9/11

Americans Have Learned Virtually No Lessons From 9/11

We still believe in the false promise of trading freedom for safety.

Nick Gillespie | 9.10.2026 5:00 PM

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(Photo: Robert Stolarik/Polaris/Newscom. Illustration: Fatima Ruiz.)

It's impossible, and probably psychologically unwise, to try to recapture the nightmare feelings unleashed by the September 11 attacks 25 years ago—that deeply sickening moment when the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m., making it clear that a terrorist attack, rather than a freak accident, was underway. The Pentagon was hit just 34 minutes later. The South Tower collapsed, and then Flight 93 smashed into the ground in rural Pennsylvania, rather than Washington, D.C., thanks to a heroic passenger revolt.

It was less than two hours after initially being struck that the World Trade Center's North Tower collapsed, taking with it not just thousands of lives but the collective breath of a country that had presided over what Time's Henry Luce had dubbed "the American Century" back in 1941, urging the United States to act unapologetically like the global hegemon it was about to become. In real time, that morning took forever to unfold, and it is stunning to think about how compressed the timeline was.

Thinking about 9/11 now, a quarter of a century later, is to feel a kick to the solar plexus, an unmanageable and volatile mix of disbelief, anger, horror, and overwhelming sadness at the spectacle of people jumping to certain death, of survivors staggering out from impossible clouds of ash, of reading "portraits of grief"—brief, evocative, and utterly devastating obituaries of the nearly 3,000 killed that day—for months to come. Of outrage at the tin-eared dismissal on September 12 of "the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the........

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