This seemed obvious to me at the time. It was hard to understand why people in the cultural mainstream let themselves get swept up in it. I felt like I lost my country, back then, as they pretty much all went off into crazyland together.
What do you think distinguishes the post-9/11 craziness from the Cold War/Red Scare craziness?
My reason for asking is because I believe that "that's unconstitutional!" has been a failed protest message for more like 100 years than 25 years (and there's threads of state violence at the local and state levels that go back far longer). And IMO that is even stronger evidence that words on an ~240-year-old-doc—and the way some interpret the second amendment in relation to those words—is a completely powerless measure against state violence. The United States is not exceptional in that regard. We'll only have a better country if we constantly, actively, choose to vote it that way.
Probably the fact that most of the readership of the article and this site were alive for the former but not the latter. One could equally pin the rise of Joe McCarthy as the moment America started its move to "autocracy". Or when Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans. Or the civil war. Or the Mexican-American war. In fact, the struggle is constant (as mentioned downthread).
I am still amazed by the typical internet American's (Yours also I presume) love for voting, despite having long degraded into a two-party charade.
Your sentiment starts out fierce: "constantly, actively..." and is immediately cut short "... choose to (only?) vote it that way."
You point out that voicing one's interpretations of the 2nd amendment is powerless - but voting, reduced to such a miniscule gesture, is also. The choice between a galloping right wing and a stagnant center-right is no choice at all. American elections are a facade for decisions already made on top. You can't vote it out.
They care about appearing to care about it. In reality if they don't think you'll vote the right way they just prevent you from voting, like with a vaccine passport or an ID card. (See? Both sides covered)
There has never been a vaccine requirement for voting. It has never been voted on. It has never gone to committee. It has never been proposed.
If you nevertheless are certain that that was or is the goal of one of the US's two major political parties, then you've reached a perplexing conclusion based on, I can only guess, no evidence, evidence imagined, evidence misunderstood, or evidence contained in a source that should be tossed into the garbage can.
Voting the way you really want in primary elections might be counterproductive.
Let's say in the main election 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side X, 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side Y, and 10% is more-or-less in the middle.
If, during the primaries, side X votes for a far-X candidate, they will definitely lose the middle 10% to a moderate-Y candidate, leading to a strong Y victory. But if side X votes for a moderate-X candidate during the primaries, the main election will be moderate-X vs moderate-Y, and they have a pretty good chance of securing the slightly-more-than-half of the middle they need for an X victory.
Of course you now end up with a lukewarm moderate X victor who isn't going to represent your far-X views, but at least you're not dealing with an even worse Y-side victor.
The real solution is to get rid of the winner-takes-all system inherently resulting in a two-party election, but Good Luck doing that kind of overhaul!
Quibble: I think you're conflating "remove winner-takes-all" with "less spoiler effect". The first implies (some of) the second, but not vice-versa.
For example, ranked-choice voting would reduce the spoiler effect and allow you vote for your real choice, however it would not (on its own) change that races have a single winner, who eventually "takes all."
This matters because even if it's preferable to have both, ranked-choice is easier to introduce incrementally and with fewer amendments to various constitutions.
That all makes sense if things are one dimensional, but they aren't. There are tons of issues, and people don't break down into just X vs Y. It's multidimensional. Find the candidate who most represents your views, and vote for them. You may find, even if you consider yourself an X, that a lot of people who consider themselves a Y will also like your candidate.
It does not stop far X candidates becoming president though, does it? Your current president is surely not moderate?
The UK has winner takes all parliamentary elections but still has multiple parties represented in it. There seem to be a lot of other barriers to other parties in the US doing the same.
The UK is more geographically diverse than USA, so Scotland votes for their party and so on. USA doesn't have that, every part of the country votes very similarly, even the most extreme states still votes very similarly to each other.
> The choice between a galloping right wing and a stagnant center-right is no choice at all. American elections are a facade for decisions already made on top.
This critique had its heyday in the 2000 election. I can't fathom still holding fast to it. The last 26 years have been a continuing, relentless stream of evidence to the contrary.
All democracy is a "two party charade" then. Countries that have a dozen parties still have them form a left-wing and right-wing coalition in order to actually get enough seats to form a majority. I'd call those coalitions the real parties.
>What do you think distinguishes the post-9/11 craziness from the Cold War/Red Scare craziness?
State capacity. USA prior to the internet and the surveillance state was too big, too populous and too sparse to be effectively administered.
Trump is doing what every other president since WWII wanted to do ... but they didn't have the technology. Just for a moment imagine what USA will look like if you didn't get someone incompetent like Trump right now but Nixon or Johnson. With the modern security state - it would be their dream.
If you weren't for the Patriot act you were pro terrorist. If you suggested that the terrorists might be motivated by us involvement in the middle east rather than pure evil then you were probably also evil. Mob mentality has been around since forever. And yet the current situation is making Bush seem like a statesman by comparison
I'm gonna be that guy and say that the concern about torture is orthogonal to authoritarianism. There were very much "less authoritarian/less centralized" eras in the US when it was general course of action was to do torturous things far worse than many of the things that got labelled 'torture' in the post 1990s era.
My first reaction is that the step to torture was a step backwards, a disregard for what we've learned about the efficacy of torture in getting reliable information, and an embrace of sadistic revenge as an end in itself as state policy.
It's the state policy part that I find the worst. Individual acts of senseless violence you can blame on the individual; state acts that in retrospect are senseless violence you can - in some cases - blame on what was known at the time.
