Tempting though it is to recall pre-9/11 America through sunny filters, America seethed with partisan animus even then. Nine months before the attacks, the Supreme Court had decided had rocked the country.
But in the wake of 9/11, the chasms we once shouted across became neighborhoods again.
It’s not that Americans suddenly agreed on all that divided them. And to be sure, we must continue to address embraced in the aftermath of that tragic day. But 9/11 largely clarified an essential truth: beneath our disagreements lay common cause. The Twenty-five years later, I am alarmed not by the solidarity we’ve lost, but by the erosion of consensus about the terms under which we disagree. Democracy itself has become debatable, especially among young people. Only in 2021. Another recent Americans endorse harassment, doxxing, or even violence against their political adversaries. And perhaps most stunning of all is that only Almost nothing went uncontested while we built the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. We fought over how to arrange the names of the dead, how and whether to represent the hijackers, and what would we delve into about America’s response. These weren’t academic debates. They were real conflicts waged by people of all backgrounds, laden with grief and anger, bound by deeply held personal, emotional, and political convictions and competing ideas about what America owed the dead and the living.
Yet we still had to build on sacred ground.
The experience taught me that pluralism doesn’t require agreement. It requires something harder: accepting that sometimes you will lose the argument, but you stay at the table anyway.
Our job wasn’t to make disagreements disappear. There was no universe where that was possible. Instead, my job was to help determine which differences the institution had an obligation to accommodate and where it had an obligation to draw a line. We could tell the truth about American failures without concluding that America itself was a failure. We could explain why the terrorists hated this country without adopting their indictment of it.
The rule of law, free expression, and equal citizenship are not partisan preferences to be renegotiated after every election. They are the terms of the deal. Protecting someone’s right to reject the American experiment is different from treating that rejection as simply another interpretation of it. A pluralistic society can tolerate almost limitless disagreement precisely because there are some principles it cannot and should not surrender.
Now, this 25th anniversary demands more from us.
The America attacked that morning was never defined by consensus. It was defined by a shared conviction that our freedoms belong as fully to people we bitterly oppose as to people we love; that our democracy is worth defending not because it settles our differences, but because it gives us a way to live with them; and that while each of us may nurture our own vision for a more perfect union, it remains a union nonetheless.