The 9/11 Effect
By Scott Horton
Harper's Magazine
Published: September 15, 2011
A decade is certainly an appropriate point for a survey. To mark 9/11, we have seen a torrent of self-congratulatory assessments. Since the dawn of time, politicians have used conflict and the patriotic impulses that it brings to burnish their own careers and add to their power—this is only to be expected. A functioning democracy, however, needs to take a more distanced approach. It needs to make a careful assessment of what was done, to consider what was effective and what was harmful; to consider where it has unthinkingly departed from its own values. It needs to ask relentlessly whether the haze of war has been used to undermine the democratic process, by allowing national security elites to make decisions in secret about important policy matters that belong to the democratic process itself. This has to be done to provide accountability for wrongdoers, but also to insure that mistakes don’t become a matter of entrenched policy going forward. This sort of careful self-criticism is essential to keeping a democracy strong, and to keeping it a democracy.
With that in mind, I want to take a brief look at how 9/11 has affected major institutions from a macro perspective. I’ll single out just four of them.
Continued. . .