To purposefully do that when you now it's useless is a rare evil; to declare it's useful when you know it's useless is an Orwellian, totalitarian turn.
And it was torture, not 'labelled' 'torture'. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, high-volume constant music, others I'm glad I don't know about. It was torture.
There's even a big book on my shelf "The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture" which catalogues extensive examples where US intelligence tortured people or was instrumental in their torture, insisted this had unlocked important information and then eventually walked that back as investigators started to dig in.
The US still more or less remembers how to improve and that book is an example of how such improvement could start, what changed in the last decades is that more and more Americans don't want to. The word "Again" is crucial, MAGA don't want to make America great, they want the America from their nostalgia. It's hollow, that's not what they wanted but it could never have been otherwise.
Don't we still have a bunch of people in gitmo that can't be tried because we tortured them, and can't be released because they are "too dangerous"? Jesus fucking Christ. Even though the wars are long over.
In the same way it is obvious that internet age gating, digital ID and abolition of physical cash will lead to much worse. But who's standing in their way?
How old are you? I think a lot of younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common, 9/11 was committed by the second group of Islamic terrorists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and 9/11 was the third major terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in a 4 year span. It's easy now to say that it was a crazy worst-case scenario, but that was not at all obvious then; for all we knew, securing cockpits might have been impractical, and we'd just have to prepare the Air Force to shoot down a couple hijacked flights every decade.
There were real excesses, and I ultimately agree with you that many of them were predictable in advance, but there was no feasible version of a response that did not go at least a little into crazyland. It was a crazy time.
(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).
There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.
These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.
And there had been another hijacking just the week before that one.
You can quote statistics at people all you want, but when something like a plane hijacking is happening nearly two out of every three months on average (throughout the entire 1970s), and sometimes on a weekly basis, and making a big splash in the media every time, people are going to want something to change.
A lot of the plane hijackers were either funded or trained by the Communist bloc, particularly Libya... Such incidents declined a lot with the end of the Cold War.
"Real excesses" is a bit of an understatement. There is the security theater instituted by the TSA, the militarization of police, normalized Islamophobia, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, torture as an official military policy, indefinite detention of "unlawful combatants", a trillion dollars spent destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, a million killed and many more made refugees. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crises in Europe can be traced back to the War on Terror. The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").
With any luck the latest debacle is so clearly a fail, that future presidents may be reluctant to get involved again (at least for a while).
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the US was reluctant to get involved militarily (at least overtly.) That seemed to last until Kuwait. The success there seemed to embolden US hawks, and there were a couple long-term excursions after that.
The current dude apparently fell for the ever-present hawks, without the savy to ask the right questions. His total capitulation, after demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the military, while at the same time proving the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare, will (perhaps, hopefully) be an educational moment for future presidents.
Certainly it is a valuable educational moment to other defendents. You don't need to fight back. You just need to affect something else the world cares about. And, it turns out, global shipping is especially vulnerable.
I would point to the TSA as a key example of what I'm talking about. You say "security theater", but which of the things they do are security theater, and which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero? We can make reasonable guesses, but does another major skyscraper get blown up if we guess wrong? It's not so easy, and it was hard to the point of impossibility in the aftermath of 9/11.
> The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").
Yes, this I agree with. The Iraq War in particular was clearly not justified.
My guess world be that the TSA had exactly nothing to do with any decline in hijackings. That is most likely due to new security protocols around cockpit access, as hijackings haven’t stopped but are committed mostly by pilots now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero
9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.
The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.
Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.
Every country in the world responded to 9/11 with enhanced airport security. After the end of "shoes off" last year, I don't think the US is stricter in any meaningful way than the global norm.
Not all of them have the same kind of enhanced security, actually. For example, if you transfer from a flight from Africa to Europe to one from Europe to the USA you sometimes have to go through security again, as the African security didn't meet American standards.
I’m struggling to read your comment in good faith but I’m going to get there by saying that you don’t travel and are repeating hearsay as fact. If you have an international inbound flight which includes a transfer in Europe, it doesn’t matter where you embarked or what the security regime was like. Whether you have to recheck your bag depends exclusively on whether your transfer is at the same airport and your airline’s policy (eg Ryanair make you pay extra not to have to recheck). In general in Europe you only clear customs at your final destination and at tge airport you transfer to leave Europe but this wouldn’t apply if you need to transfer at a different airport or between two airlines that don’t have an agreement. It certainly never depends on the European transfer countries opinion of security at your country of embarkation.
It was a crazy time, not in the danger from hijackings but the enormous amount of fear and cowardice America built up within itself. It was crazy because of the mass hysteria not the violence.
Take this example:
1.2 million Americans died from Covid. 3000 americans died in the twin towers attack. That's 0.25% of the number that died from covid.
However we gave up considerably more liberty to defend against the hijackers than we did the virus. It was a very unusual incident but the response wasn't warranted.
I mean like 1/3 of the people who died in the twin towers, about 1000 people a year, die from being hit by trains, but you don't see anyone demanding we give up constitutional rights, or do literally anything at all to change that.
Or guns. I find it crazy that the US gave up a ton of freedoms to stop the terrorists, but refuse to give up their guns. The guns clearly and obviously kill more people every year than the terrorists.
Oh yeah, good point. Gun deaths each year amount to like 15 x the twin towers attacks deaths. I'm sure deaths from our terrible unaffordable healthcare system are way higher, but we spent our healthcare money on invading the middle east and paying for a bunch of obsolete fighter jets, so at least terrorism isn't a problem anymore.
