Bluesky

Has it really been 25 years? It was my first week of middle school in New Jersey. We were led out of the building—there were rumors of a bomb threat—and waited for hours until we were sent home. That night, I lay awake wondering if Osama bin Laden was hiding in my yard.

It has been a long quarter-century since 9/11. Almost everyone now recognizes that the US response to Al Qaeda’s attacks was misguided, that the George W. Bush administration’s crackdown did as much damage as the attacks themselves. The positions this magazine took in the weeks, months, and years after September 11, 2001—against torture and military adventurism, and for a reinvestment in domestic programs—are now common sense.

Our first issue to address 9/11 was dated October 1, 2001. It went to press as Manhattan smoldered with fumes and uncertainty. “A great paralyzing white wall of not knowing,” as columnist Patricia J. Williams put it, still lingered in the air. The lead editorial acknowledged the country’s “swooning sense of helpless vulnerability.”

While hawkish ideologues began to talk about “open-ended war” and limiting civil liberties, it was vital, The Nation asserted, to maintain a grip on reality: “It is essential now to stick to hard facts, not fearsome shadows or injured hubris (or the xenophobic hatreds already in the air).” The editorial continued: “The paradox is that if or when we engage in brutal reprisals, they will serve a cathartic function for the vast majority of justifiably outraged Americans.” Yet dropping bombs and overthrowing governments would only stir up further hostility against the United States.

Instead of following our worst impulses as a country, The Nation urged Americans to take a hard look in the mirror. It was time to “examine the true burdens and obligations of acting like an empire awesomely more powerful than any others and answerable to no one.” Surely it would be wiser and more “truly brave” to refuse the easy response of jingoism, which would only lead to the passage of “draconian new laws that undermine civil liberties.” Instead, the attacks should force previously suppressed issues to the center of national debate. That plea went largely unheeded, as the following two and a half decades have shown. “Extremism begets extremism,” then–Washington editor David Corn wrote in that first post-9/11 issue, “and the dark smoke of a dark day will not be easily blown away.”