I’ve always had great respect for the people who signed on for military service after September 11, 2001. They don’t get many accolades, because America is in the midst of an identity crisis, feels little pleasure in memories of Iraq or Afghanistan, and is even inclined to wonder whether we brought that pain on ourselves with all that incomprehensible meddling on foreign shores.

　　I don’t believe that at all, though it’s certainly true that foreign meddling gets complicated. At the same time, I also know this. After 9/11, many people were grimly determined that “this must never happen to our nation again.” It has not happened again. I don’t fully understand the causal picture, but I don’t need geopolitical omniscience to feel gratitude. People put themselves on the line to protect our country after that brutal attack, and whatever the complexities, their primary mission clearly succeeded: we’ve never experienced another day like 9/11.

　　Some days I do wonder, though. Did Osama bin Laden also win, in some deeper cultural sense? In that once-vaunted “war of hearts and minds,” he seems to have gained considerable ground over the last quarter-century. We had those few years of confidence and purpose, and then our gaze turned back inwards as we collapsed into oikophobia and partisan recrimination. Now we have Americans on both sides of the line leveling stark existential critiques at our own civilization, eerily reminiscent of turn-of-the-Millennium Islamic taunts. I had many fears in the aftermath of 9/11, but I never anticipated that.

　　It’s hard not to take it a little personally. Because in fact, I too served my country in the years after 9/11, though certainly not in a way that merits the same admiration or honor. I never risked life nor limb, and volunteered only for work that one was permitted to quit at any time (though I didn’t, at least not until my defined period of service was properly up). It still meant something, at least to me. Roughly ten weeks after 9/11, I submitted my paperwork to the United States Peace Corps, something I had never even considered until that emotional period after the Towers fell, when my entire age cohort seemed electrified with the shared feeling that “we’ve got to do something.” It just so happened that I was a senior in college, standing at exactly that point in life when it’s possible to make those kinds of snap decisions. I shipped out to Uzbekistan in the summer of ‘02, part of the first complete training group to be sent back in-country after their post-9/11 evacuation. 

　　As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I spent the first and second anniversaries of that terrible date a few hundred miles north of Kabul, running seminar-style discussions with young Muslims about America, freedom, and what the future might hold for both our peoples. That kind of experience can form a person’s paradigms in ways that last.

　　I am of course aware that right-leaning Americans have little use for the Peace Corps, and I’m not looking to pen an apologia. I do think that that group of Volunteers, given the time and setting, was largely on the same page. Regardless of where we fell on the American political spectrum, we were there to convince Uzbek Muslims not to hate us. To de-radicalize. To put a human face on the Great Satan. The soldiers fought to protect America; I shilled for her.

　　“Strength” is now expressed through flattering old enemies and denigrating old friends, a gleeful torching of long-accumulated geopolitical capital.

　　My views of my country, at 22, were probably fairly commonplace, and not particularly profound. I thought free societies were a good thing. I looked favorably on the American practice of allowing people to choose the course of their own adult lives. (My Uzbek friends were quite astonished at the level of freedom that I, particularly as a woman, took for granted as my natural right. Anyone who rails against individualism should at least trouble to get a realistic picture of what the alternative actually looks like.) I also genuinely loved America, as my native land. None of this is particularly radical. But I probably became a bit more of an outlier over the subsequent quarter-century.

　　To many Americans, al-Qaeda’s brutality seemed to represent both a wake-up call and a challenge. Because they are used to sitting atop the geopolitical hierarchy, Americans don’t necessarily think all that much about what lies beneath. It turns out that the rest of the world hates us, or so many concluded in the wake of 9/11. From that ostensible insight flowed the challenge: Are they right to hate us? Have we whiffed on our global leadership? Are we the tyrannical oppressors of our age?

　　Across the intervening years, those questions have played out in the American consciousness like a bruising taunt heard in childhood that one can never quite forget. Unsurprisingly, they found a particularly receptive soil on the progressive left, where they spawned multiple strains of aggressive oikophobia.

　　Some, like Critical Race Theory, were domestically focused, but in the 2020s we have increasingly seen Muslim influencers climbing into visible spaces in the left-wing political class, actively bolstering their platforms with a public embrace of the trappings of Islamism. It’s a fascinating development, but also troubling, in ways that can be effectively separated from any particular view of Islam as a faith. One can, for instance, have deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, and also see that the Palestinian cause for most progressive Americans has precious little to do with the suffering of Gazan children, and everything to do with Western self-loathing. Likewise, the progressive embrace of Islamic imagery may not reveal a deep sympathy with radical Islamic ideals, so much as a superficial attraction to something that feels subversive and a bit dangerous. Much or most of the Islamic world would prefer to stamp out those radical fundamentalist strains; the zealots are meanwhile fighting bitter internecine wars among themselves; but those nuances are overwhelmingly lost on young Westerners, for whom Islam is interesting mainly as a repository for a nihilistic rejection of their own cultures and political traditions.

