s indirectly related to 9/11.
“I think the sense of insecurity that came with 9/11 feeds into these other insecurities: ‘If we can’t defend ourselves from terrorists, can we defend ourselves from our neighbors?’ Wow, that’s a scary thought.”
When people communicate, cooperate and participate, prejudice declines, he said.
“If you’re engaging with somebody who’s different from you, you can eventually come to an understanding that you have more in common than differences,” Green said.
Unity remains elusive
The 2001 terrorist attacks united Americans — at least initially. It may have been the last time we were united about anything.
“Members of Congress, standing arm in arm, singing patriotic songs on the steps of the Capitol,” Sikkenga said. “It’s not something you see these days, that’s for sure.”
“People really pulled together,” Green said. “It was amazing. But that didn’t last very long, right?"
“It quickly dissolved into something more fractious and more uncertain,” Adams said.
Over time, the ordinary course of things reasserted itself. But for weeks and months, there was a strong sense of unity. Can we ever achieve that again?
Maybe we shouldn’t hope for it. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, faction is “sown in the nature of man,” Sikkenga said.
“So where you have people, you’re going to have disagreements,” he said. “In a free society, people are free to air those disagreements.”
The only times when there is profound unity with no disagreement is when there’s a tyranny — or when there’s an urgentdisaster that brings everyone together, Sikkenga said.
“And that’s what we experienced on Sept. 11,” he said.
Remember when balancing the federal budget was a big issue in American politics? Adams does.
The 9/11 attacks silenced the debate over the national debt, he noted. Taxes weren’t increased to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, the U.S. deficit ballooned as the government borrowed money to pay for military spending.
The U.S. deficit is expected to top $3 trillion this year.
“We’ve spent so much money in so many wasteful ways and we’ve continued to cut taxes,” Adams said. “It’s clear no one cares — the left or the right, really.”
Bring your ID
Another tangible legacy of 9/11 is that driver’s licenses, photo IDs and other kinds of documentation have become a much greater part of everyday life in the United States. Much of the world has lived with “showing your papers” for a long time, but it’s a new concept here.
Driver’s licenses used to be for regulating automobile traffic. Now we use them for many other things: banking, voting, flying, shopping.
“People have gotten really used to having to show their ID no matter where they go,” Green said. “But I don’t think it makes us secure. If anything, it makes us feel more fearful because at any moment we might have to explain to someone in authority who we are.”
Security measures in places like airports and train stations will probably never go back. Travelers will continue to take off their belts and shoes and file through metal detectors and body scanners.
“I don’t think it will change unless there is some kind of new technology we can’t even envision,” Sikkenga said.
It remains to be seen whether other changes brought on by the terrorist attacks will be permanent for the nation.
“Uncertainty and insecurity define the post-9/11 generation,” Adams said. “And that applies to every aspect of life from foreign policy to people’s economic opportunities.”
Young people in college don’t remember the time before 9/11. Many of them weren’t born until afterward.
When Green chats with students at the university, he is keenly aware that it’s a different world than 20 years ago.
“I’ll talk to them about things and they’ll say, ‘Dr. Green, how can that be? Isn’t this the way it’s always been?’ Well, the answer is it wasn’t always that way,” he said.
Mark J. Price can be reached atmprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
