Did 9/11 break America? Or did it reveal it?

[QuinnFillory]

The anniversary of 9/11 just passed, and it was the first one we had with the pandemic going on. Now, as someone who was a teenager when the attacks happened, I have seen how America has changed over the past nineteen years. Once the biggest country in the world that people wanted to live in and American were proud of, it is now a divided, paranoid and angry mess. Not only that, they have had not one but two presidents that have gone around angering...well, everyone (I'm talking about Bush and Trump, of course. Obama was just ok.) So, I am wondering about the damage 9/11 did in the long term. Did it break the country or just reveal what is wrong with it?

[Powerboy]

Slavery: Before founding of nation to 1865.

Racism: Always.

Japanese Americans: World War II.

The McCartney Communist scare.

Lots of things I'm sure I'm forgetting.

It just brought out what was already smoldering beneath the surface, the religious and ethnic bigotry, the fear of "other". Basically, it brought out the prehistoric tribalism that is still there.

[The no face guy]

The anniversary of 9/11 just passed, and it was the first one we had with the pandemic going on. Now, as someone who was a teenager when the attacks happened, I have seen how America has changed over the past nineteen years. Once the biggest country in the world that people wanted to live in and American were proud of, it is now a divided, paranoid and angry mess. Not only that, they have had not one but two presidents that have gone around angering...well, everyone (I'm talking about Bush and Trump, of course. Obama was just ok.) So, I am wondering about the damage 9/11 did in the long term. Did it break the country or just reveal what is wrong with it?

There are a lot of precursors to decline, most notably the hollowing out of the American middle class, with the onset of a changing economy that resulted in the decline of industrialization.

The neo liberal revolution from Reagan to Bush 2, that sailed in on the stagflation & 2nd oil crisis under Carter did a lot to hollow out unions in your country. This was a choice, in the 1960's both Canada & the United States had a union representation of 30% per population, today Canada still has 30%, while your country has a measly 9%. (This includes the Clintons)

As the workers wages declined they were forced to borrow well beyond their means which led to the housing crash of 2008, which has created the mass unemployment and helped surge the ranks of the far right & left in your country.

For me, debt to GDP ratio is a real concern, because when you go down....we go down Notice the jump after 2008. If the numbers continue like that the days of the United States being a superpower are nigh.

https://www.thebalance.com/national-...events-3306287

[DrNewGod]

There are a lot of precursors to decline, most notably the hollowing out of the American middle class, with the onset of a changing economy that resulted in the decline of industrialization.

The neo liberal revolution from Reagan to Bush 2, that sailed in on the stagflation & 2nd oil crisis under Carter did a lot to hollow out unions in your country. This was a choice, in the 1960's both Canada & the United States had a union representation of 30% per population, today Canada still has 30%, while your country has a measly 9%. (This includes the Clintons)

As the workers wages declined they were forced to borrow well beyond their means which led to the housing crash of 2008, which has created the mass unemployment and helped surge the ranks of the far right & left in your country.

For me, debt to GDP ratio is a real concern, because when you go down....we go down Notice the jump after 2008. If the numbers continue like that the days of the United States being a superpower are nigh.

https://www.thebalance.com/national-...events-3306287

Solid answer. 9/11 was a detonator, not the primary explosive.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Slavery: Before founding of nation to 1865.

Racism: Always.

Japanese Americans: World War II.

The McCartney Communist scare.

Lots of things I'm sure I'm forgetting.

It just brought out what was already smoldering beneath the surface, the religious and ethnic bigotry, the fear of "other". Basically, it brought out the prehistoric tribalism that is still there.

That’s McCarthy. Paul had nothing to do with that madness. He was only 12 at the time of the hearings.

[shooshoomanjoe]

I think America's problems have always been there. Conservatism has always been a hindrance to humanity's advancement. The handling of today's pandemic by the GOP shouldn't come as a surprise as they are handling it similar to how Reagan's GOP handled the AIDS pandemic.

[Joker]

9/11 made overt nationalism acceptable. That’s all. It didn’t cause any new racism, it just gave racists a public enemy #1 that it was okay to hate.

[Powerboy]

That’s McCarthy. Paul had nothing to do with that madness. He was only 12 at the time of the hearings.

OOPS. Um, The Beatles were a bad influence. Erm, okay, okay, your No-Prize is on the No-Way.

[zinderel]

As someone who has been paying attention to the news since Reagan was president, and who has studied history, my thinking is that 9/11 exposed America as full of a cancer called ‘fundamentalism’.

Slavery, racism, ‘Indian schools’, manifest destiny...all of these were blights on the mythology Americans created for and about themselves, but the real shitshow all started with the Southern Strategy. This plan by Republican leadership enticed wealthy southern conservatives who didn’t like the ‘coloreds’ - wealthy racist conservatives who at the time were most associated with the Democratic Party - to switch parties to join a core (And believed to be unbreakable) coalition of Republican voters that would be comprised of these wealthy Southern racists and the fundamentalist Evangelical Christians who made up the Moral Majority (later simply the Religious Right), with the poor, under-informed voters who didn’t like the ‘darkening of America’ and still believed that claiming to be a ‘Christian’ was synonymous with being ‘honest and good’ as the unwashed foot soldiers and sacrifices to Mammon that would ensure the elite ruled all they surveyed and the plebes toiled...as God intended. Under this model, wealthy elites bankrolled the newly reorganized party in return for massive tax cuts that allowed the already wealthy to become OBSCENELY wealthy, the religious extremists set the platform and made sure they got preferential treatment in every possible arena (despite the Constitution forbidding such a thing) and the unwashed masses voted against their best interests for decades because ‘Jesus said vote Republican’.

For decades, people warned of the rightward pull of the country, but we were prospering, and climate change was a myth, and greed was good, and as long as you ‘believed’ in God you could do anything you wanted and ask forgiveness and be fine. If you tried to point out the flaws in blending church and state, or in ‘trickle down economics’, or in disposable culture, you were laughed at, ignored, or attacked. Materialism was King, prosperity gospel nonsense took off and became THE core of the fundamentalist movement known as ‘Dominionists’. The Seven Mountains Theology and prosperity doctrine televangelists and preachers spouted all over the airwaves without any counter corrupted the message of the man they CLAIMED to worship as a God, and force fed it to a nation distracted by The Next New Thing.

And that was America well into the start of the 20th century.

“I got mine, screw the rest of y’all! Ain’t I great!?”

And then 9/11 happened. An attack on American soil by ‘scary, dark-skinned savages’ who worshipped a ‘false’ god. One the fundamentalists has been railing against since the fall of Iran to the Mullahs. The unwashed masses went NUTS with racism of ALL types suddenly swelling and erupting where before it had hidden behind a polite veneer...and the carefully cultivated mask of cool, progress, piousness and prosperity cracked irreparably to reveal a festering corruption that had always been there beneath the surface, and had gotten worse in the decades since the implementation of the Southern Strategy.

So, in a way, it both broke America...and exposed the rancid garbage nesting at its heart.