The Long Decline of America

When the twin towers fell, it seemed to many like a second Pearl Harbor — a day of infamy, but one that would bring the nation together. And if you believed that, the state of the nation today must seem utterly shocking.

But the truth is that the seeds of where we are now had already been planted well before 9/11. There was an initial façade of national unity, but the ruthless political — and financial — exploitation of the attack began almost immediately. I wrote about what was really happening in a November 2001 column titled “An Alternate Reality” Here’s how it began:

Most Americans get their news from TV. And what they see is heartwarming -- a picture of a nation behaving well in a time of crisis. Indeed, the vast majority of Americans have been both resolute and generous.But that’s not the whole story, and the images TV doesn’t show are anything but heartwarming. A full picture would show politicians and businessmen behaving badly, with this bad behavior made possible -- and made worse -- by the fact that these days selfishness comes tightly wrapped in the flag. If you pay attention to the whole picture, you start to feel that you are living in a different reality from the one on TV.

You can read the rest at the link. The past two years have been worse than almost anyone could have imagined, but the truth is that we were already well on the road to this MAGA nightmare on the day the towers fell.

It hasn’t been an inexorable downward spiral. The election of our first Black president really was a significant moment — the truth is that while there are plenty of haters, overall we are a better, more tolerant society than we were in 2001. The expansion of healthcare under Obama wasn’t just good policy, it represented real moral progress. Although there has been a concerted effort to smear the policymakers who responded to Covid, the truth is that we managed the economic fallout from that crisis very well, and the rapid development of a vaccine was a scientific and medical miracle.

But the evil now running wild in America didn’t begin when Trump descended that escalator. It has been building for decades.