　　Psychologically, though, the development is somewhat interesting. Was it inevitable that American self-doubt would eventually find expression in the open embrace of the trappings of the mass murders whose atrocities opened this millennium? “Third Worldism,” the latest progressive fad, is mostly just tiresome on the level of theory, rehashing bad economics, some Leninism, and knockoff arguments from Edward Said. But there is a grim poetry to coming “full circle” in this way, almost worthy of Sophocles. When Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” found daylight in 2023, it was hardly even surprising to see young people thrilling to his hackneyed “critique.” It took some time, but bin Laden does finally seem to have persuaded many Americans to view the destruction of the World Trade Center as an act of retributive justice.

　　Even more startling, perhaps, is the extent to which similar lines of thought have taken root on the right. There too, the initial “reworking” had a domestic focus: think of Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93” essay, which still presented the frustration of murderous hijackers as a heroic act, but with the Democrats cast as the existential foes. Over time, the populists would advance further down that road, disparaging once-honored war heroes like John McCain for “getting captured,” and flattering ruthless autocrats to their faces with the declaration that America “isn’t so innocent.” For some, this has finally looped around to a stance eerily similar to the left’s, in which America is presented as Israel’s lapdog, in the thrall of manipulative Jews. “Strength” is now expressed through flattering old enemies and denigrating old friends, a gleeful torching of long-accumulated geopolitical capital. That kind of self-destructive behavior points towards deep wells of self-loathing that bin Laden would doubtless have relished.

　　Then there are the more overt denunciations of America and all her works. As a high school student, I can still recall reading Bernard Lewis’s1990 Atlantic article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in which he suggested that the West was locked in a “clash of civilizations” with a fundamentalist Islamism that categorically rejected secularism, with its diffused authority and embrace of individual rights, the hallmarks of Western liberty. Lewis contended that “modernism and materialism” were the twin “evils” of the West that Muslim zealots were unwilling to accept. His argument was controversial, but as something I had absorbed at a young age, it doubtless impacted my own sense of my “mission” years later, when I undertook to evangelize the Islamic world for freedom. How strange then, decades later, to hear the same categorical rejection of America’s “modernist” traditions echoing from the postliberal right.

　　I don’t really mean to suggest that these pathologies would never have arisen but for 9/11. Clearly they are multicausal: postmodernism, postcolonialism, the rejection of Western Civ, and other obvious contributors all predated September 11. We didn’t need al-Qaeda to help us undermine ourselves. Still, the collapse of the Towers represented a profoundly emotional moment, especially for those of us who were both old enough to grasp the gravity and young enough that our basic paradigms were still forming. Those emotions left scars on our collective psyche which are now finding expression across America’s cultural landscape, often in twisted forms. For America’s enemies, it does in the end seem to have been a bit of a PR coup.

　　Here’s the deep irony. It’s not even true that the world hates us. Clearly some people do, but they have never been representative of the world at large; indeed, their rage often burns hot partly because they can see that their own intimate acquaintances have immense admiration for America, and would like to be more like us. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I did, of course, encounter a range of views about freedom, authority, and the West, and some people had grievances with the United States that they wanted to air. That was something of an accent note, however. The general feeling about America was overwhelmingly positive.

　　The oikophobes of the 2020s may think they’ve transcended that place of privilege, but the odd truth is that they’re as solipsistic as any freedom-fry-munching neocon, simply replacing patriotism with its polar negative.

　　When I asked people for thoughts on why 9/11 happened, a few did have thoughtful things to say about the challenges and insecurities of the Muslim world. One such conversation (with my local dairy supplier) ranged into such a warm discussion of the glories of ninth-century Baghdad and the wisdom of Averroes that he spontaneously called his friends into the shop and urged me to repeat the Shahada in front of everyone, effectively trying to “baptize” me a Muslim on the spot. Most people, though, expressed frank incomprehension, or simply attributed the crime to unhinged radicalism. “I have no idea why they did that,” was the typical sentiment. “The Wahhabis are crazy.” I can’t recall a single person ever suggesting to me that Americans brought it on themselves. It’s mostly just Americans who believe that.

　　On September 11, 2001, Americans experienced a brief, awful moment of truth as they realized how little they understood about the rest of the world. They’d grown a little too comfortable there, on top of the world. The oikophobes of the 2020s may think they’ve transcended that place of privilege, but the odd truth is that they’re as solipsistic as any freedom-fry-munching neocon or flag-waving Buchananite, simply replacing patriotism with its polar negative. It was people like me—naïvete notwithstanding—who actually left the bubble, developing our views of America in conversation with flesh-and-blood citizens of less-free societies. That experience tends to reinforce rather strongly the reality that “this is a good country, and I’m grateful to raise my family here.” I felt no need to explore bin Laden’s ideological funhouse for perspective on America’s identity.

　　That clearly cannot be said of all of my compatriots. It pains me, but I suppose this too could be understood as one of the burdens of geopolitical dominance: one must periodically wrestle with ugly manifestations of a kind of “executive isolation,” the phantoms of our own cultural solipsism. Most great powers have ultimately collapsed after an extended period of destroying themselves domestically, finding the enemies within the gates more fearful than those without.

　　So perhaps that’s the mission at hand today. As a young woman, I went abroad to shill for my country. Heady enthusiasm comes more slowly in middle age, but I’m still willing.